Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare

by William M. Arkin

  The semblance of Gilgamesh and Enkidu still tends to dominate how we see our world: the mighty bristling with muscles, and beautiful specimens to boot. It isn’t that might makes right, as if it ever were. But it is the case that might is might. The 5,000-year-old story of Gilgamesh is still so powerful precisely because the heroic tale is so persistent and the universal lesson of the immortal quest so enduring. No matter how many conquests he accumulated, King Gilgamesh learned that he was going to die, that mortality and domination over the gods could never be achieved, and that the reality of mortal life demanded coexistence and wise leadership. Drones and their puppeteer, the Data Machine, may have developed from some sense of need and good, but no matter what, this Machine is going to kill, and it is going to make godlike decisions. In the end, having this Machine between us and the killing is making us less human. The illusion of perfect warfare is little more than a blaring video game endlessly played to higher and higher levels and higher scores, but one being played in a crumbling crack house.

  The greatness of the Gilgamesh story, told and retold over millennia, is that it touches on the loss of human innocence, on the beauty of friendship, on the brevity of human life, on the rules for proper living while we are here on earth, and finally, on human striving, tragedy, and reconciliation. Focusing on any one of these narratives isn’t wrong per se. The story’s enduring power is that the tale is so grand and unifying that even as its interpretation has shifted over the years, the enduring core of the search that never ends is just that: it never ends. And not only that, but here is an ancient book that set down universal truths long before the Bible or the Qur’an, a tale from the very threshold between the days of legend and our era of historically grounded truth.

  The Epic of Gilgamesh is about what it means to be human. In the original Sumerian version, laid down before Babylonian times, the king finds Utanapishti and receives not just the story of the flood but also long-lost information on practices and rituals that had fallen out of use after the deluge.18 Gilgamesh returns to Uruk to restore the old ways and be more civilized, which means, amongst other things, ruling wisely and caring for a human community. A hero who at the beginning of the Epic is clearly closer to the gods than to ordinary mortals, a bumbling superpower labeled a “wild bull on the rampage,” grows and learns that he is not all-powerful or all-knowing, that he will not live forever. He is a man, after all, even if he is divine. Beginning and ending with stanzas that emphasize the magnificence of the walls of Uruk, the whole narrative exudes the message that what man leaves behind is his only hope for immortality. And so there is also an epic scope in the Machine’s striving—like its namesake’s fruitless toils for immortality. The greatness of the Epic of Gilgamesh—the humanity of the endeavor—only comes in comprehending the arc from striving to failure to acceptance as that arc itself demonstrates our condition.

  EPILOGUE

  The Event

  [For whom,] Ur-shanabi, toiled my arms so hard,

  for whom ran dry the blood of my heart?

  Not for myself did I find a bounty,

  [for] the “Lion of the Earth” I have done a favor!

  TABLET XI, EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  On the day of the Event—that’s all anyone ever called it—the cloud started falling.

  From New York to London to Berlin to Tokyo, signs of trouble appeared when the nanos and the micros went rogue. Thirty years earlier, scientists had perfected tiny machines that could emulate the biology and hive behavior of bees. The technobiological invention was combined with compact high-energy power sources and ultra-low-power computing and “smart” sensors, all tied together in a swarm algorithm to manage multiple, independent machines. They called them bats, butterflies, crickets, and hummingbirds—all manner of animation and affection had been endowed on them by their creators. Rejected and belittled at first as useless, they had become tolerated and accepted, almost invisible wireless helpers that had become a part of everyday life.

  And yet on that day, almost simultaneously, as if the entire nanoworld had decided on a work stoppage, the swarms went their separate ways. In homes, at work, in stores, in hospitals, and in the streets, they were annoyingly swatted away. The worker bees began zipping through the air like a shower of juvenile rubber bands, people dodging and tripping over the clicking and skittering corpus as they began an en masse distress.

