He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden.…
TABLET I, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
No target ever died in the collection process,” General Jumper, Air Forces in Europe commander, said at the time of the Kosovo conflict in 1999. “We don’t pop the cork when the picture arrives; we pop the cork when the target is dead.”1 It was pre-9/11 and Jumper wasn’t even talking about killing terrorists or individuals; a target is a target, an airfield, military barracks, troops in the field or on the move. An air force does many things, but in the end, it’s all about killing the target. From a military perspective, intelligence—air intelligence—is useless unless it contributes to the demise of a target. All capabilities are nurtured and perfected for this singular task, a focus that has evolved from cities to factories to bridges to the individual tank to the individual on the corner.
In our era of perpetual warfare, smooth-talking generals repeat the catechism of the day, which is about nation and capacity building, and about supporting the troops on the ground. But the honest and true-blue airman is trained and prepared to drop the bomb. You want it done more quickly, safely, and effectively, with fewer civilian casualties and collateral damage? he asks. Just give me the tools, provide me with the intelligence, point me in the right direction, and let me do my thing. It doesn’t matter whether the target is another airplane in the skies, a tent in the desert, or even someone’s cybertransmissions. War is ugly, and airpower is the modern lead. So an airman says tell me what the target is, even tell me what level of damage you want, and get out of the way.
It shouldn’t be too surprising, then, that before anyone in Washington was focused on Osama bin Laden, before the politicos “thought of” putting a missile on Predator, before bureaucrats advanced their counterterrorism covert action programs, before anyone started fretting about overflying Taliban-held Afghanistan or taking out any princely phantom, air warriors were already thinking about the means: put a weapon on the new Predator, and not only can you conduct reconnaissance and find a potential target, but you can also do something about it right then. You can do it against air defenses that might be too lethal for manned aircraft, and you can do it against Scud missiles that shoot and scoot. And with the right weapons and the right black boxes, it can be done in the dark, in the rain, and a world away.
From the very beginning of drones’ development, the idea of arming them had been experimented with.2 Amber—the immediate predecessor of Predator developed for Cold War duties against an industrial army—was conceived to include a loitering model that would find the target and then turn into a kamikaze missile.3 In some ways, then, the saga of getting drones from just looking to looking and killing is unexceptional in every way. Sure, Predator (and later types of unmanned drones) had to overcome dozens of technological and institutional hurdles—even some from inside the air force itself, who bristled at the unmanned quality. But then, every new capability has to fight to gain traction in a world of tribes and limited resources: bomber versus fighter, combat versus support, intelligence versus operations, conventional versus unconventional.
There were people like General Jumper who genuinely had vision and sensed how the unmanned could fill a void.4 Musing about Predator long before it was armed, Admiral William A. Owens, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one of the original proponents of network-centric warfare, said that Predator “was flying over an area… at 25,000 feet…. It had been up there for a long time, many hours, and you could see the city below, and you could focus in on the city, you could see a building, focus on a building, you could see a window, focus on a window. You could put a cursor around it and [get] the GPS latitude and longitude very accurately, remotely via satellite. And if you passed that information to an F-16 or an F-15 [fighter flying overhead] at 30,000 feet, and that pilot can simply put in that latitude and longitude into his bomb fire control system, then that bomb can be dropped quite accurately onto that target, maybe very close to that window, or, if it’s a precision weapon, perhaps it could be put through the window.…”5 It would be many years before that vision would be even close to realization, but after the concept of loitering unmanned reconnaissance was “proven”6 in Bosnia, money began flowing: the Pentagon alone spent more than $3 billion on unmanned aerial systems in the 1990s.7 Much of that money went to fund even higher-flying, longer-range, stealthier, and far more expensive drones than Predator. More than a decade’s work lay ahead in perfecting an aerodynamically and militarily robust flying machine that would reliably be able to kill the target.
The black box rides alongside as the silent partner: a military is remarkable for its men and its machines, not for its accessories. Predator is just Predator to all but the experts, extraordinary for its flying and enthralling for its video output. But nothing happens without the peripherals and the payloads, and each year of Predator operations, different types and generations of black boxes accumulated—all with different objectives. Each accessory represented a modification and an expense. Each meant a penalty in weight, a new demand on limited onboard power, and an entire new family of corporate and government partners. So though it was still just Predator, in the course of three years from when it first flew, the drone’s service ceiling was increased to 45,000 feet and the payload expanded from 400 to 750 pounds. A new engine was installed while additional accessories needed to kill the target quietly burrowed into the fuselage and the Machine.
