… Heaven cried aloud, while earth did rumble.
The day grew still, darkness came forth.
There was a flash of lightning, fire broke out.
[The flames] flared up, death rained down.
TABLET IV, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
To really begin to understand drones, you have to understand Gilgamesh.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the world’s oldest work of literature, going back in Mesopotamian oral tradition more than 5,000 years.1 Though unknown to many in the West, its narrative has influenced countless themes of humankind: there is a great flood, and there was an ancient time that existed before the deluge; there is a serpent that upends immortality; there are parables and rules that suggest moral codes for living one’s life; and there are warnings of the dangers of absolute power on earth. Gilgamesh’s story is so universal that references to it reached thousands of miles away into Egyptian and Hittite courts, into Greek and Roman literature, and even into the two great Judeo-Christian and Islamic books. “Gilgamesh links East and West, antiquity and modernity, poetry and history,” writes one contemporary scholar.2
The Epic begins by explaining that Gilgamesh, one part man and two parts god, thought he “was wise in all matters on land and sea,” but had to endure friendship, loss, and transformation to find a cautious peace with himself.
Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk, striking in his looks, the fiercest of all warriors. But the young king was also a selfish and rapacious ruler. To teach him lessons of humility and mortal rule, the gods decided to create a friend and equal, Enkidu: a being made of clay and water and dropped into the wilderness, “innocent of mankind.”
Let them contend together and leave Uruk in quiet, the gods said.
Enkidu was feral and free-living with the gazelles and the beasts, knowing nothing of the world of men, an enduring figure of the primeval and an archetype that persists in stories through Tarzan of the Apes.3 One day a hunter spies the enormous and hairy Enkidu taking water with the wild animals and goes to tell Gilgamesh of this beast that is frustrating his hunt.
A wild one, a star fallen from heaven, strong and free? Gilgamesh exclaims. He’s had a dream of this unconquerable equal, two parts man and one part wild creature.
The king bids Shamhat, a courtesan of Ishtar’s temple, to go and embrace Enkidu, to teach him the art of the women “so that a man he will finally be.” The two lie together for six days and seven nights. When Enkidu is finally sated, he is also transformed. When he returns to the wild, the creatures run away. “Enkidu was grown weak, for wisdom was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart,” the Epic says.
Shamhat then tells Enkidu about Gilgamesh, the king who is also perfect in strength and could be his equal in all respects. On the way to Uruk, Enkidu is literally transformed into a man—shaved, clothed, taught to speak, to eat, to enjoy the pleasures of beer—and he also learns of the king’s wicked rule. When he arrives, the first thing he does is intervene to stop Gilgamesh from taking a virgin bride from her betrothed on their wedding night, a privilege the king reserves for himself. The two wrestle in a titanic bout, knocking down walls and destroying buildings. And though Gilgamesh prevails, he is deeply moved by Enkidu’s courage and strength, and they immediately develop a profound friendship, becoming brothers-in-arms.
Bored with his existence in Uruk, Gilgamesh then decides to challenge Humbaba, the devoted demon of the gods and protector of the great cedar forest. Gilgamesh and Enkidu journey many days to what is assumed to be today’s Syria or Lebanon to cut down the coveted trees to adorn Uruk’s palaces and temples. They encounter and then slay Humbaba, but only together, and then only really with the intervention of the gods.
When they return to Uruk, even Ishtar, the goddess of love, is so stunned by Gilgamesh’s conquest and his beauty that she proposes that he become her lover. But Gilgamesh spurns and shames the deity of Uruk: “Which of your lovers did you ever love forever?” he asks, recounting a string of men and their pitiful ends at her hands.
Ishtar is so incensed that she demands that her father send down the Bull of Heaven to teach Gilgamesh a lesson. When the bull arrives, he stamps the ground and opens a chasm to the underworld, killing hundreds in the city. He drinks of the Euphrates River and reduces its level by many feet. Another epic battle ensues. Fighting together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay the celestial bull. But Enkidu goes too far at the end and heaves its flank at Ishtar on her temple walls.
Is it Gilgamesh’s contempt or Enkidu’s brutal act that provides the reason for punishment? In either case, the gods decide they must teach Gilgamesh a lesson, and Enkidu is given an illness that eats away at him. He dreams of the “house of dust” that awaits him, the netherworld. And on the twelfth day, as he is dying, he beseeches Gilgamesh: Do not forget how we fought together. “I shall not die like a man fallen in battle,” he cries, shameful that his end comes merely from a sickness.
