“We want to be everywhere, know everything, and we want to predict what happens next,” declared an earnest Lieutenant General Joseph Votel, commander of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, in April 2014. Twenty years after promoters of the revolution in military affairs first promised a world of networked and omniscient precision, the dream lived on. Votel was addressing “GeoInt,” the well-funded annual Florida jamboree that brings together surveillance-industry executives with their intelligence agency customers for a week of mutually profitable confabulation. The general’s words drew respectful attention, for the night-raiding JSOC was one of the few entities relatively secure from the famine eating into budgets and revenues across the U.S. defense establishment. While most public defense forums echoed with lamentations of the “painful choices” engendered by the legally mandated cuts in defense spending known as sequestration, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), of which JSOC is a key and especially secretive component, had seen its upwardly curving budget survive almost undisturbed.
Incoming Obama administration officials inspecting the national security system bequeathed them by the Bush-Cheney team in 2009 told me at the time that “Special Operations are out of control,” and the intervening years had done little to change the picture. Operating in at least 134 countries, empowered to kill people without recourse to higher authority, endowed with “unique acquisition authority” to spend money with a minimum of congressional oversight, the “point of the spear,” as the special operators liked to refer to themselves, had grown from a 1980 force of 11,600 specialists focused on strengthening third world allies into 2013’s 66,000-person machine. From a mere $2.3 billion in 2001, the command, which extracts its budget directly from Congress, had garnered $9.3 billion in 2008, $10.3 billion in 2011, and was looking for $9.9 billion in 2015, the slight decline due to the drawdown of Afghan war operations. Such generosity to the heavily publicized “secret” warriors that had cut down bin Laden, Zarqawi, and others had endowed SOCOM with a prosperous sheen. Streams of congressional delegations invited to visit the headquarters in Tampa, Florida, marveled at the gleaming modern buildings and lavish accoutrements. “They have professional lighting engineers for the displays they put on to show us what they are doing around the world,” one awestruck house staffer told me on his return.
Unquestioning largesse had generated the inevitable result. “When SEAL Team 6 operators are sent on ‘training’ missions to Alaska to go hunting on the government’s dime, you know you have budgets that are both too fat and lack oversight,” one member of the elite force told a reporter. “If [SOCOM Commander Admiral William] McRaven is concerned with his budget, he should start with fighting the wartime tradition of fiscal abuse that has gone unchecked since 9/11 in the SOF community. Our love affair with special operations has caused the DOD to turn a blind eye on very questionable fiscal practices.” Nevertheless, there was little sign that the high-tech assassins were falling out of favor, though Congress did raise some questions about a scheme for a “National Capital Region Headquarters” with a $10 million annual budget as well as an $80 million project, championed by McRaven, to develop an “Iron Man” battle suit for the commandos. TALOS, the battery-powered “tactical-assault light operator suit,” featured full-body bulletproof protection as well as muscle-boosting components, embedded computers, night vision, and video sensors for “increased situational awareness” (with a slick, expensive, gamelike video to promote the project). Among other items on a Special Operations wish list for Advancement of Technologies in Equipment for Use by U.S. Special Operations Forces issued shortly after Votel’s address, was a “Concealable/Take Down Urban Sniper Rifle” folded into a small 12-by-20-inch suitcase, guided bullets, and tiny missiles as well as “neutraceutical and/or pharmacological enhancements to increase neuroperformance.”
Another McRaven initiative, that of building a $15 million “regional SOF coordination center” in Colombia, ran into concerted opposition from the other services, who complained to Congress. Special Operations has been heavily engaged in Colombia since the Clinton era in combating the venerable FARC Marxist guerrilla insurgency. In recent years this campaign has been promoted as the textbook example of high-value targeting powered by precise electronic intelligence, a strategy that had clearly failed in Afghanistan but was hailed as having enjoyed great success in Colombia.
Conducted in conjunction with the CIA, the ongoing operation followed the traditional pattern of the recent Asian wars. Targeted leaders of FARC were tracked by NSA via their cell phones or covertly planted tracking devices. Once located, they were struck, not by drone-fired missiles but by 500-pound GPS-guided bombs dropped from Vietnam-era light A-37 bombers provided to Colombia by the United States. According to American and Colombian officials who briefed the Washington Post on their success, the campaign eliminated at least two dozen high-value rebel leaders, causing “mass desertions” and “chaos and dysfunction” within the organization. Such results would seem to validate the whole concept of high-value-people targeting and indeed are celebrated as such by JSOC and the CIA.
