Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare
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No matter how just the war, no matter the plan, no matter the weather, no matter how precise the weapons, even with all of the bandwidth and network pipelines open and all of the intelligence flowing all the way to the edge, the only things valued are the human qualities—eyes in the back of the head, sixth sense, intimacy, teamwork, leadership—and those are the very qualities that are also in smaller and smaller stock as these qualities shift to the technological realm. Short supply isn’t affirmation of the constant political and Washington-based argument for more troops and more money, nor is it agreement with the poseurs who argue for a draft to make warfare more human, to spread around the costs and make it more painful for everyone with the hope that the cost of war-making will lessen its occurrence. More troops aren’t “needed,” particularly because technology extends the reach of everyone under arms, and computing replaces bodies, but more brains are needed, more brains to make sense of and use of everything that has now been accumulated but is so overlooked in a dialog that adheres to debates about troops and bodies and the multibillion-dollar industrial machines that are no longer at the center and yet take up so much space.
In creating the Khairabad simulation, no one means to dehumanize anyone. No one means to turn the Middle East or war merely into some video game. No one means to create some universal application that signals permanent war against the Muslim people. In fact, the desired outcome, more than anything else, is to minimize civilian exposure, whether friendly or enemy. If the hidden enemy can be more precisely identified and targeted, so the thinking goes, if the practices and protocols of superior identification can be imparted to the soldiers, then decision-making can be optimized and the dangers reduced.
Understand the village and its mood, find the anomalies, not just a hot spot or a patched roadway that wasn’t there before, but also the qualities of people’s stares, the level of nervousness of bystanders, the behavior of the young boys, the identities and presence and attitude of the key leaders. Learn the signs, smell the threats, pick up on the signals, know what to look for and what to see. Most important, do the right thing when you are the foreign organism introduced into this scenario: be smart, look smart, pass with honor, apply force as a last resort and only in proportion to the threat, be discriminating in whom you kill, leave in place the potential for a return to village life tomorrow. Protect yourself through training, prediction, and performance so that fewer civilians will die, so that fewer civilians will hate you, so that fewer civilians will side with the enemy, so that fewer will tolerate an insurgency or stateless violence in their midst, so that the pin on the map of this Everybad can change color and eventually be removed.
This is not just the laws of warfare or politics or the stuff of commendation medals; it is also intrinsic to orderly existence and self-preservation, a chain of understood behaviors—Gilgamesh the King is not just going to come in and take my bride on our wedding night—that goes back as far as there are stories of mankind and persists even in war, where even though the enemy does not honor any creed, the honorable fighters do. And they do so not just to live with themselves and maintain their humanity in the face of sanctioned killing, but also to forge a peace, to create the space for peace to return, for the sake of every good.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Oh. Obama Was Elected.
[See] the tablet-box of cedar,
[release] its clasp of bronze!
[Lift] the lid of its secret,
[pick] up the tablet of lapis lazuli and read out
the travails of Gilgamesh, all that he went through.
TABLET I, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
On September 1, 2007, two IED bombers in northern Iraq were killed while lying in wait to detonate their roadside bomb the next time American soldiers passed by. The insurgents themselves were being watched by an army Hunter drone flying high overhead. Without any noise or warning, a weapon came out of the sky and killed the men. It was the first army weapon fired from one of its own drones in combat, organically able to spy and kill at the same time and all on its own.1
But the missile wasn’t Hellfire, Predator’s aptly named hunter-killer, nor was it one of the half dozen weapons configured for delivery by Reaper, just then newly flying over the skies of the Middle East.
It was Viper Strike. A glide weapon modified from a Cold War invention intended to attack massed armored formations with swarms of what were then called “brilliant” munitions, the reconfigured Viper Strike was reoriented as a single weapon for the purpose of killing individuals. It weighs only a third of Predator’s Hellfire, and has just 2.5 pounds of explosives, one-twentieth of even that small weapon’s punch. Everything about Viper Strike is top-down. The weapon follows a trajectory that takes it directly over the target, setting itself up to make a steep dive nose-first, its warhead shaped and designed to explode with a focused downward-directed blast. With a laser seeker homing in on its quarry, it has a rated three-foot accuracy, meaning that friendly soldiers on the ground can be extremely close and still be safe in an attack.
