7. “Interoperability challenges led to the advent of ‘widgets’ that can integrate ISR data from incompatible sensors. The Services and Combat Support Agencies have also started building software applications that translate the data from non-standard sensors to understandable formats”; US Congress, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Performance Audit of Department of Defense Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, April 2012, p. 20.
8. See, for instance, the description by Dana Priest, “Piercing the confusion around NSA’s phone surveillance program,” Washington Post, August 8, 2013; www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/piercing-the-confusion-around-nsas-phone-surveillance-program/2013/08/08/bdece566-fbc4-11e2-9bde-7ddaa186b751_story.html (accessed August 9, 2013).
9. Department of Defense Directive (DODD) 5250.01, “Management of Intelligence Mission Data in DOD Acquisitions,” defines Intelligence Mission Data (IMD) as: “the DOD intelligence used for programming platform mission systems in development, testing, operations, and sustainment including, but not limited to, the functional areas of:
• Signatures
• Electronic Warfare Integrated Reprogramming (EWIR)
• Order of Battle (OOB)
• Characteristics and Performance (C&P)
• Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT).”
10. DOD, IMD Cost Methodology Guidebook, February 2013, p. 3.
11. DOD, IMD Cost Methodology Guidebook, February 2013, p. 12.
12. “Part of my goal in these conversations has been to bring back to reality many of the inflated expectations of what can be done with predictive analytics: predictive analytics is a powerful approach to finding patterns in data, but it isn’t magic, nor is it fool-proof.” Dean Abbott, “The NSA, Link Analysis and Fraud Detection,” Smart Data Collective (Blog), July 25, 2013; http://smartdatacollective.com/deanabbott/136376/nsa-link-analysis-and-fraud-detection (accessed August 1, 2013).
13. The official was Harold Hongju Koh, former dean of the Yale Law School and State Department legal advisor and one of the key Obama administration participants in decisions relating to targeted killings; quoted in Kill or Capture, p. 201.
14. Even for someone like Robert Gates, who describes his visit to the drone main operating base Creech Air Force Base in Nevada early in 2008, saying, “The whole enterprise resembled a very sophisticated video arcade—except these men and women were playing for keeps.” See Duty, p. 131.
CHAPTER TWO Dead Reckoning
1. Mark Anthony Phelps, “Roads and bridges in ancient Mesopotamia,” in Encyclopedia of Society and Culture in the Ancient World (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2008); Ancient and Medieval History Online, Facts On File, Inc.; www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE49&iPin=ESCAW572&SingleRecord=True (accessed October 8, 2013).
2. The story of Iraq’s use of its Scud-type missile in the 1991 war is complex and little understood. Most of the attention (and much of the postwar narrative) is focused on western Iraq and the missiles that were in striking range of Israel.
Less than twenty-four hours after Desert Storm bombing commenced, Iraq launched a missile at Israel in the early-morning hours of January 18, 1991. The Scud didn’t come from one of twenty-eight launch sites in western Iraq, fixed installations that US intelligence had carefully mapped and bombers had rushed to destroy, but from a mobile launcher, a huge multi-ton vehicle that trundled through the vast western desert, scooting to firing sites at night and then hiding during the day.
But Scud missiles had also been fired south from the Amarah area of eastern Iraq, aimed at US and coalition forces in Saudi Arabia and the gulf states.
3. Barry Watts writes “in Desert Storm U.S. forces had virtually no success killing mobile launchers for Iraq’s modified ‘Scuds,’ even after they had revealed themselves to nearby aircrews by firing a missile”; Barry D. Watts, The Evolution of Precision Strike, CSBA, 2013, p. 12.
An interesting updated assessment of the 1991 campaign as compared to 2003, though it focuses exclusively on western Iraq (Amarah is in southeastern Iraq) is Major Brook J. Leonard, USAF, “How the West Was Won: The Essence of Network-Centric Operations (NCO),” School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Al; June 2006, pp. 32ff. “Because of the poor resolution of the LANTIRN targeting pod and a lack of training among aircrew in how to identify SCUDs, they could not identify and employ ordnance against a target more than 80 percent of the time. Based on postwar assessment, the other 20 percent of the time, when the aircrews did employ ordnance, they hit either decoys or support vehicles;” ibid, p. 34.
4. “During Operation Desert Storm, China Lake increased Gator weapon delivery by a factor of four. Gator performed so well that United States forces employed more than 1,000 Gators to limit the mobility of the Iraqi Army and hamper Iraqi movement in areas known to hide Scud missile launchers.” Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, China Lake and Point Mugu, California, Arming the Fleet, third edition, p. 42.
