Predator

by Richard Whittle

  During the last of his two tours in Vietnam, he became a big fan of laser-guided weapons. One February day in 1970, Captain Jumper and his backseater, Lieutenant Dick Anderegg, were flying their F-4D on a Fast FAC mission over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Communist supply line that ran through Laos and Cambodia. Anderegg, later Air Force chief historian, described their introduction to the wonder of laser-guided weapons in his 2001 book, Sierra Hotel: Flying Air Force Fighters in the Decade After Vietnam. The Fast FAC tactic was to search at low altitude for enemy trucks, troops, or supply caches, climb to rendezvous with fighters carrying bombs, lead them to the targets and fire white phosphorous rockets to mark where they should strike, then get out of the way. It was hazardous duty: two months earlier, Jumper and Anderegg’s squadron mate Lieutenant Richard Honey had bled to death in the cockpit after a .50-caliber bullet hit him in the chest as his F-4’s pilot jinked over the same dirt road they were searching that day in Laos.

  After a couple of hours in the danger zone, Jumper took their Phantom roaring to safer altitudes while Anderegg tuned to the radio frequency used by a flight of F-4s who were waiting to pounce and using the call sign “Buick.” When the Buick flight leader asked if Jumper and Anderegg had any targets for his planes to hit, Jumper suggested an enemy storage area they had found. Surprisingly, the Buick leader said that wouldn’t be a good target for the ordnance they were carrying. He wanted “a small, pinpoint target.” Jumper suggested a single thirty-seven-millimeter gun “that’s been shooting at us pretty good,” to which Buick replied, “That’s perfect.”

  Jumper and Anderegg led the other fighters to the target, dove to mark it with a white phosphorous rocket, and climbed out of the way. They were then puzzled to watch the Buick flight leader circle in a lazy left-hand turn while his wingman rolled in from well above normal bombing altitude. The wingman was so high that Jumper and Anderegg were sure his bomb would miss. “Bomb gone,” they heard him say over the radio—then they watched in amazement as the attack scored a direct hit. They later learned that the circling F-4 had been shining a laser designator’s beam on the target for the other Phantom’s new laser-guided bomb.

  The phenomenal accuracy of bombs able to home in on the sparkle created by a pulsing laser beam would soon save time, money, and the lives of both American air crews and innocent civilians near their targets. On April 27, 1972, for example, F-4s used laser-guided bombs to drop one end of the Thanh Hoa Bridge, a strategic link in the Ho Chi Minh Trail that U.S. aircraft had tried to cut 871 times since 1965 without success, and at painful cost. By some calculations, 104 American pilots were lost in unsuccessful missions against the Dragon’s Jaw, as the structure was known.

  Laser guidance “was an epiphany for us,” Anderegg recalled more than four decades later. “It was like, ‘Holy smokes! If we can do that, just think of what else we can do!’”

  Jumper was eager to push the envelope his whole career. In 1999, as the four-star commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe, he strongly supported putting a laser designator on the Predator to help fighter pilots find targets in Kosovo. After that experiment ended, he concluded that it had worked well—and was furious when he took over ACC the next year and learned that his new command had made Big Safari strip the laser designators off the WILD Predators it had modified.

  “Why on earth would we do that?” Jumper asked his subordinates.

  “Well, because they’re not part of the program” was the answer he got.

  Jumper would soon see about that.

  * * *

  Big doors swing on small hinges, as the saying goes. Shortly after discovering that his new command had directed Big Safari to remove the laser designators, Jumper came up with an even more ambitious idea for how to make the Predator more useful. The broad concept wasn’t new, but in the year 2000 the innovation that Jumper proposed was both technically possible and politically timely. The door to it hinged on an unexpected spring thunderstorm.