But the reality was a little different. True to form, almost all the dead leaders were speedily replaced, often by younger, more able, or more brutal men. Mono Jojoy, for example, an aging senior leader who had risen through the ranks, was killed in September 2010; the Colombian president hailed his death as the “hardest blow” ever suffered by the rebel group. Yet he was almost immediately replaced by “El Médico,” Alberto Parra, an able younger leader who was an educated and astute doctor. Other high-level hits, except those in regions, such as the Caribbean coast, where FARC had already been shredded by government-sponsored paramilitary death squads, had produced the same result. Paul Reyes, a senior leader killed in a cross-border operation in 2008, was similarly replaced, in three days, by another experienced commander, a former university professor with the nom de guerre Joaquín Gómez. “You can see that their command and control stayed intact,” Adam Isacson, a specialist on the topic at the Washington Office on Latin America, pointed out to me. “They’ve had two ceasefires in recent years and made them stick; if command had broken down you’d have had groups going rogue and that didn’t happen.” In May 2014, in seeming rejection of long-standing U.S. policy, the Colombian government announced it had agreed in peace talks with FARC to work together in combating the cocaine trade, an initiative endorsed by the electorate with the re-election of President Santos the following month.
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.
Given their cost, these superdrones will inevitably be few in number and will require a more elaborate “reach-back” communications network with an ever-more voracious appetite for bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transmitted over a communications link). Already, a single Global Hawk drone requires five times as much bandwidth as that used by the entire U.S. military during the 1991 Gulf War, an amount that will only increase. With this Niagara of information pouring across the heavens from satellite to ground stations and up to satellites again comes the certainty that someone will at some point listen in and may well be capable of inserting their own commands to the machine.
In 2009, Shia insurgents in Iraq used SkyGrabber software, priced at $29.95 on the Internet, to capture and download Predator video feeds for use in their own battle planning. More spectacularly, in December 2011, an RQ-170 Beast overflying Iran landed comparatively undamaged. Initial denials by U.S. authorities of Iranian claims that they had captured the drone were silenced when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard put it on display. Like all drones, the machine relied on GPS for navigation, the network of satellites that had made remote drone operations possible in the first place. But GPS signals are extraordinarily weak, the equivalent of a car headlight shining 12,000 miles away, because the size of the satellite limits the power output. This makes it comparatively easy to jam or interfere with the signals, which is what the Iranians claim to have done.
As an Iranian engineer explained to Christian Science Monitor reporter Scott Peterson, the Iranian electronic-warfare specialists had the benefit of their experience working on the remains of several simpler U.S. Navy Scan Eagle drones they had retrieved earlier. To get control of the CIA’s drone, they first jammed its communication links to the pilots back in Nevada. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot,” explained the engineer. “This is where the bird loses its brain.” Once that happened, the aircraft was preprogrammed to return to its Kandahar base, navigating by GPS. But at this point the Iranians made their second intervention, feeding false signals that mimicked the weaker GPS transmissions, and gradually guided the aircraft toward an Iranian landing site. As an electronic-warfare commander explained to an Iranian news agency, “[A]ll the movements of these [enemy drones]” were being watched, and “obstructing” their work was “always on our agenda.” The landing site was carefully chosen, as the engineer explained, because it was at almost exactly the same altitude as Kandahar. So, when the drone “thought” it was at its home base, it duly landed. However there was an altitude difference of a few feet. Landing heavily, the aircraft damaged its undercarriage and one wing.
Despite energetic attempts by U.S. officials to discredit the Iranian claims, there is no reason to doubt the story, especially as their feat was later duplicated by a University of Texas professor, Todd Humphreys, in repeated public experiments in which he took control of nonmilitary drones and, on one occasion, a large yacht in the Mediterranean.
The difficulties of controlling future superdrones in the face of Iranian or perhaps Chinese electronic warriors inevitably generated speculation about the onset of “autonomous” systems capable of conducting a mission without human intervention and without command links vulnerable to hacking. Indeed, the navy’s demonstrator drone that managed two carrier landings (out of four attempts) in a flat, calm sea in July 2013 was autonomous, flying only under the direction of its onboard computers. The challenge of landing on a pitching, rolling deck, something that requires intense training for humans to accomplish, has yet to be faced. Nevertheless, the supposed imminence of robotic systems endowed with the ability and power to make lethal decisions has become a recurring topic of concern among human rights activists, complete with TED talks about the near-term probability that “autonomous military robots will take decision making out of the hands of humans and thus take the human out of war, which would change warfare entirely.” In November 2012, Human Rights Watch called for a “preemptive ban on the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons.” Naturally, in view of the money to be made, interested parties have been eager to bolster the notion that such systems are a practical possibility. As David Deptula said of drone video analysis: “Making this automatic is an absolute must.” The Office of Naval Research has even funded a joint project by several major universities to “devise computer algorithms that will imbue autonomous robots with moral competence—the ability to tell right from wrong.” This was clearly destined to be a multiyear contract, since, as one sympathetic commentator noted, “[S]cientifically speaking, we still don’t know what morality in humans actually is.”
