Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare

by William M. Arkin

  15. “AFSOC modified four [Reaper] aircraft and three GCSs to perform HD operations in December 2011 per JROCM 066-10. In April 2012, AFSOC modified three additional aircraft and one GCS to support HD operations. The first phase implements target location accuracy (TLA), which will support enhanced data exploitation tools, including real-time display of target coordinates, digital data archiving, digital video recorder playback capability, and image mosaicking. The first phase also integrates the Raytheon Community Sensor Model (CSM), which separates ‘key length value’ metadata for LOS/BLOS links, integrates CSM in the GCS, and provides ‘near-frame synchronous’ metadata. The final fielded TLA (-3) MTS-B turret will enable ‘frame synchronous’ metadata and 720p HD IR.” U.S. Air Force (USAF) Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Vector—Vision and Enabling Concepts: 2013–2038, February 2014, pp. 83–84.

  16. PowerPoint Briefing, “Disruptive Technologies; Innovation or Disruption? The Impact of Changing Technology upon ISR Capabilities”; Jim Martin, Director ISR Programs, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, October 11, 2010.

  17. PowerPoint Briefing, RRTO sponsored BAA on Persistent Surveillance Exploitation Technologies, Seeking new strategies and methodologies to leverage wide area EO and GMTI data, n.d. (2008).

  18. Stew Magnuson, “Military ‘Swimming in Sensors and Drowning in Data,’” National Defense, January 2010.

  19. PowerPoint Briefing, “Disruptive Technologies; Innovation or Disruption? The Impact of Changing Technology upon ISR Capabilities”; Jim Martin, Director ISR Programs, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, October 11, 2010.

  20. This contract was competitively procured via a broad agency announcement by the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Lakehurst, New Jersey (N68335-10-C-0064).

  21. Rand Corporation (Lance Menthe, Amado Cordova, Carl Rhodes, Rachel Costello, Jeffrey Sullivan), The Future of Air Force Motion Imagery Exploitation: Lessons from the Commercial World, 2012, p. 3.

  The pod design employs 368 visible band CCD imaging sensors, each with 5 megapixel resolution, grouped into four camera systems, to provide an aggregate ability to simultaneously image up to 1.8 Gigapixels. The CCD imaging chips are of a type used in mobile phone cameras, with a frame update rate of 12–15 frames per second, about half the frame rate required at broadcast quality. The ARGUS-IS internal data processing system with 28 parallel processors is claimed to be able to handle 400 Gigabits/sec of data. The prototype pod was carried on a YEH-60B Blackhawk helicopter, but is intended for drone employment. The demonstrator employs a 274 mbps downlink to transmit imagery to a ground station, a compressed and fractured data rate well below that of the sensor package.

  22. PowerPoint Briefing, “Disruptive Technologies; Innovation or Disruption? The Impact of Changing Technology upon ISR Capabilities”; Jim Martin, Director ISR Programs, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, October 11, 2010.

  23. From 2001 to 2003, U.S. manned and unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flight hours of all kinds (not including satellites) increased more than 5,000 percent. But even that number is misleading, for small drones of Raven size and below are not even being counted; intelligence sources say that at any one moment worldwide, it is estimated that close to 1,000 drones are in the air. And even this number is misleading, for every day, the drones and manned aircraft join with satellites and ground systems and computer-network-based systems, all collecting massive volumes of raw information, from voice transmissions to e-mails and texts to data movements to electrooptical, infrared, synthetic aperture radar, full-motion video, and spectral information.

  24. US Congress, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Performance Audit of Department of Defense Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, April 2012, p. 27.

  About 90 percent of the total number of hours was flown in direct support of combat operations. Less than 10 percent was flown inside the United States.

  25. www.theskywardblog.com/2012/08/auvsi-blog/.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Command Post of the Future

  1. Thom Shanker and Carlotta Gall, “U.S. Attack on Warlord Aims to Help Interim Leader,” New York Times, May 9, 2002; BBC, CIA “tried to kill Afghan warlord,” Friday, 10 May 2002, 03:26 GMT 04:26 UK; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1978619.stm; Airpower Against Terror, p. 202; John Yoo, War by Other Means, p. 49.

  2. Matthew Rosenberg, “Memo from Afghanistan: A Group Taking Politics and Military Strategy to the Same Extremes,” New York Times, May 21, 2013; www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/world/asia/in-afghanistan-hezb-i-islami-takes-its-extremism-into-politics.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed August 15, 2013); Lisa Lundquist, “Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin suicide bomber in Kabul kills 6 Americans, 9 Afghans,” Long War Journal, May 16, 2013; www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2013/05/this_morning_in_kabu.php#ixzz2c2qQInsM (accessed August 15, 2013); Scott Baldauf, “In crucial step toward democracy, Afghans vote for lawmakers: Violence before Sunday’s election left seven candidates and six poll workers dead,” Christian Science Monitor, September 19, 2005.

