[Wild Cow] Ninsun was clever [and wise, well versed in everything,]
[the mother of] Gilgamesh.…
She smothered the censer and came [down from the roof,]
She summoned Enkidu…
TABLET III, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
The Afghanistan war in its first few weeks just about confounded everyone—after all, there was no industrial military opponent à la Serbia or Iraq, and there were no discernible targets. But the official public utterances were right on. “I want to remind you that while today’s operations are visible, many other operations may not be so visible,” General Myers said at the podium of the Pentagon press room on the first night.1 The next night on the CBS Evening News, Rumsfeld added: “We’re so conditioned as a people to think that a military campaign has to be cruise missiles and television images of airplanes dropping bombs, and that’s just false. This is a totally different war. We need a new vocabulary. We need to get rid of old think and start thinking about this thing the way it really is.”2
Yet despite attempts by Rumsfeld and Myers, the story of war continues to be all about bombs and bullets. In this version of war, friendly versus enemy hardware is stacked up on two sides of a ledger, with divisions of men mobilized and trained and prepared to move to some front line where they engage in battles that look largely unchanged from those that took place thousands of years ago. Rumsfeld and company stressed all of the right points in arguing that this was not going to be our forefathers’ war. But even they could not anticipate how different this war would be, and how the Data Machine—and its vast collection of intelligence—would begin to take over, even as the public narrative of war stayed largely stuck in the industrial age (and on the ground).
This is the essence of the wars the United States now fights. Individual targets—fixed, mobile, and now even individual humans—are identified and validated and located and tracked from the ground or the sky; they are identified through imagery, electronic emissions, communications, or other intelligence. In this kind of war, the strikers are more abundant than good targeting information, and the data itself, like a camouflaged enemy, masks the intelligence. The magic is melding what satellites and high-flying aircraft can see and hear, fusing together audio and video, the visible and invisible electromagnetic spectrums, and then processing and moving all of the information literally around the globe in seconds to make decisions. The key is to have strikers on station above or in close for that moment in time.3
In a place as far away and isolated as Afghanistan, whether cruise missile strikes or manned bombing are involved or not, the data scouts—both human and machine—at the edge of the Machine are almost always there first. These are the intelligence collectors who map enemy air defenses, the spy planes that listen in on radio communications, the photographers who image military installations and enemy concentrations. In 2001, Predators were sent out to do reconnaissance. They first overflew Afghan airspace before anyone else did, with an air force–led crew operating the now-veteran drone from an improvised ground control station in a wooded area on the CIA’s grounds in Langley, Virginia.4 But at that point, the majority of the scouts (if you don’t count reconnaissance satellites) were almost completely manned. America’s “strategic” intelligence collectors, all manned, air force RC-135 and navy EP-3 signals intelligence planes and the high-flying U-2s, began patrols around the periphery of Afghanistan almost immediately after 9/11 to sniff out prospective targets; they would penetrate into Afghan airspace soon thereafter.5 Manned navy P-3C Orion airplanes, meanwhile, normally used for antisubmarine warfare and maritime surveillance (and also equipped with a full-motion video camera similar to the Predator’s), leapfrogged closer to the potential battlespace, where they would join the others overflying the Taliban from forward air bases in Pakistan.6 When the air force squadrons and the aircraft carriers arrived, EA-6B, ES-3, and specialized F-16 planes brought in electronic warfare capabilities and other black boxes. The Royal Air Force brought its own equivalents as well: Nimrod R1 electronic intelligence aircraft, the Canberra PR9 reconnaissance aircraft, and an E-3D AWACS flying radar. The French air force contributed the Mirage IV reconnaissance jet.7
