Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  Deptula, who had moved back to the air staff headquarters in Washington, also took to print. The operation he had planned and directed, he began telling the world, had marked a “Change in the Nature of Warfare.” The new technologies, especially stealth, had spawned “parallel warfare,” whereby it was possible to attack and disable an enemy in one fell swoop, rather than sequentially eliminating air defenses and then other targets, thus foreclosing the enemy’s ability to recover.

  Over time, Deptula expanded his vision, unveiling the concept of effects-based operations, the notion that precision now made it possible “not just to impede the means of the enemy to conduct war or the will of the people to continue war, but the very ability of the enemy to control its vital functions.” In other words, it was now possible so thoroughly to understand the way an enemy system functioned, its “centers of gravity,” as he (and Warden) termed it, as to predict precisely the reverberating effects of destroying a particular target. It was a beguiling concept, especially to the air force at a time when the disappearance of the Soviet enemy threatened U.S. military budget cuts.

  Unfortunately, the Gulf War as invoked by Deptula, Perry, Marshall, and others was not the war that had been fought. True, most of Iraq’s power supply had been knocked out on the first night or shortly afterward, reducing Iraqi civilian society to a preindustrial state in one stroke. All major bridges met the same fate, as did the phone system, TV, and radio. The Iraqi army had certainly been hard hit from the air, though most of the damage was inflicted not by the huge allied fleet of high-speed jets but by a force of 122 A-10s that had been reluctantly dispatched by the air force to the Gulf at the urgent insistence of commander in chief General Norman Schwarzkopf. Thanks to its carefully designed attributes of ruggedness and maneuverability at low altitudes, the plane proved supremely effective at destroying Iraqi armor and other units in the field, so much so that the emotional General Horner was famously moved to signal the Pentagon that “the A-10 saved my ass.”

  Meanwhile, despite expectations (and media exhortations to “go after” the Iraqi dictator), Saddam Hussein, the “first circle,” had been neither hit nor cut off from control of his government. Inevitably, he had reacted and adapted. As former Iraqi military intelligence chief Wafiq al-Sammarai explained to me later, “Saddam would come to my headquarters every day but at random times. He traveled in an ordinary Baghdad taxi, just with a driver. No guards or entourage.” Al-Sammarai himself had moved out of his headquarters a day before the war and watched from his new location as the U.S. carefully gutted his empty former office.

  Even systems that had demonstrably failed could bask in the warm glow of the technological triumph. Thus JSTARS’ side-looking radar, the system originally developed for Assault Breaker to detect Soviet tank columns, could find no sign of the mobile Scud launchers moving stealthily about the deserts of western Iraq, despite their being the highest-priority target of the war. (The two prototypes of this system used in the war zone were inside preowned Boeing 707s. Previously used to ship cattle around the Middle East, they stank of cow manure.)

  Needless to say, the various official and semiofficial post mortems did not stress such aspects of the conflict, and so the merits of pinpoint accuracy and invisible planes went unchallenged while the relevant weapons programs, and the corporations that sold them, grew and prospered. Only in 1996, when the General Accounting Office published the results of a diligent three-year investigation, did light dawn on what had actually happened. The F-117 had not flown unescorted and unafraid to its targets. It always needed the company of many escorting planes dedicated to jamming the enemy radars that supposedly could not see the Lockheed plane anyhow. So far from “one target, one bomb,” it had taken an average of four of the most accurate laser weapons, and sometimes ten, to destroy a target. Overall, the investigators concluded, “Many of DOD’s and manufacturers’ postwar claims about weapons system performance … were overstated, misleading, inconsistent with the best available data, or unverifiable.”

  It didn’t make any difference. By the time the investigators issued their sobering findings, the revolution in military affairs was carrying all before it. Though defense spending overall sank for a few years—the superpower enemy poised to pour through the Fulda Gap had disappeared, after all—research in and development of all the exciting possibilities foreshadowed in the Desert Storm triumph roared ahead, much of it aimed at the same goals that Igloo White and Task Force Alpha had pursued so many years before.

  Catchphrases such as “system of systems” and “net-centric warfare,” introduced in the 1990s, were still expressions of the idea that it is feasible to collect, sift, and use information with a minimum of human intervention. “If we are able to view a strategic battlefield and prevent an enemy from doing so, we have dominant battlefield awareness,” Admiral William Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in 2001, “and we are certain to prevail in a conflict.” Owens, an influential figure who talked about RMA (revolution in military affairs) a lot, also coined the acronym ISR for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, a term destined to loom ever larger in intelligence planning and budgets. Other high-ranking officers talked wistfully of how “if we had today’s sensors, we would have won in Vietnam.”

  Another influential admiral, Arthur Cebrowski, is credited with inventing the term net-centric to describe the virtues and possibilities of connecting all sources of information—planes, ships, drones, the more the better—to put them in constant communication with a central processor and each other. He drew inspiration from the Wal-Mart chain of superstores, deemed a net-centric organization because every time a cash register rang up a light-bulb sale, a central computer automatically ordered a new bulb from the supplier.