  3. MetaVR News, “26.A, MetaVR’s New 3D Afghanistan Terrain,” Volume XIII, Issue 1, April 29, 2009; “Virtual Afghanistan Village; www.metavr.com/technology/afghan_village.html (accessed August 15, 2013).

  The overall imagery resolution of the virtual terrain of the whole country is 2.5 meters. The terrain, built with MetaVR’s Terrain Tools for ESRI ArcGIS, includes an area of 1,120 sq km of 60 cm Digital Globe commercial satellite source imagery and 90 meter elevation posts. Within this area is the highly detailed 2 sq km terrain of the 3D “geospecific Afghan village,” Khairabad. All 3-D content was created in Autodesk 3ds Max, and is referenced by the terrain’s cultural feature file at run time; the content is rendered by VRSG at run time as part of the terrain.

  4. My Share of the Task, p. 144.

  5. On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003–January 2005, pp. 114, 193, 195.

  6. Matt J. Martin with Charles W. Sasser, Predator, p. 188.

  7. Anthony Tata, “IEDs: Combating Roadside Bombs,” Washington Post, October 2, 2007.

  8. The SIGACT report is the cornerstone of event reporting in CIDNE. This report is the method by which event information is transmitted through the chain of command and eventually made visible to all users. The SIGACT report can be completed at any echelon and submitted through a user-defined validation chain for publication. The SIGACT report contains the information regarding any event that happens to a unit. Only six fields are required to be entered before submitting a SIGACT report; however, the report can collect well over 100 data points on any given event. Completing as many fields as possible provides a clearer picture of the event to the data consumer.

  9. Andrew G. Schlessinger, Advanced analysis techniques: the key to focused ISR, Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin (US Army), July 2010.

  10. Long Hard Road: NCO Experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, US Army Sergeants Major Academy, October 2007, p. 161.

  11. Duty, pp. 199, 205–209.

  12. Network-centric warfare and the concept of everything being a network originated in electronic warfare and nodal targeting at the start of the computer age, when the exponential impact of network-level modes of attack over physical attack was first recognized. Attacking the network became the priority. And that meant targeting, spying, and killing. See Colonel Joseph Yavorsky and Mike Hamilton, “Unit of action NETWORK MAPEX: Testing the network in a virtual warfight,” Army Communicator (US Army), Summer 2003.

  13. William H. McMichael, “Head of Anti-IED Agency Says It’s Been Effective: Now takes more bombs to get same level of casualties,” Army Times, May 21, 2007, p. 24; “U.S. Forces Clearing Half of All Combat Area IEDs Before Detonation,” Inside the Pentagon, March 22, 2007, p. 5.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Oh. Obama Was Elected.

  1. Timothy M. McGrew, Army Aviation Addressing Battlefield Anomalies in Real Time with the Teaming and Collaboratio
n of Manned and Unmanned Aircraft, Naval Postgraduate School, December 2009, p. 16.

  2. Information on Viper Strike is taken from PowerPoint Briefing, Northrop Grumman, Rick Schultz, Aircraft w/Viper Strike—Transformational Weapon System for Today’s Operational Environment, October 13, 2004; PowerPoint Briefing, Small Guided Munitions Program Office, Small Guided Munitions Path Ahead, March 11, 2009; Army PowerPoint Briefing, Steve Borden, DPM [Deputy Program Manager] Submunitions, Viper Strike, April 2006; Shelby G. Spires, Huntsville [Alabama] Times, “Cold War-Era Weapon Is Hot Again; Viper Strike concept uses BAT on an unmanned aerial vehicle,” June 23, 2004.

  A test Hunter dropped four Brilliant Anti-Tank (BAT) submunitions at WSMR, New Mexico, in October 2002 and achieved four hits in four attempts. It then dropped laser-guided Viper Strike munitions in March/July 2003, the Hunter drone self-lazing the target. On March 8, 2004, the army G3 (Operations Deputy) signed an Operational Needs Statement (ONS) for weaponized Hunter to be used in Iraq.

  The Congressional Research Service wrote in 2005: “It was widely reported in 2002 and 2003 that the army had already deployed two weaponized Hunter UAVs, but recent press reports quote Army spokesmen denying this, and saying that classification issues prohibited any further elaboration.” CRS, Report for Congress, Military Aviation: Issues and Options for Combating Terrorism and Counterinsurgency, January 24, 2005.

