Immediately, the Predator banked to the right. On the computer monitor, the little blue icon for Gordon rotated until it paralleled the road. At that magnification, the aircraft looked as if it was on top of the road.
My mind wandered to the diagram I had drawn of the moving shot. So far, the crew was following it perfectly. The Predator flew parallel to the trucks to make it easier for the sensor to keep the laser on target. The sensor’s cross hairs pulled off the target after the rollout but quickly adjusted and placed the cross hairs about twenty yards in front of al-Awlaki’s truck. The vehicles didn’t swerve or even change speed. Al-Awlaki continued down the road as if unaware of the threat.
In my head, I started checking off my mental checklist as if I was flying. I knew the short two-second burn of the Hellfire engine accelerated the missile to nearly 1.4 Mach, creating a sonic boom. This intense acceleration subjected the missile to ten times the force of gravity. When the missile’s sensor detected enough g-forces, the warhead armed. The infrared eye opened and then looked for the laser spot.
I knew the missile used its fins to keep the reflected laser energy in its field of view. It constantly tweaked its course to keep the spot centered on the seeker head’s glass.
“Ten seconds,” the pilot said.
The Predator floated alongside al-Awlaki’s truck. Had he looked up, it would have been entirely possible that he would have seen the aircraft as the pilot eased a little rudder to pull the nose away from the target. Distance at this point determined stability for the sensor. Too close and the cross hairs would wobble. A couple of miles out, the angle down wouldn’t be so steep and the cross hairs would remain stable.
At five seconds, the missile slowed below the speed of sound, causing a second sonic boom. The shock wave coursed in all directions, loudest in the direction of the missile’s travel. The boom washed over the two trucks. These were not large booms and would have been hard to hear if the radio was on or the window was open causing the wind to howl into the cab. The trucks sped forward.
“Five, four, three . . .”
The sensor relaxed his grip a mite. The cross hairs drifted toward the lead vehicle. The pilot paused to let the sensor focus on his cross hairs. A black streak entered the picture from above, raced downward, and slammed into the hood of the truck. It hit right where the sensor had placed the cross hairs.
Smoke mushroomed out of the hood and debris shot out of the engine in all directions. The truck skidded awkwardly, spun sideways, and rolled to a stop. The truck containing the security team frantically hit the brakes and swerved to miss the first vehicle. Bong was trailing behind. He rolled in, cleared by the Task Force JTAC, and put a missile into the hood of the second truck.
Months of tracking ended in a matter of seconds. There was little reaction in the operations center. No cheers. No high fives. The Task Force was too professional for that. Frog and I shook hands. He was smiling. We were one team. We’d earned a victory, evident by the trucks smoldering in the monitor.
Two of the Predators started the journey back to Djibouti. The third lingered for a while watching for survivors. There was no ground team to verify the kill. We had to wait for other sources. He would be missed at his next meeting and someone would think to send out a team to find him.
Verification that al-Awlaki had died came within hours.
Abdullah al-Jumaili, a tribal sheik from Al Jawf Province, later told the New York Times the truck was nearly destroyed and it was hard to recognize bodies. He was “100 percent sure” al-Awlaki was killed. We also saw message traffic from the enemy about his death almost as fast as CNN announced the air strike.
“The death of Awlaki is a major blow to al Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate,” President Obama said a few days later.
I walked back to my compound and stepped onto the T-barriers to watch the first aircraft, Bong, approach. Colonel Jay Bickley, my group commander, was touring the base and joined me.
“We had a mission success today,” I told him.
I watched the transmitter tower as it panned the sky. It maintained a position where it could best transmit to the airplane as it rotated around to point at final approach.
“Here it comes, sir,” I said.
“Where is it?”
In the distance, a speck emerged from the late afternoon haze. At first, it was a dot. Then wings sprouted. Only inside a mile did we recognize it as a Predator.
We could hear nothing.
The little plane glided toward the runway, flared, and touched down with two little white puffs of rubber smoke. The bird, devoid of missiles, rolled past us en route to the taxiway that would take it to parking.
“That’s it?” Bickley asked.
“It’s more exciting in the cockpit.”
We walked to the GCS to recover the last bird. I took the seat and Bickley sat behind me on an office chair. The Gulf of Aden slipped below us. We clipped the north shoreline of Djibouti and entered the Gulf of Tadjoura. My flight path took me around to the west of Djibouti City, where I would land pointed at the sea.
The sun was setting over Ethiopia. The large orange ball sank low to the horizon, making the shadows long. I had wanted to see a famous African sunset for my entire year in theater. So far, I had not been treated, as most of our sunsets had been shrouded by distant thunderstorms or haze. Today, we watched from the Predator’s cameras.
The Predator, nicknamed “’57 Chevy,” touched down as gracefully as it could and rolled down the runway, slowing to taxi speed. I marveled, as I always did, at the empty rails of the aircraft. We flew so often with weapons that we often forgot how the aircraft looked unarmed. I knew the maintainers wouldn’t miss the empty rails as the Predator taxied from the runway to the ramp. In combat, empty rails meant we had done more than just watch our prey grow old. We were no longer vultures.