When the 1996 model of the Predator started Bosnia duty, certainly the most important black box was its new synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the very ground-mapping capability which allowed the drone to see day or night, through cloud cover and during inclement weather. SAR works by transmitting sharp microwave beams (pulses) to “illuminate” an area and then receive and process the reflected signals.8 The first SAR mounted on Predator was called the Tactical Endurance SAR system (TESAR) and provided continuous, near-real-time strip-map (wide-area) imagery. The radar allowed the identification of objects viewed from 25,000 feet within an area as small as one square foot.9 The continuous sweep was formed on board Predator, compressed, and sent via data link in a scrolling manner called a “waterfall display” to the ground control station, where dedicated computer stations and special software were used to reform and display usable images. Analysts on the ground could then select one-by-one kilometer stills for further exploitation.
At 165 pounds, TESAR was an engineering marvel, not the first of the Gilgamesh generation of black boxes by any means, but certainly the most influential in opening up the world of seeing beyond the optical, not just into the fog but also increasingly into other spectra. Some panned TESAR’s scrolling output because that streaming waterfall display could be read only by trained analysts and was thereby useless to the average viewer.10 But multiple generations followed: the Lynx SAR and then the Starlite black boxes that produced a more pleasing display at a fraction of the price, with multiple channels instead of one, with spot map and moving targeting indicator modes in addition to strip-map mode, at a third of the weight, with four times less power consumption, at ten times the resolution, a thousand times more user friendly. These are the very tablets of our modern era, the revelation of all that is hidden.
The air war over Kosovo started in March 1999, and by then, Predator (and its predecessor the Gnat-750) had been routinely flying in congested airspace across national boundaries for four years. During the seventy-eight days of bombing, seven Predators flew alongside a navy Pioneer detachment operating from ships in the Adriatic Sea, and the army flew Hunter (a drone a third of the size of Predator and the first army drone to fly in real-world combat).11 Problems related to weather and technology led to many cancellations and losses, but the fleet still managed an average of six one-to-three-hour missions daily, largely thanks to black boxes. Predator transmitted near-real-time imagery directly to users and acted as a “second set of eyes” on targets.12 And most important, Predator video fed the chain of command, appearing live on screens in Belgium, Italy, and Germany, at the Pentagon, and even in the White House Situation Room.13
The Serbs had become proficient both in hiding from drones and in shooting them down when they wandered too close, honing their experiences during Bosnia. Still, as air force chief of staff General Michael Ryan quipped: “[Drones] go out there and die for their country—and we don’t mourn.”14 Given that mission number one for the international coalition was zero friendly casualties, and that the road to winning the war against Serbia was continuous flying and bombing until Slobodan Miloševic cried uncle, not mourning really mattered. And despite their limitations, drones could do things that manned aircraft couldn’t. They could linger and spot targets in hollows or other shadowy areas where reconnaissance satellites or manned aircraft couldn’t see. They could assess bomb damage in near–real time by loitering above the bombers. They could linger and search for mobile targets that the Serbs otherwise ably camouflaged.
In Kosovo, General Jumper credited Predator’s long loiter time as a key element in allowing targeters to distinguish civilians from fighters and paramilitaries. “We have documented instances of Serbian special police using the very tractors that the civilians were using to go from house to house to burn and to kill,” he said.15 But Kosovo was also the first true global information war. Every image of American and NATO destruction on television and the Internet heavily influenced a nervous European public, scoring a direct hit in the battle for hearts and minds. It didn’t matter that this was the very war where B-2 bombers and their weather-defying JDAM bombs shifted the percentage of weapons dropped squarely into the precision column. The debate about civilian casualties and collateral damage grew red hot.
