Given their cost, these superdrones will inevitably be few in number and will require a more elaborate “reach-back” communications network with an ever-more voracious appetite for bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transmitted over a communications link). Already, a single Global Hawk drone requires five times as much bandwidth as that used by the entire U.S. military during the 1991 Gulf War, an amount that will only increase. With this Niagara of information pouring across the heavens from satellite to ground stations and up to satellites again comes the certainty that someone will at some point listen in and may well be capable of inserting their own commands to the machine.
In 2009, Shia insurgents in Iraq used SkyGrabber software, priced at $29.95 on the Internet, to capture and download Predator video feeds for use in their own battle planning. More spectacularly, in December 2011, an RQ-170 Beast overflying Iran landed comparatively undamaged. Initial denials by U.S. authorities of Iranian claims that they had captured the drone were silenced when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard put it on display. Like all drones, the machine relied on GPS for navigation, the network of satellites that had made remote drone operations possible in the first place. But GPS signals are extraordinarily weak, the equivalent of a car headlight shining 12,000 miles away, because the size of the satellite limits the power output. This makes it comparatively easy to jam or interfere with the signals, which is what the Iranians claim to have done.
As an Iranian engineer explained to Christian Science Monitor reporter Scott Peterson, the Iranian electronic-warfare specialists had the benefit of their experience working on the remains of several simpler U.S. Navy Scan Eagle drones they had retrieved earlier. To get control of the CIA’s drone, they first jammed its communication links to the pilots back in Nevada. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot,” explained the engineer. “This is where the bird loses its brain.” Once that happened, the aircraft was preprogrammed to return to its Kandahar base, navigating by GPS. But at this point the Iranians made their second intervention, feeding false signals that mimicked the weaker GPS transmissions, and gradually guided the aircraft toward an Iranian landing site. As an electronic-warfare commander explained to an Iranian news agency, “[A]ll the movements of these [enemy drones]” were being watched, and “obstructing” their work was “always on our agenda.” The landing site was carefully chosen, as the engineer explained, because it was at almost exactly the same altitude as Kandahar. So, when the drone “thought” it was at its home base, it duly landed. However there was an altitude difference of a few feet. Landing heavily, the aircraft damaged its undercarriage and one wing.
Despite energetic attempts by U.S. officials to discredit the Iranian claims, there is no reason to doubt the story, especially as their feat was later duplicated by a University of Texas professor, Todd Humphreys, in repeated public experiments in which he took control of nonmilitary drones and, on one occasion, a large yacht in the Mediterranean.
The difficulties of controlling future superdrones in the face of Iranian or perhaps Chinese electronic warriors inevitably generated speculation about the onset of “autonomous” systems capable of conducting a mission without human intervention and without command links vulnerable to hacking. Indeed, the navy’s demonstrator drone that managed two carrier landings (out of four attempts) in a flat, calm sea in July 2013 was autonomous, flying only under the direction of its onboard computers. The challenge of landing on a pitching, rolling deck, something that requires intense training for humans to accomplish, has yet to be faced. Nevertheless, the supposed imminence of robotic systems endowed with the ability and power to make lethal decisions has become a recurring topic of concern among human rights activists, complete with TED talks about the near-term probability that “autonomous military robots will take decision making out of the hands of humans and thus take the human out of war, which would change warfare entirely.” In November 2012, Human Rights Watch called for a “preemptive ban on the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons.” Naturally, in view of the money to be made, interested parties have been eager to bolster the notion that such systems are a practical possibility. As David Deptula said of drone video analysis: “Making this automatic is an absolute must.” The Office of Naval Research has even funded a joint project by several major universities to “devise computer algorithms that will imbue autonomous robots with moral competence—the ability to tell right from wrong.” This was clearly destined to be a multiyear contract, since, as one sympathetic commentator noted, “[S]cientifically speaking, we still don’t know what morality in humans actually is.”
Early experiments appeared to confirm that autonomous drones, ethical or otherwise, might be just around the corner. An experiment involving two small drones with computers that process images from onboard cameras reportedly managed to locate and identify a brightly colored tarp spread out in an open field. “The demonstration laid the groundwork for scientific advances that would allow drones to search for a human target and then make an identification based on facial-recognition or other software,” explained the Washington Post confidently. “Once a match was made, a drone could launch a missile to kill the target.”
Picking out a brightly colored object with sharp edges against a plain background is in the grand tradition of budget-generating Pentagon tests. (Infrared systems are usually tested in the early morning, for example, so that the warm target-object shows up nicely against the ground, still cool from the night air.) In the real world, where edges are not sharp and shades of gray are hard to differentiate, not to mention the shifting silhouette of a human face, life becomes a lot more difficult, especially if the target is taking steps to stay out of sight. (According to an al-Qaeda tip sheet discovered in Mali, Osama bin Laden had advised his followers to “hide under thick trees” as one of several sensible suggestions for evading drones.) Given the difficulty humans face in making correct decisions on the basis of ambiguous electro-optical and infrared images of what may or may not be an enemy (is that a squatting Pashtun?), not to mention the ongoing and oft-lamented failure to get computers to analyze surveillance video, such anxiety might be premature. Exponentially increasing computer processing power has kept alive the dream of artificial intelligence, founded on the belief that the brain operates just like a computer through a series of on-off switches and that therefore a computer is capable of performing like a human brain. But it has become clearer that the brain does not operate in any such fashion but rather, as Berkeley philosopher Hubert Dreyfus has long maintained, on intuitive reactions based on accumulated expertise and intuition, not on the mechanistic process, characteristically evoked by Votel, of “connecting the dots.”