We were birds of prey.
EPILOGUE
The October sun still baked the flight line in Djibouti. The heat had broken and the temperatures slowly dropped to the low hundreds. The strong summer blast from the west had diminished to the doldrums as the prevailing winds started their shift to the east.
We gathered in the shade of a hangar. My operators, maintainers, and security forces assembled under the wing of an MQ-9 to meet the JOC commander. The JOC wanted to thank the troops and to offer them feedback. This was a first for us.
Predator squadrons never got feedback from the units we supported. We only got complaints. Nobody liked failure, no matter how trivial. In our world, the lack of feedback always meant we were doing our jobs.
I approved the meeting more out of curiosity than anything else.
I stood to the side while the commander talked. He spoke about the mission and its impact. He congratulated the team on their hard work and the success it garnered. And I tuned out all of it.
Instead, I marveled at the airmen arrayed around the JOC. They were a mix of airmen from numerous backgrounds and specialties. They didn’t clump into groups, but integrated themselves like equals. After nearly a year, they had become a seamless team, a family. They had suffered together through physical, mental, and spiritual deprivation. They had stood together and carried those who felt the effects of isolation from their friends and families.
The 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron was not a unit I had ever expected to see, let alone command. Nor did I ever anticipate that the aircraft they flew would revolutionize modern warfare and intelligence gathering.
Times had changed significantly since I had joined the program.
Following the Facilitator shot, I had an epiphany while drinking that martini on my buddy’s balcony. It occurred to me that the Air Force had just entered a great transformation as significant as that seen following World War I.
In 1916, artillery was the only way to hit your enemy from long range. The aircraft was a new inventi
on flown by the aristocracy in combat as a novelty. Initial missions were essentially reconnaissance only. Pilots waved like gentlemen as they passed each other over the trenches. Then the war bogged down and the slaughter mounted. Someone threw a wrench in frustration. Then someone fired a pistol. Then someone mounted a machine gun. The ensuing arms race heated up the skies of Europe. By 1918, the aircraft had superseded artillery as the principal long-range threat, leaving behind its surveillance-only mission set.
World War II brought with it greater destruction and loss of life. General Henry Arnold and the US Army Air Corps (or USAAC) looked for alternatives to the increasing casualty rates incurred through their precision daylight bombing campaigns. Project Aphrodite experimented with remotely controlled aviation. Its major project became a radio-guided B-17 to be flown kamikaze style into difficult targets. The USAAC intended to hit the sub pens at Lorient, which had proven impervious to aerial bombardment. The war ended before the technology could be used in combat.
It would take nearly fifty years until research truly delved into RPA technology.
In the 1990s, the first-generation Predators flew in Kosovo and Southwest Asia, providing limited imagery to an unappreciative, and at times hostile, community. Predators were a novelty, much like aircraft were in 1916.
The years following September 11 saw a nearly exact replication of World War I. The new Predator with advanced avionics and its AGM-114 Hellfire missile deployed. Droopy’s shot fired in defense of friendly forces ushered in a new era of weapons development reminiscent of biplanes evolving from surveillance to full-scale fighters.
RPAs of all kinds, from the small hand-tossed Ravens to the gargantuan Global Hawks, appeared. Some only looked over hills to detect possible ambushes; others collected strategic intelligence by flying high above their targets. Each year of the war, manufacturers introduce dozens of new platforms in an effort to meet the ever-increasing demand for intelligence.
Now remotely piloted aircraft dominate the theaters and the news.
The Air Force no longer calls them drones. The very word invokes fear and misunderstanding. Lack of information about how the aircraft operate has led vivid imaginations to envision James Cameron’s Terminator rampaging around the countryside, killing anything that moves.
The technology controlling the Predator and Reaper is anything but robotic or autonomous. Real pilots control these aircraft. They follow the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulations when in the United States and comply with the International Civil Aviation Organization’s rules when operating overseas. In Djibouti, not only did we prove that we could operate safely in a high-traffic area with both civil and military aircraft, but we also helped develop the airspace plans to make it a routine occurrence.
The incident with the Air France Airbus spurred me to approach the State Department and request permission to directly engage the Djiboutian government. I proposed special procedures to help de-conflict our aircraft. I also invited them into our compound to see us fly from the cockpit. The incident was both eye-opening and wildly successful for us. The Djiboutian air traffic controllers had a ball waving at themselves from the ground and watching their images on the cockpit HUDs.
If anything, they learned that we flew like real pilots. Push stick forward, cows get big. Pull stick back, cows get small. We had complete control, just like any other aircraft in the world. The only difference between the Predator and a manned aircraft was that our cockpit was not physically connected to the aircraft. Despite that, we were just as capable as any professional aviator out there.
