I examined the look of the weather.
The weather to look at was full of foreboding,
I went into the boat and sealed my hatch.
To the one who sealed the boat, Puzur-Enlil the boatman,
I gave my palace with all its goods.
TABLET XI, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
One can almost hear the adolescent guffaws in the American telling of the first Gulf war, locker-room swagger that glosses over all the difficulties involved in preparing to fight the fourth-largest army in the world. Gone and forgotten are the many drills in anticipation of chemical weapons or worse, the thousands of body bags shipped to Saudi Arabia for the expected corpses, the fear that the new smart weapons would not work, and the many frustrations when the likes of Scud missiles stymied the best of plans. All was miraculously expunged at the end of forty-three days, and making fun of the hapless opponents, with their mismatched uniforms and meager supplies, became the new narrative, the impetuous and thoughtless heaving of the severed flank of the Bull of Heaven at the gods was the taunting of the enemy.
Perhaps one of the saddest pretenses is in the urban legend of Iraqi soldiers being so stupid that they tried to surrender to a drone. It was on one of the last days of the conflict. An unmanned Pioneer, its snowmobile engine screeching away at about 2,000 feet, overflew Kuwait’s Faylakah Island, taking video that included footage of Iraqi soldiers waving white flags in the air.
The footage was beamed back to a US Navy battleship and went viral in military channels. The story, which was quickly embellished, became lore not just of Iraq’s easy dispatch but also of the magic of the unmanned.1 Remote images of the enemy surrendering!
In 1991, live video was virtually unheard of outside highly classified intelligence circles, and now the hierarchical bottom-dwellers had their own eyes in the sky. No longer did they have to wait for information to come in from distant agencies—agencies that would package this information without regard for the consumers.2 It wasn’t quite real-time surveillance in the way we think of that today, but it was a taste. Users fell in love with the pictures. General Walter Boomer, the top marine commander, labeled the Pioneer drone “the single most valuable intelligence collector” of Desert Storm.3
But this wasn’t really the case. On the contrary, drones were actually a scant footnote in the war, deployed in limited numbers and of marginal utility. One-way kamikaze-like electronic fakers were used by air warriors to deceive Baghdad air defense systems on the opening night of the war.4 But other than that, the only notable contribution was made by three dozen 400-pound Pioneers, which flew a total of 330 missions, spending about 1,000 hours in the air.5 Working for the army and the marines, these short-range drones went in close where it was thought too dangerous for man to venture, and in a couple of instances scored some tactical success, perhaps auguring what was to come with greater reliability and integration in the future.6 But in actuality, the majority of Pioneers belonged to the navy and spent most of their time out of harm’s way and supporting a sideshow, lurking over a Kuwaiti mudflat jutting into the gulf. There the most forsaken of Iraqi infantry remained trapped and cut off from communications and supply, bit players in an American pretense of pinning down coastal forces by deceiving them into thinking an amphibious invasion was coming. In reality, those soldiers were Saddam’s cannon fodder, pins on some craven general’s map.
“Exceptional utility,” Vice Admiral David Jeremiah, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of Pioneer’s role when the war was over.7 The Pentagon’s postwar report on unmanned systems lauded the “unprecedented success” of the drone, which it said proved “the utility and importance of UAVs in combat.” Only one was shot down, the Defense Department crowed.8 “Pioneer became a legend,” said another analysis.9
Without digging further, uncurious historians refer to “Pioneer’s ability to spot each sixteen-inch round fired by U.S. battleships in real time,” thereby increasing “the accuracy of the big guns.”10 “Ability” is the key word here: there is no evidence that the Pioneer did more than fly and film. And “accuracy” also has a very strange definition; the obsolete and inaccurate projectiles hit the ground, but we don’t know much more about what happened to these shells, which weighed as much as a Volkswagen Beetle. They barreled down to earth with all of hell’s fury, the very antithesis of precision and a leftover of another epoch, America’s own version of Scud terror. In fact, over a period of sixty hours, from February 23 to 26, almost six hundred parcels of retribution—more than half of all the projectiles fired during Desert Storm and nearly as many shells as American battleships fired during the last fifteen months of World War II—rained down on the coastal “defenders.”11
The official military justification was to deceive Iraqi troops into thinking an amphibious invasion was coming and thus pinning them in place. But the real purpose was a form of brutal housekeeping: away from TV cameras and probing eyes, the battleships were pulled out of the old industrial closet and deployed. The United States was able to landfill the old ammunition abroad, rather than having to dispose of it back home.12 Faylakah was the perfect venue for our leftovers. In fact, fighters bombing Iraqi targets farther inland also dropped bombs on Faylakah Island upon returning to their aircraft carriers from unsatisfying missions—the planes couldn’t land on the ships with external bombs still slung under their wings, so they had to go. They could have been jettisoned into the water, but why waste a bomb? Even the incident involving Iraqi soldiers surrendering to Pioneer has an explanation. A Pioneer launched from the battleship Wisconsin became uncontrollable and headed off over Iraqi positions, positions that had already been subjected to heavy bombardment. Iraqi troops poured out of their bunkers and trenches, waving any white material they could lay their hands on in a desperate bid to surrender before—they assumed—the arrival of yet more sixteen-inch shells. Flying at a low level and out of control, the drone had developed a mind of its own and must have appeared particularly menacing—at least before it ran out of fuel and crashed.13
The boosters crowed about Pioneer’s debut, but the actual record of its performance and its overall military contribution tells a different story. This would be the usual case as warfare moved from the industrial to the information era, this dichotomy of everything going as well as could be expected, or even better, the technology working perfectly, and yet that fact is completely divorced from any complex and larger outcome. This phenomenon has become even more pronounced with drones and the world of black boxes, where in addition secrecy and novelty aggrandize so much attention, obscuring and even erasing the reality on the ground.
