In Pakistan, after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, President Bush expanded the target list beyond al Qaeda to the Taliban and other “nexus” targets and increased the tempo of attacks; by the end of 2008 there had been forty-six drone strikes over the border.31 Initially, Pakistani intelligence was consulted, but when US intelligence showed President Bush evidence that the targets might be receiving warnings, the United States started only to inform Pakistani officials concurrently. Bush also approved the employment of a more “attack the network” approach, bombing infrastructure and then tracking “squirters”—those who got away—to the next hideout.32 X-men operating as part of Joint Expeditionary SIGINT Tactical Reconnaissance (JESTR) teams would infiltrate and get as close to potential targets with their Swiss Army knife black box collection conducting “Charlie Ops” under the COHESIVE OVATION program. The operations were so successful that twenty additional ones were mounted between July and Obama’s election. When Obama took over the program, drones were flying out of Pakistan and there were extensive plans to expand the area of permitted strikes and increase operations on the ground in Pakistan.33 Deputy National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon told Bob Woodward that though Obama had campaigned against Bush’s ideas and approaches, he underestimated the extent to which he had inherited George W. Bush’s presidency—“the apparatus, personnel and mind-set of war making.”34
In other words, Obama didn’t accelerate anything. He just assumed “command” of greater capabilities to hit targets. That means also that the pretense of fewer troops can be sold as de-escalation of conflict or even success. The impression can be left behind that the American president himself sits at the joystick and the rest of the country has nothing to do with it. But that in itself is the triumph of the Machine. The unlaborers and the system are invisible, and so the Machine becomes platform agnostic—political platform agnostic as well.
When President Obama appeared before the cadets at West Point on graduation day 2014, his promise was a withdrawal from Afghanistan by a certain date, just as he had done in Iraq. The administration said that as the United States wound down its war in Afghanistan, it would keep a force of just 9,800 US service members in 2015. But “America’s combat mission will be over,” Obama said. And the United States would “have to develop a strategy that matches” the diffuse terrorism threat—“one that expands our reach without sending forces that stretch our military too thin, or stir up local resentments.” 35
Commentary on the president’s speech dissected every nuance about the American future, but black boxes are what makes that withdrawal possible, by allowing for a network that is less dependent on a human ground presence at the point of fighting. And because of the network, nearly ten thousand troops on the ground equals some hundreds of thousands of yesteryear. The nature of the Data Machine, moreover, including all of its mystifying classifications of military, civilian, and contractor; of overt, covert, clandestine, invisible, and just special, obscures what is the true commitment and activity on the ground and presents the illusion of demobilization and pulling back, when in fact that is not the reality. Find a president or a political decision in the continuity from Desert Storm to the mid-1990s to 9/11 and beyond: Clinton inherited Bush; Bush inherited Clinton; Obama, Bush. Our foreign policy itself is unmanned.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Pattern of Life
The axe at my side, in which my arm trusted,
the dirk at my belt, the shield at my face,
my festive garment, my girdle of delight…
TABLET VIII, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
I told my publisher that if I bought my own drone, I could tell the story, understand the allure, and perhaps even convey the complexity of the Machine.
My first stop was eBay, especially after I read that a Philippine man had pled guilty to trying to auction parts from a military reconnaissance drone on the website.1 A search for “drone” yielded over 5,000 active listings as of mid-2013, including everything from women’s clothing to action figures. The top listing, though, was a Parrot 2.0 App-Controlled Quadricopter, $293.95 or best offer—which I dismissed as a toy—followed by a $679 DJI Phantom. And then there was an Oktokopter DJI Wookong for $6,400. The cost was ten times as much as the Phantom but came with the caveat: “Please note that this equipment is not a toy.”
Before your own eyes glaze over, let me say that I wasn’t even sure if the Wookong had a camera, and I was hearing the voice of some fast-talking car salesman in my head: four on the floor, carburetor this, muffler that, souped up; the salesman in my head was lovingly stroking this baby. I’ve never really cared much about cars and don’t have a pilot’s license, and I’ll admit that it was all pretty much Greek to me. So I plunked down my $300 and ordered the Parrot to start.
What a fabulous toy!
Without its Styrofoam bumpers—aka “the indoor hull”—protecting the four propellers, it looks like a big bug. Though it’s not bigger than a laptop—a really small laptop—it has a forward-looking high-definition video camera and a non-high-definition video camera underneath. The attraction for a neophyte like me is that you can download the app and operate it with your iPhone or iPad. Charge the battery and it’s ready to go.
In my living room, admiring my new Parrot, I joined the AR.Drone Academy online to track my flights and to find other Parrot users. I read the (surprisingly short) operator’s manual (clearly, nobody reads anymore). I watched a variety of arty and instructional videos online that made it look really easy. And I decided on an inaugural indoor flight with the protective bumpers on. It looks pretty fragile, I thought. I’ll just hover around the room, check out the controls, and see how the camera works.