  3. Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 President’s Budget Submission, Navy, Justification Book Volume 1, Weapons Procurement, Navy, January 24, 2012.

  4. Dan O’Boyle, “Stealthy glide weapon strikes like viper: Viper Strike sub-munition augments Army’s arsenal,” Redstone Rocket (Redstone Arsenal, Alabama), April 9, 2008.

  5. DOD, Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap 2013–2018, p. 73.

  6. Briefing, Colonel Larry L. Felder, Commander, UAVB; Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Battlelab, January 5, 2005 (FOUO); obtained by the author.

  7. Arming the Fleet, p. 98; DOD, Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap 2013–2018, pp. 73–74.

  8. Arming the Fleet, p. 98.

  9. DOD, Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap 2013–2018, p. 74.

  10. Arming the Fleet, p. 67.

  11. APKWS Is a Hit, Precision Strike Digest, 1st Quarter, 2013.

  12. U.S. Air Force (USAF) Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Vector—Vision and Enabling Concepts: 2013–2038.

  13. DOD, Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap 2013–2018, pp. 74–75.

  14. Army Acquisition Support Center, “Direct fire munition increases lethality, reduces collateral damage,” January 2, 2013; http://asc.army.mil/web/access-st-direct-fire-munition-increases-lethality-reduces-collateral-damage/ (accessed July 13, 2014); Paul McLeary, “U.S. Army Wants More Switchblades: Remote-Control Munitions Are Small, Lethal,” Defense News, February 12, 2013.

  15. Staff Sergeant Christopher Flurry, “KC-130J Harvest Hawk: Marine Corps teaches old plane new tricks in Afghanistan,” Marine Corps News, April 1, 2011; www.cherrypoint.marines.mil/News/NewsArticleDisplay/tabid/4890/Article/66147/kc-130j-harvest-hawk-marine-corps-teaches-old-plane-new-tricks-in-afghanistan.aspx (accessed July 13, 2014).

  The Harvest Hawk system, fitted on existing KC-130J aircraft, includes a version of the target sight sensor used on the AH-1Z Cobra attack helicopter (the AN/AIQ-30 Targeting Sight System), as well as a complement of four AGM-114 Hellfire, 10 Griffin, or Viper Strike munitions. The “mission kit”—the black box—reconfigures any KC-130J aircraft rapidly into a platform capable of performing persistent targeting ISR. See USMC, Deputy Commandant for Aviation, FY2011 Marine Aviation Plan, p. 3-3; Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 President’s Budget Submission, Navy, Justification Book Volume 1, Weapons Procurement, Navy, January 24, 2012.

  16. Since 9/11, only about 1,700 Hellfire missiles had been expended and only two dozen Viper Strikes were fired in combat.

  “More than 100 of the APKWS rockets have been fired in action in Afghanistan since the Marines first deployed the weapon in March 2012. None of the APKWS rockets fired has missed its target due to failure after launch”; APKWS Is a Hit, Precision Strike Digest, 1st Quarter, 2013.

  17. Company Man, p. 280.

  18. “Obama’s advisers were fascinated by the CIA’s targeted killing program and the ruthlessly effective use of drones. At a second meeting… they peppered these hosts with questions: How Many al Qaeda leaders have been neutralized? What was the civilian death toll? They were awed by the precision and lethality of the strikes…. John Rizzo, a longtime CIA lawyer known for his bespoke tailoring and sardonic wit, came away from the meeting thinking Obama would keep the program, and might even step it up. ‘I guess they’re not a bunch of left-wing pussies after all,’ he thought to himself.” See Kill or Capture, p. 32.

  19. Under President Bush, the CIA carried out two targeted killing drone strikes in Pakistan in 2006 and three in 2007. In July 2008, Bush increased the number of drone strikes, totaling thirty-four attacks by the end of the year.

  20. General Atomics, Air Force MQ-1 Predators Achieve 500,000 Flight Hours; GA-ASI Predator A Deliveries to USAF Nears 200, 3 March 2009.

  21. The Raytheon-built ARTEMIS—the Advanced Responsive Tactically Effective Military Imaging Spectrometer—was launched by the air force in May 2009 aboard the TacSat-3 satellite built by ATK. ARTEMIS performed well enough that in June 2010, STRATCOM declared the sensor operational, clearing the way for analysts to feed processed intelligence products to forces in Afghanistan. Ben Iannotta, “Afghan war brings call for new Predator sensor,” Defense News, July 1, 2011; Amy Butler, “USAF Turns to Hyperspectral Sensors in Afghanistan: New sensors provide new edge in finding explosives in Afghanistan,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, September 19, 2011.

