Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  As the American war in Iraq wound down—Rivolo’s scrutiny of IED statistical trends gave early warning that the majority of Sunni insurgents were changing sides—the targeting machinery redeployed with renewed vigor to Afghanistan, its masters convinced that they had found the key to victory.

  10

  A PIECE OF JUNK

  Despite accounting for almost half the world’s arms spending, in much of the country the U.S. military establishment is largely invisible. There are exceptions where landscape and politics have resulted in an evident military presence. One of these is Virginia’s Southern Neck, the long peninsula jutting out into the Chesapeake Bay. An archipelago of bases and forts, as well as the CIA’s Camp Peary, it stands as a testament to the enduring power of the state’s congressional delegation. Whole communities were swept away in the headlong militarization of the area during the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century, periodic outbreaks of peace occasioning only minor shrinkage before a fresh cascade of appropriated dollars rained down to irrigate the area’s economy.

  In July 1921, General Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Corps took off from the corps’ Langley Field at the tip of the peninsula to prove his theories regarding the omnipotence of airpower by bombing and sinking a number of surrendered German warships anchored in the bay. Mitchell is one of the patron saints of the U.S. Air Force, as it was founded on the presumption that airpower can win wars unaided by interventions from armies and navies. Down through the years, this conviction has underpinned the doctrines and budgets of the service. For true believers, presumptions about technology embodied in the revolution in military affairs and David Deptula’s theory of effects-based operations, and further expressed in the drone-assisted manhunts of the twenty-first-century wars, merely reaffirmed Mitchell’s contentions. “Find, fix, finish,” Deptula remarked to me one day over lunch. “We spent a hundred years working on finish. We can now hit any target anywhere in the world, any time, any weather, day or night.”

  So it was fitting that when I visited Langley Air Force Base it was on an introduction from Deptula himself, who had retired in 2010 and was appointed dean of the Air Force Association’s Mitchell School of Airpower Studies two years later. I came to the base to view the Langley “node” of the Distributed Common Ground System, the “system of systems” that General Deptula had been promoting since 2003. In essence, the DCGS is the repository of the oceans of data flowing from “platforms,” drones, spy planes, and satellites in an endless stream of video as well as electronic signals and conversations.

  Earlier, we saw analysts at the DCGS node at Florida’s Hurlburt Air Force Base in Florida monitor video from a Predator drone as it stalked a little convoy of Afghan civilian vehicles in the mountains of Uruzgan. But DCGS (pronounced D-sigs) does more than that, collating imagery from different platforms in order to identify targets or just watching a house, a vehicle, or a person to monitor “pattern of life” or logging archived material for later reference. There are five principal and forty subsidiary sites within the network. Each of the principal system “nodes” is co-located with a specific air force unit, thus the site at Hurlburt Air Force Base pairs with the air force special operations headquarters in support of Special Forces missions. Even so, this is a network in which all the parts are interchangeable, all having equal access to the same material, all enabled to coordinate lethal strikes. The air force calls this a “weapons system,” with a unit cost of $750 million for each of the principal sites. At $4.2 billion for the air force—and $10.2 billion across all services—when completed, it will represent a far more substantial financial prize for major corporations than drone programs. The contractors who shared in programming and building those “weapons”—Raytheon, Lockheed, L-3 Communications, Northrop, Hughes—are among the titans of the defense complex. Further monies are being garnered (at least $63.5 million in 2013) to support the enterprise. Recipients are many of the above as well as General Dynamics, SAIC, CACI, and Booz Allen along with smaller fry. “It’s the key to the whole system,” Deptula told me, “drones are just fiberglass in the sky.”

  Prior to his retirement, Deptula had risen high in the air force, gaining his third star by 2005. Along the way, he had continued to spread his gospel, encouraging Wesley Clark in the air strategy of the Kosovo conflict and for two months directing the air operations staff doing the targeting for the 2001 air campaign against Afghanistan. An admiring air force biographer summarized that war as one in which “small teams of special forces on the ground had supported airpower as it dispersed Taliban forces.…” Ground forces supporting airpower rather than the other way around was the fulfillment of a dream going back to Mitchell himself. Subsequent developments appeared no less gratifying. Deptula’s friend General Michael Moseley, supervising the air component of the 2003 Iraq invasion, had, according to that same biography, very properly “employed stealth with precision weapons” in the initial attempts to kill Saddam. Thereafter, as implemented by Moseley, Deptula’s “vision of parallel warfare and effects-based operations resulted in devastating the Iraqi ability to defend itself.”