5. Aircraft patrolling from medium and high altitudes randomly delivered cluster bombs on roads and highways, and around culverts and bridges suspected of being missile traveling routes or hide-sites. F-16 aircraft primarily delivered CBU-87 CEMs in eastern Iraq as part of these operations, and the F-111F aircraft delivered CBU-89 Gator antitank and antipersonnel mines in western Iraq; Department of the Air Force, Gulf War Airpower Survey (GWAPS), Volume IV, Part I, pp. 43, 48.
From February 19 onward, in addition, B-52 heavy bombers flying at extremely high altitudes dropped cluster bombs in potential Scud launch areas, traveling down roads and releasing bombs at timed intervals. See GWAPS, Volume IV, Part I, p. 290.
Toward the end of the war, B-52 bombers, together with many types of tactical fighter aircraft, also delivered cluster bombs on tank and vehicle columns retreating from Kuwait, including at the so-called “highway of death” north of Kuwait City, but also at the main highway due north out of Basra, which crossed the Euphrates River at al Qurnah and continued through Amarah on the way to Baghdad. See GWAPS, Volume IV, Part I, p. 231.
6. Department of the Air Force, Reaching Globally, Reaching Powerfully: The United States Air Force in the Gulf War: A Report, September 1991, p. 36.
7. See, e.g., R. Jeffrey Smith, “Numerous US Bombs Probably Missed Targets,” Washington Post, February 22, 1991, p. A1.
8. W. Andrew Terrill, Nationalism, Sectarianism, and the Future of the U.S. Presence in Post-Saddam Iraq, Army Strategic Studies Institute, July 2003.
9. “Further on Saddam Interview with Turkish Paper, Third Installment,” FBIS-NES-92-030, February 13, 1992, p. 22.
10. “Because of the enemy air defense systems, allied manned aircraft were forced to fly too high, well above their useful sensor ranges for viewing targets of this size. Other data show that humans are not good at search in high stress, multi-tasking scenarios, even with good sensor inputs. Thus, it can be argued that Allied aircraft would not have found their targets any better even if they had been able to fly lower.” See The Development and Deployment of Precision Guided Munitions (PGMS) for Standoff Attack, Richard H. Van Atta and Ivars Gutmanis; in IDA, Transformation and Transition: DARPA’s Role in Fostering an Emerging Revolution in Military Affairs, Volume 2—Detailed Assessments, p. V-24.
11. Major Brook J. Leonard, USAF; “How the West Was Won: The Essence of Network-Centric Operations (NCO),” School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Alabama; June 2006, p. 33.
12. The “kill chain” was later defined as “find, fix, track, target, engage, assess.” See Air Force Doctrine Document 2-1.9, Targeting, June 8, 2006.
CHAPTER THREE Fire and Forget
1. “On February 27, 1991, when a Pioneer detected two Iraqi patrol boats off Faylaka [sic] Island, naval aircraft were called in to destroy the craft. Seeing the drone and thinking they were about to be attacked, Iraqi soldiers on the island surrendered to the Pioneer! It was the first recorded surrender of enemy troops to an unmanned vehi
cle.” See Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Spy Book—The Encyclopedia of Espionage (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 466.
“When the battleships sent their Pioneers on a low-level surveillance of Faylaka [sic] Island after pummeling its defenders with 16-inch gunfire, the surviving Iraqis were observed waving bed sheets in an effort to ‘surrender’ to the UAVs!” See John Barry and Evan Thomas, “Up in the Sky, an Unblinking Eye: The hundreds of drones cruising over Iraq and Afghanistan have changed war forever,” Newsweek, June 9, 2008.
“Noisy as a lawn mower, the Pioneer was scarily effective in the 1991 gulf war, when Iraqi soldiers learned to fear the barrage of missiles that would quickly follow its buzz. One Pioneer shot footage of a squadron of Iraqi soldiers waving their shirts in the air, likely the first unit ever to surrender to a drone”; Bill Yenne, Attack of the Drones: A History of Unmanned Aerial Combat (St. Paul: Zenith Press, 2004), p. 53.
2. Coskun Kurkcu and Kaan Oveyik, U.S. Unmanned, Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Network-Centric Warfare (NCW): Impacts on Combat Aviation Tactics from Gulf War I through 2007 Iraq, Naval Postgraduate School, March 2008, p. 24.
