Industry also started using tagging technologies to track shipping containers, cargo, and other important assets, a field generally called Automatic Identification Technology (AIT).12 The military used GPS satellite technology and radio-frequency identification devices (RFIDs) to monitor convoy logistics, munitions, and hazardous materials.13 By 2007, the US Army operated the largest active RFID system in the world, over 3,000 read-and-write sites and more than two million tags. Information stored on the tag and affixed to an object like a pallet is remotely detected by specialized readers whenever they are within range, the small battery on the tag allowing it to transmit a signal. No one needed to point a gizmo at the bar code, and active tracking became a normal way not just to monitor movements but also to receive health status reports of sensitive shipments.14
Of course, the same technologies migrated to the secret world. Long before 9/11, law enforcement agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI began using microprocessor-based vehicle tagging and tracking systems, and the DEA even created a black box that could process the propeller noise of a small plane and identify it by the specific signature it emitted, based upon minute variations in balance and torque. Scientists at the CIA developed elegant covert agent communications, listening devices, and clandestine surveillance (remember Afghan Eyes from the pre-9/11 bin Laden search). Night vision and forward-looking infrared, and the entire world of search and rescue beacons, advanced on the military front. When the new black commandos of the Joint Special Operations Command were given the “national” assignments of hostage rescue and weapons of mass destruction search and recovery, no expense was spared and any potential technology was considered. And just to illustrate the utter irrelevance of any one administration, if it isn’t already obvious, the weapon’s developers began working on long-range facial recognition (the Human ID program) before Bush II came along, at first under laboratory conditions, until Afghanistan and Iraq became the laboratory.15 The capability to find a face, locate the eye, and focus for an iris capture was achieved at one meter, and then at three meters, and then went longer and longer until biometrics at a distance was a reality.16
At the end of 2004, with the bloom off the rose of victory in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Defense Science Board assessed the state of TTL and special activities, the phrase that refers to all clandestine and quasicovert military action. A “Hostile Forces TTL Capability Development Document” had been approved at the Pentagon, and the tags-on program of tracking suspected terrorists and their networks of facilitators—clandestine TTL—became “SOF-operator defined,” that is, in direct support of the one-percenters already moving into clandestine battlefields like Pakistan and Yemen and East Africa.17 Special Operations Command told Congress that year that it needed to address “surveillance inadequacies in the Department of Defense’s ability to collect timely, actionable intelligence on difficult-to-access, high-value targets and on tagging, tracking, and locating (TTL) vehicles, aircraft, vessels, containers, and individuals.”18 The Defense Science Board didn’t mince words as to its sense of urgency: the Pentagon’s highest scientific advisors called for a new Manhattan Project to focus on programs that would find, identify, and track individuals. Having fully supported drones and all of the latest black boxes through hyperspectral experimentation, the board wrote: “We need close-in, terrestrial means. We believe an integrated, coherent approach is required in order to develop identification, tagging, tracking, and locating (ID/TTL) capabilities that will give U.S. military forces the same advantage finding targets in asymmetric warfare that it has in conventional warfare.”19 By February 2006, the SOCOM (Special Operations Command) commander General Bruce Brown designated TTL the highest-ranked capability need of his command.20
It would never quite become a Manhattan Project, but in five years, the special reconnaissance world moved more and more into TTL techniques as part of common operations, with pattern of life drone study from overhead, close-access target reconnaissance looking through the windows, and TTL and its supersecret methods going inside. Like the counter-IED empire that produced flocks of drones and other black box devices, a TTL patron emerged as well, this one with a budget of $450 million. Special reconnaissance capabilities rebranded itself Special Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Exploitation (SRSE), and in August 2010, its portfolio of developing new tagging, tracking, and locating sensors expanded to encompass the biometrics and forensics systems, the edge-of-intelligence work, and much more akin to what straight-up policemen did.21 State-of-the-art “technical surveillance collection” also moved forward under the x-men banner, a term once reserved exclusively for bugs planted behind light fixtures and vents, now including so-called technical audio and video systems used for reconnaissance and targeting, all, of course, made mobile and networked for remoting and reachback. At each step along the way, the black boxes of special reconnaissance needed to be more capable, be undetectable, have longer battery life, and be able to communicate outside normal networks. Man-carried devices also had to be smaller, smaller, and smaller, even to the point of being “wearable” by a soldier, the epitome being lightweight, low-power, body-worn cameras, eavesdropping and TTL command centers. The human was now the bug and the furthest forward probe of the unmanned Data Machine.22 A specialized unattended land mesh network for high-data-rate, long-range persistent communications was created; TTL at the edge would demand robust wireless communications.23