We did lose four aircraft during my year in country. Some losses were preventable; some were not. One was a new experience for the whole community. I would later learn from sources at Air Combat Command and Air Force Special Operations Command that the results of all four safety investigations had been thrown out. Both ACC and AFSOC determined the investigations had tainted conclusions.
The only parts of the reports to survive the purge were the recommendations for improvement. These recommendations would serve only to make the community stronger and safer in the increasingly congested airspaces around the world.
And flying safer was our goal.
In 2011, the Air Force flew more than five hundred thousand hours in combat with the Predator alone. In comparison, all the fighters and bombers in the Air Force flew approximately forty-eight thousand hours worldwide, not just in combat. Despite that heavy load, Predators lose an average of only thirteen aircraft a year. That number remained stable, or dropped, while our hours flown expanded exponentially over the decade. We became safer as we flew over the years, eventually achieving the status of having the lowest accident rate in the Air Force. Our crashes, like those of airliners, make good headlines, though that is rarely the whole story.
But the RPA’s main moral issue is its use to kill.
Amnesty International and other organizations cry foul when an RPA kills an al Qaeda operative or helps ground forces do the same. They never complained when F-117s dropped bombs on the Baath Party headquarters in an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein on the first night of Operation Iraqi Freedom. They didn’t complain when an F-16 dropped a bomb on al-Zarqawi, even though a Predator had followed the same legal procedures the day prior. Each strike involves a pilot pulling a trigger in full compliance with the Law of Armed Conflict.
We never flew autonomously.
The Predator is a remotely piloted aircraft, with a human in the link at all times. Nothing can occur without a human first commanding it. The plane cannot shoot without a pilot pulling the trigger. A kill cannot be made without the pilot’s first complying with a lengthy string of rules before a strike clearance is issued.
I wrote this book in part to tell the incredible story of the Predator’s surge to prominence as a valuable tool to combat terrorism. I never intended this book to decide or define the legal and moral arguments the lawmakers and philosophers must decide. I wrote it to showcase the manner in which the Predator revolutionized warfare.
The al-Awlaki mission marked a noticeable shift in American military operations. Osama bin Laden had been killed only five months before, using scores of SEALs, helicopter pilots, and a few other assets. Tracking had taken nearly two decades, with little to show for it other than frustration, significant loss of treasure, and a string of terror attacks that propelled the United States into an ugly war. Mission failure would have been a national nightmare, with dead or captured men paraded on foreign televisions.
We saw that in the failed hostage rescue in Iran.
RPAs revolutionized the hunt for terrorists by removing risk to the human element. There were no choppers to be shot down, no men to be wounded or killed. The capabilities RPAs brought to the fight both augmented and superseded human limitations in a way that allowed us to find al-Awlaki more quickly without committing the whole of America’s conventional and special forces to the task. More important, this evolution in warfare gave us the hope that we might live in a world without another UBL holding the world hostage for years.
In the eight years of flying the Predator covered in this book, I’ve seen our combat air patrols increase more than twentyfold to fight terror worldwide. In the year we hunted al-Awlaki, the 60th flew more than nine hundred missions, encompassing more than seventeen thousand hours of combat. In that time, we explored new missions including sea interdiction and antipiracy. We also fulfilled the president’s priority mission.
When I think of iconic images of past wars, I think of the trenches in World War I, the P-51 and B-17 in World War II, Huey helicopters and napalm in Vietnam, and the M1A1 Abrams tank and A-10 in the Gulf War. The MQ-1 has become an icon, along with the SEALs, of the global war on terror that will characterize this past decade.
The young men and women standing on the tarmac listening to the JOC commander were the ones to do it. Their actions have changed the face of war forever. They remain a
nonymous by choice. They fiercely defend one another, their communities, and the nation while watching over our heroes on the ground. They ask for no reward beyond the simple acknowledgment of their contributions to our overall war effort.
I marveled at how farsighted General Arnold really was when he said, “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all. . . . It will be different from anything the world has ever seen.”
A T-37 over Virginia at sunset.
Photograph courtesy of Lt. Col. T. Mark McCurley
T-37s in formation over Mississippi.
Photograph courtesy of Lt. Col. T. Mark McCurley
A flying selfie.
Photograph courtesy of Lt. Col. T. Mark McCurley
An Air Force crew prepares to launch a Predator.
U.S. Air Force photograph by Tech. Sgt. Kevin J. Gruenwald
An MQ-1 Predator at Kandahar Air Base, Afghanistan, taxis out for a mission in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
U.S. Air Force photograph by Maj. David Kurle
An MQ-1 Predator basks in a desert sunset at Balad Air Base, Iraq, ready for nighttime operations.
U.S. Air Force photograph by Master Sgt. Jonathan Doti
A fully armed MQ-9 Reaper taxis down an Afghanistan runway.
U.S. Air Force photograph by Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson
Airmen preflight an MQ-1 Predator at Ali Air Base, Iraq.
U.S. Air Force photograph by Airman 1st Class Jonathan Snyder
An MQ-1 Predator takes off from Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, for a training mission.
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