  At first, at monitoring stations, technicians and security guards shook their vidocles and handheld controllers, and then even banged the sides of their monitors twentieth-century style to see what was wrong.

  Most everyone at first thought there was some local connectivity break or a glitch in the wireless mesh. Nearly everyone trudged to reboot their systems or reached for the phone to call their service providers.

  Authorities—at least those humans left to supervise the 911 call centers—took the first reports of a nationwide failure as mostly prank calls. But the reporting was steady and the Internet itself was poky, and then news reports started coming in: a massive satellite failure, a solar flare of epic proportions, a cyberattack, an enemy electromagnetic pulse, an IT blackout, no one knew for sure.

  Then the service copters started dropping. From just beyond the rooftops and above the trees, they descended in a loud and jangling heap, all plastic and ceramic parts and wiring—quads, octorotors, hexocarts—smacking into whatever was in their way, hitting pedestrians and cars and structures, signaling a wide system failure. They were soon followed by the minis, most made of composites but some still fifty-pound chunks of metal, some idly parachuting down from even higher flight paths, the unguided ones like missiles, some wandering off into the trees, some with blades still whirring as they slashed their way to the ground. Like the litter at a stadium after a raucous match, sponsor names and company logos piled up, trashed and grounded.

  Remote came home to roost, they’d later say. The nanos, micros, copters, and minis were an immediate annoyance, but then they were followed by the mid-altitude workhorses, some the size of small cars, zigzagging lumps dropped dead on roofs, breaking windows, hitting power lines, littering highways, followed by flying glass and deadly debris. The mail carriers arrived on cockeyed schedules, their letters and packages landing wherever, scattering to the wind. Delivery craft let loose with groceries and store inventories at the most unpredetermined of points. Airvans and then the logistical megamovers sailed off their perfectly set and timed routes into missile trajectories, the formerly unseen moving parts of unmanned society becoming the new unannounced guests, some reverting to preprogrammed emergency flight paths that were built in when they went to “lost link” status, but others just speeding to earth without fail-safe systems or recovery pilots.1

  For those who lived under the aerohighways, and for those in the major flight paths, the highfliers came down in abundance. Near the regional drone hubs, where the swarms went to refuel and line up for resupply and repair and modification, where the corporations had established the shipping centers run by the picker-packer robots and worker drones—yep, people would say in the latest affront of unmanned everything, I’ve been replaced by a shelvie—the scenes ended up close to the wreckage one might imagine from a tornado or a hurricane, the electronic carnage of hundreds of autocopters, superlights, hoverers, spanditos, and hypercarriers littering roads and fields and rooftops like some legendary bird kill.

  The surveillance eyes and the police craft and the first responders and the preresponders arrived in a heap. At first, operations centers toggled off the net, activating their closed-loop disaster networks, but then the backup sky-borne communications nodes and airborne cell towers began to follow, booting up and meshing together for a moment to form their own government protocol networks, and then sputtering to silence as parts of the mesh tangled and floated to the ground. And then last came the photovoltaic-powered and solar and hydrogen sentinels, up there for weeks and months doing their work, lost and tetherless, gliding along like autumn leaves entangling in trees, on m
ountaintops, precariously settling on skyscrapers like splayed-out dormant moths.

  Society’s shrapnel storm continued for less than forty-five minutes, but even in the smallest towns, even in the most remote areas, there was wreckage. In the rural everywheres where people chose to live their lives intentionally to be as close to manned and away from the grid as possible in 2034, even with their seemingly uncluttered skies, the long arm of the network collapsed like a tottering colossus, the drones and robots more omnipresent and a hell of a lot closer than anyone had thought.

  Not only was no one immune, but in the communities where people truly lived the 34.0 lifestyle, in the wireless burbs, the gated communities where unmanned meant complete 24/7 assistance and robotic security, blackout prisons were formed. Unmanned pets paralyzed and froze, the flying avatars literally dropping dead. In the gyms and on the tennis courts, the ball-playing roto-opponents took one last smack at the ball before collapsing.2 Navigational signals on personal flypacks failed suddenly, schools of hovering strollers smacking into sidewalks and trees, babies and children upended, traumatized and injured. Sensors went blind, gates locked, spikes protruded; even the most granola of New Agers retreating into shutdown fortresses.