  22. Ben Iannotta, “Afghan war brings call for new Predator sensor,” Defense News, July 1, 2011; Henry Canaday, “Seeing More with Hyperspectral Imaging,” Geospatial Intelligence Forum (GIF) 11.2, p. 21.

  23. Air Force PowerPoint Briefing, USAF FMV Needs, Initiatives, & Requirements; Robert T. “Bo” Marlin, DISL Deputy Director, ISR Capabilities (AF/A2C), May 22, 2013, U/FOUO; obtained by the author.

  In September 2010, the air force and Raytheon completed flight testing of ACES HY on a manned Twin Otter aircraft used as a surrogate for Predator. Raytheon received its initial production contract for ACES HY in 2011.

  24. Amy Butler, “USAF Turns to Hyperspectral Sensors in Afghanistan: New sensors provide new edge in finding explosives in Afghanistan,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, September 19, 2011.

  25. Amy Butler, “USAF Turns to Hyperspectral Sensors in Afghanistan: New sensors provide new edge in finding explosives in Afghanistan,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, September 19, 2011.

  26. GATR Demonstrates world’s only inflatable, 2.4m satellite solution at Trident Spectre, Norfolk, Virginia, May 11, 2009.

  27. Office of Secretary of Defense, Exhibit R-2, RDT&E Budget Item Justification: PB 2013 Office of Secretary of Defense, PE 0603618D8Z: Joint Electronic Advanced Technology, February 2012. See also Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 President’s Budget Submission, Office of Secretary of Defense, Justification Book Volume 3 of 3, Research, Development, Test & Evaluation, Defense-Wide, PE 0603618D8Z: Joint Electronic Advanced Technology, April 2013.

  28. Rebecca Grant, “Iraqi Freedom and the air force,” Air Force Magazine, March 2013.

  29. Air Force PowerPoint Briefing, Air Force ISR Reach Back: Distributed Common Ground Systems; Colonel Mike Shortsleeve, Commander, 497th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group (DGS-1), n.d. (2013); obtained by the author.

  30. Air Force PowerPoint Briefing, Air Force Acquisition Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities, AFCEA Luncheon, February 12, 2012; obtained by the author.

  31. Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife, pp. 103–109. “The first strike in the FATA took place in South Waziristan on 18 June 2004, with the full support of President Musharaff’s government, when Nek Muhammad, a Taliban commander knowingly misrepresented by the US as an ‘al Qaeda fac
ilitator’ was killed along with four of his companions. He was marked by Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence Agency as an enemy of the state, and his death was the price the CIA agreed to pay Islamabad for its tacit consent to ‘covert’ drone strikes in the FATA.”

  32. Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), pp. 4–5.

  33. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, pp. 208–209.

  34. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, p. 281.

  35. Remarks by the president at the United States Military Academy Commencement Ceremony, US Military Academy-West Point; West Point, New York; May 28, 2014.

  CHAPTER TWENTY Pattern of Life

  1. Raven Parts Seller on eBay Pleads Guilty, UAV Vision (Blog), posted on July 29, 2011, by The Editor; www.uasvision.com/2011/07/29/raven-parts-seller-on-ebay-pleads-guilty/#more-5836; Spencer Ackerman, What Not to Sell on eBay: Drones, Wired, 03.29.11 [March 29, 2011]; www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/what-not-to-sell-on-ebay-drones/; eBay Raven Seller Faces 20 Years Jail, UAV Vision (Blog), posted on April 4, 2011, by The Editor; www.uasvision.com/2011/04/04/ebay-raven-seller-faces-20-years-jail/#more-2400.

  2. See, e.g., Matt J. Martin with Charles W. Sasser, Predator, pp. 22ff.

  3. U.S. Air Force (USAF) Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Vector—Vision and Enabling Concepts: 2013–2038, p. 39.

  4. U.S. Air Force (USAF) Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Vector—Vision and Enabling Concepts: 2013–2038, pp. iii–iv.

  5. U.S. Air Force (USAF) Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Vector—Vision and Enabling Concepts: 2013–2038, p. 13.

  6. ISR Leader Q&A: Ensuring Warfighters Have the Intelligence Support They Require, Lieutenant General John C. Koziol, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Joint and Coalition Warfighter Support; Director, DoD ISR Task Force, Geospatial Intelligence Forum (GIF 8.6), September 2010, p. 21.