Gilgamesh’s heart is shattered with Enkidu’s death. He goes off in search of immortality, believing now that his life is meaningless unless it can be made eternal. He returns to the wild, clothing himself in animal skins and seeking out Utanapishti, the legendary man who reputedly survived the great flood with “the seed of all living creatures,” to find out how he too might escape death.
At the edge of the world, Gilgamesh overcomes the scorpion men who guard the Mashu district, the mountains where the sun rises and sets. At the waters of death, he impetuously kills the odd stone oarsmen of Urshanabi, the ferryman, almost destroying all chances of crossing. During a great sea journey, Gilgamesh’s and Urshanabi’s punting poles are eaten by the death waters, and the two bind their clothing into sails. Finally arriving before the great prophet, Gilgamesh learns the knowledge of all the times before the great flood. And he learns that he cannot live forever. Defeated, he returns to Uruk with the knowledge of mortality and settles into his role as wise ruler, satisfied that his tale will live on in the stone tablets he leaves behind.
Someone with a sense of antiquity, or irony, gave the name Gilgamesh to an actual device that is one of the top secret tools of the modern-day Data Machine. Developed and fielded for the National Security Agency in 2006 to hunt terrorists, Gilgamesh the black box is attached to unmanned Predator and even larger Reaper drones, where it performs a very specific task in “signals intelligence,” seeking out the faintest and most fleeting of buried digits emanating from the contemporary netherworld and performing the alchemy needed to precisely place them.
By itself, Gilgamesh the black box is just a laptop-sized hunk of metal and circuit boards. But when combined with a host of other similarly named devices—ARTEMIS, Gemini, Nitro, Temptress, Nebula—the gathering horde of sensors, receivers, processors, direction finders, decoders, and recorders accumulates both a greater synergy and a higher vision. This is warfare truly transformed. Though many make the mistake of assuming that what has changed since 9/11 is global terrorism—nonstate actors or an Islamic jihad or even “asymmetrical” warfare—the enduring transformation, that which will affect human history from now until all eternity, is not the enemy but the world that Gilgamesh the black box represents.4 It is not a weapon per se, nor is it a game-changer of blatant historic note. Gilgamesh is also not merely the kind of joystick-controlled robot that so many have put forth to punctuate their distaste for war and ancient bloodlust. In fact, military historians and buffs will probably never speak of this Gilgamesh in the same way they speak of Enigma, blitzkrieg, Little Boy, precision, stealth, or any other war winners of any of the Great Wars. Gilgamesh’s setting, moreover, will never have the heroic distinction of a Waterloo or a Gettysburg or a Normandy. Not only is Gilgamesh virtually invisible due to crushing government secrecy, it also floats above and is disconnected from the very geography it meticulously catalogs; it is difficult to make concrete as what we think of when we think of an army, or warfare, or even a place.
Gilgamesh is an obscure cog in a bigger system of systems and a network that is the heart of what I call the Data Machine. I call Gilgamesh itself a black box, the term attached to a flight recorder on an aircraft but also, according to the dictionary definition, any complex piece of equipment, typically a unit in an electronic system, whose contents are mysterious to the user. Part eye, part ear, part balance and sensing, Gilgamesh is just one of thousands of pieces of what military command and control experts call the “sensors, actuators, and data layer” of the Global Information Grid (GIG), a military combination of all networks, mobile and landline, voice and data.5
Just as “black box” is an imperfect representation because Gilgamesh needs to be conceived as more anthropomorphized than a mere box, the Machine that Gilgamesh attaches to has to be seen more like a living body made up of organs and bloodstream, each part cellular and complex and interconnected. This Data Machine—the national security complex, US intelligence, spying and killing, targeted death—grew and improved as needs presented themselves, as technologies emerged, and as computing power increased. But it has never been nurtured, or, to extend the analogy even further, it has been raised in the wild, magnificent and hairy but lacking in those attributes that make for a thoughtful human endeavor. Those in charge speak of the GIG’s “architecture” as if someone started with a blueprint, but as retired air force chief General John Jumper said more than a decade ago when describing the growing machine: “You wouldn’t dare buy a house that your architect couldn’t draw for you first.” And yet, as he says, “We’re buying parts and pieces of our military without having a picture of the house.”6