So despite all of the quotes from the generals, Pioneer wasn’t any kind of magic bullet; in reality, ground commanders and operators alike found Pioneer difficult to employ and limited in its usefulness. The army’s Pioneer didn’t arrive in Saudi Arabia until a week after the shooting began and did not fly a mission until February 1.14 The 100-mile range and three-hour endurance were really too short to support ground forces at distances where they needed reconnaissance the most. The drones also demanded constant radio line of sight from the operator, and had communications lines that were both limited and vulnerable to jamming. It was supposedly a dangerous place to be, exposed to Iraqi antiaircraft guns. Thus, the claim that only one drone was shot down would be impressive were it not for the fact that Pioneers flew only in airspace where defenses had already been beaten back by other aircraft and artillery. In fact, more than a dozen Pioneers ended up lost not to enemy action, but to operator error or mechanical failure.15 Since imagery feeds via satellite links had not been developed yet, data transmission of what Pioneer could see was also limited.16 If two Pioneers were flying at once, the imagery could only be viewed from one at a time. Insufficient infrared cooling systems hampered nighttime viewing, and operators never quite knew precisely where the drones were, lacking as they were in both precision navigation and onboard geolocation. With a small engine that was overstressed and required special 100-octane gasoline, and with little ability to maneuver, flying was also hazardous.17 Rain eroded Pioneer’s laminated wood propellers.18 “If it’s raining… or even drizzling, we aren’t flying,” said one navy Pioneer operator.19
Pioneer wasn’t the only system hindered by weather conditions. Even the latest aircraft and laser-guided weapons were flummoxed by rain and moisture, dust and smoke. Half of the missions of the star of the war, the F-117 stealth fighter, were aborted due to weather. The problem was mostly the laser-guided bombs the F-117 carried, predominantly the GBU-27, the newest-generation 2,000-pound munition designed specifically for use by the stealth fighter and its advanced target acquisition system.20 Laser-guided bombs work by using an onboard seeker that responds to reflected laser radiation at a certain frequency. The seeker sees the target as a bright spot and sends signals to the bomb’s basic steering mechanism to orient the direction of flight toward the target. But low visibility and moisture in the air interfered both with basic laser performance and with the aircraft viewing system. Even when weapons were launched, the success rate of synchronizing and then “locking on” the laser spot with the seeker was compromised.
It was a mass of frustrations—the need to counter Iraq’s Scud missile maneuvers, the weather limitations, and the promise (and limitations) of Pioneer and other drones 21—driving what airpower expert Barry Watts calls the development of “a true reconnaissance-strike complex able to find fleeting or time-sensitive targets and strike them in near–real time.”22 Needed first was something that would allow aircraft and weapons to simply receive coordinates on the ground and home in on that location. The navy’s Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging Global Positioning System (NAVSTAR), which later went by the acronym GPS, provided the geographic transparency.23 After Desert Storm, the air force also accelerated development of a new bomb called the Joint Direct Attack Munition (or JDAM, pronounced “jay-dam”), a weapon dependent on GPS and one that eventually paved the way to making geolocation the most important objective in warfare.24
Developed by Boeing, JDAM is a conversion “kit” for dumb bombs that gives any aircraft an all-weather precision strike capability, requiring only that the weapon senses where it began and where the target is in geographic coordinates. And at less than $30,000 per kit, JDAM cost one-twentieth of what a laser-guided bomb cost and one-fiftieth of what a cruise missile cost.