  On March 15, 2000, Jumper spoke at a black-tie dinner at the Hilton Sandestin Beach Resort and Spa in Destin, Florida, the sumptuous setting for a three-day, military-industrial get-together styled as a high-level deep-think event by its two-star-general host. Major General Michael C. Kostelnik, head of the Air Armament Center at nearby Eglin Air Force Base, billed his Air Armament Summit 2000 as a venue for top Air Force and industry leaders—“company presidents, directors of research, or major division chiefs”—to discuss what sorts of bombs and missiles the service might need over the coming quarter century. Fighter pilot Kostelnik also wanted to use the summit to promote his pet project, the development of a 250-pound, GPS-guided “Small Smart Bomb” he thought the Air Force needed for its stealth fighters. Kostelnik had been promoting the experimental weapon for more than a year but was finding that few others in the Air Force wanted to fund a bantamweight bomb with money they could spend on airplanes instead. Kostelnik could see he needed a new sales strategy, and the air war in Kosovo led him to one. Maybe, he reasoned, his Small Smart Bomb could piggyback, literally and politically, on the increasingly successful Predator.

  At the Air Armament Summit, Kostelnik’s deputy, Brigadier General Kevin Sullivan, was due to present a proposal that industry join the Air Force in funding and conducting a two-year “Weaponized UAV Demonstration,” in which a Predator would be modified to drop a Small Smart Bomb just to test the concept of arming a drone. Jumper was scheduled to leave before Sullivan’s presentation, but one of Florida’s frequent thunderstorms grounded the ACC chief’s plane the morning after his speech. Seizing the chance, Kostelnik asked if Sullivan could give Jumper his presentation privately, and Jumper readily agreed.

  Jumper frequently interrupted with questions as Sullivan cited events during the air war in Kosovo as evidence that, politically as well as technologically, the time had come to start arming UAVs. A PowerPoint slide titled “The Rules Have Changed” showed a photo of a Serb soldier standing triumphantly over the shredded windshield of the F-117 stealth fighter plane shot down over Kosovo in March 1999. Another photo showed Serbia’s Grdelica railroad bridge, where two TV-guided missiles fired by an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber in April 1999 inadvertently hit a passenger train, killing more than ten civilians and wounding many others. A Predator armed with a Small Smart Bomb, Sullivan suggested, could reduce the risks to pilots, and to innocent civilians as well, in future conflicts. Then he laid out a plan to involve nine Air Force agencies, the three other military services, DARPA, the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, General Atomics, and aerospace giants Lockheed Martin Corporation and Boeing Company in a two-year collaboration. The goal would be to drop a live Small Smart Bomb from a Predator by May 2001 and start producing some kind of “weaponized UAV” between 2004 and 2006.

  When Sullivan finished, Jumper told Kostelnik he was welcome to pursue the idea, as long as he did so within the Air Armament Center’s existing budget. With that, Jumper left. But over the next six weeks, the new ACC commander kept thinking about what he had heard that morning in Florida. Putting a weapon on the Predator wasn’t just a good idea, Jumper reflected—it was a great idea. Carrying a laser designator, as in Kosovo, the Predator might find targets with its sensors and lase them for strike aircraft, but those other planes might be miles away, and their pilots had to be talked onto targets the drone found, which gave mobile targets time to escape. Jumper could also imagine situations where a Predator might find a “high-value target” with no strike aircraft available to attack. So why not just go ahead and arm the Predator itself so it could strike targets on its own, not just find them for others? Why not turn this unmanned scout into an unmanned killer scout?

  On May 1, Jumper sent an announcement to the Air Force chief of staff, the secretary of the Air Force, and other top service leaders. “Chief, ACC has internalized the Predator lessons learned from Operation Allied Force and is changing the direction for the Predator program,” Jumper’s message began. “The original construct of the Predator
as just a reconnaissance surveillance target acquisition asset no longer applies. ACC will employ Predator as a FAC-like resource, with look-out, target identification, and target acquisition roles.” Using military jargon, the announcement added that the Predator would be getting a new laser designator. Then Jumper dropped a bureaucratic bombshell. ACC, his message concluded, was “moving out on the next logical step for USAF UAVs using Predator—weaponizing UAVs.”