3. Bill Yenne, Attack of the Drones: A History of Unmanned Aerial Combat, p. 54.
4. “At the outset of the air campaign, the USAF and USN employed target drones to confuse and disrupt Iraqi air defenses. Following the initial F-117 and cruise missile strikes, Navy A-6s launched 25 Tactical Air Launched Decoys and USAF ground crews launched 44 BQM-34C target drones. Thinking the decoys and drones were incoming strike packages, Iraqi air defenses turned on their radars and engaged them, only to be attacked by radiation homing missiles”; Christopher J. Bowie, Robert P. Haffa, Jr., and Robert E. Mullins; Future War: What Trends in America’s Post-Cold War Military Conflicts Tell Us About Early 21st Century Warfare, Northrop Grumman Analysis Center, 2003, p. 55.
5. Major Christopher A. Jones, USAF; Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVS): An Assessment of Historical Operations and Future Possibilities; A Research Paper Presented to the Research Department, Air Command and Staff College, AU/ACSC/0230D/97-03, March 1997, p. 19; IDA, Transformation and Transition: DARPA’s Role in Fostering an Emerging Revolution in Military Affairs, Volume 1: Overall Assessment, p. S-8.
6. On one mission, a low-altitude Pioneer melded its close-in observations with the wide-area radar contact data generated by the brand-new Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), a lumbering airplane flying far overhead and hundreds of miles away in Saudi Arabia. At the end of the battle, a Pioneer flying under the obscuration of the smoke from oil fires set by Iraqi forces also spotted a tank unit poised to ambush at the northern edge of the international airport, a tip-off that led to merciless bombing and naval gunfire. One account described how “UAVs were used to map Iraqi minefields and bunkers, thus allowing the Marines to slip through and around these defenses in darkness, capture key command sites without warning, and speed the advance into Kuwait City by as much as two days.” The attack on the Iraqi-held Kuwaiti Airport provides another illustration of the utility of UAVs. During that encounter, “a live Pioneer UAV picture showed a battalion of Iraqi tanks poised on the north end of the airfield for a counterattack. The armored force was broken up by naval gunfire and air attacks before it could strike the advancing Marines”; David A. Fulghum, “UAVs Pressed into Action to Fill Void,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, August 19, 1991, p. 59.
See also Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) Program Plan, April 1994, For Official Use Only markings removed, pp. 2-2, 2-3.
7. Quoted in Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) Program Plan, April 1994, For Official Use Only markings removed, p. 3-1.
8. DOD, UAV 1994 Master Plan, n.d. (1993), p. 3-9.
9. Cesar E. Nader, An Analysis of Manpower Requirements for the United States Marine Corps Tiers II & III Unmanned Aerial Systems Family of Systems Program, Naval Postgraduate School, June 2007, pp. 8–9.
10. Coskun Kurkcu and Kaan Oveyik, U.S. Unmanned, Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Network-Centric Warfare (NCW): Impacts on Combat Aviation Tactics from Gulf War I through 2007 Iraq, Naval Postgraduate School, March 2008, p. 24.
11. CNA, Desert Storm Reconstruction Report, Volume XIV, pp. v, 8–10; partially declassified and released under the FOIA to the author; David S. Steigman, “Big guns’ last hurrah aids allied triumph,” Navy Times, March 11, 1991, p. 12.
12. DOD, Final Report to Congress: Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, Pursuant to Title V of the Persian Gulf Conflict Supplemental Authorization and Personnel Benefits Act of 1991 (Public Law 102-25), April 1992, pp. 341, 722–725, 796–797.
During Desert Storm, Navy Pioneer UAVs flew 64 sorties for 213 hours while providing naval gunfire support (NGFS) for 83 missions.
A total of 1,102 sixteen-inch rounds were expended on an average of nineteen projectiles per mission, more than half estimated against targets on Faylakah Island. The first firing took place on February 3, the first battleship sixteen-inch gun firing since the Korean War.
13. RAF, Air Power UAVs: The Wider Context, p. 31.
14. RAF, Air Power UAVs: The Wider Context, p. 30.
15. Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) Program Plan, April 1994, For Official Use Only markings removed, pp. 2-2, 2-3.
16. Introduction to Unmanned Aircraft Systems, p. 14.
17. Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) Program Plan, April 1994, For Official Use Only markings removed, pp. 2-2, 2-3; DOD, OSD UAV Reliability Study—Section 2, UAV Reliability Data, February 2003, pp. 12–13; Introduction to Unmanned Aircraft Systems, pp. 14–15.
18. Dr. Daniel L. Haulman, Air Force History Research Agency, U.S. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Combat, 1991–2003, June 9, 2003.
