Drone Warfare

by Medea Benjamin

  “Autonomous, fighter-sized unmanned aircraft are real,” said program manager Craig Brown after the first test flight. “The bar has been raised.”

  According to the Los Angeles Times, the Phantom Ray differs from existing, weaponized drones in that it does not require a human pilot to do much more than chart a flight path.53 It could “carry out a mission controlled almost entirely by a computer.”

  Though it currently has no buyer for the Phantom Ray, estimated to cost around $60 to $70 million, the company is confident it will someday.

  “The reason we’re doing this, fundamentally, is to make sure the Boeing Company has a core competency in this area,” Darryl Davis, president of Boeing’s Phantom Works research and development division, explained in 2009.54 “You want to be ahead of the market and not be reacting.”

  But when it comes to building autonomous flying killer robots, Boeing’s not alone. General Atomics already has a model, the Gray Eagle, which is currently deployed in Iraq. “It thinks for itself,” gushed General Atomics executive James Bouchard in a company press release entitled, “Armed and Dangerous—the Gray Eagle goes lethal.”55

  You don’t even have to be a certified pilot to fly it. “The aircraft is very autonomous,” raved Capt. Mike Goodwin. “It’s the latest and greatest.”

  But Boeing is in a class of its own when it comes to building a top-secret unmanned robotic aircraft designed to be launched into space. Its X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle was in development for ten years at Boeing’s “Phantom Works” shop, after NASA selected Boeing to design and develop the vehicle in 1999. NASA paid Boeing over $400 million for the spacecraft, which is capable of staying aloft for over 270 days. It was first launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in April 2010, serving as a test platform for secret experiments, and landed 244 days later in Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. While details of the flight are classified, it was reported to be a successful test run, although the bumpy landing blew out the left main landing gear tire on touchdown, causing damage to the belly of the vehicle in about seven places.

  Despite the enormous price tag, Boeing was contracted to build a second vehicle, which was launched in March 2011. Once again, the details of its mission were withheld from the public.

  Northrop Grumman also jumped into the drone race. Its signature drone, the Global Hawk, became controversial for its huge cost overruns. It was originally part of a $12 billion Air Force program that aimed to replace the Air Force’s aging fleet of 1950s-era U-2 spy planes with modern UAVs. The military describes the Global Hawk as a “high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aircraft system,” one capable of surveilling large swaths of territory, as opposed to the more limited range of vision offered by smaller UAVs.56 According to the New York Times, the unmanned Global Hawk surveillance plane is being manufactured at the company’s factory in Palmdale, California. Notably, the factory employs “just fifty people,” suggesting that investments in militarism are not the best way to create jobs during a global economic downturn.57

  “The Global Hawk is a very impressive product,” industry analyst Richard Aboulafia told the Times, “but it is also a very expensive product.” Since 2001, the cost of the Global Hawk program has more than doubled, as military programs are wont to do. Each plane is now expected to cost a whopping $218 million. By contrast, the largest armed drone, the Reaper, costs $28 million and the Predator about $4.5 million.

  Investing $218 million in anything is a lot of money. But investing $218 million in a plane that “Pentagon tests also suggested…was not reliable enough to provide sustained surveillance” is just plain foolish. It is also, unfortunately, typical for the Pentagon, which is accustomed to getting away with wasting taxpayer money with little to no consequences.

  A comparison of the Predator/Reaper program shows just what a dud the Global Hawk is.58 In April 2010, General Atomics’ Predator/Reaper aircraft had passed the one million flight hours milestone, with more than four hundred aircraft produced and flying nearly 80,000 missions, mostly in combat. This is compared with about four Global Hawks in service and fewer than 2,000 combat missions.