Like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earthly world of Gilgamesh the black box comprises an expansive cast of characters—some with mythical names, some felicitous, some warlike and ominous. Each black box character plays a distinct role in each stratum of digital war-making. And in the way that Gilgamesh the actual king is recorded in Sumerian history as having ruled for 126 years, Gilgamesh the black box has to be thought of in a very contemporary time frame. The niche capability that this and other black boxes provide might last only 126 days, but that’s an eternity in our information age. Think of them as the latest smartphone or app in the form of specialized wiretaps or spy cameras. There’s a demand for a one-off to be fabricated and put in place to exploit some opportunity or fill some intelligence blind spot. But the hunted quarry is also ever-changing, adapting or making use of new methods to exist, communicate, travel, or hide within a bigger digital background that is itself constantly undergoing growth and change. So when the target or the technological or computational conditions change, the inventors go back to their shadowy caldrons, and another specialized Gilgamesh comes along to take the place of the outmoded one. Black box Gilgameshes that each play a specific role in intercepting and precisely geolocating a potential target thus emerge whenever and wherever there is a need. The type of data being collected constantly mutates as new sources and methods of collecting and deciphering are discovered. There are countless other secret sensors like Gilgamesh of the black box variety—ACES HY, Lynx, Dragonfly, Pennantrace, Silent Dagger, Star Sapphire, Airhandler, Viper Reach—each a platoon mate, each slightly different and able to “see” or “hear” or untangle some identifying characteristic of an electronic morsel to penetrate into the most unconventional of domains. Black boxes process imagery—photos in the visible spectrum, infrared images, synthetic aperture radar, light detection and ranging, or spectral renderings—scrutinizing each frame as it floods in, tagging and sending the take either for immediate use or for retrieval later. Other black boxes act as secret agents that can suck down the contents of a computer hard drive: more data to be sent off for processing and use. Sound waves, facial recognition, smells, infinitesimal changes in chemical makeup or landscape, the special and unique gait of an individual’s stride, can all be collected and measured in some form of digital indicator. Searchers seek even to capture and characterize innate emanations: a dormant cell phone, a computer keystroke in front of a screen, a microprocessor within an automobile, some oscillating or unintentionally revealing digit that might indicate a presence and an identity even when the mechanical and corporeal world is seemingly silent. Data is the prize, but the path to getting it is the task.
The collectors would be nothing without the processors, the members of another black box tribe: Alaska, Association, Final e Curfew, Gargle8 and Garuda, Temptress, and Witchhunt. These tools characterize and analyze the collected data, peering into pixels and wavelengths and binaries, triaging and fusing information to discover or figure out an identity and then its place in a larger social network. Sharkfinn, Chalkfun, and Goldminer, part of the Real-time Regional Gateway (RTRG) family, push intercepted communications to battlefield users. Specialized brethren such as Thunderbunny and Metrics do specific tasks such as computing the connections between one electronic device and another: “call chaining.” Dishfire, Octave, Contraoctave, Broomstick, and Taperlay store the voluminous material. Stratus and Turretfire keep it in the cloud. As digits are logged, translated, parsed, sorted, and displayed, hundreds of additional specialized and secret applications arrange them by date, by location, by language, by voice, and by subject. Incompatible software and formats are threaded together through other sets of black boxes, software, and widgets.7
Each of these ingenious Gilgameshes represents tens or hundreds of millions in invested dollars and hours by some government laboratory or (more often) private company of IT geniuses unlaboring away in obscurity. But this is not a tale about industry or money. Gilgamesh and its kind are not only almost universally absent from the public debate about warfare and targeted killing, but no one is really privy to or can fully grasp the totality of the new indecipherable, not the users, not the managers, not the decision-makers, and certainly not the elected officials.8 This is a world beyond “death TV,” as it is sometimes referred to, the now-familiar black-and-white renderings of full-motion video that have become all too common in describing a singular eye in the sky as just “drones.” It is a world beyond voice transmissions or even the so-called metadata that is attached to every piece of digital communication and that most people just associate with the NSA. Struggling with its own definition, the military sometimes calls it intelligence mission data.9 “The speed of technical innovation and the complexity of modern weapons systems are creating ever-increasing demand for specialized intelligence mission data to feed sensors and automated processes,” a 2013 Pentagon report says.10
Feed me! Is this the human condition of intelligence, of the Data Machine? That the Machine churns on because it serves no purpose except to ingest everything? Does it churn because in political terms, leaders are afraid they will be punished after the next spectacular terror attack if they have failed to detect that specific something that might have made the difference? Or is it just data, and are they merely sucking up everything simply because we can, “a growing amount of surveillance, communications, and intelligence work… being performed by unmanned aircraft and satellites”11 disconnected from a human endeavor, even one as repugnant and glorious as war?
