With the infiltration of military special ops and the “success” of October 19, though, bombers and fighters shifted from hitting preplanned fixed targets to flying “flexed” missions against Taliban troops: opportunistic strikes.19 As more and more US special operations soldiers arrived to accompany anti-Taliban forces, highly specialized ground controllers (called Joint Terminal Attack Controllers, JTACs—pronounced “jay-tacks”) also arrived. With their GPS and laser designators and black boxes connecting them to the precise maps and all of intelligence in the GIG, there was an immediate increase in the lethality of JDAM strikes.20 If the Taliban reinforced their weak points or moved to redeploy, they only exposed more targets for aircraft—which were now practically circling overhead in wait—to attack.21 After ten years of overflying Iraq, every one of those fighter jets and most of the bombers also brought with them their own black boxes, external pods and data links that gave them photographic and radar capabilities better than any spy plane of old. The attacker and the scout were also increasingly integrated, the synergy meaning that every individual mission had greater effect even as fewer weapons were expended.
Still, the anxiety among the government and the American population on the whole about military progress continued to rise. At a National Security Council meeting on October 24, President Bush shot a “barrage of questions at Rumsfeld and Myers” about whether the Pentagon had a “winter scenario” to go after cave hideouts, the assumption being that the war would go on for at least several more months. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice even “suggested to the president the possibility of changing the strategy and Americanizing the Afghan effort by adding large numbers of U.S. ground forces.”22 That anxiety was reflected in the public debate as well. Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and future vice president, told the Council on Foreign Relations that the air attacks were making the United States look like “a high-tech bully.” On Face the Nation, Senator John McCain said the United States was “going to have to put troops on the ground.” The war would involve casualties and “it won’t be accomplished through airpower alone.”23
On October 26, 2001, nineteen days into Operation Enduring Freedom, the young Machine almost at full bore, Donald Rumsfeld signed a deployment order to send the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle to Afghanistan. The drone was still experimental, and only two airframes were ready—no one had ever flown it in any kind of combat environment. By the first week of November, Global Hawk was overflying Afghanistan at 60,000 feet, giving commanders something they had never had before: a persistent wide-angle view of the battlefield.24
By the first of November, twenty-three days after combat began, CIA teams on the ground reported intercepted Taliban radio communications “full of panic and fear…”25 The Machine was demonstrating its economy, and JDAMs were hitting their targets. And then it was dramatically over: bombed and harried, greased by CIA money and fighting their brethren rather than Americans, the Taliban disintegrated. Mazar-i-Sharif fell, and then Taliban forces started retreating from Kabul. The western city of Herat also fell, followed by Jalalabad and finally Kandahar. Taliban government ceased to exist, and al Qaeda leadership fled to the eastern mountains and Pakistan.
And then, ironically, though precision airpower had worked while the Taliban defended their turf, it turned out that once Taliban forces left their prepared defenses, that same machine faltered. Both sides were out of uniform; both insisted on using military and civilian vehicles; the battlefield extended into cities and towns, and fighters freely (and even intentionally) intermingled with civilians. This shift to the long war of individual targeting occurred silently. And with it came the need for those very ISR assets not only to be able to linger much longer, but also to exist in such abundance that each would serve as a replacement for a human spotter (or fighter) on the ground.
Special operations and airpower seem to be the easy answer to the question of future US military strategy, even if one considers the enormous US and international ground forces that would follow over the next decade and a half. Those small-scale forces were leveraged by what the military calls “persistency over the battlefield” and “highly adaptive planning,”26 which colloquially can be translated to mean almost limitless options at any time or place, as long as reliance is not too heavy on forward-deployed forces, which tend to suck up as much energy to sustain and protect as they exert additional combat power in this kind of frontless battle. None of this strategy could be implemented without black boxes and drones. As military attention shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, true star status was conferred on Predator. General Franks called the drone “my most capable sensor in hunting down and killing al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership,” and General Jumper declared it “the ideal weapon”27 to “take care of a range of targets that we called fleeting and perishable—ones that get away quickly.”
