Poindexter’s focus is significant activities (SIGACTs) and statistical trends. He works alongside scores of others in the local intelligence fusion center. In each of the regions, there are counterpart centers and task forces with analysts and subject matter experts (SMEs) numbering in the hundreds who toil away, an activity duplicated endlessly in each of the districts and base hubs and units. They are backed up by thousands at higher headquarters, with more than half of the boots on the ground provided by men and women of statuses other than soldier. They are backed up by tens of thousands more working 24/7 shifts in the United States. More thousands populate similar fusion centers slightly different than counter-IED. There they wrestle with the reporting tools and databases of local and third-country national vetting and hiring, counterintelligence and insider threats (“green on blue”), counternarcotics, counter–threat finance, counter–human trafficking, countercorruption, warrant-based targeting, information security, physical security, and base and force protection. If a Poindexter supports the world of special operations, he does the same cubicle work that prepares and supports Village Stability Operations (VSO), Foreign Internal Defense (FID), Counterinsurgency (COIN), psychological operations, and irregular warfare. If he directly supports killers in the black world to find and fix the high-value targets and individuals, he resides in a similar world of the x-men. The higher any unlaborer goes, the more distinguished the arsenal of databases and networks—MagicDesk, Fire Truck, SKOPE, JIANT, SOIS, PDAS—the software and networks of the new gods.
Even as troops left Afghanistan, collection never faltered. Just in Kandahar, at just one enormous military and intelligence hub, more than a dozen different types of planes and drones flew at the end of 2013. Their black boxes are all the latest models. Hovering above all is the multi-INT Persistent Ground Surveillance Systems (PGSS), a combined balloon and unmanned ground sensor grid keeping watch on direct threats to every hub. Technicians fiddle with the latest black boxes in this world as well: the austere location force protection kits and the shooter detection systems. Also flowing in are the signals from fixed intercept sites and vehicle-mounted stations, even the take from the close-access technical reconnaissance of the x-men. Out on patrol, the actual warriors conduct sensitive site exploitations, collecting documents, hard drives and disks, cell phones and anything else that might provide a clue; they conduct meticulous forensics of what can only be called crime scenes; and they deal with the people, carrying out key leader engagements, interrogations, screenings, and background checks; and, most important these days to populate the databases for tomorrow, they collect biometric data.
This is a different kind of army: it doesn’t advance per se, setting up camp and pitching pup tents as it halts for the night. The Poindexters and their subordinate plain old analysts are more like Dilbert technicians filling air-conditioned offices—planning, scheduling, monitoring, scanning, collating, translating, geolocating, data-pulling, processing, formatting, chatting, and briefing. Day in and day out, they prepare pattern of life studies, predictive analysis, historical threat analysis, District Narrative Assessments (DNA), intelligence preparation of the battlefield, Intelligence Summaries (INTSUMs) and graphic Intelligence Summaries (GRINTSUMs). They are literally the masters of software, valued for their digital acumen, almost all of them commercial products, technicians and unlaborers present and accounted for in attending to the Data Machine. There are dozens if not hundreds of additional black box software packages and databases of all of the three-letter agencies that connect the unlaborers. Their world is a self-contained and self-generating society within itself, not the real world.
In my experience of trying to tease out some intersect between the secret life of the information warriors and war, I discovered that video games and television series like Game of Thrones unite digital natives and their elder brethren-in-arms in some common and enduring language. And since I know nothing of the most current games or fads, I’ve tried to talk about Star Trek and have come up with an interesting conversation. Poindexter and his ilk can completely get into debating Spock versus Data, the next-generation science officer: who’s smarter, who’s a better character, who is more likable or who they would like to spend eternity with on a deserted planet. Amongst people of a certain generation—mine—Spock wins hands down, not just because he is a first love but also because he was an introduction to the future; charismatic and fearless, with that mystical otherworldly quality characterized by all the Vulcan mumbo jumbo and the mind meld. To the digital natives of the Poindexter generation, Data is the man. He is not just Spock 2.0 but a walking thesaurus intrinsically more lovable than the half-man with no emotions, a striver who wants external input and wants to collaborate, a techie who can learn at an astronomical rate, funny precisely because he is unfunny, an overtalking and eager oid that crosses the line from a that to a who.
