Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  Notwithstanding the claimed victory in Colombia and the glamour associated with the Special Operations “brand,” opinion polls have for years suggested that a majority of Americans firmly believe the United States should be “less active” in world affairs. Nevertheless, in 2014 Votel stressed that he still saw his mission as global: “Since we can no longer draw a box on a map and say that’s where the problem is, we must be everywhere, in the sense that we must be able to find the threat anywhere on the planet.”

  A decade or so earlier, he might have lapsed into the acronym-laden jargon associated with effects-based operations, but now JSOC’s youthful-looking three-star general, who would shortly be nominated to a fourth star and to succeed McRaven as overall head of Special Operations Command, contented himself with the simple desire, expressed with a straight face, to “know everything.” Pursuit of this goal would require “wide area persistent surveillance” and “precision geolocation.” The former was a reference to a system that might live up to the undelivered promises of Gorgon Stare, Sierra Nevada’s attempt to monitor entire cities with one sensor, while the latter referred to a computerized version of the phone-tracking IMSI Catcher that had mistakenly drawn the missiles down on Zabet Amanullah in the middle of his election campaign tour. Along with a desire to “see through clouds,” Votel also expressed the need to “bring the data from all disciplines of intelligence together in near real time so that we can know everything.”

  Three days after this speech, Votel’s CIA partners in the drone war unleashed a hail of drone-launched missiles across southern Yemen, killing some sixty-five people. Yemeni journalist Farea al-Muslimi succinctly described the effect of such strikes in a tweet following the attacks: “Dear America,” he wrote, “there is an infinite support in Yemen for the army in its current battles against #Aqap [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula]. Plz don’t ruin tht by launching #Drone.”

  Given that weeks later no government official in the United States or Yemen had been able to name a single one of the intended victims of what Muslimi called a “tsunami” of strikes, it appeared that neither Votel’s command nor the CIA targeters could yet “know everything.” Even the facts Votel said he knew may have been incorrect. On December 12 of the previous year, a JSOC drone strike near Rada’a in central Yemen had hit a tribal wedding party, killing twelve people and injuring fifteen, including the bride. The alleged target, a “midlevel operative” named Shawqui Ali Ahmed al-Badani, deemed to have been involved in a mysterious plot that had sparked a shutdown of nineteen U.S. embassies and a torrent of strikes the previous August, was not among the victims.

  The resulting outcry was sufficiently vehement to generate official investigations, one commissioned by Votel and another, on White House orders, by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Contradicting a detailed Human Rights Watch on-the-ground investigation that drew on many interviews with survivors, concluding that probably all and certainly most of the victims were civilians, both official enquiries duly reported that mostly “militants” had been killed. Officials shown the drone-feed video of the attack were later quoted as saying it showed that the trucks that were hit contained armed men. However, in an implicit reminder that any Yemeni tribesman considers himself undressed without a gun, the Yemeni government not only apologized for the attack, calling it a “mistake,” but also presented 101 Kalashnikov rifles in compensation to leaders of the victims’ tribe. Meanwhile a convenient leak suggested that the CIA had informed JSOC before the strike that the “spy agency did not have confidence in the underlying intelligence” and that afterward, CIA analysts had assessed that “some of the victims may have been villagers, not militants.” The timing could not have been better (at least from the agency’s point of view), given JSOC’s low-intensity campaign to take over all CIA drone operations. In fact following the wedding-party fiasco, JSOC drone operations in Yemen were suspended, at least temporarily.

  Despite this setback, Votel, as his remarks to the intelligence-industry gathering indicated, affirmed his faith in remote sensing and the need to “leverage technology” to help analysts “predict what’s going to happen next.” This was entirely in line with official high-tech procurement orthodoxy, maintained with undeviating vigor for at least the half century since General Westmoreland had promised that “enemy forces will be located, tracked and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control.”

  One exception to the rule of high tech had been the introduction of the A-10 attack plane, optimized for “close air support” of troops on the ground and hence detested by the air force hierarchy as detracting from their preferred mission of long-range bombing independent of ground action. Recurring efforts by successive air force chiefs to discard the A-10 had been stymied by imminent combat or congressional opposition.

  In 2014, the Air Force mounted its most determined effort yet, announcing the abolition of the A-10 force on the excuse that budget cutting left it no other option. Henceforth, all aerial strikes would be inflicted via video screens, not just with drones but also with bombers and fighters that flew too high and fast to assess targets with the naked eye, instead relying on the screens linked to the sensors in their targeting pods.

  In the face of the air force edict, many rose in defense of the plane, notably soldiers whose lives had been saved by its timely interventions when they were badly outnumbered or ambushed. Special Operations troops had particular reason to be grateful in this regard. Yet from Fort Bragg, their home base, there was only silence. Strict orders, so I was informed, had gone out from Votel’s headquarters that no one in his force was to say a word in defense of the A-10. A leadership wedded to $80 million armored suits inspired by a comic-book fantasy was clearly not interested in anyone saving lives by looking at the real world close-up.