  With the ensuing insurgency having dashed American hopes for a trouble-free occupation, Deptula was nevertheless confident that he had the answer to this very different kind of war. “Like a liquid that gravitates toward our weakest points, they aim to defy our grasp,” he wrote in 2007. “Because they infest urban areas and hide among the civilian populations, finding the enemy has become a great challenge. In this sense knowledge is assuming precedence over kinetics as the prerequisite ‘weapon’ of war … victory will go to those who create and exploit knowledge faster than their opponents.” If knowledge were more important than “kinetics,” meaning physical force, then whoever collected, analyzed, and distributed the knowledge would be in a very powerful position and worthy of a commensurately sized budget. “When we took out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Deptula liked to tell audiences, “that operation consisted of over 600 hours of Predator time, followed by about ten minutes of F-16 time.” Traditionally, the collection of intelligence, especially about underground insurgents, had been in the hands of signals and human intelligence collectors, that is, NSA, CIA, and DIA. The advent of drones with their enticing streams of video, not to mention their ability to collect signals intelligence and track people through Stingray technology, meant that the air force was expanding its role and therefore entitled to a bigger share of the pot.

  Offered the powerful position of deputy chief of staff for intelligence in 2006, a position traditionally occupied by a mere two-star general, three-starred Deptula had successfully negotiated an expansion of the title to deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. This was more than just an exercise in title inflation. In air force terminology, reconnaissance has heavy implications of space and satellites, usually the purview of other agencies, including the young and expanding National Geospatial Agency, which supposedly had responsibility for analyzing and distributing satellite pictures. Surveillance also had interesting implications, since it was traditionally associated with monitoring the borders by land and sea. Indeed, at this time Deptula was also leading a push for the air force to be nominated as the “executive agent” for all medium- and high-altitude drones, meaning that it would hold the purse strings on other services’ drone programs. This was not, obviously, an initiative welcomed by the other services, which lobbied furiously and effectively to kill the proposal.

  Central to the argument that these activities and responsibilities be combined was the notion of jointness, a term that might suggest a spirit of benign interservice cooperation. Deptula invoked it to mean, among other things, “an arrangement where one service oversees the acquisition and standardization of theater-capable UAVs.” Simply put, this meant that the air force should own all the important drones. As a serving air force officer familiar with this approach remarked to me, “Deptula was one of the generals in the air force that were at war, first and foremost, with the othe
r services. More than Russians or Chinese or Al Qaeda or anybody else, Deptula’s main enemy was the United States Army, and after that the Marine Corps, and after that the Navy.”

  Deptula’s attitude toward the marines may have been colored by rhetorical salvos regularly loosed off in his direction by his old nemesis, retired marine general Paul Van Riper. In a 2005 email exchange between the generals, Van Riper once again derided the airman’s claims to have changed the nature of war with choice observations such as “let me say that your description of an approach based on ‘control of the enemy’ demonstrates, at least to me, your lack of understanding of non-linear or structurally complex systems.” Van Riper’s friend and fellow marine General James Mattis, who had been appointed to lead the Joint Forces Command formerly humiliated by Van Riper in the Millennium Challenge war game, gave what he thought was a death blow to Deptula’s effects-based operations doctrine by issuing an order banning the use of the term in his command. Among other pungent critiques of the concept (“Assumes a level of unachievable predictability”) Mattis pointed out that its wholehearted embrace by the vaunted Israeli Defense Forces prior to the 2006 Lebanon War had proved disastrous. “Although there are several reasons why the IDF performed poorly during the war,” noted the general, “various postconflict assessments have concluded that overreliance on EBO concepts was one of the primary contributing factors for their defeat.”

  The Distributed Common Ground System headquarters at Langley is not an institution comfortable with outside scrutiny. Throughout my visit, I was an alien presence. Touring the facility with a squad of escorts, my little phalanx was preceded at all times by a serviceman holding high a red torch to signify that an interloper from outside the classified universe was in their midst and therefore that nothing secret should be shown or uttered. The huge rooms, lined with workspaces crammed with multiple screens, resembled nothing so much as a Wall Street trading room, except that here the screens display images of Afghan hillsides collected by a Reaper drone or a patch of the Pacific ocean sent by a Global Hawk drone at 60,000 feet or the horn of Africa from an orbiting satellite or the coast of Iran from a U-2 spy plane, any and all of which, in theory at least, could be called up by the young men and women consigned to gaze at the screens day after day. They may be coordinating a strike, archiving video so that it can be called up later, or simply gazing at a targeted house, car, or person far away. Larger screens high on the walls displayed the location of “platforms,” the drones and planes and satellites gathering the knowledge being piped into the system in a ceaseless torrent, the equivalent, so the air force informed me, of 700 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica per day.

  It is a system of extraordinary complexity and expense. Simply to ensure that all the different nodes and sites remain interconnected at all times involves a massive investment in bandwidth and fiberoptic communications. Even rendering the incoming imagery viewable requires a considerable engineering effort to “clean up” what may arrive as unintelligible images.

  Thus, ever since William Perry championed the privatization of defense operations and support functions in the 1990s, outsourcing key missions to civilian contractors has taken up an ever-increasing share of military operations and budgets. This makes it legally difficult, given the sanctity of contracts and corporate litigiousness, to cut spending in this area. The esoteric world of “D-Sigs” is no exception. Just as private contractors handle drone takeoffs and landings before handing them over to the military crews to conduct actual strikes, so corporations not only built this complex electronic nervous system but also to a considerable extent operate and maintain it.