There is no right answer in this debate, which is itself highly symbolic: an equal number of fanboy scholars seem annoyed that Data can babble on uncontrollably as are annoyed about Spock’s monotone and the fact that his every line ends with the always anticlimactic “illogical.” Data is endearing precisely because of his obvious almost-human flaws; it is in fact the nonmachine who seems more robotic.
The prime difference, of course, is that Data is a robot, an android with a positronic brain, a Hollywood tip of the hat to the great Isaac Asimov, who first conceived of such a brain in 1950s science fiction. Spock, on the other hand, is an alien from another galaxy, and though he has a human mother and a Vulcan father, in the end, he is not even on our historical horizon, while here is the truth: Data is completely logical.
Data the machine, on the other hand, can be more likened to the NSA or the Data Machine itself—he can literally listen to 100 separate songs at once and discern all of them. It is an incredible achievement and a necessary demonstration. Yet as a character, Data sought—with the processing of enough information—to be more like a human and even to tackle the human soul, a struggle not unlike the human struggle going back six thousand years to the time when the story of Gilgamesh was first conceived. Spock is in many ways another in a long line of Gilgameshes, that fantastic character that is only part human. In his detached way, he has to be likened to the modern-day national security wonk, the hyperexpert pursuing über-objectives with superhuman focus, the man or woman who will do almost anything to save lives, the unflappable officer you want on the bridge, unless it is a bridge to nowhere.
While science and society debate the potential of artificial intelligence and the limitations of actual software and models in becoming self-aware or producing humanlike reasoning, even the skeptics admit that a fusion agent like Data might be able to crunch the numbers with great accuracy to determine where a human target or an improvised explosive device might be hidden, even if, as one scientist friend says, it might also have nothing to say about what to do about it next. The popular nightmare and a staple of science fiction and movies going back to 2001: A Space Odyssey is somehow that the machines go beyond their programming and threaten humans and humankind. Thus the egghead advisors in today’s military formations don’t even pretend to be working for the purpose of unlinking warfare from its human dimensions; it is merely that the Machine has already become too complex for ordinary humans to master.
Autonomy is coming precisely to solve this problem. The vigilant Data Machine already supports mission tasks that must be accomplished on a scale beyond human capability. Translation software, artificial intelligence, and electronic means of processing raw data—signals and imagery—are already managing the glut.3 The military isn’t shy about calling for “appropriate levels of autonomy”4 in future development, with the increased use of autonomy and autonomous behaviors not just improving performance but also providing cost savings.5 The increasing volume of data, combined with an ever-changing operational environment in the limitless number of possible Everybads, the air force says, demands innovative approaches in order to translate ra
w data into intelligence and deliver it rapidly.6 It can all sound like another Gnat-750-to-Reaper continuum or a WARHORSE-to-ACES HY reduction in weight and improvement in performance, except that lurking in the dark corners are the mad scientists who do foresee “Complete Kill Chain Weapons,” that is, machines that would make every decision from detection to the kill.
