Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  In 1973, under the patronage of Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger (a fellow Rand alumnus), Marshall moved to the Pentagon to head a newly created Office of Net Assessment. He was still there, forty years later, in the second Obama administration. In the intervening period he had evolved into an object of reverence, perhaps because his proposals, despite their iconoclastic flavor, somehow never threatened established interests—and often required lavish additions to their budgets. Marshall’s sharp eye for ambitious talent and his skill in the careful deployment of study contracts ensured that, while administrations came and went, generations of mutually supporting graduates of his office were seeded throughout the defense establishment, orbiting between corporations, the bureaucracy, and think tanks.

  The eye-catching feature of the revolution in military affairs as popularized by Marshall and others was the emphasis on “precision guidance.” This was a long-anticipated development. At the beginning of World War II the air force had claimed that its recently acquired Norden bomb sight, an instrument carried in the plane to enable the accurate launching of bombs, would ensure that 50 percent of its bombs would fall within 75 feet of their target. The boast went unfulfilled. On an infamous raid against the German ball-bearing works at Schweinfurt in October 1943, with the attackers suffering huge losses and little damage to the plants, only one in ten of Norden-aimed bombs fell within 500 feet of the target. (The device was still being used to drop sensors for the electronic barrier in 1967.) While the Norden sight was an attempt to position a bomber in the correct spot to drop a bomb, postwar efforts were concentrated on ways of guiding a bomb after it had left the bomber. In December 1968, John Foster told an interviewer that although bombing Vietnam had produced “meager results … we’ve recently developed a series of weapons that permit us to get incredible accuracies, as compared with normal aircraft delivery systems. Instead of having accuracies of hundreds of feet, we now talk in terms of ten feet.”

  At the time, this had been another idle boast. Repeated efforts to hit “critical” targets in North Vietnam were still missing by hundreds of yards. One such target was a bridge over a river about one hundred miles south of Hanoi near a town called Thanh Hoa that was supposedly crucial to the enemy supply effort. The air force and navy bombed it obsessively with guided and unguided bombs between 1965 and 1972 to zero effect—apart from the loss of dozens of pilots. Finally, in May 1972, the bridge was cut with two laser-guided bombs. Though hailed as a momentous event then and since, it turned out that the Vietnamese had stopped using the bridge years before, while traffic flowed unmolested across an undetected river ford five miles upstream. Meanwhile the bridge itself was put to use as the center of what Pentagon wags termed “a flourishing anti-aircraft school.”

  The notion that this triumph of precision might have been irrelevant found little favor where it counted. Under the tutelage of Perry and Defense Secretary Harold Brown (a former nuclear weapons lab director who had also had Perry’s job directing defense research and development), billions of dollars poured into variants of precision guidance, some focused on directing the missile via a little TV camera in its nose or by tracking hot shapes with a heat-seeking infrared camera. Others followed the reflection of an infrared laser beam shone at the target by a pilot or a soldier on the ground. Once Ronald Reagan replaced Carter in 1981, defense spending, already inflated, went into a steeper climb, with the costs of all the revolutionary new weapons systems predictably following suit.

  Among these were various subsystems of Assault Breaker that took on independent but nonetheless prosperous lives after the program was officially ended. The heart of the original system had been the component that Perry hoped would make it possible to see “all high value targets on the battlefield at any time.” This radar was “side looking,” meaning that the antenna stretched along the plane’s fuselage and thus looked sideways, which, because of its size (bigger is better for radar antennae), promised to deliver sharper images. By filtering the data’s echoes to display only objects in motion, the system was billed capable of revealing Soviet tank armies moving up in the rear. Unfortunately, it proved all too efficient at detecting any moving object, not merely tanks, but also automobiles and even trees blowing in the wind. Though the problem proved intractable, the program lived on, to the recurring benefit of the Northrop Corporation, under a variety of code names that ultimately settled on JSTARS for Joint Surveillance Target Attack System.