  * * *

  Contrary to later accounts, Jumper’s initiative to arm the Predator originally had nothing to do with the CIA’s covert operations against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Nor was Jumper’s project secret, though defense trade publications were the only media paying attention. The well-sourced newsletter Inside the Air Force revealed Jumper’s decision on May 26, 2000, just over three weeks after he made it, and continued to report on the project for months. At the time, though, few outside the service and the Pentagon or readers of Inside the Air Force took any apparent notice of Jumper’s initiative, or had much reason to care if they did.

  When Jumper announced his intent to arm the Predator, using the unarmed version of the drone to look for Osama bin Laden was still no more than an idea the NSC’s Richard Clarke and the CIA’s Charlie Allen were urging on their reluctant bosses. The Afghan Eyes/Summer Project had yet to be approved, and would be a tightly held secret once it was. Hardly anyone outside the military even knew what a Predator was, and many insiders were unimpressed by this fragile little reconnaissance drone, which in Bosnia had proved vulnerable to bad weather and relatively easy for the enemy to shoot down. Some regarded the Predator as an oddity of dubious value that owed its survival to the strange circumstances of its birth. “This $600 million program has so many combat limitations that its long-term viability remains in question,” Air Force Colonel Thomas P. Ehrhard wrote in a PhD dissertation on drones published the same month Jumper made his decision. Ehrhard did allow, however, that “despite its meandering path to Air Force adoption,” the Predator “seems to have found a home.”

  Even so, the Air Force owned only sixteen Predator air vehicles at the time, and the service would have had even fewer if Representative Jerry Lewis of California hadn’t added another twenty million dollars to the program in that year’s defense appropriations bill. The Air Force was planning to buy a total of only forty-eight Predators in all by the end of 2003. Interest in the drone was still uneven, its future uncertain. By arming the Predator, Jumper was simply trying to make the drone more useful in fighting wars. “All I wanted to do was to be able to cure the problem that we had in Kosovo,” Jumper recalled a decade later, “and that is, the Predator is sitting there looking at the target. Why can’t you put something on there that allows you to do something about it, instead of just looking at it?”

  For technical, legal, and cultural reasons, the next logical step was a giant one. Since the Kettering Bug, World War I’s never-used “aerial torpedo,” the U.S. military had tried putting explosives or bombs or missiles on drones several times, but the results were never satisfactory. The closest brush with success came in the 1970s, when the Air Force and Teledyne Ryan put the TV-guided Maverick missile and later a TV-guided glide bomb on some Firebee target drones like the ones Big Safari modified to fly unmanned reconnaissance missions in Vietnam. By firing a Maverick from a modified Firebee on December 14, 1971, at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the Air Force’s 6514th Test Squadron claimed a place in aviation history—the first launch of an air-to-ground missile from a remotely piloted aircraft. None was put into operation, though, and with the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Air Force interest in drones evaporated. The Navy, meanwhile, cancelled the most extensive armed UAV program in U.S. history the same year the armed Firebee was tested, retiring its QH-50 DASH drone helicopter, which carried torpedoes and even nuclear depth bombs that were never used in combat.

  Over the three decades since those experiments, the idea of weaponizing UAVs had been pursued by a number of people, including Abe Karem with one concept for his Amber, and Neal and Linden Blue with the first General Atomics kit plane Predator in the 1980s. But after 1987 the very legality of arming drones became questionable, at least for the United States and the Soviet Union. On December 8 of that year, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which required both nations to eliminate ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (300 to 3,300 miles). Missiles launched from the sea or air were outside the pact, which defined a ground-launched cruise missile as “an unmanned, self-propelled vehicle that sustains flight through the use of aerodynamic lift over most of its flight path” and “a weapon-delivery vehicle.” The INF Treaty, as it is known, prompted Congress to give the Navy-run Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Joint Program Office authority solely over “nonlethal” drones.