19. PH3 Todd Frantom, “Eyes in the Sky,” All Hands (US Navy magazine), March 2005, p. 16.
20. “PAVEWAY III (GBU-24) Low Level Laser Guided Bomb (LLLGB) consists of either a 2,000-pound MK-84 general purpose or a BLU-109 penetrator bomb modified with a PAVEWAY III low-level laser-guided bomb kit. The LLLGB was developed in response to improved enemy air defenses, poor visibility, and low ceilings. The weapon is designed for low altitude delivery with an improved standoff capability of more than 10 nautical miles. The PAVEWAY III also has increased seeker sensitivity and a larger field of regard. Another guided bomb development was the GBU-27, a 2,200-pound laser-guided bomb designed specifically for use by the F-117 Stealth Fighter. It is a highly accurate, hard-structure munition compatible with the F-117’s advanced target acquisition/designator system. The GBU-27 uses a BLU-109 improved performance 2,000-pound bomb developed in 1985 under the project name HAVE VOID, designed for use against hardened structures. The GBU-27 was used extensively during Desert Storm with a claimed hit probability of over 70 percent.” See The Development and Deployment of Precision Guided Munitions (PGMS) for Standoff Attack, Richard H. Van Atta and Ivars Gutmanis; in IDA, Transformation and Transition: DARPA’s Role in Fostering an Emerging Revolution in Military Affairs, Volume 2—Detailed Assessments, p. III-14.
21. The army also employed the Pointer micro-UAV in Desert Storm, but poor weather and high winds made it even less effective than the Pioneer; McDaid and Oliver, p. 60.
22. Barry D. Watts, The Evolution of Precision Strike, CSBA, 2013, p. 8.
23. See The Development and Deployment of Precision Guided Munitions (PGMS) for Standoff Attack, Richard H. Van Atta and Ivars Gutmanis; in IDA, Transformation and Transition: DARPA’s Role in Fostering an Emerging Revolution in Military Affairs, Volume 2—Detailed Assessments, p. III-19.
24. Operational Requirements Document (ORD), Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), CAF 401-91-II-A (ORD324), 1991.
The kit includes a Global Positioning System (GPS)–aided Inertial Navigation System (INS), consisting of a power supply, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), a GPS receiver, and an autopilot. The Guidance Control
Unit (GCU) provides guidance commands to the tail actuator system of the bomb, which steers the weapon to the target. It communicates with the aircraft through the MIL-STD-1760 interface to receive initialization data and mission-specific guidance information. It also sends GCU and fuse status information back to the aircraft. See USAF Weapons School, Nellis AFB, Nevada; Student Paper: Joint Direct Attack Munition and the F-15E, for F-15E Class 96 AIM, by Captain Daniel F. Holmes, 4 FW, Seymour Johnson AFB, North Carolina, May 1996.
The initial accuracy goal for JDAM was 13m CEP. Even during testing, that goal was surpassed.
25. USAF Weapons School, Nellis AFB, NV; Student Paper: All Weather PGMS for the F-16 for F-16 Class 98-AIF, by Captain Matthew R. Dana; 51 FW, Osan AB, ROK, 13 June 1998.
“The second part of the alignment process is the initialization of the GPS… the JDAM gets GPS almanac data from the DTC. If the host aircraft has no GPS or the GPS is not functioning, the JDAM needs to be provided date and time data to know where to look for the satellites. This is done by entering the time (in GMT) and date on the Up Front Control (UFC) time page. Once the bomb is released, it uses the almanac data and the time/date data to begin its search for the satellites. If the host aircraft is GPS equipped and tracking satellites when the weapon is released, the position of the satellites being tracked by the aircraft and time/date information is passed to bomb. This greatly decreases the time required for the weapon to acquire satellites after release. The free flight state of the JDAM involves separation from the aircraft, fuse arming, GPS satellite acquisition, guidance optimization, trajectory adjustment, and impact. When the weapon is released, the fins are locked in position for one second to allow for safe separation. Once the fins unlock, bomb orientation rotates to place the stationary fin down. Guidance commands are phased in during the first 250 msec after the fins are unlocked. The weapon then attempts to achieve Optimal Guidance. The Optimal Guidance law computes the minimal control effort to go from the present position and velocity state to impacting the target at the desired flight path and approach angle. If all the planned impact conditions cannot be achieved, the guidance law trades off impact velocity first, then angle/azimuth, and finally impact point. The JDAM does not begin self-tracking satellites until after it is released. The acquisition process starts three seconds after release. This is to prevent the aircraft from ‘shadowing’ the satellites from the weapon. The weapon uses five channels for satellite acquisition. Channels one through four are used to track four satellites. The fifth channel is used to obtain correction computations. The fifth channel is also used to search for and receive data on reserve satellites. The maximum amount of time needed before the weapon will start guidance from the GPS is 27 seconds.”
Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare Page 30