  It was the same new, same new; except that those with the greatest levels of connectivity ended up being the most cut off. Landlines and wires were something grannies held on to, the once fortunate previously scoffed. Now the modern-day dronenuts who’d gone over the digital edge discovered the menace of X-Peller drones guarding golf courses and gated communities, normally chasing away birds and keeping the real mosquitos at bay from pools and yards.3 They all mutinied as well, causing hundreds of injuries. Then the wireless set soon found that they didn’t even have old-fashioned ambulances and rescuers to help anymore, none that weren’t machines themselves.

  Out in the middle of nowhere, where those who were prone to I told you so even before the Event, where “remote” merely meant a job that was too dull, dirty, or dangerous for real humans to do, there was no escape. Schools of electrical power and pipeline monitors and airborne wind turbines fell. The unmanned crop dusters exhausted themselves and puffed out their last toxic breaths. Aerotractors banged into the dirt. Picoherders ceased their buzzing, frightening and scattering cattle and sheep. The mighty X-loggers and the autominers crashed like giant trees in the woods and mountains, unseen and unheard.

  The count wasn’t a death count, though thousands of innocent bystanders were killed when the crash came. The conventional explanation—the predictable commentary that was as automatic as any mechanical recording—first screamed terror and cyberattack, except that word started coming in of the same thing happening in China and the Middle East. On-air analysts spoke of the flash crash of 2010, where still-inscrutable computer trading errors caused a 1,000-point drop in the Dow Jones; or the Yongbyon tragedy in the second Korean War, where a software miscalculation led a squadron of unmanned combat vehicles to attack the wrong targets, killing 4,000 civilians.

  Predictable, said the experts: Moore’s Law, the doubling of computer power every eighteen months—the theorem adopted in 1965—had been updated dozens of time through the 2020s, and now scientists spoke of a 32-million-times increase in performance,4 a new opportunity to replace the mixed generations of unregulated machines, their only bond, their only government control the adherence to standard protocols. The technology is there, they said, almost licking their lips with a taste of investigation and repair. Public acceptance of an unmanned airline transport system just then hung in the balance—most commercial operators still employed pilots to monitor unmanned freight carriers to comply with civil aviation rules, completely autonomous and unmanned passenger travel being as much a political and cultural uncertainty as a systemic challenge.

  As the numbers started coming in—over 22,000 medium-and high-altitude drones just in North America and Europe, as many as 70,000 worldwide, and that was the number that was just randomly up in the skies at 8:45 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on a typical Tuesday—it was the realization of totality that signaled David’s task against Goliath.5

  There were just environmental and soil monitors, traffic eyes, news cameras, weather sniffers, data gatherers, refuelers, drone-haulers, energy aides, transponders, network bridges, drones on the way to and on the way back from work.

  Rumors started flying, and so did the snapshots. In some places, it was like a scene out of The Birds, the litter of drones literally covering the streets. Everyone knew that the Skyguard network was up there, everyone had either hired or knew someone who had hired a private investigator to follow some cheating spouse or to spy on some neighbor, but again the wake-up was in the numbers. From police to homeland security, to NSA and NRO and even some foreign intelligence agencies, the pictures were astounding. Biomimicry had been enlisted by the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies to mask drones and emulate biological species, to aid low observability and deniability, but the pictures on the ground didn’t lie.

  The viral e-mails had photo attachments of the wreckage of craft showing the logos of unknown government agencies and unheard-of corporations. There were fallen military and security and police spies, identified by international, national, and local logos of governments and corporations, strange cameras and sensors in unknown orbits. “Drones no more,” someone wrote, a slogan that originated in what survivalists like to call the American redoubt, one that didn’t need much translation, one that quickly took over personal walls and postings and the Web itself, a call to do something. It was the very opposite of the classic sci-fi cybernetic revolt of the robots. It wasn’t machines taking over; it was mankind taking a stand.