  Much of the excitement had been generated by the rapidly increasing power of computers. The Pentium III microprocessor introduced in 1998, for example, had a “clock speed” eighty times faster than that of Task Force Alpha’s IBM 360/65 and over a hundred thousand times more directly accessible memory. But while computers had become more powerful, the sensors providing the information, such as infrared and TV cameras, still could not distinguish one hot spot from another or see through smoke or haze. These were facts of life that would not go away.

  This inherent problem was apparently lost on Cebrowski, who suggested that if every soldier and warplane was connected up like the Wal-Mart cash registers, an entire force could operate as a coordinated mechanism, identifying and destroying targets with maximum efficiency and discrimination. Jasons pondering how to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail back in the summer of 1966 would have caught on to the idea immediately. Unsurprisingly, the defense intelligentsia was quick to fall into line. Two Rand Corporation researchers, David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, academic foot soldiers in the revolution in military affairs, popularized the notions of “cyberwar” and “netwar” as well as the catchy slogan “It takes a network to defeat a network.”

  Meanwhile, politicians were getting in on the act. In 1996 Senators Joseph Lieberman and Dan Coats sponsored a National Defense Panel as a forum to advance “the revolution in military affairs.” Andrew Krepinevich, the Marshall aide who had coined the revolutionary slogan, was picked to represent the senate Democrats on the panel. The Republicans selected a burly former naval officer and fellow graduate of the Marshall office, Richard Armitage. Their report, “Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century,” was a paean to revolutionary techno-wizardry, thanks to which a transformed military would be able to “project power” around the globe. Prominent in their conception was a huge role for unmanned aircraft—drones—in every aspect of the fight. “Air forces,” for example “would place greater emphasis on operating at extended ranges, relying heavily on long-range aircraft and extended-range unmanned systems, employing advanced precision and brilliant munitions.… Aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and unmanned combat aerial vehicles operating in theater could stage at peripheral bases
outside enemy missile range…”

  Not everyone bought in. Paul Van Riper, for example, an acerbic and somewhat intimidating three-star marine general, publicly derided the doctrine of “information superiority,” as preached by Owens, Cebrowski, and others, which he said consisted of “sweeping assertions and dogmatic platitudes.” Nor did Van Riper think much of airpower enthusiasts in general, on occasion delivering a speech entitled “From Douhet to Deptula, a History of Failed Promises” in which he referred scathingly to “those who espouse much of the current nonsense” coming from “organizations within the armed forces that are generally far removed from the confusion and horror of the close-in fighting that occurs in real war.… ‘Fighting’ for them revolves around the movement of icons and tracks on a screen.” A Vietnam combat veteran who had made a name for himself as a junior officer for “leading from the front,” Van Riper was amazed, as he told me later, “that people who were smart could believe this stuff. The hubris was unbelievable.”

  Such critiques had little effect, partly because the most influential figure in U.S. defense policy for most of the 1990s was William Perry, who returned to the Pentagon as deputy defense secretary in 1993 and was promoted to secretary the following year. Among his first acts was to direct and subsidize a series of mergers among the major defense contractors on the grounds that the end of the cold war rendered a spending famine inevitable. As it turned out the relatively small decline that did occur lasted only for a brief period in the 1990s, after which spending began once again to edge up and then soar far above even the cold war’s bountiful levels. Meanwhile Perry continued to pursue the dream, unrealized in Desert Storm, of seeing “all high value targets on the battlefield at any time.”

  Perry’s undeviating objectives were of course a reaffirmation of those pursued by his predecessor, John Foster, ardent proponent of Task Force Alpha. But Foster, the model-airplane enthusiast, had felt no less strongly about the ultimate weapon that would not only see all those high-value targets but also destroy them. In 1973, in his final session of congressional testimony before a deferential house committee, Foster was asked about his priorities for defense. “To improve surveillance” over land and sea, he answered, and “to get remotely controlled vehicles that can perform that surveillance and the attack missions.” The age of drones was not far off.

  Foster had hoped that unmanned aircraft might play their part over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but the effort had proved unsuccessful. Even so, money continued to sluice into drone development for some time after the United States had pulled out of Vietnam, but it was difficult to pretend that drones could defend themselves against Soviet antiaircraft missiles and fighters. For that, a thinking pilot on the scene was obviously necessary. Even so, Boeing and other defense corporations mobilized support in Congress for various drone projects, including Condor, an enormous high-flier proposed by Boeing, with a wingspan wider than that of a 747. None got further than the test stage.

  But with the Soviets gone, the U.S. military would now be operating where there was little or no danger from unfriendly fire in the air, a perfect time for drones to flourish. Civil wars in defenseless Somalia, Bosnia, and elsewhere provided a strong rationale for ever more surveillance, for which drones were thought to be ideal.

  Perry helped speed the process along by setting up a special office under his direct control called the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office to develop and buy a whole new generation of drones. Most of these projects never came into service. One that did was called Predator, the weapon that in the eyes of large parts of the world would one day come to define America.