Though concerns about “killer robots” are valid, and there are already weapons that people should be concerned about that essentially kill automatically on the battlefield, the reality is that automated killing is inimical to military culture and the concepts of just warfare that most militaries rely on. Again, the military is quite aware of the shift and the danger, stressing the difference between performance and “execution,” the military’s actual word. “Autonomous mission performance may demand the ability to integrate sensing, perceiving, analyzing, communicating, planning, decision-making, and executing to achieve mission goals versus system functions,” the Pentagon says.7 Systems, the military says, are “only as good as the software writer and developer because the control algorithms are created and tested by teams of humans.” And that is where we will be as long as machines can’t adapt to changes as well as predict what will happen next, as the human brain does. Killer robots are probably not the only place to look. Much more likely is human-robot teaming at the small-unit level: unmanned ground systems that guard bases or conduct logistics or even conduct missions such as remotely conducted, “nonlethal” crowd control; “dismounted offensive operations; and armed reconnaissance and assault operations,”8 with everything under human control at some command post until that line is crossed or some undefined accretion of capability is achieved.9
Will the Machine someday decide who lives and dies? In some ways, the technologists can’t contain themselves in seeing exponential growth and development in the future. Hence we hear not just of Complete Kill Chain Weapons but also of a future of “swarming” autonomous drones, actually operating “out of the loop,” meaning without human intervention.10 I simply wonder how different that really is from what we have today.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Warka
As for man, [his days] are numbered,
whatever he may do, it is but wind…
TABLET II, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
Gilgamesh’s Uruk, Warka in modern-day Iraq, is about 185 miles south of Baghdad. It is mostly a wreck of a place, half buried and picked over by centuries of looters, largely unknown outside the world of archeology. Yet it has the distinction of being the first, largest, and longest-lived city from the most ancient period of Mesopotamia, perhaps even the oldest city in our entire world.1
Sometime during the first half of the third millennium BCE, in the early dynastic period of Sumerian civilization, a real Gilgamesh is said to have ruled there.2 The city goes back even further, at least 2,000 years further. Within its 10-kilometer-long walls—claimed in the Epic to have been built by King Gilgamesh himself—were 500 acres where wheat was first successfully cultivated on a large scale, where the pottery wheel was developed, where time was first divided into units of sixty, where the first examples of writing were found, and where authorship was granted. This place was the ancient world until it disappeared—some say because of conquest, others because of the effects of overpopulation, others because of a change in the course of the great river and environmental challenges that followed.3
When Sumerian civilization disintegrated and Uruk perished, the Epic of Gilgamesh also disappeared. A lively oral history circulated throughout the Near East, and the story shaped countless others, but it wasn’t until 1850 that the West discovered it. Tablets and fragments recording the Epic were found in the ruins of a royal Assyrian library at Nineveh, many hundreds of miles north of ancient Uruk, near today’s Mosul.4 Since then, almost 100 different caches of all or parts of the Gilgamesh story have been found from modern-day Iran to Turkey and into Palestine. And fragments are still being recovered.
Early translations, some hastily concluded and based on sparse understanding of the Akkadian language,5 framed the story in the aesthetics and interests of the day. That mostly meant molding European Christian ideals and orthodoxy: the flood was a real event, and thus the Bible challenged the emerging theory of evolution.6 Then, if you will, the intelligence improved. The “standard version” uncovered in Nineveh, missing some 575 of its total of 3,500 lines, was supplemented by parts of other tablets, some in other languages, some even from different epochs.7 As one scholar points out, each subsequent translation and version that emerged was thus based on “steadily accumulated knowledge.”8
Like a modern military PowerPoint briefing that is constantly fiddled with and always shifting, and now also like our entire world of interactive, ever-changing, and never static data, which masquerades as our “intelligence” explaining the world, each version of the Epic reflects the input, competence, interests, and biases of its author. That’s why in academia there is a gay Gilgamesh and much dogma about everything from the origins of the gods to the rule of oppressive kings. Saddam Hussein even spoke of himself as a Gilgamesh in one of his last councils with his generals, the maniacal dictator born for and to a people who could rest assured that they had a unique history of giving birth to legends and heroes.9 To me, Gilgamesh not only symbolizes our lack of understanding of the very lands in which we fight, but is also a seminal document that suggests the moral guidelines for making war, not just some heroic motif of comradeship in performing amazing feats and the brotherhood of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and their synergy in battle. Gilgamesh symbolizes the importance of thinking through why to undertake a fight, how to fight once we are in that battle, and then what the consequences of each conquest are, even in how we celebrate our victories.