In one sense, however, the system is already “autonomous.” On the eve of World War II, air force planners identified the few targets they needed to destroy to bring Germany to its knees. The plan did not work, targeting committees met, their target lists expanded, the enemy adapted to each list change, and the war dragged on for year after bloody year. Nevertheless, the same strategy was followed in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, each time with more elaborate technology. Ultimately the technology offered the promise of destroying not just the physical objects—power plants, factories, communications, roads, and bridges—that sustained the enemy but also selected individuals, duly listed in order of importance, who controlled the enemy war effort. By 2014, with Afghanistan sinking back into chaos and the jihadis’ black flag waving over ever-larger stretches of the globe under the aegis of a leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, more capable and successful than his targeted predecessors, it was clear that this latest variation of the strategy had also failed. Michael Flynn, formerly McChrystal’s intelligence officer in the hunt for Zarqawi who had gone on to command the Defense Intelligence Agency, ruefully admitted as much as he prepared to leave office, telling an interviewer, “We kept decapitating the leadership of these groups, and more leaders would just appear from the ranks to take t
heir place.”
Flynn’s insight made no difference. President Obama, claiming success in assassination campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia (where a recently assassinated leader had been immediately replaced), pronounced that this newest threat would be met with the same strategy. Predators, Reapers, and Global Hawks accordingly scoured the desert wastes of Iraq and Syria, beaming uncountable petabytes of video back up the kill chain. Among the recipients were four hundred members of the Massachusetts National Guard sitting in darkened rooms at a base on Cape Cod, gazing hour after hour at blurry images in search of “patterns of life” that might denote the elusive enemy. “None of them are on the ground, and none of them are in the theater of operations,” said their local congressman proudly, “but they are contributing from here, conducting essential frontline functions.”
As David Deptula promised that “with a more intense campaign” victory would come quickly, enemy leaders switched off their cell phones and faded from view. Pentagon officials demanded more spending. Wall Street analysts hailed the prospect of “sure-bet paydays” for drone builders and other weapons makers. The system rolled on autonomously—one big robot mowing the grass, forever.
NOTES
The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented of discussed.
Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.
1 | Remember, Kill Chain
In a cold February dawn in 2010: The description of events in this chapter is drawn from U.S. Central Command, “AR16-6 Investigation, 21 February 2010, U.S. Air-to-Ground Engagement in the vicinity of Shahidi Hassas, Uruzgan District, Afghanistan.” https://www.aclu.org/drone-foia-department-defense-uruzgan-investigation-documents. The report was originally released following an FOIA request by Los Angeles Times reporter David S. Cloud.
2 | Wiring the Jungle
Asked who the enemy was: Personal investigation by Leslie Cockburn, who led an ABC News team to the area in 1994.
The scheme had been conceived far away: Anne Finkbeiner, The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006), p. 92.
On the eve of World War II: Charles R. Griffith, The Quest, Haywood Hansell and American Strategic Bombing in World War II (Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air University Press, 1999), p. 70.
Early in 1966 air force planners believed they had identified the “critical node”: Bernard C. Nalty, The War Against Trucks (Washington, DC: U.S. Air Force, Air Force History and Museums Program, 2005), p. 7.
To process the data Garwin, the IBM scientist: Finkbeiner, op. cit., p. 100.
Ensconced in Santa Barbara: Ibid., p. 97.
Their preferred choices: Ibid., pp. 100–101.
“On the battlefield of the future”: The full text is carried in the appendix of Paul Dickson’s amazingly percipient book, The Electronic Battlefield (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1976).
Marshall Harrison, a former high school teacher: Marshall Harrison, A Lonely Kind of War, Forward Air Controller Vietnam (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corp., 2010), pp. 106–107.
“Just as it is almost impossible…”: Dickson, op. cit., p. 22.
“after analyzing various names of insects and birds”: Thomas P. Ehrhard, Air Force UAVs: The Secret History (Washington, DC: Mitchell Institute, 2010), fn. 159, p. 66.
In World War II the U.S. Navy had brought about the death: Jack Olsen, Aphrodite, Desperate Mission (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970), p. 224.
Come the Vietnam War, they were adapted for reconnaissance: Ehrhard, op. cit., p. 20.
The raids were therefore conducted in deepest secrecy: Department of Defense, “Report on Selected Air and Ground Operations in Cambodia and Laos, Sept. 10, 1973.” http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/International_security_affairs/vietnam_and_southeast_asiaDocuments/27.pdf. Accessible via Google.
Back in Santa Barbara, the Jasons had entertained: Finkbeiner, op. cit., p. 101.