  Fifteen years earlier, in his speech at the Citadel outlining his vision for America’s defense, George W. Bush had promised that “when direct threats to America are discovered, I know that the best defense can be a strong and swift offense—including the use of Special Operations Forces and long-range strike capabilities … we must be able to strike from across the world with pinpoint accuracy—with long-range aircraft and perhaps with unmanned systems.” In 2012, Barack Obama, in a speech at the Pentagon outlining his defense vision, had declared that “as we reduce the overall defense budget, we will protect, and in some cases increase, our investments in special operations forces, in new technologies like ISR and unmanned systems…”

  In the decade and a half between these visionary statements, American forces had been embroiled in two long and bloody wars costing unimaginable sums of money. The wars were publicly justified by the urgent need to crush al-Qaeda, which at the outset occupied a few training camps in Afghanistan on the sufferance of the Taliban government. As of the summer of 2014, jihadi manpower had grown faster than SOCOM’s, and the area controlled by al-Qaeda and its equally militant jihadi spin-offs in western Iraq and eastern Syria alone was equal in size to Great Britain or the state of Utah, with other territories across North Africa and beyond falling into its sway. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the formidable ISIS (as he had renamed al-Qaeda in Iraq), was the more effective successor to previous leaders whose eliminations, starting with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been serially hailed by U.S. officials as “devastating blows” to the group.

  Yet the doctrine propounded by Bush and restated by Obama was more strongly in force than ever. At the end of the Bush tenure, SOCOM was operating in sixty countries. Five years later, Special Operations had an ongoing presence in over twice as many countries and basked in the approval of politicians, media, and the public. Reaper drones were still rolling off the General Atomics production lines. Though the public was repeatedly assured that the wars were ending as U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan, the administration was working hard to preserve a residual force of some ten thousand men in that country—principally, it seemed
, to secure a drone base to attack Pakistan’s Taliban along with remnants of the original al-Qaeda leadership—apparently a crucial need since Pakistan’s eviction of U.S. drone bases in 2012.

  Meanwhile, as central Asian target lists shrank, army engineers were busily constructing an archipelago of bases for drones and Special Operations across Africa. In 2014, Niger, for example, was hosting drones at the airport outside Niamey, its capital, as were Ethiopia, the Seychelles, and Djibouti. Djibouti indeed was the centerpiece of ambitious plans for coverage of both the continent and southern Arabia, affirmed in 2014 by a thirty-year $2 billion lease for an expanded Camp Lemonnier, the former French Foreign Legion base on the edge of the country’s main airport. The camp, home to the JSOC drones targeting Yemen (so many crashed into the nearby city on takeoff and landing that they had to be moved to a desert facility a few miles away), already featured a $220 million Special Operations compound, along with a $25 million fitness center, forerunners of a $1.4 billion decade-long expansion planned for the base.

  Even less visibly, the U.S. Air Force was maintaining and expanding its global network of “unmanned aircraft systems operations center support,” also known as “reach-back sites,” electronic nerve centers in the elaborate communications system that make “striking across the world with pinpoint accuracy” possible. (Other countries may buy or build drones, but none have the global command and control system that make worldwide strikes possible.) Thus while Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany hosted “EUR-1,” relaying communications and video feeds between the United States and its drones operating in the Middle East and Central Asia, the Pentagon was spending millions of dollars constructing a new site, EUR-2, in Italy to handle expanding drone operations in Africa. PAC-1 at Kadena Air Force Base in Japan dealt with the drones flying over east Asia, while yet another new site, PAC-2, was planned for somewhere in the Pacific to focus on drone flights over the South China Sea. As General Votel liked to emphasize, the threat could be “anywhere on the planet.” Most of the drones linked to this system would be General Atomics Reapers. As of 2014 the air force planned to have 346 of these in service by 2021, of which more than 80 would likely be under CIA control. As the proliferating bases across Africa made clear, Reapers targeting lightly armed tribesmen and insurgents still had a promising future. That future was necessarily restricted to countries unable or unwilling to contest foreign airstrikes on their territory, since Reapers or Predators were liable to be shot down by anyone with any antiaircraft weapon more powerful than a machine gun, let alone an air force.

  Clearly, there was no guarantee that the United States would enjoy the same lopsided advantage in future wars, especially if they were against developed states in the former Communist bloc. This was why, sometime around the end of the first decade of the century, a new acronym entered military jargon, A2/AD, which stands for antiaccess/area denial, and in plain English means strong defenses against U.S. incursions by air, sea, or land. Thus in “Air Sea Battle,” a 2013 defense department document promoting combined air and sea power as the best way to attack China, the authors define A2/AD capabilities as “those which challenge and threaten the ability of U.S. and allied forces to both get to the fight and to fight effectively once there. Notably, an adversary can often use the same capability for both A2 and AD.” Once this concept, which could apply equally well to locks on the doors of a house, had been suitably dressed up with the impenetrable acronym, it quickly became the favorite peg on which to hang expensive new weapon system development programs.