  “Once again, we have a system that has failed to meet effectiveness and suitability requirements, but one that no doubt will proceed post-haste into full production and deployment,” said Thomas P. Christie, a former Pentagon testing official.59

  On the other hand, maybe not. Citing budget constraints, the Pentagon announced in January 2012 that it was changing its plans to replace its fleet of U-2 spy planes with the Global Hawk. A Defense Department official said the latter’s massive cost had “priced itself out of the niche, in terms of taking pictures in the air.”60 Apparently not even the $165,000,000 Northrop Grumman invested in bribing US officials from 1998–2011 could get the Pentagon to overlook the massive costs and problems with its flagship drone.61 So much for UAVs being a cheap, efficient panacea for all the military’s needs in the 21st century.

  Giant Bethesda, Maryland-based military contractor Lockheed Martin, with more than 130,000 employees and 2010 sales upwards of $45.8 billion, has also been greasing the wheels62 with $142,000,000 in lobbying (1998–2011)63—and reaping the benefits with three-quarters of its revenues coming from military sales.64

  One gift that keeps on giving is its Hellfire missiles, the weapon of choice that UAVs have been raining down from the sky at a handsome $68,000 a shot. Lockheed has developed an even more deadly version that it lovingly calls the Romeo Hellfire. Dripping with sexual innuendos, Lockheed brags that the Romeo can “lock onto targets before or after launch,” “engage targets to the side and behind them without maneuvering into position,” and thanks to its more virile guidance and navigation capabilities, can “increase the missile’s impact angle and enhancing lethality.”65 Speaking about this man’s man of missiles, managing editor Gareth Jennings from Jane’s Missiles and Rockets gushed, “Before you would have to employ a specific missile-type to take out a particular kind of target—tank, truck, foot soldier. This allows the aircraft to engage ‘targets of opportunity’ as they appear on the battlefield.”66

  Proving that size is not everything, Lockheed Martin is also getting into the drone business in smaller ways. It is developing a concept drone called the Samarai Monocopter, which the magazine Popular Mechanics reports is inspired by “the winding flight of a falling maple seed.” This would almost be beautifully poetic were its purpose not to provide “a powerful…tool for soldiers” on the battlefield.67

  Lockheed’s contribution to the new world of warfare doesn’t stop there. Lockheed also makes its own surveillance UAVs at its so-called “Skunk Works” facility in Palmdale, California. Chief among Lockheed’s drones is the stealth RQ-170 Sentinel model primarily used by the US Air Force and better known because of its enormous size as the “Beast of Kandahar.” Beyond acknowledging its massive, roughly forty-foot wingspan drone, the military has been characteristically tight lipped about its role on the battlefield. But according to the National Journal’s Marc Ambinder, it was that very Lockheed Martin drone that provided surveillance for the Navy SEAL operation that ended in the execution of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.68 Less exciting for the company is the fact that it was this very model that showed up on TV screens around the world, in the hands of the Iranian government.

  What the big companies like Lockheed, Boeing and Northop Grumman are bringing to the drone market, which General Atomics and other small companies can’t do, is the ability to produce high-performance supersonic aircraft. This marks the transition from using drones against peasants in Afghanistan to turning them against military forces with heavy modern weapons, such as those of Iran, North Korea and China. According to robotics expert Mark Gubrud, “What lurks behind this is the specter of drone-vs.-drone warfare or possibly robotized military standoffs, where the potential exists for automated responses to initiate or rapidly escalate warfare between major powers and between nuclear-armed states.”69 Get ready for a drone-eat-drone world�
�fed by your tax dollars.

  In addition to all the government-dependent private sector work on drones, the US government is doing its own research and production.

  At the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, the military is working on so-called “micro air vehicles,” or MAVs, which resemble and mimic small birds and larger insects. The British Daily Mail reports that government researchers hope this tiny vehicle will soon be able to “find, track and target adversaries while operating in complex urban environments.”70

  Work at the Dayton facility, which is part of the Air Force Research Laboratory, began in May 2010. After the May 27 ribbon-cutting ceremony of its “fortress-like” facility, a report in a local trade journal noted that the Air Force is “pressing for tiny aircraft that can flutter down a city street or slip through an open window to spy on or attack enemy targets.”71 To achieve this goal, government scientists have an entire indoor flight test facility complete with 60 motion-capture cameras intended to mimic an urban environment.