“For the first time in the history of modern warfare,” Ben Lambeth wrote in his semiofficial history of the conflict, a war “was conducted under an overarching intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) umbrella that stared down relentlessly in search of enemy activity.”8 There was a lot of ISR, but “relentlessly” is pure hyperbole, and the initial small contribution of the unmanned goes by without remark. It was the amount of ISR overhead that would become a measure of success; it was the ability of each collecting platform or its black boxes to collect the right data to serve the needs of the specific weapons or the characteristics of the specific targets. And those needs were becoming more and more exacting. Bombing, the visible element of the conventional war model, initially unfolded with the attack on fixed targets associated with the Taliban and then moved to troops in the field. But the satellite-guided JDAM bombs—precise and economical—had taken on a meticulous singularity, each a product of a specific GPS coordinate rendered by some human. You want the bomb where? At that spot on the front lines? On that mortar position? So one bomb was delivered. But government officials were not impressed with one bomb—no matter how precise it was. They wanted more. In fact, the day after bombing commenced, the head of the CIA team inside northern Afghanistan wrote that the “disappointment with the Northern Alliance’s senior ranks to the first night’s bombing was palpable…. News from the NA commanders on the Kabul front reported no bombs falling on the Taliban or Arab positions.” Intercepted radio communications from Taliban positions on the front lines also “indicated a sense of relief among the Taliban forces at the low level and limited impact of the bombing.” 9 Four days later, the CIA station chief in Islamabad further sent a cable labeling the military effort in southern Afghanistan even worse and a “political disappointment.”10
The Northern Alliance probably would have been ecstatic if B-52s and “dumb bombs” had come in instead and carpet-bombed their archenemies into dust, as was the case through the end of the war in Vietnam. But regardless of the emotions of 9/11, something crucial had changed, and practices lacking in a precision result had become antithetical to the airpower creed. Despite all the anger unleashed by the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, despite a Bush administration that beat its breast, bellowing that it would break with the recent past of controlled bombing to introduce “shock and awe,” the same unmanned Tomahawk cruise missiles dominated in the first few days, and air attacks remained as controlled as they had been at any time in the Clinton administration. The Bush White House—or at least someone with a political eye to the future—restricted attacks in urban areas and imposed collateral-damage and civilian-casualty restraints not much different than those used in the Balkans.11
Even General Tommy Franks called the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom the “ten days from Hell,”12 demonstrating that his lifelong artilleryman’s viewpoint was even more habituated to imagining blistering bombardment. Rumsfeld was putting constant pressure on Franks, particularly apoplectic that the CIA was getting all the credit because military special operations forces hadn’t yet arrived. It appeared that perhaps a frustrated nation and a wholly changed military would still reach back into the deep past of carpet-bombing to mete out a little more old-fashioned killing.13
For almost a week nothing changed in the design or pace of the war, but then on October 16, manned AC-130 gunships took part in the air campaign for the first time, attacking Taliban frontline positions.14 Gunships operated by the Air Force Special Operations Command would become the most lethal assets available to the CIA and special operations forces working with the Northern Alliance (and later with Karzai’s Pashtun fighters in the south) in the weeks ahead, supporting nearly every major offensive in strafing Taliban troops and pulverizing prepared defenses. With a legacy of nicknames like Puff the Magic Dragon, Angel of Death, Ultimate End, and Equalizer, the gunships delivered old-fashioned bloody vengeance. Each plane was armed with a side-mounted 25mm Gatling gun capable of firing 1,800 rounds a minute, a 40mm cannon—think machine gun firing small artillery shells—and a 105mm howitzer that fired 33-pound shells. These were said to be so accurate and fast that a single airplane could put one round in every square foot of a football field in seven seconds. If anyone argued that bombardment of that sort wasn’t precision, the airpower advocates would counter that these were “special” operations. They hardly had to argue; the missions were secret.