  By 1996, the Soviet Union had met its demise, but the INF Treaty between Washington and Moscow remained in force. The Predator’s success in Bosnia, however, was sparking new thinking about drones. For some, it was more exciting to imagine the technical possibilities than the possible legal limits. That year, U.S. Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican influential on defense issues, got ten million dollars included in the House version of the annual defense authorization bill to demonstrate “air-to-surface precision guided munitions employment using a Predator, Hunter, or Pioneer unmanned aerial vehicle and a nondevelopmental laser target designator.” But the Pentagon, as Weldon later wrote, saw “UAVs solely as a reconnaissance asset” and “aggressively opposed” his legislation. Consequently, a House-Senate conference committee ultimately stripped it from the defense bill. The idea of arming the Predator lay dormant until the spring of 2000, when a Florida thunderstorm helped revive it.

  No one was more excited about Jumper’s decision than Kostelnik, who saw it as an opportunity to advance his Small Smart Bomb. He wanted to run Jumper’s project, but Big Safari Director Bill Grimes thought it rightfully belonged to his outfit, which after all was the Predator’s official System Program Office. Lieutenant General Robert F. Raggio, a three-star Grimes and Kostelnik both answered to, sided with Grimes. In early June 2000, Raggio told Kostelnik to stand down and directed Big Safari to figure out the smartest way to meet Jumper’s goal.

  Grimes gave the assignment to a trio of majors on his staff—Brian Raduenz, Raymond Pry, and Mark “Spoon” Mattoon—who came up with three options. The Air Force, they found, owned no weapons light enough for a Predator to carry and had only two experimental ones in the works, the Small Smart Bomb and a lightweight air-launched cruise missile that was still just a concept. The Army, however, had a missile that Big Safari thought showed promise. It weighed a mere ninety-eight pounds but packed enough punch to kill a tank. Army helicopters had first fired it in combat nine years earlier, during the 1991 Gulf War, so it was proven. The Army had more than eleven thousand in stock, and the Navy and Marine Corps had some, too. Best of all, this Army missile was a “smart” weapon; it homed in on its targets by seeking the sparkle of a laser designator. The missile’s official designation was AGM-114, with AGM standing for “anti-tank guided missile.” Its official name was Heliborne-Launched Fire-and-Forget Missile. But to those familiar with it, the missile was known by an acronym describing what it delivered—Hellfire.

  * * *

  Air Combat Command headquarters resides in a two-story, redbrick building at Langley Air Force Base in coastal Virginia’s Hampton Roads region, near Norfolk. On June 21, Jumper got a briefing there from Colonel Robert E. Dehnert Jr., director of reconnaissance programs for the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, on the three options Big Safari had come up with. The two Air Force weapons that might work, Jumper was told, would not be available in any useful quantities for several years. The Army’s Hellfire was available immediately and could be integrated with the Predator—made to fit under the drone’s wing and be lau
nched from it—for as little as $485,000, a pittance to the Pentagon. The one major technical risk was that no one knew how launching a Hellfire would affect the aerodynamically delicate Predator.

  There were also two legal hurdles to the project, no matter what weapon Jumper chose.

  First, to modify the Predator this drastically, the Air Force might need to ask key members of Congress to approve a so-called New Start Notification, a legal requirement for significant and unanticipated changes in defense programs made between annual appropriations bills. Air Force leaders were especially sensitive to this issue in 2000 because members of Congress and the news media had severely criticized them in 1999 for ignoring that legal requirement with respect to other programs.

  The second legal issue was the 1987 INF Treaty, which was still in effect. A committee of government lawyers would have to decide whether an armed Predator fit the INF Treaty’s definition of a ground-launched cruise missile. If it did, Jumper’s “next logical step” could be a violation of a major international agreement.

  Jumper couldn’t resolve the legal issues, but he knew a good military idea when he saw one. At the conclusion of Dehnert’s briefing, he directed his staff to work with Big Safari to come up with a detailed plan for arming the Predator with the Hellfire.

  Just over three weeks later, on July 14, Dehnert returned to Jumper’s headquarters with the three Big Safari majors who had prepared the presentation that the ACC commander was about to receive. The conference room was packed with more than forty Air Force officers, senior enlisted experts, and officials and engineers from General Atomics and other companies, all crowded around a long table or seated in chairs against the walls. Standing beside a screen at one end of the conference room, Dehnert went through a series of slides that outlined two possible plans for arming the Predator with the Hellfire.