“We spent seven days trying to arrive at a solution”: James Zumwalt, Bare Feet, Iron Will—Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefields (Chantilly, VA: Fortis Publishing Co., 2010), p. 258.
Otherwise the Vietnamese ran herds of cattle down the trail: Vietnamese language Wikipedia page on Igloo White (auto-translated). http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi%E1%BA%BFn_d%E1%BB%8Bch_Igloo_White#cite_note-ReferenceA-2. Accessed April 19, 2013.
The electronic barrier cost almost $2 billion to set up and roughly $1 billion a year to operate: Nalty, op. cit., p. 283; Edgar C. Doleman, Tools of War (Boston: Boston Publishing Co., 1984), p. 151.
The funds for the secret operation were so artfully hidden: Dickson, op. cit., p. 101.
“This process,” an official U.S. Air Force historian tartly noted: Nalty, op. cit., p. 110.
As the same air force historian pointed out: Ibid., p. 296.
When General Lucius Clay, commander of the Pacific Air Force: Ibid., p. 302.
A CIA analyst’s suggestion: George W. Allen, None So Blind, A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (New York: Ivor R. Dee, 2001), p. 271.
At a public meeting in Boston of the antiwar Winter Soldier movement: Fred Branfman, “Guide to the Laos Automated War Archive,” Testimony by former U.S. Air Force member Eric Herter (grandson of former secretary of state Christian Herter), November 22, 2009. http://fredbranfman.wordpress.com/.
“They knew what they were doing when they sent John”: Interview with Tom Christie, Washington, DC, May 8, 2013.
“John” was Colonel John Boyd, a legendary fighter pilot: General information about Boyd derived from interviews over many years with, among others, John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, Franklin Spinney, and Tom Christie. For best published source on Boyd, see Roger Coram, Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Boston: Little Brown, 2002).
His superiors had already used him: Interview with Pierre Sprey, Washington, DC, March 17, 2013.
Packs of wild dogs roamed unmolested: Coram, op. cit., pp. 268–69.
One suggestion actively touted by an air force research base: Nalty, op. cit., p. 279.
“They sent me to close it down”: Interview with John Boyd, Washington, DC, 1989.
Rivolo watched in amazement: Interview, Rex Rivolo, Washington, DC, February 10, 2011.
Task Force Alpha was finally switched off: Nalty, op. cit., p. 279.
3 | Turning People into Nodes
“Don’t knock the war that feeds you”: Interview with A. Ernest Fitzgerald, former management systems deputy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management and Comptroller, Washington, DC, January 2001. The slogan was also featured on a badge worn by aerospace workers around the U.S. during the Vietnam War. See also “Oral History of Edward S. Davidson,” SIGMICRO online newsletter, http://newsletter.sigmicro.org/sigmicro-oral-history-transcripts/Ed-Davidson-Transcipt.pdf. Accessed July 19, 2014.
Money authorized for buying weapons: The defense budget authority in 1975 was approximately $17 billion for procurement and $9 billion for research, development, test, and evaluation, for a total of $26 billion. http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/publications/usbudget/bus_1977.pdf., p. 330. The defense budget authority in 1978 was approximately $30 billion for procurement and $11 billion for research, development, test, and evaluation, for a total of $41 billion. The Budget of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 1977 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977), p. 537. http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/publications/usbudget/bus_1980.pdf.
In 1976, McDonnell Douglas, then the largest contractor: John Finney, “Not Enough Profits for the Defense Industry?” New York Times, January 9, 1977.
Intelligence reappraisals of Soviet intentions: Raymond Garthoff, “Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities,” ch. 5 in Watching the Bear, Essays on CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union (Washi
ngton, DC: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2007). https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/watching-the-bear-essays-on-cias-analysis-of-the-soviet-union/article05.html.
The new barrier fostered by the Pentagon’s DARPA: General Accounting Office, “Decisions to Be Made in Charting Future of DOD’s Assault Breaker,” January 28, 1981, p. 1. http://www.gao.gov/assets/140/132235.pdf. Accessed February 23, 2013.
Instead of the sensors: Carlo Kopp, “Precision-Guided Munitions, The New Breed,” Air Power Australia, 1984. http://www.ausairpower.net/TE-Assault-Breaker.html. Accessed January 15, 2013.
“The objective of our precision guided weapon systems”: Robert R. Tomes, U.S. Defense Strategy from Vietnam to Operation Iraqi Freedom (Florence, KY: Taylor & Francis, 2006), p. 67.
The General Accounting Office, the watchdog agency that monitors: GAO, “Decisions to Be Made,” op. cit., p. 9.
“Precision weapons, smart shells, electronic reconnaissance systems”: Michael Sterling, “Soviet Reactions to Nato’s Emerging Technologies for Deep Attack,” A Rand Note Prepared for the U.S. Air Force, Santa Monica, 1985. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2009/N2294.pdf.
When, for example, the navy’s development of invulnerable ballistic-missile submarines: Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), pp. 233ff.
At the beginning of World War II: Don Sherman, “The Secret Weapon,” Air & Space Magazine (February/March 1995).
On an infamous raid: “Factsheet: The Norden M-9 Bombsight,” The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Dayton, OH. Posted August 16, 2010.
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