  One early example of such a program was a mysterious delta-winged jet-powered unmanned aircraft first spotted by outsiders at Kandahar Airport in Afghanistan in 2007 and eventually revealed to be the RQ-170, a “stealth” drone designed to operate over unfriendly territory while remaining invisible to defenders’ radar. It was not an attack drone carrying bombs and missiles like the Reaper or Predator but one dedicated to surveillance with TV and infrared cameras as well as radar. Designed and built by Lockheed Martin, its status as a “black,” that is, secret, program guaranteed that its costs and performance would remain cloaked from public scrutiny, as was its very existence until it made its debut on the runway at Kandahar Airport and was promptly nicknamed “the Beast of Kandahar.” As we shall see, the Beast was by no means invisible or invulnerable to ground defenses, but it did represent an all-important feature of post-Reaper/Predator drone development: the advantage of being expensive.

  Thanks to Predator and Reaper, General Atomics had flourished in the post-9/11 era, scooping up just over $2 billion from the Pentagon in 2013. But that was a mere 0.68 percent of U.S. defense contracts that year, a pittance compared with the $37 billion raked in by Lockheed Martin, the leading contractor. Despite the fact that its products had sold so well and were the topic of worldwide discussion, the San Diego–based firm ranked only twenty-first in the league table of U.S. defense firms. Furthermore, despite the prominent role played by the attack drones in the recent and ongoing wars, there had been no sign that the “prime” contractors, the five giant firms that had emerged from the mergers of the early 1990s, had made any attempts to break into that market. The reason was easy to discern: the drones were too cheap. For the twelve Reapers the air force planned to buy in 2015, for example, the service requested $240 million, or $20 million per copy. Boeing’s F/A-18 “Growler” electronic warfare plane, by contrast, weighed in at $67 million each, while Lockheed was happily extracting $106 million for the C-130J transport plane, an upgraded version of a 50-year-old design, not to mention the Bell Boeing V-22 troop transport, which clocked in at $119 million per. Clearly, with such rich pickings available elsewhere, the primes were not going to be too interested in crashing General Atomics’ market.

  Such lack of interest would inevitably evaporate if drones were worth real money. It was no accident that while Reapers could be had for $20 million apiece, Global Hawk, a new, much larger, higher-flying drone offering the “wide-area persistent surveillance” so desired by General Votel, cost at least $300 million a copy and was built by Northrop Grumman, number four in the contractors’ rankings. As discussed in Chapter 10, Global Hawk has turned out to be functionally inadequate, given its inability to fly in bad weather and the tendency of its plastic airframe to twist and even disintegrate in flight. Nevertheless, with the lobbying power of a major contractor behind it, the program entered into that happy state where no reported failing—or even an effort by the air force to discard it—could drive a stake through its heart.

  As noted, Lockheed’s RQ-170 drone, of which twenty were built, had its price tag mercifully obscured by its “black” status, but a calculation based on estimates of the secret drone’s weight, conservatively estimated the cost at $140.1 million, most likely rising to $200 million if the costs of the stealth features were included.

  Following on the heels of the Beast was the even more secret RQ-180, which, like the Beast, was due to be operated jointly by the air force and the CIA. Apparently the same size as Global Hawk but conceived in hopes of being entirely stealthy, its cost would almost certainly soar past the latter’s already staggering $300 million price tag. Like the Hawk and the Beast, it was to be designed purely for surveillance. A drone designed to carry out strikes with bombs and missiles, defend itself against attackers, conduct electronic warfare, refuel in midair, and take off and land on an aircraft carrier would quite certainly be a far more ambitious and therefore costly undertaking. So in 2013 the U.S. Navy dangled a prospective $3.7 billion contract as inducement for corporations to develop something that could do just that. The program followed claims of success for the Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator, a seven-year program launched in 2006 to show that a drone could indeed take off and land on a carrier. That feat was ultimately accomplished at an overall cost of $1.7 billion for two Northrop Grumman delta-winged X-47B prototypes, flown from the USS George H. W. Bush on a July day when the sea off Virginia was very, very calm.

  Back in the distant
days of the Carter administration, high-tech apostle William Perry, occupying the powerful post of director of defense research and engineering, had begun pouring huge money into stealth. The money spigot has stayed open ever since, although the actual results in combat have fallen short of expectations (and public boasts). The F-117, the first stealth bomber, had in fact proven visible enough to enemy radars in the 1991 Gulf War to require escort by fleets of radar-jamming aircraft, while in the 1998 Kosovo conflict, the Serbs had managed to use elderly Soviet SAM radars to locate and shoot down one F-117 and severely damage another. Nevertheless, stealth continued to be deemed essential to any scheme for using drones, or any other aircraft, in the face of determined enemy air defenses such as the dreaded A2/AD so frequently invoked in official discussions of future weapons systems. The incorporation of stealth features—exotic plastic and glue coatings to absorb radar waves and special airframe shaping to deflect them—makes drones and planes not only less airworthy and less maneuverable but also enormously costly, which means, given the cost-plus business model of the defense industry, they could be enormously profitable. Drones, once hailed for their cheapness, were inevitably becoming more expensive than the manned planes they were supposed to replace.