  Soon after his appointment by Carter, Perry began assiduously promoting an even more ambitious concept, pouring huge amounts of money into a technology called radar cross-section reduction. This was first invented by the Germans to make their World War II submarine snorkels harder to detect with special shaping to reflect radar waves away from the sender and special materials to absorb radar. Perry renamed the technology “stealth” and changed the security classification from a low-level “confidential” to the highest levels of “top secret.” Intimations that something new and incredibly sensitive was in the works helped to justify the massive funding while simultaneously making test data inaccessible to skeptics. Meanwhile, Perry pursued his grand vision of stealthy cruise missiles and large stealthy aircraft, even stealthy ships. The services were aghast at the impact the inevitably staggering cost would have on more cherished projects, but Perry calmed their fears by promising that the programs would be “technology driven, rather than funding driven,” meaning that there would be no limits on spending for any apparently promising advance in technology. Behind the cloak of secrecy the multibillion-dollar B-2 strategic bomber and the smaller F-117 proceeded slowly and expensively toward production, their performance and, more important, their budgets screened from the outside world.

  While these technologically ambitious programs were under development, one program founded on radically different principles was quietly entering service. The A-10 Thunderbolt II, to give it its official name, was commissioned to provide “close air support” to troops actually on the battlefield rather than to attack enemy forces far in the rear. Pilots soon renamed it “the Warthog.” True to its core belief in waging war entirely independently of the other services, the air force had no interest in such a weapon, but there came a moment in the early 1970s when it seemed possible that the army might capture the close air-support mission for itself with a costly new helicopter, a development that would have deleterious effects on the air force budget. Consequently, the service turned to an analyst then working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense known for his unconventional view on the importance of the close-support mission.

  Pierre Sprey, a mathematical prodigy whose parents had escaped to the United States from Nice in 1941, had worked summers at Grumman Aerospace from the age of fourteen, the year he was admitted to Yale. By the time he had left Yale at age eighteen and moved to Cornell for his masters, Grumman was paying him as a statistical consultant on programs that included NASA’s Lunar Excursion Vehicle and navy jets. In 1960 he was enlisted to work on an experiment with a direct bearing on “remote sensing” systems of the kind that would one day enable operators looking at a video screen in Nevada to target a truckload of tribesmen on the other side of the world. The experiment was designed to test whether it was worth putting TV cameras in reconnaissance planes to give pilots images better than those they could get with the naked eye.

  In a research facility on Long Island a Grumman team crafted a display filled with models of tanks, jeeps, command posts, and other tactical targets, all carefully camouflaged to appear as they would on an actual battlefield. Combat veterans monitored the effort to ensure realism. An observation platform overlooking the display gave observers the same view they would have from an airplane, with a shutter in front of the platform that could be opened to allow only as much time to view the scene, ten or twenty seconds, as a pilot would have as he flew past. In those few seconds the observers were asked to pick out as many targets as they could. Then, for the same amount of time, observers were shown a
TV picture using a high-definition camera of a similar display and asked again to look for targets. The results were surprising. Only when the camera had zoomed in enough to show a narrow view, the equivalent of looking down through a soda straw from 15,000 feet up and seeing an area no larger than two tennis courts, were the TV viewers able to find as many targets as those spotted with the naked eye. But the TV viewers also identified five times as many false targets—tanks and other objects that were not there—as those identified with plain eyesight. The implications were very clear: electronic imaging does not depict battlefield reality with the same acuity as the human eye, an essential truth long forgotten by the time the U.S. military and CIA began watching the world via drone-fed video imagery, with tragic consequences for many a false target.