Doctrine was for the gunships to fly a racetrack pattern above the battlefield, but the lumbering aerial battleships, flying slowly and at low altitude (and with a crew of fourteen) were consequently also vulnerable to missiles and gunfire from the ground (one was shot down over Kuwait during Desert Storm). So despite the passions of 9/11, the vulnerability of these manned aircraft restricted their operations. Crews were also having a problem in sparsely populated and mountainous Afghanistan: the sound of their presence traveled great distances at night, when the AC-130s flew for greater protection and safety. During orbits to line up their targets, the crews would often watch enemy fighters scatter in their infrared scopes.15 To give the gunships a leg up in defending themselves and in preparing immediate fire, the technologists furiously worked to bring a live feed from a Predator already overflying Taliban defenses that would then prep the planes while they were as far as 100 miles away. The addition of the black box in November had an immediate payoff. Now, rather than the aircraft gunners looking through their own television viewing system and infrared detection sensors to find targets, or making contact with a ground spotter who would literally have to talk the aircraft gunner onto a desired target, those in the plane had their own unmanned scout and could see exactly what the drone saw, arriving ready and blasting away.16
It wasn’t until October 16, the same day AC-130s began flying, that military special operations forces staged in Uzbekistan were also finally given the go-ahead to insert into the Panjshir Valley as well.17 Then on October 19, in the first action by US ground forces, special operators flew in four specially configured MH-47 helicopters from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk in the Indian Ocean, overflying Pakistan to penetrate deep into Taliban country. Officially it was a mission to “disrupt Taliban leadership and AQ [al Qaeda] communications, gather intelligence and detain select personnel.” AC-130 gunships and heavily armed MH-60 Blackhawk helicopters peppered the objectives with artillery and missiles moments before the assault.
Really, it was a demonstration, an isolated operation to put boots on the ground, one intended to send a signal both to the enemy and to the American people. For General Franks and the other ground force leaders in the US military, and for the Bush administration, the departure from cruise missile strikes and airstrikes represented the important break with the recent past. So on October 19, when the parachutes opened and the helicopters roared, old-fashioned images of real war were finally registered. The assault was directed at two objectives—one Gecko (Mullah Omar’s house west of Kandahar) and the other Rhino, an unused airfield in southern Afghanistan. The special operators spent a total of an hour on the ground at Gecko, some collecting whatever was left to collect, but most just manning security positions to protect everyone until the show was over.18
With the infiltration of military special ops and the “success” of October 19, though, bombers and fighters shifted from hitting preplanned fixed targets to flying “flexed” missions against Taliban troops: opportunistic strikes.19 As more and more US special operations soldiers arrived to accompany anti-Taliban forces, highly specialized ground controllers (called Joint Terminal Attack Controllers, JTACs—pronounced “jay-tacks”) also arrived. With their GPS and laser designators and black boxes connecting them to the precise maps and all of intelligence in the GIG, there was an immediate increase in the lethality of JDAM strikes.20 If the Taliban reinforced their weak points or moved to redeploy, they only exposed more targets for aircraft—which were now practically circling overhead in wait—to attack.21 After ten years of overflying Iraq, every one of those fighter jets and most of the bombers also brought with them their own black boxes, external pods and data links that gave them photographic and radar capabilities better than any spy plane of old. The attacker and the scout were also increasingly integrated, the synergy meaning that every individual mission had greater effect even as fewer weapons were expended.