Despite their frustrations about the political constraints on bombing, the military remained focused on the job they had to do when they could fly: killing the target. Predator in its 75 sorties and 870 hours of flying proved more promising than ever, but the senior leadership was also aware that it wasn’t yet the optimum tool. Jumper called the problem the “dialogue of the deaf”: a Predator team would locate some target of opportunity with its camera, circuitously relaying the information to tip off some nearby strike asset, and then a frustrating exchange would ensue. That was because the sensor operator of the Predator was looking through what is called a “soda straw” optic at 10-power magnification. He’d say: “Well, if you look over to the left, there’s a road right beside the two houses. A tree line is right next to that. A river is running nearby.” The pilot nearby saw an endless sea of red-roofed buildings and countless roads. Forty-five minutes later, the sensor operator and the pilot might have talked their way “into the same Zip code,” Jumper said, but by that time, the jet would have had to leave the target area to refuel. “You’d have the Predator up there looking at targets, but you had no way to get that information, other than verbally, to the airplanes that were going to attack those tanks.”16
So once again, a black box stepped in.17 Off the books and unrestrained by bureaucratic red tape, the technologists who serve to arm the cutting edge recommended that Predator’s first-generation rotating camera ball be replaced with one that would offer both a camera and a laser illuminator—just like the one on a combat airplane. That would allow the drone sensor operator to observe a potential target and put a laser “spot” on it on the ground for a nearby fighter pilot to instantly see. A Raytheon-made turret, intended for use by navy helicopters, already existed, its sole downside being that it had only an infrared viewer and not a daytime camera.18 That wasn’t so bad, however, particularly since “hot” hiding tanks were the target of the moment, and now Predator could spot a target’s heat signature and put a laser on it.
“Things moved with what became legendary speed,” one study recounts. “The laser designator was obtained from the navy only 18 hours after the recommendation was approved. Testing was accelerated, and the first laser-equipped Predator was deployed to Kosovo just 38 days later.”19 Two airframes (nicknamed WILD, for wartime implemented laser designator) were ready for combat on June 2, and the drone was now bulked up with a targeting black box.20 There was one successful test in which a WILD Predator lased for an A-10 that night;21 Miloševic accepted NATO’s demands for ending the conflict the next day.22
But the vision was solidified. WILD transformed Predator from “just a pure surveillance system into something that actually… directs weapons on the targets,” Jumper said.23 When he returned to the United States months later, he inquired as to the further development of more WILD Predators, only to learn that bureaucrats had not only squashed the retrofit of Predators with the new laser designators, but had even ordered the laser ball turrets taken off the WILDs because they weren’t a validated official requirement. Jumper was “furious”24 that “the tyranny of our acquisition process” had mindlessly excised a capability.25 Air force bureaucrats maintained that “there was general concern for the lack of proper training and employment/tactics to use the laser designator” and that Predator had three different configurations, each of which required a different set of technical orders, whereas there needed to be one baseline system.26
I don’t want to understate the impact of an unthinking bureaucracy or the passive-aggressive tendencies of all government infighters. Bureaucratic shenanigans and rivalries are common, and they are hardly unique to the air force. But here’s the point: this is the why of why the black box world exists. In Washington things rarely get done unless they happen off the books and in the underworld. Nothing happens without top cover support of someone in a position of leadership, like a Jumper, or the outside lobbying of self-interested voices. Nothing happens unless a special organization with special authorities does it. A black box solves so many problems. And black boxes are so good at then becoming both darling (and star) for those special few in the know.
The black box hovers above and rides parallel to all that is unspecial, not just adding to the allure of the next black box, but also leaving behind unanswered bigger questions. In the American narrative, it’s hard not to see Predator and other hunter-killers—unmanned and manned—as the spindly loners wielding justice: the very embodiment of some laconic Clint Eastwood hero or some futuristic and noisy Luke Skywalker breaking the rules but fighting the fight against the dark side.
How, though, do others see the black boxes and the unmanned? When I visited Serbia immediately after the Kosovo war, the impact of an airpower-only war was palpable. After seventy-eight days of air attacks but with no ground fighting and political capitulation by Slobodan Miloševic after he failed to outlast NATO’s bombing, the people on the streets (pro-and antigovernment alike) were outraged. The United States was cowardly, they said, and since the United States with all of its technology was all-seeing, the only conclusion they could draw was that the United States had intentionally decided who would die and who would live, creating civilian casualties to instill fear and uncertainty, punishing the Serbian people but not even saving the Kosovars, because the real purpose of the war was to teach Serbia a lesson and subordinate it to modern Europe. Thus the shape of the post-9/11 world was already forming. Black box operations were starting to demonstrate a speed and flexibility that matched the emerging information culture. Unmanned war machines were showing real promise not just in sparing human lives but also in filling gaps in capabilities. And though the objective of hitting the target—anywhere, anytime, in any weather, and now even with exactly the political modulation suggested—was undeniably reducing collateral civilian harm, warfare was becoming remote and baffling and even opaque, pulling it more and more into secret recesses and therefore further away from human intervention.