Viper Strike was first tested in 2002—another “quick reaction capability,” of course—conceived for combat in places like Kabul or Baghdad where “urban canyons” exist. A small munition like Viper Strike reduces risk to nearby friendly soldiers, in addition to minimizing harm to civilian bystanders. Viper Strike is a kind of cop on the beat, turning loitering not just into observation of what goes on in the corners of Everybad but also into its own SWAT team, the full cycle completed in turning everyday soldiers into assassins for the Machine.2
GPS guidance and a data link were further added to Viper Strike’s laser seeker in 2008, allowing the weapon to fly to the target vicinity, receive updates while in the air, and then use its laser seeker to home in on a designated spot.3 Like a satellite-guided JDAM, the forty-pound missile could be launched indirectly and off-axis from as high as 31,000 feet, with operators and commanders on the ground and in helicopters watching its flight path through a constant video feed, another one of those truly brilliant inventions where the drone itself is the least important part. Unseen, unheard, and undetectable, Viper Strike offers a “covert capability.” The weapon “does not have a plume; it is a stealthy glide weapon. You don’t hear it coming,” the program manager said.4 As an army briefing expounds, Viper Strike is perfect for picking off one car in a motorcade or as a six-kilometer-range sniper for “Golden Shot” missions, which it describes as taking out a bad guy on a roof while leaving the roof intact or killing two guys hiding without any further skin off the hide.
When the 15th Military Intelligence Battalion fired Viper Strike from one of its twenty-year-old Hunters in September 2007, the earth moved for those once-lowly geeks, collectors, and analysts previously relegated to combat support.
As there is with all new weapons, there are shortcomings: Viper Strike has to be launched from a canister, and it doesn’t operate in all weather conditions. And only about 1,200 Cold War BAT munitions could be converted into Viper Strikes, and even they have a limited shelf life. And, as with other spiral and ad hoc developments, the weapon, though approved by the army vice chief in 2002, came about without any validated military requirement. But with Secretary Gates on a tear criticizing the endless search for perfect weapons while soldiers were dying, the potential for Viper Strike to join the black box cavalcade unfolded. As early as 2004, the army was working on the Laser Homing Attack or Anti-Tank Missile (LAHAT), essentially an advanced follow-on to Hellfire at a third of the weight.5 The air force followed the Viper Strike path and took another Cold War antitank weapon—called Skeet—and started a program of test-firing it from a drone.6 The navy’s weapons laboratory at China Lake developed Spike, the world’s smallest guided missile. Weighing in at about 5.3 pounds and two feet in length, it could be fired from a small drone or from a shoulder launcher and travel two miles. And it could punch right through a window before exploding.7 Another weapon under development was the Miniature Guided Bomb Unit (MGBU), weighing less th
an four pounds and designed for urban use from army Shadow and marine corps Blackjack/Integrator drones.8 Soon after, BAE Systems tested what it called the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS), doubling Viper Strike accuracy to half a meter (or 1.5 feet) by adding a laser seeker to a 2.5-inch rocket.9 The Lethal Miniature Aerial Munitions System (LMAMS) followed, a weapon that would fit on man-portable drones like Raven—“incapacitating effects using kinetic means,” in other words, making it sound almost like no explosion was involved. Next came Griffin and then Pyros, both weapons with even more advanced targeting techniques that allowed for increased accuracy.