  The military hopes the cool, killer technology will attract a steady stream of scientists interested in careers fashioning deadly gadgets out of a James Bond movie.

  “We don’t view this as necessarily an [Air Force] asset,” Douglas Blake, deputy director of the Air Vehicles Directorate, told the Daily Mail. “We view it as a community asset.”

  Once upon a time, libraries and parks were seen as community assets. In the age of the war on terror, facilities aimed at developing the next generation of miniature drones are the new baseball fields.

  The efforts to construct tiny drone aircraft builds off earlier work by the ultra-secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on “a whole host of cyborg critters,” notes the Daily Mail.72 Founded in 1958 in response to the Soviet’s 1957 Sputnik satellite launch, DARPA is the US Defense Department’s “primary innovation engine,” according to the agency, undertaking “projects that are finite in duration but that create lasting revolutionary change.”73 This is no idle bragging, given that DARPA is credited, unlike Al Gore, with creating the Internet.

  To this end, DARPA often employs unique methods for developing the next generation of military hardware. Indeed, in March 2011 the agency launched a crowd-sourcing competition, “UAVForge,” to actually design a small drone that is “small and light enough to carry in a rucksack” and capable of perching somewhere, vulture-like, for at least two hours while transmitting video back to its operators.74

  The person or group who designs the best performing drone wins $100,000, which is a relatively cheap way for the US government to develop its latest war gadget. Opening up drone design to the public also has the added benefit of normalizing drone warfare among the public. As DARPA’s Jim McComick told the media, “We seek to lower the threshold to entry for hobbyists and citizen scientists,” the objective being an “exchange of ideas among a loosely connected international community united through common interests and inspired by innovation and creative thought.”

  The way DARPA puts the outsourcing of drone research, you’d almost think they were starting a hippie commune. But the US military isn’t terribly interested in peace, love, and understanding—and it has its eyes on creating more than just lightweight surveillance drones.

  The Air Force is currently developing a technology named the Gorgon Stare after the many-eyed monster from Greek mythology “whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them.” This technology promises to greatly expand the surveillance capability of the Reaper drones it uses in Afghanistan and other sites in the war on terror.

  As the disconcerting name suggests, the Gorgon Stare is a $15-million-a-pop system that utilizes multiple infrared and conventional cameras that the Air Force claims will dramatically broaden the view that a drone on the battlefield will be capable of capturing.75 Reportedly, the system will allow drones to monitor all movement within a four square kilometer zone, whereas surveillance technology as of 2010 only allowed for the monitoring of less than one square kilometer.

  But there’s a problem: the technology might not be all it is cracked up to be. According to a draft of an Air Force report obtained by Wired magazine, December 2010 tests of the Gorgon Stare technology, which was to have already have been deployed on the battlefield in Afghanistan by that point, found it to be “not operationally effective” nor “operationally suitable.”76

  You don’t have to be a military expert to know that is bad. And you don’t have to be a prophet to know that this bad news will probably not stop the military from sinking ever more US tax dollars into the project. Indeed, the Air Force responded to the Wired report by reaffirming its commitment to the Gorgon Stare because “lives depend on the quality of the intelligence” it promises to produce.

  This enormous focus on unmanned vehicles is expected to continue for the decade 2011–2020, with the US accounting for 77 percent of worldwide research and development and about 69 percent of the procurement dollars.77

  That’s not to say other countries aren’t experiencing their own drone booms. Take Israel.

  “We’re trying to get to unmanned vehicles everywhere on the battlefield for each platoon in the field,” Lt. Col. Oren Berebbi, the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ technology division, told the Wall Street Journal in 2010.78 “We can do more and more missions without putting a soldier at risk.”