  Graduating with a masters in operations research and mathematical statistics, Sprey worked full-time at Grumman for two years until, in 1966, he moved on to the Pentagon as a member of the “whiz kids,” an iconoclastic team of analysts recruited by Defense Secretary McNamara to bring a fresh look to military thinking. Before long, the young mathematician had earned the wrath of air force generals with a study demonstrating that their plan to fight the Soviets in Europe with long-range bombing was essentially worthless and that the only effective use of airpower was in close support of ground forces on the battlefield. Faced with the political necessity of fending off the army’s bid for the close-support mission and the money that went with it, the chief of staff, a devious bureaucratic politician named John McConnell, detailed Sprey, despite the repugnance of his views on air power, to come up with the basic design for a close-support plane that would underbid the army’s helicopter candidate.

  Endowed with this high-level support, Sprey conceived a design that enabled pilots to operate low and close to the battlefield (thanks to the plane’s maneuverability and multiple safety features) and thus be in a position to see and judge for themselves what course of action to take. This was a very far cry from the sensor-dependent concepts underpinning the revolution in military affairs, but faced with the threat from the army, the air force went ahead and put the plane into production.

  Like all new systems, the A-10, which first flew in 1975, was officially justified by the perennial Soviet threat, which would be confronted in a mighty clash on the plains of Europe sometime in the future. In reality, an actual Soviet invasion of Western Europe seemed highly unlikely (though Andrew Marshall proposed in the 1980s that a weakening USSR might “lash out,” thereby generating a billion-dollar nuclear shelter scheme). Then, to everyone’s complete surprise, opportunity knocked for a real live demonstration of what the post-Vietnam high-technology military could do, and under near-perfect conditions.

  Within a few days of Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, U.S. Central Command forces had been rushed to Saudi Arabia to prepare the counterattack. Following in their wake came the air force’s Deputy Director for Strategy, Doctrine, and War-Fighting, Colonel John Warden, complete with a plan for the air force to win the war on its own. Warden, deeply immersed in the subject of bombing, had long ruminated on the theory that identifying and destroying a limited number of specific “centers of gravity” essential to the functioning of an enemy society would lead inescapably to the enemy’s collapse or paralysis.

  This was not a new idea; the air force had maintained for years that the destruction of “critical nodes” would ensure such an outcome. The problem had always been how to identify these critical targets, let alone put them out of action. Repeatedly, during bombing campaigns, assaults on supposedly crucial nodes tended to yield minimal effects, so new nodes were designated and targeted. In World War II, for example, ball-bearing plants were succeeded by rail networks, which were followed by oil refineries. None of them brought about the anticipated enemy collapse. In addition, a recurring consequence of these campaigns had been an eventual broadening of target categories, so that in the end, everything got hit. As we shall see, this syndrome applies even when the targets are individual humans rather than things.

  Warden believed that technology had changed the equation. New methods of intelligence and surveillance, including radars such as JSTARS, combined with stealth bombers invisible to enemy defenses and precision-guided bombs and missiles would enable U.S. bombers to do their job not only rapidly but with a gratifying economy of force: one plane accomplishing what had required hundreds or thousands of missions in World War II. As for targets, he had developed what he called the “five rings” theory, in which the rings denoted targets of progressively greater criticality, with the innermost representing the enemy leadership. The other rings were “centers of gravity,” such as power plants and communications centers, which, if put out of action, would lead to enemy paralysis in a neat, surgical, and above all predictable manner. Resorting to metaphor, Warden compared an enemy system to the human body, with the brain and nerves representing enemy leadership, bones representing infrastructure, and so on. This sounded like an “organic” approach to war, except of course the human body cannot replicate or bypass lost parts, whereas enemies like General Nguyen, defender of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, certainly could.

  Untroubled by such quibbles, Warden and a specially assembled team code-named Checkmate drew up a plan, Instant Thunder, which he was convinced could defeat Iraq without the army firing a shot. The targets associated with each ring were duly posted on a board in Checkmate’s Pentagon basement office. At the top of the “leadership” list, the most important target, was a name: Saddam. Critical nodes were no longer just things—bridges, oil tanks, and power plants—now they could be people. Two days later someone remembered that assassination was officially banned as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Saddam’s name was erased and the entry changed to “Isolate and incapacitate Saddam’s regime.”