But in 2002, Predator was ideal more in potential than in reality. The drone continued to be plagued by the weather; it could not take off or land when crosswinds exceeded 17 knots, and at least three Predators crashed in Afghanistan between October 2001 and February 2002 because of bad weather and ice.28 Global Hawk, in fact, only flew seventeen missions and was grounded between January and March 2002 after one of two crashed (a second crashed in July 2002).29 Drones didn’t get Mohammed Atef, and no one of any consequence was hunted down by Predator until November 2002, when a CIA drone flying from Djibouti made its first kill in Yemen.30
But the Machine was an immature prodigy. Every part was producing or moving information and adapting inside a growing network. Communications had moved a long way since Desert Storm in 1991, when there was a negligible spread between voice, video, and data needs. Most people did not have e-mail, and the World Wide Web had yet to be invented. The army corps commander was limited to being able to fax one sheet of paper to each of his division subordinates to send written orders,31 and the daily air tasking order telling all planes where to fly and what to bomb had to be printed out and each copy ferried to aircraft carriers and outlying air bases via courier because the file was too large to transmit over existing lines. In the entire Gulf War of 1991, to support more than half a million troops on the ground, the total data rate used by the entire US military was 99 megabits per second (Mbps).32
The demand for bandwidth to support military operations increased from 99 Mbps in Desert Storm to 250 Mbps in Operation Allied Force, the seventy-eight-day Kosovo war.33 That was two and a half times as much bandwidth, but it was to support one-tenth as many soldiers; hence, it was 25 times as much bandwidth per soldier on the battlefield. Much of that increase was caused by the need to move digital intelligence data. To operate two Predators simultaneously required 12 Mbps.34 Maintaining a quality link to Beale Air Force Base in California (where imagery was being processed) “remained problematic throughout the campaign.”35 Even with only a few drones operating, one study concluded, “communications systems were stressed to the point that operational trade-offs were required and some activities had to be delayed or cancelled.”36 Video teleconferencing also came of age in Kosovo and became all the rage for political consultation and micromanagement, sucking up additional satellite bandwidth, particularly when the meetings were held at the top secret level and took over specialized communications networks. And even simple networked changes in ways of doing business demanded more bandwidth; the shift from maintaining huge stockpiles of munitions and supplies to what is called “as needed” transport, even basic bar code and GPS tracking that provided greater visibility over supplies, demanded additional bandwidth.
In the weeks before Operation Enduring Freedom, the Afghanistan war, Central Command projected that its network data needs would peak at 500 Mbps—it was already routinely using about 100 Mbps before 9/11 just to support day-to-day operations and the Iraq no-fly zones. Yet shortly after Afghanistan operations commenced, the military realized that its forces would need much more than 500 Mbps and potentially more than on
e gigabit (one billion bits) per second (Gbps).37 In just two years, from Kosovo to OEF, the network requirement almost tripled. And that was while the “force” on the ground also declined by more than 95 percent in terms of the number of human beings.
More and more unmanned vehicles were also not just creators of information, but also voracious users. Within three weeks of 9/11, the Defense Department leased its first commercial satellite transponder just to accommodate the bandwidth demands of one drone—Global Hawk. Before the end of 2001, the commercial bandwidth capacity for CENTCOM support surged to more than half a gigabyte; and the Pentagon paid over $300 million to lease (and reserve) capacity on civilian satellites.38 On the East Coast, four commercially operated gateways were added to the existing military teleports, quadrupling capacity.39
One postwar lessons learned report says: “The dominant transformation feature throughout the campaign… whether technological, operational, or organizational in nature, was the contributory role of information over kinetics—‘brains over brawn.’”40 Some would confuse the change as a simple combination of airpower and special operations. Some would chalk up the victory to covert action, money, and some unique attribute of the Afghan people. Why wars are won and why this campaign signaled such a false picture of successful conclusion will be debated for years. What can’t be debated is that no one really understood what “brains over brawn” meant in practical terms.
By Thanksgiving 2001, planning for an Iraq war started, slowly beginning the process of bleeding away intelligence assets from Afghanistan.41 The network formed for the initial advance on Baghdad mostly built upon what had been created for the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban, and though few additional unmanned systems were fielded between two wars, a networked and fully tracked ground force of 350,000 soldiers to invade Iraq demanded 3.2 gigabits per second (3,200 megabits per second), four times the bandwidth that was used in Afghanistan.42 Lieutenant General Harry Raduege Jr., director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, said of the first few months of war in Afghanistan that “we’re supporting one-tenth the number of forces deployed during Desert Storm with eight times the commercial SATCOM bandwidth.”43 Compared to Desert Storm twelve years earlier, the data requirements per soldier in Gulf War II grew exponentially. The growing number of Predators44 and Global Hawks was greatly increasing the amount of data used, but it was more that each new black box upgrade demanded yet more data as well.
On August 1, 2003, the first of forty-eight initial Global Hawk production models rolled out at Northrop Grumman’s plant in Palmdale, California. The data rate requirement to process intelligence collected by Global Hawk was ten times the bandwidth demand of Predator.45 The next growth modification of Global Hawk would require 1.1 Gbps, per drone, ten times the total bandwidth used by the entire US military in the first Gulf war; double that used for operations in Kosovo.46 Fewer men, more links, more black boxes, more data, more unmanned collectors—the Machine itself was beginning to determine the design of the very campaign that would unfold.
CHAPTER TEN
The Split
My friend, I have had the fourth,
it surpasses my other three dreams!
I saw a Thunderbird in the sky,
up it rose like a cloud, soaring above us.
