Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  Installed in the General Atomics “campus” on the outskirts of San Diego, Cassidy and the brothers identified unmanned aircraft—drones—as a niche market in which a comparatively small company like theirs might stand a chance against the “primes” (meaning the major contractors). At the end of 1988 the company demonstrated a 16-foot prototype that Cassidy claimed could deliver “300 pounds of explosives, or a small nuclear warhead, to a target 300 miles away for a cost of $30,000.” But the Predator, as the device was called, repeatedly crashed and failed to generate any military interest.

  Meanwhile Avraham Karem’s company, Leading Systems, had slid into bankruptcy when the navy cancelled its order for his torpedo tube–launched Amber drone. Sensing a quick and cheap road to success, the brothers snapped up the assets of Karem’s foundering company as well as his own services. One of the assets the Israeli brought with him was an acquaintanceship with R. James Woolsey, a former secretary of the navy appointed to head the CIA by President Clinton following the 1992 election. Woolsey, a protégé of arch-neoconservative Richard Perle, combined eager enthusiasm for spy-craft gadgetry with a strong affection for all things Israeli. Karem’s design suddenly became a CIA program, and a prototype was dispatched to Albania to fly over the battlefields of the burgeoning Balkan civil wars. As it turned out, dreams of a persistent bird’s-eye view of the complicated ethnic conflicts on the ground were dashed. Of thirty-two flights planned, only twelve were completed, and those reportedly yielded no useful intelligence of any kind. Loath to waste a good name, the Blues called it Predator, after their earlier failed initiative.

  Karem’s design had the aerodynamics of a glider, its light weight (thanks to the plastics of which it was made) and long, thin wings allowing it to remain aloft for many hours. On the other hand, those wings also made it extremely vulnerable to wind shifts while taking off and landing (especially because it was piloted by remote control), which led to an extraordinarily high rate of crashes. Almost half the 268 Predators ultimately bought by the U.S. Air Force would be involved in major accidents. They were too delicate to fly in anything but perfectly calm weather. In the interests of making the drone’s noisy presence less obvious, the CIA demanded the addition of a muffler to its otherwise famously reliable Rotax piston engine. The consequent chronic overheating led to numerous engine failures and crashes, a problem that continues to this day. (“The problem is that nobody is comfortable with Predator. Nobody,” said the pilot of a Predator that crashed at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico in 2010, calling the notoriously unreliable drone “the most back-assedward aircraft I have ever flown.”)

  The Predator that first flew in 1994 (Karem had parted company with General Atomics a month before) might have lingered as a historical footnote, like many abortive drone programs before it, had it not been for unrelated advances in technology that opened up new possibilities for drones just as the Predator was ready for market.

  Up until this point, all drone projects had faced two major problems. First of all, once the aircraft was out of sight beyond the horizon, it was exceedingly difficult to know exactly where it was and thus navigate it to follow the desired flight path. Second, communicating with the drone beyond the horizon, either to send commands or receive whatever information it might be picking up, was impossible, given that the required high-frequency radio signals would not follow the curve of the earth.

  As it happened, the U.S. Navy also had been wrestling with a precision-navigation difficulty. For decades after they were introduced, submarine-launched ballistic nuclear missiles were acknowledged to be less accurate than their rival land-based ICBMs because the launching submarine could not know precisely where it was when firing the missile. The navy’s missiles were therefore limited to large targets, such as cities, rather than more precise objectives such as the Kremlin, or Soviet command posts, so the search for a solution was the navy’s highest priority. The answer that eventually emerged enabled the navy to claim accuracy on par with that of the air force. Along the way, it changed the way our society functions.

  Familiar to anyone with a smartphone, the Global Positioning System (GPS), designed primarily by inventor Roger L. Easton, consists of 31 satellites, each passing overhead at an altitude of 12,600 miles twice a day. Their orbits ensure that, at any one time, at least 4 satellites are in line of sight from any point on the planet. Each satellite continually broadcasts its position as well as the time it is making the broadcast. A receiver on the ground, such as an automobile’s GPS or a smartphone, calculates how long it has taken each signal to travel from space, thereby establishing its own position relative to the satellites.

  After a period of tests, the air force began launching these satellites in 1989, and by the following year U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia preparing for war with Iraq were using the system to find their way around the desert, though not always with success. By 1993 there were twenty-four satellites aloft. (The thirty-one now in orbit include spares.) Over the following twenty years, GPS would find applications far removed from submarine-launched missiles or even vehicle (car, boat, or plane) navigation. These include bank ATMs, cell-phone networks, stock trading, and the electric power grid, all of which depend on the precise time signals provided by the system for their all-important security encryption.

  More or less simultaneous with the GPS-derived revolution in navigation came a revolution in communications technology that was no less vital in promoting the rise of drones. Thanks mainly to exponential increases in the amount of data that could be transmitted via satellite, available bandwidth soared during the 1990s and beyond. Thus the amount of information, quantified in “bits,” transmitted by satellite and fiber-optic cable increased forty times just between 1999 and 2002. This was just as well for the U.S. military. “Net-centricity,” after all, required vast communication capacity. Thus the comparatively minuscule American force involved in the 1999 Kosovo war—entirely fought from the air—used two and a half times the bandwidth consumed by the force that had fought Iraq in 1991—over half a million men. Thanks to the revolution in communications technology, such extravagance was possible.

