Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  In its early years Palantir worked exclusively for the CIA, which had initially funded it through its In-Q-Tel start-up arm. Basically, the system categorizes information in an easily readable form, making use of whatever disparate databases the user can access and wants to use. So, for example, it could display a list of cities in Libya ranked according to the number of suicide bombers they have produced or in graphic form to show maps of where the most productive cities are. An army officer in Afghanistan sent me a Palantir-generated color-coded display, showing which senior officers in the Afghan unit he was advising had good relations with senior officials in the Kabul government and which did not. Bolstered by intelligence agency accolades for its undisclosed feats in tracking al-Qaeda terrorists, Palantir has expanded its market to Special Forces, law enforcement, and JP Morgan, where it detects mortgage fraud (by outsiders). I queried a marine friend serving in an isolated Afghan outpost about its alleged ability, as one enthusiastic congressman put it, to “detect IEDs.” He responded that it is indeed a “great system … since the enemy in this part of the world is habitual, you can ‘predict’ where possible and likely IEDs will be, based on historical trends.”

  This is clearly an eminently useful function, as long as enemy habits don’t suddenly change and as long as the hard data, in this case records of previous IED attacks, have been correctly entered. There is no reason to suppose this would not be the case; bombs, especially when they kill and maim, are easy to define and record. But even at the simplest level, the automation optimistically foreseen by Deptula and others represents a more ambitious goal: a system that will “extract insight from information” (as the Palantir website neatly defines analysis) from sensors in real time, painlessly delivering prepackaged analyses to “customers” for further action as desired.

  Ruminations on the problems of managing enormous quantities of surveillance data and the exciting possibilities for analyzing it automatically are a frequent topic on those occasions when inmates of the military-intelligence-industrial complex meet and confer, such as at the annual GeoInt convention in Florida (dubbed by insiders “the intelligence community’s spring break”). Less attention is paid to more mundane matters, such as the shortcomings of existing systems for reasons of technical unfeasibility, incompetence, or greed. The MQ9 Reaper drone, for example, General Atomics’ successor to the Predator, was introduced into service in 2005 and is now the backbone of the drone fleet. “They developed and fielded it in a hurry,” an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense explained to me. “Jumper [the air force chief of staff who promoted Predator] was retiring. He was an enthusiast for UAVs, but they knew Moseley, the incoming chief, was not so keen, so they pushed it on Jumper’s watch.” Larger and heavier than the Predator and capable of carrying more weapons (including 500-pound bombs), Reaper is extremely expensive to buy (more than $30 million a copy) and maintain ($5 million per year), much greater than older manned combat planes such as the F-16 and A-10. Though advertised as capable of patrolling for up to 30 hours, it manages less than half that when carrying its limited load of armaments, and it crashes at least twice as often as F-15 and F-16 manned fighters.

  Nor should it be assumed that the Reaper is better equipped than Predator to survey the ground beneath and thus avoid confusing women and children with “military-aged males,” a problem known in the video-surveillance world as “slants.” In fact, it carries essentially the same sensors as the Predator that killed a marine, staff sergeant Jeremy Smith, and a navy corpsman, [medic] Benjamin Rast, in Upper Sangin, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on April 6, 2011, because it could not distinguish their distinctive helmeted and armored profiles from turbaned Taliban. The engagement was monitored by a DCGS substation in Terre Haute, Indiana, manned by the Indiana Air National Guard, where an “imagery supervisor” concluded that the two men in the process of being targeted by the Predator appeared to be shooting away from fellow marines, indicating they were friendlies. He communicated this to the “tactical communicator,” who passed the information on to the Predator base in Nevada, but the message was received by two mission intelligence coordinators who somehow failed to communicate this important news to the Predator pilot and sensor operator sitting a few feet away. They were looking at exactly the same video but were convinced that the muzzle flashes indicated the men were shooting toward the marines, hardly a testament to the much-touted resolution of drone videos. Furthermore, as the pilot subsequently told investigators, he thought the targeted men were enemy partly because, on infrared, their images tended to be “much hotter than friendly forces.” The subsequent investigation concluded that no one was to blame. Nor did anyone seriously question the baroque complexity of these arrangements, with “imagery supervisors” trying (via a “tactical communicator”) to get a vital message to “mission intelligence coordinators” (one of them a trainee) so that they could tell a “pilot” that he was misreading a murky image of a confused firefight eight thousand miles away or suggest that perhaps a live pilot in a plane overhead in direct communication with the ground force might have done a better job.