My heart pumping, I hooked up the battery, tested the propellers as instructed, plugged in a USB thumb drive to store the recorded video, connected my iPhone via the drone’s own wireless receiver, set the software for indoor flight, and put everything on the lowest possible speed and altitude settings. My Parrot took off and hovered; think tiny helicopter, the four propellers whirling in unison to provide lift and control direction. With thumbs on the two dots that simulate joysticks on the iPhone touch screen, I made the slightest movement and the Parrot darted away, almost twinkling at me like some Pixar character, animated and alive, as I later surmised, because it clearly had a mind of its own. Less than ten seconds into my first flight, I unceremoniously crashed into the window.
The second attempt was no better—I hit the chimney of the wood stove.
By now I was laughing and so was my wife, who was recording my endeavor. But it was very frustrating, and I told myself I’d get the feel for it.
The first flight outdoors didn’t go much better. I was worried about the wind—this baby only weighs fourteen ounces, less than a small box of pasta. I set the maximum altitude at three meters just to be safe. The barn, two trees, the house, the driveway: before the battery ran down, I’d crashed into them all. I just couldn’t get the hang of the controls and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get the drone to come back once it darted away. Specks of dirt in the gears that turn the propellers were my first maintenance job, but other than that, my Parrot actually proved pretty hardy. And not only that, the video produced was beautiful and unintentionally hilarious.
The Parrot came to my brother-in-law’s wedding in Maine the next week, where I hoped to find a big enough flat space far away from any water to practice. It’s very pesky, I told my stepson, Galen, age eighteen, who badgered me to break it out so we could fly. I’m not going to let you fly it until you watch the instructional videos, I told him. Two minutes later, he was back and ready.
It wasn’t like I was teaching him to shoot a gun, but as owner and commander of my own embryonic squadron, I became ridiculously officious, carefully showing him how to connect it to the phone, how to do the self-test, instructing him to land it on my command, fretting about the wind and using words like “aloft” like I knew what I was talking about. It was just breezy. Then I le
t him take the controls. The wind from the ocean definitely buffeted and pushed the Parrot around, but Galen almost effortlessly got the hang of it right away, flying it up to the top of the house we were staying in, crossing the road between two electrical wires—“Watch out!” I yelled—darting the Parrot back to the front lawn, flying it this way and that, and then landing it. He loved it, I loved it; I was humbled. When I debriefed Galen after this and other missions, he said the trick for him was calibrating himself to the rhythm of the drone, what actual pilots call “feeling” the plane, though unlike the pilot of a manned airplane, a drone pilot doesn’t actually feel the inertia and acceleration caused by a gust of wind.2
They call Galen’s generation “digital natives.” His instinctive aptitude truly says something about our society, and about the expansive world of the Data Machine that drones represent. Whatever happens in the wiring of a brain that allows a young child to so easily pick up a second language, the digital natives have acquired a new way of absorbing and interacting with our wholly digital world.
Still, it drives me to distraction when I watch how Galen or any of his contemporaries operate; they have multiple things going on at once, on the laptop, on the iPod, on the phone, on the TV. They’ll have several chat sessions open on a variety of appliances, texting on the phone as well; they’ll be watching a show and watching a ball game; they’ll have a YouTube video running; they’re listening to music; and sometimes they’ll have a couple of homework assignments going, sometimes involving real books but more often than not digital pablum and hands-on projects. The relentless demand to command all this data is only compounded by the speed at which music and videos are transmitted globally, not just to the home Wi-Fi network but also through the satellites and cables and fiberoptic networks needed to move it all. Galen and his generation didn’t conform to the machinery of our day; the Machine conforms to their expectations.
And that wedding in Maine? It was truly beautiful. After a week of dreary rain and fog, the sun shone brightly at the top of Cadillac Mountain at the moment of the ceremony, and everything went off without a hitch. Everyone, even my father-in-law, age eighty-four, had their own digital camera and was snapping away, the big old cameras with the bulging lenses dusted off, powered up, and brought out for the occasion as well, but more often than not it was just the ubiquitous smartphones, especially among the digital natives. There we were, recording everything, an NSA-like acquisition, each wedding participant—myself included—more comprehensive and efficient collectors than the old-fashioned single authoritarian wedding photographer of old, gigabytes upon gigabytes so easily collected, a massive and dispersed digital record. Those little LED screens also served, though, as a kind of obstacle, removing the participants by one step from the event. And then I saw our own family intelligence agency choking on data as everyone compiled their mass of photos and signals, the designated nerd spending hours on end putting them all on a DVD, the task of sorting through them all left to the bride and groom back at the family CIA.
As wedding turned to reception and after-party, the picture taking hardly slowed. This is my Parrot’s way as well. In flight, one doesn’t turn the video camera on and off—the data collection is automatic and constantly streaming like a data waterfall. Video continues, only constrained by onboard power, which constrains the flight. Movement of the video from camera to thumb drive to iPhone to computer (or the Web) is slow and intrusive to the operation of the drone itself. Storage being so cheap these days, I was able to use a 128-gigabyte USB thumb drive, its capacity exceeding the amount of video that could be shot by the drone in a single mission, given the thirty-minute life of the battery. And with my mighty thumb drive, I’d never run out of storage space. So my squadron’s second requisition, after my ginormous data center, was going to have to be a second battery, and maybe a third, for sustained operations.