Early experiments appeared to confirm that autonomous drones, ethical or otherwise, might be just around the corner. An experiment involving two small drones with computers that process images from onboard cameras reportedly managed to locate and identify a brightly colored tarp spread out in an open field. “The demonstration laid the groundwork for scientific advances that would allow drones to search for a human target and then make an identification based on facial-recognition or other software,” explained the Washington Post confidently. “Once a match was made, a drone could launch a missile to kill the target.”
Picking out a brightly colored object with sharp edges against a plain background is in the grand tradition of budget-generating Pentagon tests. (Infrared systems are usually tested in the early morning, for example, so that the warm target-object shows up nicely against the ground, still cool from the night air.) In the real world, where edges are not sharp and shades of gray are hard to differentiate, not to mention the shifting silhouette of a human face, life becomes a lot more difficult, especially if the target is taking steps to stay out of sight. (According to an al-Qaeda tip sheet discovered in Mali, Osama bin Laden had advised his followers to “hide under thick trees” as one of several sensible suggestions for evading drones.) Given the difficulty humans face in making correct decisions on the basis of ambiguous electro-optical and infrared images of what may or may not be an enemy (is that a squatting Pashtun?), not to mention the ongoing and oft-lamented failure to get computers to analyze surveillance video, such anxiety might be premature. Exponentially increasing computer processing power has kept alive the dream of artificial intelligence, founded on the belief that the brain operates just like a computer through a series of on-off switches and that therefore a computer is capable of performing like a human brain. But it has become clearer that the brain does not operate in any such fashion but rather, as Berkeley philosopher Hubert Dreyfus has long maintained, on intuitive reactions based on accumulated expertise and intuition, not on the mechanistic process, characteristically evoked by Votel, of “connecting the dots.”
In one sense, however, the system is already “autonomous.” On the eve of World War II, air force planners identified the few targets they needed to destroy to bring Germany to its knees. The plan did not work, targeting committees met, their target lists expanded, the enemy adapted to each list change, and the war dragged on for year after bloody year. Nevertheless, the same strategy was followed in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, each time with more elaborate technology. Ultimately the technology offered the promise of destroying not just the physical objects—power plants, factories, communications, roads, and bridges—that sustained the enemy but also selected individuals, duly listed in order of importance, who controlled the enemy war effort. By 2014, with Afghanistan sinking back into chaos and the jihadis’ black flag waving over ever-larger stretches of the globe under the aegis of a leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, more capable and successful than his targeted predecessors, it was clear that this latest variation of the strategy had also failed. Michael Flynn, formerly McChrystal’s intelligence officer in the hunt for Zarqawi who had gone on to command the Defense Intelligence Agency, ruefully admitted as much as he prepared to leave office, telling an interviewer, “We kept decapitating the leadership of these groups, and more leaders would just appear from the ranks to take their place.”
Flynn’s insight made no difference. President Obama, claiming success in assassination campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia (where a recently assassinated leader had been immediately replaced), pronounced that this newest threat would be met with the same strategy. Predators, Reapers, and Global Hawks accordingly scoured the desert wastes of Iraq and Syria, beaming uncountable petabytes of video back up the kill chain. Among the recipients were four hundred members of the Massachusetts National Guard sitting in darkened rooms at a base on Cape Cod, gazing hour after hour at blurry images in search of “patterns of life” that might denote the elusive enemy. “None of them are on the ground, and none of them are in the theater of operations,” said their local congressman proudly, “but they are contributing from here, conducting essential frontline functions.”
As David Deptula promised that “with a more intense campaign” victory would come quickly, enemy leaders switched off their cell phones and faded from view. Pentagon officials demanded more spending. Wall Street analysts hailed the prospect of “sure-bet paydays” for drone builders and other weapons makers. The system rolled on autonomously—one big robot mowing the grass, forever.