When I discovered that there was a Gilgamesh black box, I tried to find out whether the person who named it had something in mind. Was it a wry acknowledgment of the futility of the modern endeavor? I didn’t really expect to find the answer, but many of the military officers I asked, many of whom considered themselves historians and specialists on the Middle East, had never heard of the historic Gilgamesh or could only vaguely recount what the Epic was about. These Iliad-reading officers considered warfare’s roots to lie in Greek heroes and battles that took place thousands of years after Sumeria. And though they were taught as young cadets that “the challenges and complexities associated with the moral and ethical dimensions of warfare can be traced back to ancient times,” those times were never ancient enough to be associated with Uruk as an actual place.10 Not only, then, do Western militaries fight in Gilgamesh’s land largely oblivious to the stories of universal mankind, but the ways of the Data Machine ensure that as battles shift to any Everybad, the background becomes ever more irrelevant.
Intelligence collection and analysis, at least at the keyboard and monitor level, look awfully Googleized, an algorithm-and machine-determined imposition of what’s important that seems to leave us as dumb as ever. I question how the practitioners of War 2.0 know the real world in all of its complexity or can possibly be learning anything. There is too-rapid turnover in assignments to any of a half dozen war zones for any geographic experience to develop among American military officers, and there is too much diversity of language and culture for any of them to truly emerge as an expert. Mastering the workings of the Data Machine and its never-ending shifts and changes is a full-time job.11 An analyst or officer can shift from country to country, even from continent to continent, applying the same cultureless techniques. This is not even to mention that the job is targeting, not understanding. That is the essence of our unmanned world.
And as for that specific black box named Gilgamesh that sits on Predator and Reaper drones? The fact that this geolocating gizmo can reach right into cell phones and other communications devices to determine their precise location seems wholly unremarkable and transitory to the modern unlaborer. My friends in the military and intelligence worlds unanimously dismiss Gilgamesh and its ilk as the mi
litary equivalent of some digital crush and problem solver that is absolutely essential one day but accumulates in the back of the dresser drawer the next. These black boxes—so invisible—are not tangible fragments like ancient pieces of tablets and humanity, nor do they have any distinction in grasping why American war tends to unfold the way it does. Add to their unrewarded toil and mechanical dismissal the fact that technical proficiency doesn’t have the same romance as any kind of human bravery, honor, or sacrifice. In other words, the unmanned are not worthy of an Epic.
When the US military found itself digging into these very lands in August 1990, confronting Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, it was probably the last place it ever expected to be. In describing the new battlefield, there were some news stories about the cradle of civilization and even mention of Iraq’s Ur of the Chaldees as the birthplace of the biblical Abraham. The father of Judaism and the patriarch of Islam, if he existed at all, probably lived during the time of King Shulgi, maybe some 3,000 years after Gilgamesh. In modern-day southern Iraq there was still the millennia-old ziggurat of Ur, a wondrous archeological object that is unfortunately relegated to being little more than an entry in a database of objects that should be avoided; they are called no-strike targets.
Thirty-nine days of bombing in 1991 led to a complete rout of Saddam’s army. Though most still can’t believe it, modern airpower changed the human calculus: men and tanks clashing on the ground and mass slaughter were supplemented, some would even say replaced, by the technology of unstoppable remote attack. Organized war as it had been fought throughout history was finished. No one quite knew how to capture air war, it being so ahistoric and heroless. So the focus changed from battles to bombing, and the depiction became an endless stream of lifeless numbers of sorties and targets. Then the propagandists stepped in. Baghdad cried about hidden civilian casualties and collateral damage, actually scoring a hit when they unveiled an infant formula production plant that had been bombed, near a then little-known town called Abu Ghraib. Saddam Hussein even sat for his only wartime interview with Peter Arnett of CNN, and through a wordy and roundabout ninety-minute monologue, he promised “blood… lots of blood… let not fickle politicians deceive you once again by dividing the battle into air and land parts—war is war.”12
Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare Page 26