  A simple check on Internet job postings from corporations on contract to service the system helps to convey the scale of the business. Openings at just the Langley node, for example, were appearing daily, with no sign of a slowdown even as Washington rang with talk of austerity and “a hollowed out military.” A typical day’s sample in early March 2014 advertised openings for, variously, a “systems administrator” (the position that Edward Snowden put to good use) required by CACI International, a “subject matter expert” sought by Sehike Consulting, an “intelligence capabilities analyst” required by Digital Management, while General Dynamics was looking for a network engineer. All positions required at least a Top Secret Clearance, and most mandated SCI (special compartmented information), which usually meant signals intelligence. Salaries ranged between $120,000 and $170,000 annually, though of course the contractors would be adding a hefty overhead when submitting bills to the taxpayer.

  The Langley unit has a resident chaplain and a psychologist who patrol the area between the computer banks ready to offer counseling to anyone unduly distressed by scenes of remote death and destruction in which they may have participated via video. But though much has been made of the combat stress suffered by servicemen and women in such conditions, Colonel Hernando Ortega, surgeon for the Air Force Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, has expressed a different view of the stresses of what he calls “tele-warfare.” Addressing a Washington think-tank seminar in 2013, he divulged the fact that “our guys are below the general civilian population as far as risk for PTSD.” To murmurs of disbelief from his audience of defense intellectuals he insisted that “we haven’t had any pilots with PTSD.… We had, I think, one sensor operator, maybe.”

  One side of the huge room at Langley was reserved for the signals intelligence workstations where NSA assignees monitored the cell-phone locations of targets, eavesdropped on their conversations, or checked links based on calling patterns, all crucial elements in Deptula’s drive to fulfill his thirst for “knowledge.” They enabled the marriage of visual and signals intelligence, so that a specific SUV in a wedding-party convoy can be pinpointed thanks to signals from the high-value target’s cell phone and then incinerated with a Hellfire missile. This does indeed constitute an impressive feat of technological intelligence, assuming, of course, that they have the correct phone number.

  “I overhauled the system,” Deptula told me, “made it global, so that any station could be involved in any operation with a phone call.” The scale was impressive—the whole world enclosed in one thinking spiderweb—even if the end result was a tsunami, a thousand hours per day of full-motion video (defined as 24 frames per second) plus further streams of intercepted calls and associated signals intelligence that the current 5,000-strong complement of air force Distributed Common Ground System analysts will never have time to review.

  Lamenting the quantity of information collected, whether images or signals, is a traditional meme of intelligence officials. Deptula, for example, liked to warn that “we will soon be swimming in sensors and drowning in data.” However, neither he nor any of his fellow generals has ever suggested that the answer might be to collect less. As General James R. Clapper, future director of national intelligence, once said, “I cannot see a situation where someone is going to say, ‘Hey, I can do with less of that.’” This statement suggests that perhaps the object of the exercise, wittingly or otherwise, is not the production of useful information but simply the building of a bigger bureaucratic empire with a bigger budget. Clearly, however, no one could admit to this. Therefore the orthodox response to the “drowning-in-data” lament has been to invoke the urgent need and imminent prospect of turning the business of analysis over to machines. As Deptula himself has declared, “making this automatic is an absolute must.”

  This is the Holy Grail, pursued ever since the distant days of Task Force Alpha, with ever-more participants joining the chase. Exponential expansion in processing power and software improvements has certainly made it easier to extract relevant items from a mass of data and “connect the dots,” as the hackneyed phrase has it. Yet this program embodies a mechanistic approach to warfare, as in the 1941 air-war plan that projected the defeat of Germany with the destruction of a set number of targets, or Warden’s “five rings” concept for defeating Iraq in 1991. Lack of information leading to miside
ntification of truly critical nodes has been routinely blamed for the long string of post-1941 failures of this target-list approach to war.

  This mind-set has been extremely beneficial for the various interested parties, including most recently the contractors who are building and servicing the air force DCGS (Distributed Common Ground Systems) as well as those (largely the same cast) who are creating its army and navy counterparts, DCGS-A and DCGS-N. While the air force version primarily serves to assist in the execution of airstrikes, the $2.3 billion army system is supposed to help soldiers on the ground assess present and future threats, such as the names, faces, relationships of known enemies, favored sites for planting IEDs, and so on. DCGS-A attracts a great deal of well-merited abuse from a host of critics, in and out of uniform, who attest to the difficulty of using it and its frequent breakdowns.

  Many of these critics, including soldiers in the field, swear with equal vehemence to the merits of the data-analysis system offered by Palantir, a Silicon Valley corporation with origins in the PayPal fraud-detection division. Much of its appeal derives from its ease of use: “It’s a database with an Apple-ish interface,” one contractor in the automated intelligence business told me, “and they’re really good at selling themselves.” Palantir, like DCGS, is an intelligence fusion system but one that has applications across a wide range of fields, from Wall Street to disaster relief. “Palantir works because it’s a commercial system, constantly refined,” one longtime Pentagon consultant explained to me. “The army system is produced by a bureaucracy that works in partnership with the usual suspects, Northrop, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed, and they put together something horribly complicated, unwieldy, and expensive.”