TABLET IV, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
The drive from El Mirage, California, to Las Vegas is bleak, crossing the Mojave Desert and the Providence Mountains at nearly 5,000 feet. In January 2002, three months into the war against terrorism and more than a month after the Taliban had abandoned Kabul, an SUV left the General Atomics test site in El Mirage on a rogue mission with three passengers: the company’s lead hardware engineer, an air force civilian scientist, and an army Special Forces warrant officer named Chris Manuel. A Predator drone flying high overhead was transmitting motion imagery of the hangars and other buildings at the test site back to its ground control station.
On the engineer’s lap was a Panasonic Toughbook laptop that was receiving constant updates from the Predator feed. Manuel had spent months in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan tracking down al Qaeda fighters and was on home leave in Ohio when he decided to offer a field operations perspective. Using his military ID to get onto Wright-Patterson Air Force Base but bearded and in civilian clothes, he walked into the Big Safari office. He’d served in Bosnia, where his “special reconnaissance” teams operated deep behind enemy lines and clandestinely “exfiltrated” digital stills and video.1 Later he saw Predators transmit motion imagery back to command centers during the Kosovo war, and then he’d heard that the technologists in the secret recesses had equipped each AC-130 gunship with its own special antenna, black box, and monitor to bring the Predator imagery right into the plane.
What the units on the ground needed, he told his wary air force listeners, was a direct feed from the Predators or other sensors flying overhead, not just some voice report coming through an intermediary or liaison. “I know these guys are flying up there,” he said, referring to Predators. “I just want to see the video before my team arrives at its objective so that we know what we are getting into. Couldn’t something like the black box installed on the gunships be given to the troops?”
Eight days later, he was in the SUV as it drove north on Interstate 15. When they were 117 miles from El Mirage, as the car went through a mountain pass, the General Atomics engineer proudly announced: “We got it.” There in the backseat, they were watching what the Predator was watching.2
They called the black box ROVER, the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver, neither a drone nor a weapon and yet eclipsing both in the relentless quest to leverage America’s technical advantages. ROVER brought the extended eye everywhere and made the job of targeting even more individual and intimate—the army of hunters in the field were equipped with the same information that the deskbound had back at home; the imagery product from on high was melded as an integral part of operations. And that created an expectation and then a requirement that everyone have their own eye, their own drone.
It wasn’t always that way. When I was a young intelligence analyst in West Berlin in the 1970s, “bandwidth” wasn’t even a word and index cards were still the database. Intelligence was hierarchical and material. Oh, our command on the front lines of the Cold War collected—we had listening stations and our own little reconnaissance planes and human intelligence of a surprising variety. Raw reports were filed, sometimes at FLASH precedence over teletype during a crisis, but the intelligence was mostly delivered in typed reports and hard-copy photos and occasional artifacts and then turned into articles and charts and products created and delivered by people at higher commands.
Everything in my upbringing as a student and as an intelligence analyst in the army in the days of index cards was that information delivery was serial in nature: one completed a project before one moved on to the next—until war and contact with the enemy provoked “tactical” intelligence, that is, movement and changes of immediate significance. With few alterations, this basic Cold War, pre-Internet design remained in place through Desert Storm: layered intelligence was employed to collect its small bit, each echelon from the platoon all the way to the Pentagon seeing a bigger and bigger view of the battlefield, with the “fusing” of all only occasionally achieved; the scarce (and expensive) collection resources were carefully doled out and carefully marshaled. The result was hardly ever pretty.
Think television before cable: the intelligence agencies were the networks. There were only so many channels, and you watched what they broadcast. They decided what you needed to know. Anything we produced in Berlin was just their fodder for potential remanufacture into one of their broadcasts. Every once in a while, something rocketed right to the top because it was truly consequential, but compared to the broadcasters, we were more akin to some obscure webcast with a very specialized following.
Predator and ROVER couldn’t have emerged without the larger network architecture, the multiuse fiber and sat
ellite communications pathways, literally a larger “enterprise” supplying the means, bandwidth, routing, and distribution that link platforms, sensors, operators, and consumers. Miniaturization of electronic components and advances in detection, guidance, and networking technologies facilitated generational leaps after Desert Storm, the effect being that the process of finding, fixing, and tracking a target could be completed faster and more cheaply and no longer depended on either expensive stand-alone platforms or the high priests of analysis at the top echelons. The true advance came not in intelligence sensors per se, not even in the unmanned; it came in the form of the black box, literally plug-in and plug-on avionics modules and pods (strap-on appendages for aircraft, usually attached to the wing or fuselage). Though a number of pods were in use starting with the Vietnam War, and select aircraft in Desert Storm could carry single-function targeting pods for reconnaissance or laser designation,3 the introduction of the Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared for Night (LANTIRN) in 1991 changed the capability of the individual: the pilot could now see in the dark.4 The eight-foot-long LANTIRN Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) sensor and its Terrain Following Radar (TFR) enabled pilots to fly at low altitude at night and view the forward terrain. An integrated laser designator and range finder allowed the crew to self-illuminate or mark the target and then deliver its own laser-guided bomb—collecting, processing, and killing a contemporaneous target all in one process.5
Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare Page 12