  Under “Expected results,” Warden wrote: “National leadership and command and control destroyed.” He estimated it would take six days. After getting an enthusiastic response from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, who exclaimed, “This could win the war!,” Warden flew with his team to Saudi Arabia to lay out the plan to General Charles Horner, commander of the coming air war with Iraq.

  Horner, a notoriously emotional character, took an instant dislike to the obsessive theorist from Washington and ordered him on the next plane home. However, Warden had brought with him Lieutenant Colonel David Deptula, who had been seconded to the planning team from the office of the secretary of the air force. Deptula, a former fighter pilot like Warden, had developed greater skills as a bureaucratic politician. Earlier in 1990 he had coined the air force’s new motto: “Global Reach—Global Power,” the title of a manifesto he penned at the secretary’s request, touting the air force’s unique and enduringly desirable attributes of “speed, range, precision, and lethality” in a changing world when the Soviet threat appeared to be going away. These assets, he noted, offered “decisive capabilities against potentially well-equipped foes at minimum cost in casualties—increasingly important in an era in which we believe the American people will have low tolerance for prolonged combat operations or mounting casualties.”

  While a despondent Warden flew back to Washington, Deptula had ingratiated himself sufficiently with Horner to stay in Riyadh and was soon ensconced at headquarters as the chief attack planner for the coming war. With Warden’s ideas and Horner’s backing, he was about to make his reputation.

  The air attack on Iraq launched on January 16, 1991, incorporated the basic scheme of Instant Thunder and appeared to be a triumphant success. Lights went out all over the country. Military and other government headquarters were neatly demolished without damage to their neighbors. Within a few days, residential streets in affluent districts of the capital bore the stench of meat that had rotted in freezers left without power. Adding to the triumph were the TV broadcasts of videos beamed from the bombs’ cameras as they unerringly zeroed in on their targets. For the first time the public at h
ome could watch and thrill at the air force’s “precision and lethality” administered with cool professional efficiency. (The navy, to its chagrin, had not installed the necessary equipment for broadcasting the videos and was thus bested in the public relations war.) Publicity regarding the hitherto highly secret Lockheed F-117 stealth bomber, with its excitingly futuristic design and mystique of invisibility, only added to the allure. As Lockheed publicists reported, on the first night of the war, the plane had “collapsed Saddam Hussein’s air defenses and all but eliminated Iraq’s ability to wage coordinated war.” Not to be outdone, Texas Instruments, makers of the Paveway III laser bomb-guidance system, advertised “one target, one bomb.”

  Even at the time there were some disquieting indications that not everything was going as predicted. Though the Iraqi air force had been easily neutralized, the Iraqi army remained obdurately in place in Kuwait, clearly still receiving and responding to orders from Baghdad. When Iraqi Scuds fired from mobile launchers started landing on Tel Aviv, intense surveillance efforts using all available technologies failed to find a single launcher. The Iraqi army was driven out of Kuwait only when attacked and outmaneuvered by U.S. and allied ground troops. Saddam, the one-man innermost ring, remained alive and in charge.

  Nevertheless, the impression prevailed that the war had been an unalloyed triumph for airborne technology. The promises of Foster, Westmoreland, Perry, and Deptula had been dramatically vindicated, as some of them were happy to point out. Writing soon after the war, Perry celebrated the success of various systems he had fostered and championed, including JSTARS and other surveillance systems—“manned and unmanned”—that had tracked the enemy on a continual basis, not to mention the stealth bombers, 80 percent of whose bombs, he claimed, had destroyed their targets. Andrew Marshall was quick to catch the wave, encouraging a military assistant, Andrew Krepinevich, to pen a pamphlet, “The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment,” that echoed Warden’s nostrums about centers of gravity, precision strikes, and other possibilities of the new technology. A year later it was reissued with the catchier title “Revolution in Military Affairs,” a phrase that was soon firmly lodged in the defense-intellectual lexicon.