  Two years after the twenty-fourth GPS satellite soared into orbit in 1993, a small fleet of prototype Predators controlled from a U.S. Army base in Albania was in the air over the Balkans, surveying the ongoing civil war in Bosnia. (The craft now had a distinctive bulge at the front housing a satellite antenna.) Two of these prototypes disappeared during the 1995 missions, either crashed or shot down.

  Prone to breakdown and requiring perfect weather, the curiously shaped little airplane might yet have joined the many similarly esoteric prototypes thronging the nation’s military aviation museums had it not suddenly been picked up and borne aloft by the underlying currents that propel U.S. weapons development: money and politics. It was an area in which General Atomics was well equipped to compete.

  Any veteran of the U.S. defense establishment knows that the fiercest battles and deepest enmities are reserved not for the official enemy but for service rivals in the ceaseless struggle for budget share. Budgets, it should be remembered, are always the source and symbol of power in Washington. For the military services, budget share is largely determined by “roles and missions,” control of which in turn determines the strategies that protect service budgets. For example, back in the cold war, the air force initially held the strategic nuclear role and mission, meaning it had a monopoly on funding for delivering nuclear weapons on Russian targets. Then the navy developed submarine-launched missiles, invulnerable to an enemy surprise attack. The air force, its role and therefore a large slice of its budget threatened, quickly devised and promoted a strategy that required precision intercontinental missile strikes, which the navy’s less accurate missiles could not deliver. Thanks to the new strategy, the air force strategic-missile budget was saved. Former air force chief of staff Curtis LeMay expressed the spirit of interservice camaraderie when he remarked of a forthcoming Army-Navy football game, “I hope they b
oth lose.”

  In October 1994, when General Ronald Fogleman, a former fighter pilot and veteran of Vietnam (he had narrowly escaped capture after being shot down in his F-100 fighter) took over as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, he was shocked upon learning that Predator was under the purview of the U.S. Army. Ever since the air force had gained independence in 1947, it had jealously guarded its exclusive right to operate all fixed-wing aircraft, including reconnaissance. A lightweight, unmanned craft that flew at 80 mph would be a very thin end of the wedge, but the army was claiming a “major breakthrough in UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] technology,” while publicity over Predator’s involvement in actual combat operations was generating attention in Congress.

  Fogleman moved swiftly to seize the initiative. Millions of taxpayer dollars had already been poured into a brand-new training site for drones at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona, but even though Predators had not yet been assigned to the air force, Fogelman, acting unilaterally, set up a special squadron dedicated to drone operations at Indian Springs, a base outside Las Vegas. The U.S. Army has a long tradition of bureaucratic defeat that goes all the way back to its loss of what had been the Army–Air Force following World War II, and Fogleman’s determined onslaught yielded the traditional result. By the end of 1995 the army had caved, ceding control of Predator operations in return for a vague promise that the air force would respond to its “battlefield reconnaissance needs.”

  Victory was not yet total, however. In April 1996, William Perry, by now defense secretary, signed an order that confirmed the air force as “the lead service for operating and maintaining the Predator UAV” but left “responsibility for system development and procurement” with the navy. This was no good at all, the navy being a much more formidable opponent on the budgetary battlegrounds than the army. Both Fogleman and General Atomics had need of a higher power, which duly arrived in the form of Representative Charles Jeremy “Jerry” Lewis, Republican member of Congress for California’s Forty-first District and a staunch ally of both General Atomics and the Predator. As Neal Blue, who contributed $100,000 to Republican campaigns in 1988 alone, observed in a rare interview for Defense News, “For our size, we possess more significant political capital than you might think.”

  As originally written, President Dwight Eisenhower’s epochal 1961 farewell address had warned of the “military-industrial-congressional-complex” and its “economic, political, even spiritual” influence at every level of government. On delivery, the reference to Congress had disappeared. “It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the congress as well,” the president explained afterward. In his years of power, Jerry Lewis amply demonstrated that Ike had been right the first time. First elected to Congress in 1978, Lewis rose steadily through the Republican ranks, securing potent slots in the hierarchy on the appropriations, armed services, and intelligence committees, to the great benefit of his constituents and campaign contributors, who reciprocated his generosity with votes and checks. In 1999 he secured the chairmanship of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, a post that gave him suzerainty over the entire Pentagon budget, then running at $289 billion. “We must provide the resources our men and women in uniform need,” he announced to the full House Appropriations Committee the following year, “to maintain America’s role as the world’s last superpower.” In 2005 Lewis took command of the full appropriations committee and in 2006 was nominated, for the first but not the last time, by the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as one of the twenty most corrupt members of Congress. The honor was bestowed principally in recognition of his tangled relationship with the lobbying firm of Copeland Lowery Jacquez Denton & White, on behalf of which hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts were disgorged by Lewis’ appropriations committee to the firm’s clients while Mr. Lowery, his partners, and their spouses contributed $480,000 to Congressman Lewis’ campaign committee and other related funds between 2000 and 2005.