In early 2009, Spike was fired from a drone,10 joining Viper Strike as another potential personal weapon and extending the possible number of armed drones into the hundreds. In March 2012, APKWS went to Afghanistan, initially qualified on marine corps helicopters, attack and utility, but slated for drones as well.11 The air force acquired a LMAMS prototype that it called Anubis.12 The army started shipping the tiny LMAMS, now called Switchblade, to Afghanistan in August 2012. It is described as the perfect hybrid of spying and killing—a “weapon designed for hand, tube, or aerial launch that could provide the warfighter with a rapid delivery to gather ISR information”—an expendable camera that goes beyond line of sight and gives the soldier the option to kill.13 When LMAMS reaches the target, its camera allows an individual soldier to have not only “eyes on” the target but also the ability to wave the weapon off if the situation demands or if the soldier thinks the person being targeted is the wrong one. And then Switchblade can loiter for up to an hour in the air while the user searches for another person to kill.14
The marine corps also deployed Harvest Hawk in 2010, not a drone or a new weapon but another platform, this one a manned hybrid that could be called cousin to Global Hawk’s BACN. Harvest Hawk is a black box that fits onto marine corps aerial refueling aircraft, giving them intelligence collection and weapons capabilities all in one. It is a black box of the future: one platform doing everything, as Harvest Hawk doesn’t just collect—it also can carry Hellfire, Viper Strike, and Griffin.15
It would be stretching things beyond the innovation of each development to say that any of these weapons made much of a difference beyond the immediate ability to just kill the same target in a different way and with seemingly less immediate danger and harm to others. Given the efforts expended to reach this level of seeming perfection and equality, the numbers still don’t support the image of a terrorist and insurgent class being eliminated.16
Granted, the war in Iraq had ended and the war in Afghanistan was winding down when Harvest Hawk first deployed, but the advances in spying and killing didn’t and don’t stand still. The production lines for drones stay open not because of the need to ship more to the fight but because they are becoming the standard equipment of every unit. If every army and marine corps division now needs its own complement of Predator-type drones, that is what determines the inventory. If every tactical unit is expected to go out with a Raven or a Puma, that is what establishes how many are required. If every base and every military police unit needs a certain number of drones or other unmanned surveillance gadgets in the form of balloons and towers and ground sensors for security and force protection, the number of bases in Afghanistan or Iraq or Djibouti or wherever determines how many. And none of this seemingly interferes with traditional missions or changes doctrine. Harvest Hawk is of value precisely because it is, as they say, “platform agnostic”—a black box and a weapon fitted to an airplane up there and flying anyhow. The plane is manned, but its unmanned spying and killing black box is more tied to the larger Machine than to the refuelers on board.
The military has been wholly transformed by these black boxes, and yet the army itself can’t see what it has become. Any notion of centralized intelligence—of a temple of information leading a nation in an actual strategy—has disappeared. Information belongs to everyone, and the assassin’s tool is increasingly at the beck and call of the decentralized god. The new aesthetic favored above all else is that no one puts their life at risk if a machine can do the job instead. And if soldiers have to work at the edge, they must be connected to the network and have personal ISR and weapons. Processing and bandwidth expand in service of the Data Machine, reachback continues because everyone serves the fighting man. No civilian leader or decision-maker—not Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Gates—seems to have the ability to see what has been created or question that the United States is stuck not just in this state of perpetual war but in a particular kind of war. No one has wrestled with the accumulated impact of the Data Machine and its erosion of distinction, nor the impact of its rampaging across cyberspace for five years or a decade and more. Unmanned, “attack the network,” geolocation, reachback, a network for all, smaller and smaller weapons—each represents a huge but little-understood “advance” that stymies an understanding even of what is new and old, what is military and what is not. Harvest Hawk isn’t married to just any airplane: it is married to a KC-130J tanker, a version of the venerable four-engine propeller C-130 transport, which is itself one of the oldest airplanes in the US inventory, surpassing fifty years of continuous production and upgrade, now souped up with black boxes to make it nothing like its ancestors. We can no longer measure combat capability merely in numbers of troops or platforms and ignore the black boxes and networks. But the arithmetic of the enemy also confounds, seemingly demanding hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of effort to merely keep a few thousand at bay.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, a new president arrived in Washington. Everyone wants to believe that the Obama team decided to pursue some new tack against al Qaeda. 17 Critics from the left and right, even insiders, speak of “Obama’s drone war” almost in an attempt to personalize this wholly automated and detached effort driven by the Data Machine.18 Obama is labeled “assassin in chief,” making personal life-and-death calls from the White House, micromanaging the military and intelligence community in a style reminiscent of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Dick Cheney can both express his affection for drones and criticize the Obama administration for being so weak that it has given up on trying to capture and interrogate the bad guys and instead just kills them.