In those same five years, more than 2,500 regular soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines completed the close-access target reconnaissance course, and the less secret and more rudimentary tools of TTL proliferated to white special operators and intelligence units. As early as 2004, the Hostile Forces Integrated Targeting Sub-system (HITS) was up and running, melding geolocation computations of raw data with radio frequency modeling and error estimation, bringing black and less black together. Then came SpotterRF, the world’s smallest surveillance radar, a low-power unit that weighs about four pounds and can fit into a backpack. In February 2007, TTL was being heralded as “influencing the battlefield by providing location and intent of hostile forces.” Operatives could now contribute to persistent surveillance while collecting and extracting information “from denied areas.” The community of x-men merged with the “interagency partners” of the CIA and FBI to synchronize capabilities that would perpetuate counterterrorism and killing operations even after the troops were gone.24 The next month, John Young, the director of Defense Research and Engineering, testified that research was emphasizing “advanced nanotechnology, biology, and chemistry to give us a means to find, identify, and track individual human beings with minimal exposure of our forces and with an ability to project this capability into areas of limited access.”25
Manned close-access target reconnaissance—combining the four main technical surveillance disciplines (electronics, video, audio, and TTL)—puts the x-men in the riskiest positions, whether in penetrating deep into the mountains of Pakistan on lone missions, or in going into the urban areas of Fallujah and Baghdad (or even into cities and places not yet on the public target lists). But the development of these technologies and the risk assumed can also obscure the true transformation here and the ultimate hallmark of the x-men: They cross the lines. They go where others can’t. They are soldiers, policemen, and covert operators all rolled into one. No border holds them back, and similarly, no conventional law applies. They have ridden the wave of post-9/11 jingoism, of connect the dots, and they march forward on the simplest explanation of why those attacks came. They are armed with technologies that are only tangentially arms. They have access to nanotechnologies and MASINT and the sciences of biometrics and forensics, which previously were available only in the security and law enforcement domains. And they are the answer machines: what used to be complementary and a mere adjunct to traditional intelligence is now more often than not the second source, the positive ID or the right-down-to-his-socks conclusion that decision-makers and x-men use to pull th
e trigger, acting as both intelligence collectors and executioners. These nonsoldiers, nonlawmen are all-in-one: a manned unmanned.
In special corners of the Machine, special corners only hinted at in the killings of Zarqawi and bin Laden, the x-men incorporate an everything portfolio, “technical support systems, special communications, SIGINT, and satellites,”26 building a self-contained world. The tools have accumulated, just as the data that the NSA collects worldwide accumulates, almost to the breaking point. And yet still there is a deficit—the urban hunt, the global hunt, the jungle hunt, the desert hunt, the island hunt, the cyberhunt—none will be successful without something more. And the deficit isn’t the obvious falling behind in processing and making use of all the incoming information, though that problem haunts. When the Defense Science Board issued its report Summer Study on the Transition to and from Hostilities at the very time when wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were spawning more and more terrorism, it was mainly expressing a growing sense of a need to finish the two wars and just return to the hunt, the original mission. That in itself was the answer: extracting America from conventional war meant moving warfare even further into the shadows: close-access, terrestrial, as man-to-man as could be imagined to find and kill terrorists, manhunting perfected and, most of all, made invisible.
Somewhere along the way, the Data Machine and its growing capacity also facilitated (and maybe even demanded) the creation of two sets of rules—two sets that have profound consequences. One is open and the other is in the shadows, one subject to scrutiny by the news media and public opinion and even normal laws, the other doing the dirty work that is often too difficult for humankind—the very articulation of what justifies unmanned systems in the first place—but also that which floats above written law. It isn’t just bravado; there is literally a black-and-white special operations force, and there are even two sides of the CIA and the NSA and other institutions, one side that operates in accordance with laws and another that makes its own law in the name of security. And here is the ultimate irony: this other world of dead or alive, “bring me his head in a box,” of waterboarding and secret prisons, of targeted killings, of indefinite detention, and even warrantless surveillance and bulk collection, tries to minimize harm in order to evade detection and intervention. It is not just political cynicism. Even the task of the x-men, or at least the driving factor in developing their black boxes and special reconnaissance capabilities—all of the enablers of fighting in the shadows—is articulated in official documents as having to be accomplished so that capabilities can be provided “without undue exposure of [friendly] personnel to risks.”27
And manned versus unmanned? For all the talk of drones and black boxes, this hunt of the x-men is about as human as one could imagine. Yet when armed with so much information and so much power, it seems almost that remote and long-range begins to look pretty good in comparison. For to embody all of the attributes of military and civilian, soldier and policeman, surgeon and killer in one is essentially to create highly adaptive and essentially automated decision-making that leads to one answer, one continual answer. And it is hard not to condemn the enterprise as the toil of a rapacious Gilgamesh exercising the power of the gods.