  Gilgamesh taming a lion—on a relief taken from the palace of Sargon II in modern-day Khorsabad, Iraq. Pre-Judaism, the Sumerian king Gilgamesh became the subject of an epic poem, the first to struggle with questions of immortality and humanity. When the author discovered that Gilgamesh was also the name for a black box used on drones, the story—and the American military’s ignorance of it—came to symbolize the continuing search, more than 5,000 years later, for security, a search undertaken in lands that the West fundamentally does not understand. (Photograph courtesy of Erich Lessing. “Statue of a hero taming a lion,” Louvre, Département des Antiquités Orientales, Paris, France.)

  Kandahar, early 2002: the author and his Afghan bodyguard at Objective Gecko, the bizarre compound of Mullah Omar, head of the Taliban, located in an off-limits and fortified notch outside the city. The compound was assaulted by special operations forces on October 19, 2001, and bombed and attacked by a Predator drone—the story of which grew into one of the first urban legends of this supposed new mode of perfect warfare. (William M. Arkin)

  The star of every drone show, the now twenty-year-old Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), this one preparing for takeoff from Balad Air Base, northeast of Baghdad. In military jargon, Predator provides intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and in this MQ model, can strike with two laser-guided Hellfire missiles. Over the years, though, more and more black boxes have been attached to Predators (and other drones) to give them new ways of seeing and finding electronic signals. (USAF/Tech. Sgt. Sabrina Johnson)

  The original Global Hawk drone, dwarfing two company employees from manufacturer Teledyne Ryan (later Northrop Grumman) in a hangar in San Diego before its rollout on February 20, 1997. Global Hawk flies at twice the altitude of Predator and Reaper and can loiter for more than twenty-four hours, imaging large geographic areas with a variety of black boxes. It can survey, in one day, an area equivalent to the state of Illinois (40,000 square nautical miles). A single Global Hawk—nicknamed Grumpy—was the unsung hero of the Iraq war, using its endurance and synthetic aperture radar to keep an eye on (and then target) Iraqi forces during the epic sandstorm of 2003. (David Gossett, courtesy of Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical)

  All large drones are flown from remote ground control stations. Here is a training mock-up at Hancock Field Air N
ational Guard Base in upstate New York, where air force, reserve, and National Guard men and women train as pilots and sensor operators of the Reaper drone. From New York, the 174th Fighter Wing also controls missions over the Middle East and Africa, a process called “reachback,” where the majority of the activity supporting forward-deployed military forces takes place here in the United States. (USAF/Tech. Sgt. Ricky Best)

  Silhouettes of the big three drones—the more than twenty-four-hour-flying Global Hawk, Reaper, and Predator—in comparison to the size of a human. Also shown is the most numerous drone, Raven, a handheld short-range “over the hill” spy plane assigned to army and marine corps troops. (William M. Arkin)

  An army handheld Raven drone, here flown during a domestic exercise called Vigilant Guard in 2008. Thousands of Ravens have been issued to almost all service units down to the lowest echelon. The short-range systems are capable of looking over the next hill or scouting ahead on a highway, sending images back to a processing black box where they can be viewed by combat forces. (William M. Arkin)

  The author’s own version of Raven, an online-purchased Parrot drone. It has even shorter range, but has two cameras with higher definition. Here the author and his squadron pilot, Galen Richardson, prepare the first flight of their drone on Mount Desert Island in Maine. (William M. Arkin)

  High-definition full-motion video imagery taken by a Special Operations Command Reaper drone. The sensor operator, or user on the ground, is able to zoom in to individual houses, automobiles, and even people; the cost being the amount of imagery collected and the pipelines of communications (called “bandwidth”) needed to move and store all of that data. (Photograph obtained by the author from a confidential source.)