  Indeed, now is a great time to be making drones. Giora Katz, vice president of the Israel-based Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., told the Journal he expects that a full one-third of all Israeli military hardware will be unmanned by 2025, if not sooner. “We are moving into the robotic era.”

  And like their counterparts in America, Israeli drone manufacturers—the most prominent of which are Aeronautics Defense Systems, Elbit Systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI)—aren’t just producing their wares for a domestic market. Israel’s perpetual war economy and combat history, combined with its early use of UAVs dating back to the occupation of the Sinai in the 1970s, have provided it with a competitive export edge. The “combat proven” aspect of Israeli technology is advertised by the Israeli military, the media, and arms firms. Elbit Systems’ Hermes 450—sold to at least a dozen nations—is advertised as “Operational in the Israel Defense Force,” a fact highlighted with a bright yellow “BATTLE PROVEN” stamp on the front of its brochure.79

  In 2009, the Israeli government inked a deal to sell $50 million worth of drones to Russia.80 That agreement was immediately followed by talk of another deal, this one worth $100 million.81 By 2011, the state-owned Israeli Aerospace Industries had delivered a dozen drones to Russia as part of a $400 million contract.82

  As of 2011, Russia was also eager to get its hands on a massive, weaponized Israeli drone called the Heron. About the size of a Boeing 737, the Heron can stay in the air for almost an entire day before needing to be refueled.

  Like any dealer, Israel started by giving Russia just a taste, and now it’s hooked. And it’s not the only one. “Israel is the world’s leading exporter of drones, with more than 1,000 sold in 42 countries,” noted Jacques Chemia, chief engineer at IAI’s drone division, in 2011.83

  Turkey uses Israeli-made drones to conduct surveillance operations against Kurds in northern Iraq. India has purchased lethal drones as part of its long-running arms race with neighboring Pakistan,84 which just produced its very own domestically made armed drone.85

  The British have been collaborating with the Israelis on the production of their long-awaited and much-delayed Watchkeeper drone, which is based on the Israeli Hermes 450 and is being developed by a jointly owned Israeli-UK company. Separately, the British government, along with the private firm BAE Systems, is developing the Mantis, a drone that flies autonomously (without a remote pilot) according to a pre-programmed flight. The Brits are also entering into a joint venture UAV project with France.

  While Israel and the US are the leaders in drone technology, they may be surpassed before long. China surprised m
any Western officials when, as the Wall Street Journal reported, it unveiled no fewer than twenty-five different types of UAVs at a trade show in November 2010, just four years after it unveiled its first concept model.86 “China’s apparent progress is likely to spur others, especially India and Japan, to accelerate their own UAV development or acquisition programs,” the Journal reported. A distant second to the US when it comes to global military spending, China has already produced two drones, the Pterodactyl and Sour Dragon, that respectively mimic the features of the weaponized Predator drone and its surveillance, U-2-like sibling, the Global Hawk.

  Even lesser military powers are getting in the game. Indeed, Iran has already begun deploying its own reconnaissance drones—one was shot down in Iraq in 200987—and weapons-ready models are in the works, if not already in the field.88 An Iranian state news outlet reported in March 2011 that the Islamic Republic had designed an “unmanned flying saucer” equipped with a pair of ten megapixel cameras for aerial surveillance purposes.

  And the US gave a boost to Iran’s drone program, albeit unwittingly, when an RQ-170 Sentinel was downed in December 2012 after crossing into Iran, reportedly as part of a joint CIA-military spying program. Just like that, the top-secret technology the US spent millions of dollars and many years developing fell into the hands of an official enemy.

  “It’s bad—they’ll have everything,” one US official told the Los Angeles Times.89 “And the Chinese or the Russians will have it too.” The technology was so valuable that the Obama administration even considered launching an air strike or sending a special operations team into Iran to destroy the downed drone.90 Iran, Russia, and China can thank US taxpayers for the gift.