Equipped with the greatest of real-world black boxes, sensors, communications, and weapons, with the Data Machine always at their beck and call, these x-men are the essence of imagined perfection—the x-men working at the edge also increase the level of confidence in the final decision. The willingness to make mortal sacrifices, the assumption of meticulous preparation, and the magic of the special ensure that commanders and decision-makers start from the assumption that the target is the most dangerous and deadly to friendly forces (and to the World), thereby justifying all of the effort, but also that once the penetration is made, they know enough detail to satisfy the unspoken color-of-the-socks test. As former air force chief scientist Dr. Mark Maybury says of the combination of persistence and closeness, they have “a very positive impact on increasing knowledge because you have a chance to loiter and see more things,” bolstering with positive identification and reducing civilian casualties.28
That might just be the end of the story: assassins sent out, modern-day snipers creeping and hiding just a little bit closer to danger than less-skilled warriors, but even here, the Data Machine has changed everything and the warriors of special reconnaissance are valued more as collectors than killers, humans to be sure, but not valued for their cognitive abilities or language skills or even because they make a choice at the end whether to pull the trigger or not. No, here, “close” is the key word: the human operative is valued because getting close, putting an RFID device on a car, tagging an individual to follow him or her, slipping an intercept chip into a phone, fiddling with someone’s computer or home router, picking up some cell phone call, or taking some picture; even just watching and listening to all of this activity peeping tom–style, is valued because it gains access and data that the central brain does not (yet) know. Yet the close-access operator is also merely a new platform and data processor for the unmanned.
The president and his advisors literally sit around the conference table at the White House Situation Room half a world away watching an operation unfold live because of these men. One might imagine that courageous political decisions are made in executing the mission that day, in taking whatever momentary risk there is in the willingness to take the heat for failure. But in approving the execution—We know the color of the socks! It’s a go!—the option of trial isn’t even seriously considered; and in military terms, capture isn’t even attempted. All these decisions are made a little easier because navy SEALs or other special operators are not quite soldiers. These are, after all, the elite of the elite, further obscuring all of the distinctions of military and civilian and just and unjust, a blurring that empowers other outlaw fighters to justify their own actions and their cause. From targeting Osama bin Laden down to designating the umpteenth al Qaeda number three to be killed, the machine facilitates a corrosive blight. The military mission from Desert Storm through this post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan period of no-name war is ever more obsessed with perfecting the process of finding and killing the target. Only the imprecision of using such a euphemism is left.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ring of Fiber
[… How can I keep silent?] How can I stay quiet?
[My friend, whom I loved, has turned] to clay,
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has [turned to clay,]
[Shall I not be like] him and also lie down,
[never] to rise again, through all eternity?
TABLET X, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
In early 2009, General David Petraeus signed Joint Urgent Operational Need 336, a request to rapidly deploy the Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN). BACN was a system that filled an important gap in servicing soldiers operating at the very edge.1 It was a need specific to the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where peaks and valleys inhibited normal communications and created a vaporous and unacceptable nonnetworked space.2 BACN would link to everyone who found themselves out of range of the Data Machine. In addition, it would be the military’s own Internet to receive, bridge, and distribute data from satellite, radio, and data networks—a universal relay and intelligence disseminator for standard and nonstandard platforms alike.
To understand BACN, we have to take just a quick journey back to the beginning, to the parts that make up the unmanned machine. Every drone consists of four distinct elements: the platform itself (whether aircraft, ground, or waterborne robot), the payload (what I call the black box—that is, the sensor or weapon), the control station (where the flight is directed from, whether it is on the ground or not), and the communications network that is required to control the platform and receive its product. External to the drone world are the processors (analysts or computers) who scrutinize the product and then the users (political decision-makers, commanders, special operatives, soldiers) who take action, the manned
element of the unmanned system, who are hardly trivial.
If all of this were a tactical system—that is, simply serving one user—then the entire system could be relatively self-contained. But think of drones instead as a set of computing appliances (smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, etc.), all overlapping: some are indeed used offline and are personal, but the majority are connected to some network and then to the Data Machine, which demands constant data flowing through it like blood flowing through a living body. In the olden days, the military erected its own terrestrial and then space-based communications networks, and it still has many such networks today. But today, most military communications demand access to a network to operate. Where the networks are robust or can be supplemented by military-only systems, communicating is manageable. But where the network is lacking, or when the number of appliances connecting to it surpasses capacity, something different has to be created. And just as in the mid-2000s, when no operation would be undertaken without some drone flying overhead, now no one can be out of network range.
BACN, like other black box systems, really has no simple definition or description, no birth date, and no single identity. On October 24, 2003, its manufacturer, the defense giant Northrop Grumman, conducted a first set of communications between a Global Hawk drone and a manned airborne command post in the skies above California.3 Its system, called the Advanced Information Architecture, was a ROVER-like setup that allowed the drone to send imagery directly to the command aircraft but then also connected to everyone within range of the network to share what it was seeing. It facilitated not just faster and more personal provision of intelligence but also the automatic layering of different types of intelligence. By creating its own IP-based airborne network in the sky, BACN avoided the expensive and bandwidth-intensive transfer of imagery to processors far away. In short, BACN was a self-contained intelligence agency extending and speeding up the process, whatever it was.
Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare Page 21