  4

  PREDATOR POLITICS

  The various drone programs that blossomed during the cold war decades before fading away again in the face of military irrelevance and technical unfeasibility had been supervised by major defense corporations such as Boeing and Northrop, with impressive price tags to match. The machine that captured the twenty-first-century world’s imagination, however, originated with an Israeli immigrant with an impressive record of quarreling with employers, and a fringe defense contractor, albeit one with a knack for cultivating useful connections.

  The Predator drone was originally designed by Avraham Karem, an Israeli once deemed so irascible by Pentagon overseers they insisted that his daughter be the chief financial officer and spokesperson for his corporation. Born in Iraq in 1937, Karem had grown up with a fascination for model planes, which took him to the Israeli air force and eventually to the design shop of the state-owned Israeli Aircraft Industries. After falling out with his employer thanks, he says, to his single-minded fascination with drones, Karem moved to California in 1977 and continued designing pilotless planes. One potential customer was the U.S. Navy, which was in the process of acquiring large numbers of cruise missiles, one of the projects fostered so assiduously by William Perry. The missiles, themselves essentially self-guiding drones, bore claims of impressive accuracy and gratifyingly extensive range capable of reaching far-off Soviet fleets should the opportunity for a future replay of the Battle of Midway present itself. But the navy had no way of finding the enemy’s precise location in real time; hence the promise of Karem’s drone. Code-named Amber, it was a cigar-shaped vehicle with an odd-shaped inverted-V tail so that the aircraft could be fired out of a torpedo tube. Once aloft, it had the capacity to beam back video images (though not over long distances). But, as in the case of so many earlier drone programs, after the funding of the design and prototype, official interest flickered and died. However, just as Karem’s company, Leading Systems, spiraled into bankruptcy in 1990, a rescuer appeared.

  The General Atomics Corporation had begun life in 1955 as an offshoot of the General Dynamics Corporation whose aim was that of breaking into the nuclear-reactor market. Coincidentally, its initial project, the Triga research reactor, was conceived by a group of nuclear-weapons designers who were active members of the Jasons recruited to the company’s San Diego headquarters by fellow Manhattan Project alumnus Freddy de Hoffman. The company also sponsored the same group in Project Orion, a scheme to propel spaceships by exploding nuclear bombs, which never progressed further than the lively imaginations of the physicists who dreamed it up. After parting company with parent General Dynamics, the company passed through the hands of various oil corporations until it was bought in 1986 for $60 million by the Blue brothers of Denver, Colorado. Neal Blue, thirty-five at the time, assumed the office of chairman, while his thirty-three-year-old sibling, Linden, was installed as deputy chairman.

  As they have told their story, these scions of a wealthy family were aviation devotees from an early age. By the time Neal was twenty-one, he and his brother were flying a single-prop plane around Latin America. Among the contacts they made south of the border was the long-standing Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Samoza, with whom they formed a business partnership that lasted right up until Sandinista revolutionaries ejected the Samoza family in 1979. As Neal later told an interviewer, he and his brother were “enthusiastic supporters” of the Contra rebels who sought, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the Sandinistas in the 1980s.

  In 1982 Neal was hired by the major defense contractor Raytheon to run their newly acquired Beech Aircraft subsidiary. In this capacity he battled the machinist unions, which were opposed to his plans to introduce labor-saving composite materials. Simultaneously he embarked on a scheme to turn a pristine Alpine landscape abutting Telluride, Colorado, into a major subdivision, complete with condos, hotels, and golf courses. Furious residents blocked the scheme, ultimately raising $50 million to acquire the land through eminent domain, and although Neal battled for twenty-five years, he never realized his dream of the subdivision.

  Though the founders of General Atomics had sought to discover new technologies for nuclear power, the Blues initially opted for a more traditional business model, buying a uranium deposit in northwest New Mexico, the largest in the country. The brothers also bought the decrepit Sequoyah uranium-processing facility
in eastern Oklahoma that had had a radioactive leak equivalent in size to Three Mile Island just a few years earlier. A nine-legged frog had been discovered nearby. Undeterred, General Atomics kept operating the leaky facility, cranking out specialized uranium metal used in fuel rods and armor-piercing munitions until 1992, before finally shutting it down after the plant experienced yet another major release of radioactive material. An investigation found that groundwater near the plant was 35,000 times above the legal limit of permitted levels of radioactivity and that the company should have known the plant was leaking radioactive waste but did not stop it.

  Profitable though mining toxic materials might be (the Blues had another uranium operation in Australia), the mother lodes of government contracts could be at least as rich. Among the brothers’ goals in buying General Atomics was the prospect of lucrative business from the Star Wars missile defense initiative launched by Ronald Reagan three years before. To that end they set up a defense programs group within the company with an advisory board decorated with Washington door openers, including former secretary of state Alexander Haig and former Joint Chiefs chairman John Vessey. In 1987 the Blues turned to a recently retired navy admiral, Thomas Cassidy, to helm a newly created “advanced technology projects division.” Cassidy, described by subordinates as “not beloved, but admired,” had formerly been in command of the nearby Miramar Naval Air Station but had been relieved of his command following an investigation into irregularities in the purchase of overpriced ashtrays and maintenance tools for the base. He was later reinstated after an appeal.