Of course, nothing is that simple, especially once an active, mobile enemy is involved, but as long as the position, speed, and heading of the aircraft are known and communicated to the weapon; as long as JDAM can acquire and track the signals of four GPS satellites once it leaves the airplane; as long as the coordinates of the target on the ground are accurate; as long as the release mechanism on the airplane, the computers, the mission planning software, the fuses, and the bomb all work; as long as no human error is made in “fat fingering” data into computers, then JDAM is able to fly itself to the given coordinates and hit the target, exploding within about forty-five feet of any intended location on earth, regardless of weather.25 This is officially labeled “near precision,” which gives some sense of how much perfection was sought.
After all of the unexpected weather interferences of Desert Storm, JDAM quickly moved forward in development. During testing, weapons recorded 95 percent system reliability while consistently landing one-third closer than the design specifications demanded.26 Amidst testing, on June 26, 1993, the twenty-fourth GPS satellite was launched into orbit, completing the worldwide network. Each satellite carries a time code and a precise data point that when triangulated allows a receiver to calculate position, speed, and time to the nearest few feet. The extremely precise time lag—measured in fractions of a second—between the satellite transmission and the receiver is converted into distance to each satellite. The minute difference between signals is then used to calculate the receiver’s position.27
JDAM kits were developed to go on 2,000-pound, 1,000-pound, and 500-pound bombs. The navy joined the program, and GPS receivers were installed in aircraft of all stripes, and a massive program was started to verify and make target coordinates on the ground up-to-date and superprecise. Time-critical targets, then identified as ballistic missiles (like the Iraqi Scuds), also demanded ways of transferring target data from real-time intelligence systems to the attacking aircraft even after the aircraft had taken off.28
In 1997, the air force received its first operational JDAMs. By then, the United States had been patrolling the skies over Iraq for six years, enforcing no-fly zones and occasionally bombing targets on the ground. Development of JDAM followed big-war visions, which of course meant big numbers. According to one air force briefing, incorporating JDAMs into B-1 bombers would represent 78 percent of the air force’s payload, or the ability to deliver 2,280 JDAMs by ninety-five bombers in a single attack,29 more than all of the weapons delivered by the entire stealth fighter force in forty-three days of Desert Storm. General Buster Glosson, the operational deputy of the first Iraq air war who went on to head the air staff’s development directorate, described JDAM’s potential, based upon testing in Nevada, as a single bomber being able to “destroy” twenty-four separate targets in a single pass.30
The astuteness behind developing JDAM was seen in 1999, when Operation Allied Force, the air war over Kosovo, began. Weather conditions over Serbia and Kosovo were at least 50 percent cloud cover more than 70 percent of the time, and only twenty-one days out of a total of seventy-eight days of bombing were clear. In addition, Serbian ground forces and paramilitaries baited and vexed air planners, moving in the literal fog, hiding under trees and in urban areas, not to mention using human shields to instill hesitation in NATO’s committee-based decision-making. Yet while 16 percent of all strike sorties were lost to poor weather, JDAM never faltered. Forty-five B-2 stealth bombers, flying arduous round-trip bombing missions all the way from Missouri to Europe, delivered 656 JDAMs day in and day out. Despite the poor weather conditions, the JDAMs performed flawlessly, according to air force reports.31
The reaction from military pilots was no different than some dot-com boomers gushing about their new inventions. “Weather and other battlefield conditions that might obscure a target do not affect JDAM,” one air force pilot said.32 “JDAM solves the problem of bad weather, camouflage, [and] excessive winds aloft and night,” said another.33 Appearing at a Pentagon briefing toward the end of the conflict, Brigadier General Leroy Barnidge, Jr., the B-2 wing commander, told reporters, “I’ve seen zero collateral damage” from JDAM strikes.34
So many bombs dropping on so many precise targets: that was the public picture. But the true behind-the-scenes goal was a scramble to obtain and generate sufficient targets, thereby increasing the capacity of bomb-damage assessment in wartime: Did the bomb hit its desired impact point? Did the bomb detonate as planned and with full force? Did the bomb fuse function as intended?35
By the time JDAM proved itself, the simplicity of black box advancements like GPS was already resulting in revolutionary changes in automobiles, telephones, and other civilian gadgetry. Many senior leaders, even senior airmen, tried to temper the notions of weather being brushed aside, of darkness being turned to light, of perfect warfare emerging in a simple three-step process of finding the target, locating it precisely, and destroying it. It wasn’t just that the networks and black boxes would themselves be potentially vulnerable to a competent opponent. The Data Machine to support the overall endeavor was still in its infancy. Unmanned technologies were becoming more and more dominant, but, like modern-day Gilgameshes, the military still needed to make a long journey.