More drone flights followed: my friend Peter came to visit for the weekend, and to my surprise, he was fascinated with the drone. A decade older than me and a journalist and writer of the old school, which means two-finger typing and a deep love of musty archives—the real stuff—he’d never seemed to me to be much of a technology guy. So we went down to the school, where the size of the playing fields was sure to keep us out of trouble. I was getting better at flying, practice and help from Galen paying off. But on flight segment three, the Parrot sailed away and just kept going. It took us a good half hour to find it in the trees, ominously close to Barnard Brook.
My brother, an ultralight enthusiast who built and flies his own airplane in Virginia, asked if my new drone carried a weapon, certainly an apropos quip given how one type seems to rule over all others. I guess I could use it kamikaze style, I responded, but the weapon would have to be awfully light. He suggested attaching something called a servo and dropping a paintball, but I was thinking more of the aptly named and supersecret Pyros or some other variety of the forearm-sized weapons increasingly becoming the side arms of the uniformed digital natives.
Another training session with Galen, as he finally taught me how to just nudge the controls and get the Parrot to come back and we flew the drone higher and higher, over the roof of the house, peering now into all of South Pomfret village: the general store, the library, homes, and beyond. Winds at 120 feet required our smart little craft to constantly compensate to right itself, and the video, though beautiful at that altitude, was so jerky that watching it was enough to cause vertigo. But I was thinking that pretty soon I’d be able to bring the drone along to people’s homes and parties, weather permitting, second battery now part of the unit supply, and do little surveys and demonstrations, and peer into neighbors’ backyards, conduct some real espionage.
A short conversation with an attorney introduced me to tort law and the detail that Vermont might have some special rules. “If you look into a neighbor’s yard it probably is not a violation of their privacy,” he said, “but if you get on a ladder to do so…”
Now, in addition to needing an insufferable multitasking digital native assistant, and a budget, and someone to handle the accumulating mass of pictures and video, I also needed a squadron lawyer.
I’m afraid of my drone. There: I admit it. I still want to get that singular beautiful picture from a unique vantage point to serve as an illustration for this book, but I’m worried about trying to master something that isn’t about anything except mastering something. And I’m worried about all that video: Why am I even keeping it all? It’s a great illustration, my Parrot, of the fact that I don’t want to spy on my neighbors, and though I own a new toy, I’m not really much of a hobbyist or a flier. I won’t be getting my wings, but the drone has shown how the military and intelligence communities have impetuously moved forward with their drone acquisitions: You gotta fly it. You gotta communicate with it. You gotta keep it in good repair. You gotta have power and lots of it. You gotta point it at something and that’s gotta have a reason. You gotta look at the video and you gotta store it and then be able to find it later. You can always use a better camera, which means more storage space and more issues with where and what you can record. And more range is useful, too, which means longer-range communications, which means a better controller, and maybe even a staff. Pretty soon, you’ve got a squadron; you’ve got dozens, hundreds, thousands.
Is that it? The acquisition of toys, toys turned into tools into weapons of war? Whatever you call it, we have created a killing Machine. We need to examine whether it is effective, to ask first of all two fundamental questions: whether it is even the right strategy to pursue to defend against terrorism, and whether it secures our future. And we also need to understand the Data Machine itself, whether it is spending our national treasure wisely or doing its given job well. But what if there are legality and economy and even oversight, no matter how effective or ineffective they might be? What if the making of the killing Machine in itself, the creation of this other black box–packed world of Gilgamesh’s, changes the real world, changes u
s? That’s my discovery with my own little Parrot and my deep descent into the world of the unmanned. We do have thousands of drones, and the Machine already rules. Somehow, though, it seems exactly what we want, what we crave in this life separated from the reality of war.
I went to look at the digital natives to seek an answer, and the sight was not pretty. One brainiac with a physics doctorate arrived in Kandahar in 2013 to serve as a kind of science officer with Combined Joint Task Force Paladin, the multinational counter-IED authority then still busily at work.
The Georgia Tech graduate’s job title reads “operations research analyst”: part staff officer, part intelligence analyst, part scientist, a new kind of government issue sent into combat, but a fighter who would be unrecognizable to an Eisenhower or even a Schwarzkopf. Put through his paces at basic in a coddled and lecture-filled predeployment training building in Maryland, the modern-day Poindexter is not an actual military officer or soldier or spy, nor is he one of those dreaded contractors; he’s a bona fide army civilian employee, the kind that used to populate the arsenals in the rear areas doing the industrial weapons work but that now are essential unlaborers of the Data Machine. Like his volunteer brethren who serve in uniform, and yet totally different, he is there on the battlefield serving his own one-year combat tour because actual soldiers, no matter how good they are, need something beyond even the perfected Niagara of the user-friendly Machine to make sense of the big data of war.
Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare Page 25