It is true that drone activity over Pakistan accelerated in the year that overlapped the Bush-to-Obama transition, but in a historical sweep, it is the continuation of a policy predicated on a capability.19 On January 30, 2009, the new administration asked the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut the defense budget submission for Fiscal Year 2010 by more than 10 percent. Two months later, General Atomics delivered its 200th Predator to the air force.20 Reaper, its eventual replacement, was moving steadily forward in production, deployed with Gilgamesh and Airhandler black boxes, and armed with its own wide-area sensor, called Gorgon Stare. Wide area widened even further with Constant Hawk, MAAS, Kestrel, and WAPS (the Wide Area Persistent Surveillance system), all coming off production lines in the new administration.
While Obama and his advisors debated Afghanistan surges and withdrawals, General Petraeus asked for more hyperspectral imagery, prompting Secretary Gates’s ISR Task Force to search for an instrument “that was not a science project” and could be delivered quickly. The Advanced Responsive Tactically Effective Military Imaging Spectrometer (ARTEMIS) black box was launched into orbit barely four months after Obama was elected, collecting 480 different channels of data for each pixel in its view.21 But the capability was so secret and so obscure that six months later, when ACES HY was approved, it was called the first.22 Airborne Cueing and Exploitation System-Hyperspectral would fly on Predator in 2012, the thoroughbred successor to WARHORSE,23 a 100-pound marvel that could be integrated and enable the drone to also carry its standard electrooptical/infrared ball.24 Satellite-borne, unmanned, and even manned hyperspectral would join the Obama team: U-2s incorporated SPIRITT in 2010, the Spectral Infrared Remote Imaging Transition Testbed, optimized for its high-altitude mission.25 Not one is an Obama in
itiative, not one is anything more than more.
Each ongoing emergency project, each quick-reaction capability, each experiment carried the most promising technology or black box forward. If there weren’t enough drones and black boxes already in the fight, there was also each new discipline, like hyperspectral, that came on board. And then there were also “special communications” black boxes to support unmanned ground sensors and the x-men, some of the devices so secret-agent that they slip as much into the category of black bag as black box. In 2009, one company even touted an inflatable, airline-checkable, 2.4-meter satellite antenna system that would allow a secret agent to set up a remote high-bandwidth communications hub, perfect for infiltrating into a Pakistan or a Yemen or beyond.26 As one set of top secret briefing slides says, the goal is “holistic integrated solutions,” the ability to differentiate between terrorist and “indigenous activities” with the goal of “providing timely, actionable intelligence enabling disruption of terrorist kill chains.”27 The Data Machine drives an uninterrupted and never-ending search for novel techniques to detect and locate the signatures of terrorist activities, right down to their socks. Everybad is now reachable, and though we may debate “defense” as a set of choices of buying this or that industrial monster or pivoting to Asia, the reach to Everybad is political party and president agnostic.
In Obama’s first year, Predator and Reaper inventories peaked at 228—174 Predators and 54 Reapers.28 Two years later, at the height of all operations overseas, Predator-type drones had increased their daily schedules from three combat air patrols (orbits) to seventy-five-plus “caps” daily. And it wasn’t just Predator and Reaper—there were Global Hawk and all the other drones and dozens of different types of manned aircraft. After 9/11, the United States accumulated hundreds of different types of wide-area and hyperspectral sensors on thousands of platforms capable of creating countless images daily. And try to fathom this: the next generation of wide-area motion imagery sensors will be capable of collecting 2.2 petabytes of data per day, bringing 450 percent more data into the network than all of Facebook adds on a typical day.29 And the generation after that, “broad area” imaging, what is called persistent surveillance and is already happening, will demand twice that.30