  Lewis was a good friend to General Atomics and the Predator. As a colleague no less practiced in the lubrication of defense contracts, the late Jack Murtha (D-Pa), remarked in a 2003 hearing, “The chairman [Lewis] is too modest when he talks about the Predator. If it hadn’t been for him there wouldn’t be no Predator. He was the guy that pushed it. He was the guy that got criticized and he was the guy that they tried to stop from putting it out in the field. And he persisted and that Predator is one of the most important systems that we have.”

  Thus it was that Lewis, in his capacity as vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, inserted a provision in the 1998 intelligence authorization bill mandating that all authority over the Predator and all its funding be transferred to the air force. Simultaneously, Michael Meermans, an influential intelligence committee staffer, made sure that Big Safari, a semi-secret air force development office empowered to cut corners on development funding (and, coincidentally, Meermans’ previous employer), be assigned to oversee Predator development. A Big Safari team accordingly moved into the General Atomics plant in an effort to make the machine perform some useful function, which, as we shall see, was not entirely successful. Meanwhile, General John Jumper, the head of Air Force Combat Command, deputed staffers to begin drawing up official requirements for what the Predator was actually expected to do. Jumper, who would succeed Fogleman as chief of staff, firmly believed that drones were the wave of the future as far as the air force was concerned and was ordering his priorities accordingly.

  By 1999, when the Clinton administration led NATO into an air campaign against Serbia, the Predators were ready to play a part.

  The three-month war on behalf of the insurgency in Kosovo, an ethnically distinct province of Serbia, put the revolution in military affairs on full display. NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley K. Clark was confident enough at the beginning to predict victory in three days. As in the 1991 Gulf War, “critical nodes”—bridges, TV stations, power plants—were targeted along with Serb army units. Also hit were businesses belonging to President Milošević’s friends; strategists assumed that “crony targeting” would generate enough pressure on the Serbian leader to cave. As Deptula, by now a brigadier general, later remarked, particular targets had been attacked “to achieve a specific effect within the parent system.” Deptula himself was away in Turkey commanding the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, but as an admiring biographer stresses, “Deptula’s ideas guided planning and execution, though he was not present in the command structure.” Stealth bombers were once again given a leading role although one was shot down and another badly damaged (Serb radar could track it after all), along with every available tool of ISR, which now included a growing fleet of Predator drones.

  Despite Clark’s confident prediction of imminent victory at the outset of the Kosovo operation, days turned into weeks as bombs rained down on a steadily expanding list of targets. Eventually, after eleven weeks and one day, President Milošević agreed to evacuate Kosovo. That made it easy for airpower partisans to claim victory, especially as not a single airman had been lost to enemy fire. In fact, Milošević caved only when his indispensable ally, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, withdrew his support following high-level U.S.–Russian negotiations in Moscow. As General Michael Jackson, commander of the British contingent, said afterward, Yeltsin’s desertion “had the greatest significance in ending the war” because Milošević had banked everything on keeping Moscow’s support.

  Nevertheless General Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quickly announced that the happy result was due to NATO bombs and missiles, which, according to Clark, had destroyed “around 120 tanks … about 220 armored personnel carriers,” and “up to 450 artillery and mortar pieces.” Subsequent investigation on the ground by a specialized bomb-damage assessment team concluded that the Serbs had lost no more than 12 or 13 tanks and equally few of the other vehicles and weapons. Clark was outraged and sent the team back to Kosovo for further research.
Once again, the team found no evidence that the air strikes had in any way discommoded the Serb military occupation. Ultimately, a U.S. Air Force general, without conducting further research in the field, produced a report with numbers that were close enough to the initial claims to be acceptable and were so recorded as the final, official tally.

  NATO staff members were in no doubt as to what had happened. As U.S. Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor, who was director of joint operations at NATO military headquarters throughout the war, later told me, “Pressure to fabricate came from the top … the [Air Force] senior leadership was determined that whatever the truth, the campaign had to confirm the efficacy of airpower and its dominance.”

  Treating the enemy as an inanimate object, something that could be addressed by destroying a set number of targets, had failed once again. The Serb military, it turned out, had followed in the footsteps of General Nguyen in Vietnam. They had put dummy tanks on display, laid out sheets of black plastic to simulate roads, and deployed microwave ovens that emitted decoy signals on the same wavelength as the air force’s anti-SAM, radar-homing missiles. None of this was apparent to General Clark as he peered eagerly into his drone video monitor, or to the serried ranks of allied intelligence officers masterminding the “critical node” targeting and bombing.

  Unlike the conflicts to come, the Kosovo war caused no bitter debates and left no searing memories. Yet the political effects of the instantly falsified history had far-reaching consequences. The war had been popular with liberals, both the Clinton administration and center-left governments in Europe. The campaign’s apparent confirmation that precisely targeted bombs and missiles could achieve victory at no cost in friendly casualties, and in a good cause, too, prepared the political landscape for the wars of the next century.