  Unsurprisingly, the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the increasingly potent drone lobby (“Advancing the unmanned systems and robotics community through education, advocacy and leadership,” according to its mission statement) does not like to dwell on such mishaps. Now boasting 7,500 members and a board of directors well larded with defense aerospace industry stalwarts, the group lobbies for all things drone, especially their freedom to share the skies of America with traditional civilian air traffic. Among other successes, the group, by its own account, literally wrote a 2011 law mandating the Federal Aviation Authority to allow this. For the industry, law enforcement is a promising market, and so Congress obligingly appropriated money to the U.S. Border Patrol to buy six Reapers. Reviewing their operation, the Government Accountability Office found that as of 2011 these Reapers had enabled the capture of 5,103 undocumented aliens and drug smugglers at a cost of $7,054 per captive. However, some subversive border control official had arranged to rent a Cessna light aircraft that did not require a huge support team (171 people for a Reaper patrol) and equipped it with a simple infrared sensor. Performing the same duties as the Reapers, the Cessna operation yielded at least 6,500 captives at a cost of only $230 per person, 3 percent of the Reaper tally. Needless to say, the experiment was not repeated, and Congress soon appropriated more Reapers to guard the frontier.

  Fortunately, as of 2014 the Border Patrol had not been required to buy and operate the most expensive drone of them all. “Northrop took billions and billions of dollars off us, and gave us a piece of junk,” said a high-ranking Pentagon weapons acquisition official as we breakfasted at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Pentagon City (the social ground zero of the military-industrial complex). Our topic was Global Hawk, manufactured by the Northrop Grumman Corporation, the largest drone ever developed, lauded for its reach and endurance, touted as a giant step toward total situational awareness. A best-selling 2009 book on drones enthusiastically summarized its salient attributes, including the ability to “stay in the air up to 32 hours. Powered by a turbofan engine that can take it up to 65,000 feet, the stealthy Global Hawk carries synthetic aperture radar, infrared sensors, and electro-optical cameras.… Global Hawk can fly from San Francisco, spend a day hunting for terrorists in the entire state of Maine, and then fly back to the West Coast.”

  At the time of our breakfast, the $26 billion Northrop Corporation had plastered billboards situated at strategic locations, such as the Pentagon Metro station, with advertisements extolling its prowess, while Raytheon, the $30 billion defense electronics corporation responsible for its radars and other sensors, unreservedly claimed: “Day or night, on land or at sea and in all weather conditions, Raytheon’s Enhanced Integrated Sensor Suite (EISS) on the Global Hawk air vehicle pinpoints stationary or moving targets with unparalleled accuracy. It transmits imagery and position information from 60,000 feet with
near real-time speed and dramatic clarity—empowering warfighters to respond quickly and decisively.” The fact that the cost, including research and development, had risen from an original target of $10 million to a sobering $223 million per copy did not feature in these encomiums.

  “Junk is right,” grumbled an air force officer who had long grappled with the aircraft’s shortcomings. “On the first flight the rear access door fell off. It’s made of composite plastic with adhesives instead of nuts and bolts to keep the weight down, but that glue doesn’t work so well, so internal parts, fuel lines and electrical conduits, come apart in flight. That just shouldn’t happen.” After pausing for breath he resumed his doleful litany. “Northrop had hopes that with all the sensors on board it would replace JSTARS, but the basic aircraft was slow, underpowered, and the sensors were poor. The infrared can pick out campfires, but that’s about it, and that’s only when it’s directly over the target, and you need the target’s cooperation for that. The radar suffers from the plastic airframe twisting and flexing at high altitude, so the picture shifts with it.”

  Even those campfires can escape scrutiny when the weather is bad. The three Hawks stationed in Guam (flown by pilots in California) since 2010 have a primary mission to monitor North Korea’s nuclear and other military initiatives. Unfortunately the rainy season lasts six months in the northern Pacific, and when fast-moving storms blow in over Guam, Global Hawk stays on the ground, unable to fly over them or, since it lacks the ability to see clouds ahead, go around them. Entire months have gone by without these massive aircraft leaving the ground.

  By 2012, even the air force had had enough, announcing that the sixty-year-old U-2 spy plane, developed by the CIA for a total cost of $19 million in the mid-1950s, could fly higher and take better pictures than its purported successor and that the Global Hawk version, then under production, would be scrapped. In a 2011 report, the Pentagon’s test office announced that the drone was “not operationally effective,” citing such drawbacks as its inability to carry out assigned missions three-quarters of the time. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, weighed in, telling Congress that Global Hawk “has fundamentally priced itself out of our ability to afford it.” The White House took the same position.

  It made no difference. Congress, led by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon and Democratic Congressman Jim Moran (whose northern Virginia district hosted the headquarters of both Northrop and Raytheon) effortlessly brushed aside these pleas, forcing the air force to keep buying the unwanted drone. No fewer than twenty-six lobbyists cited Global Hawk or surveillance issues on their required lobbying reports, including Letitia White, the longtime aide to the Predator’s godfather, Congressman Jerry Lewis. Now they swung into action. This potent team was commanded by Northrop Grumman’s vice president for government relations Sid Ashworth, who had spent fourteen years on the Senate Appropriations Committee staff, serving as staff director for two subcommittees, including defense. In recognition of his stellar performance in saving Northrop’s profitable, if largely useless, product, The Hill, a widely read journal covering Congress, nominated Ashworth to a slot on its prestigious list of top lobbyists two years in a row, 2012 and 2013.