In the closed community of Gilgamesh the black box, in locked rooms inside barricaded and guarded compounds, the relentless Machine churns. The cameras and the sensors and the listening devices are carried aloft by another family—Predators, Reapers, Global Hawks, little Ravens, manned Liberties, Rivet Joints, Senior Scouts, and Dragon Ladies (U-2s). The unmanned “platforms” like Predator that have become so well known, however, are, as the label “platform” suggests, merely hosts—kind of like flying buses—carrying the army of passengers (certainly more often black boxes than bombs or missiles) that collect the digits.
The essential finishers are the wizards of geolocation—ARTEMIS, Displayview, Foxmill, G-box, GEGS, Nemesis, Talonview, Toxicaire, Typhon, and Worldwind—more black boxes and software workers that—or is it who?—perform direction finding and triangulation, comparing the times and frequencies from signals as received at different collectors, pinpointing the location of something even when an object is moving, even performing geolocation when only one vertex in a triangle is known.
When Gilgamesh seamlessly meshes and everything is revealed, when digital markers can be calculated and timed and fused with change detection histories and “pattern of life” databases, it is relentless exactitude from the heavens. The end result is labeled High Value Target (HVT) assured pursuit, “assured pursuit” being an official buzzphrase used to describe a very specific and very secret achievement: the finding and killing of the enemies of the state. In this top secret world, “Assured Pursuit Certified (APC)” is even something one can actually put on one’s résumé; it is a kind of marksmanship badge meaning that one has mastered the use of all the modern-day black boxes and is privy to the secrets of the gods: how to conduct the meticulous work of human archeology that has come to be at the center of perpetual war.
Gilgamesh the black box is at the center of our story, but it isn’t the hero. Given the totality of the Machine, there isn’t really a single hero in the world of black boxes. This is not to impugn some leader or general or commander or scientist or analyst or pilot or soldier, nor is it to question or doubt the human sacrifices of the killed and injured or the exceptional bravery of the actual fighters who indeed go out and take the greatest risks. But Gilgamesh is, in the end, just one of thousands of components; and though we have way too much of a tendency, in our struggle to grasp modern warfare, to reduce the world of drones to those Cessna-sized Predators that we imagine are guided by some joystick-wielding adolescent, the truth is that except for the few who actually hike and hide and sweat, the few who actually have to go outside the wire and beyond the barricades to the edge of the world in the quest, the vast majority of humans are a removed network of technicians—unlaborers—who outnumber old-fashioned fighters tens of thousands to one. Two parts machine, one part man: the fight is truly unmanned.
“We should join together and do one thing, a deed such as has never (before) been done,” Gilgamesh says to Enkidu in Tablet IV of the Epic. It could be the motto for this extraordinary search party. It never has been done before, not on this scale, not with this ambition, a global network that seeks the most elusive morsel in an infinite information universe, searching deeper and deeper into every buried recess, processing all for the singular purpose of locating an enemy—the unanticipated and diabolical that forever eludes.
The cold truth is that the endeavor is irreducible from the Machine and its network.12 Feeding the Machine, and the enormity of the mere task of integrating it all, overwhelms. The culmination is not some final battle per se, it is the distillation of the military’s efforts into some 3-D model or PowerPoint briefing or even video simulation to evoke a decision to kill, a process that has “crisp efficiency” and an inexorable quality, as one veteran of targeted killing decision-making said, that “left him feeling more like an observer than a participant.”13 It’s therefore hard not to see the Machine as kin to some kind of divine execution, hard not to label it all godlike, hard not to decry a robot takeover or some sanitized video game, warfare stripped of all the humanity.14
Who other than Gilgamesh can say “I am king without equal”? the Epic asks.
And thus our story begins, an effort to fathom our descent into the world of the unmanned and our servitude to the Machine. Our modern-day Gilgamesh travels leagues, and journeys to unknown places in the beyond. It exists in a world of warfare, but also a world inextricable from our society and its struggles with the information age. It is a world where human interventions in the decisions of life and death are essential and where the entire enterprise is indeed man-made, but where the Machine’s purpose is to eliminate the weaknesses and errors of human input.