  But Ashworth’s greatest triumph was yet to come. On February 24, 2014, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced a series of stringent cuts to the U.S. military. Among them was the entire force of A-10s, the plane that uniquely allowed pilots a clear view of what was happening on the ground. Not all programs, however, were slated for Hagel’s axe. “In addition to the A-10,” said the secretary, “the Air Force will also retire the 50-year-old U-2, in favor of the unmanned Global Hawk system.” Sheepishly, Hagel conceded that the decision was a “close call,” given previous strenuous efforts to kill the huge drone. His feeble justification was that with its “greater range and endurance,” the Global Hawk makes a better high-altitude reconnaissance platform “for the future.”

  Northrop Grumman is one of the “primes,” the too-big-to-fail contractors formed by merger and acquisition under Defense Secretary William Perry’s auspices in the 1990s. Thanks to its deep coffers and a manufacturing base spread across many states and congressional districts along with those of its suppliers, the corporation’s programs were always likely to survive the harshest budget cuts or the most damning evidence of technical incompetence. But the allure of manhunting surveillance technology, when lubricated by political connections, has provided similar buoyancy for smaller companies whose actual products are perhaps even less useful than Northrop’s giant drone. As an example, we can look to the Sierra Nevada Corporation of Sparks, Nevada.

  On January 2, 2011, the Washington Post reported the imminent deployment of a “revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.” Major General James Poss, the air force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, was quoted as claiming that with the new tool, analysts would no longer have to guess where to point the camera: “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.” David Deptula was no less effusive, certifying that the system offered “many orders of magnitude improvement over existing sensors on drones in Afghanistan.… Instead of looking at a truck or a house, you can look at an entire village or a small city” with the multiple cameras, simultaneously.

  Gorgon Stare was definitely the hit of the year in intelligence-surveillance circles. That October, the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation honored Sierra Nevada with its 2011 Industry Achievement Award, given annually for “outstanding accomplishments in GEOINT tradecraft.” A year later, Deptula’s successor as air force intelligence chief, Lieutenant General Larry James, was still extolling the system’s wide-area imaging as “very powerful in the [Afghan] battlespace” and relaying further tributes from American commanders in that country. Six months later, the general’s enthusiasm was undiminished. “The combatant commanders love it,” he told an interviewer. Earlier, Air Force Times had highlighted its utility in spotting “squirters,” as people fleeing for their lives in an air attack were popularly known in the ISR community. Civil libertarians, no less impressed by the Gorgon’s advertised capabilities, expressed alarm at the possibility that it might be put to use by domestic law enforcement.

  First appearing in budget documents in 2008, as a response to Defense Secretary Gates’ insistent request for more surveillance systems, Gorgon Stare, developed and manufactured by Sierra Nevada, essentially consisted of five “electro-optical” TV cameras for daytime and four infrared cameras for night missions. These were mounted on a pod under the right wing of a Reaper drone, while another pod under the left wing processed the images, transmitting them to recipients on the ground and storing them for later retrieval. The intent was for the cameras to provide a four-kilometer-square picture with a six-inch resolution, meaning that a scan of a town would reveal objects as small as six inches. A “chip-out” feature allowed troops on the ground to receive a segment of the overall picture. Indeed, according to its developers, the system would be able to transmit a panorama of sixty-five different pictures to different users, as opposed to the single, narrow, “soda straw” images currently available from drones. Thus a single Gorgon-carrying drone could circle over a town, effortlessly delivering images of selected areas to ground units on request. Not only could the wide area under scrutiny monitor “squirters,” as discussed, it was one more attempt at the dream of being able to look back into the past to discover who planted a bomb. As Deptula himself explained, “You can review it and accomplish forensic study of the area by looking at movement and tracing activity. If you know where an improvised explosive device went off, you can ‘rewind the tapes’ and see where the activity was and what led to it.”

  There was one problem. Gorgon Stare didn’t work, a fact of wh
ich the air force was perfectly well aware. In the last months of 2010, the system had been subject to an intense program of tests by a specialized air force testing unit, the 53D Wing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The results were damning. The final report deemed the system “not operationally effective” and “not operationally suitable,” breaking down, apart from anything else, on average, 3.7 times every sortie. Officially, Gorgon Stare generated “motion video,” which turned out to be just 2 frames a second (as opposed to “full-motion video” at 24 frames a second). While it was possible to make out cars and other vehicles, it was impossible to distinguish “dismounts” (people) from bushes. One of the test team’s briefing slides that I looked at compared aerial pictures of an air base. One was a Gorgon Stare infrared “full image.” In other words, it showed the widest area of which it was capable. The other came from Google Earth, the free online service available to all. They were identical, revealing buildings and roads, and airfield runways, but nothing smaller and more detailed. Another slide showed a “subview,” a sample of what troops in the field would get if they were to make a request to the drone overhead. It was just possible to make out the cars. People were another matter, merely the faintest of blobs and certainly indistinguishable from bushes.