Still, the anxiety among the government and the American population on the whole about military progress continued to rise. At a National Security Council meeting on October 24, President Bush shot a “barrage of questions at Rumsfeld and Myers” about whether the Pentagon had a “winter scenario” to go after cave hideouts, the assumption being that the war would go on for at least several more months. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice even “suggested to the president the possibility of changing the strategy and Americanizing the Afghan effort by adding large numbers of U.S. ground forces.”22 That anxiety was reflected in the public debate as well. Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and future vice president, told the Council on Foreign Relations that the air attacks were making the United States look like “a high-tech bully.” On Face the Nation, Senator John McCain said the United States was “going to have to put troops on the ground.” The war would involve casualties and “it won’t be accomplished through airpower alone.”23
On October 26, 2001, nineteen days into Operation Enduring Freedom, the young Machine almost at full bore, Donald Rumsfeld signed a deployment order to send the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle to Afghanistan. The drone was still experimental, and only two airframes were ready—no one had ever flown it in any kind of combat environment. By the first week of November, Global Hawk was overflying Afghanistan at 60,000 feet, giving commanders something they had never had before: a persistent wide-angle view of the battlefield.24
By the first of November, twenty-three days after combat began, CIA teams on the ground reported intercepted Taliban radio communications “full of panic and fear…”25 The Machine was demonstrating its economy, and JDAMs were hitting their targets. And then it was dramatically over: bombed and harried, greased by CIA money and fighting their brethren rather than Americans, the Taliban disintegrated. Mazar-i-Sharif fell, and then Taliban forces started retreating from Kabul. The western city of Herat also fell, followed by Jalalabad and finally Kandahar. Taliban government ceased to exist, and al Qaeda leadership fled to the eastern mountains and Pakistan.
And then, ironically, though precision airpower had worked while the Taliban defended their turf, it turned out that once Taliban forces left their prepared defenses, that same machine faltered. Both sides were out of uniform; both insisted on using military and civilian vehicles; the battlefield extended into cities and towns, and fighters freely (and even intentionally) intermingled with civilians. This shift to the long war of individual targeting occurred silently. And with it came the need for those very ISR assets not only to be able to linger much longer, but also to exist in such abundance that each would serve as a replacement for a human spotter (or fighter) on the ground.
Special operations and airpower seem to be the easy answer to the question of future US military strategy, even if one considers the enormous US and international ground forces that would follow over the next decade and a half. Those small-scale forces were leveraged by what the military calls “persistency over the battlefield” and “highly adaptive planning,”26 which colloquially can be translated to mean almost limitless options at any time or place, as long as reliance is not too heavy on forward-deployed forces, which tend to suck up as much energy to sustain and protect as they exert additional combat power in this kind of frontless battle. None of this strategy could be implemented without black boxes and drones. As military attention shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, true star status was conferred on Predator. General Franks called the drone “my most capable sensor in hunting down and killing al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership,” and General Jumper declared it “the ideal weapon”27 to “take care of a range of targets that we called fleeting and perishable—ones that get away quickly.”
But in 2002, Predator was ideal more in potential than in reality. The drone continued to be plagued by the weather; it could not take off or land when crosswinds exceeded 17 knots, and at least three Predators crashed in Afghanistan between October 2001 and February 2002 because of bad weather and ice.28 Global Hawk, in fact, only flew seventeen missions and was grounded between January and March 2002 after one of two crashed (a second crashed in July 2002).29 Drones didn’t get Mohammed Atef, and no one of any consequence was hunted down by Predator until November 2002, when a CIA drone flying from Djibouti made its first kill in Yemen.30
But the Machine was an immature prodigy. Every part was producing or moving information and adapting inside a growing network. Communications had moved a long way since Desert Storm in 1991, when there was a negligible spread between voice, video, and data needs. Most people did not have e-mail, and the World Wide Web had yet to be invented. The army corps commander was limited to being able to fax one sheet of paper to each of his division subordinates to send written orders,31 and the daily air tasking order telling all planes where to fly and what to bomb had to be printed out and each copy ferried to aircraft carriers and outlying air bases via courier because the file was too large to transmit over existing lines. In the entire Gulf War of 1991, to support more than half a million troops on the ground, the total data rate used by the entire US military was 99 megabits per second (Mbps).32
The demand for bandwidth to support military operations increased from 99 Mbps in Desert Storm to 250 Mbps in Operation Allied Force, the seventy-eight-day Kosovo war.33 That was two and a half times as much bandwidth, but it was to support one-tenth as many soldiers; hence, it was 25 times as much bandwidth per soldier on the battlefield. Much of that increase was caused by the need to move digital intelligence data. To operate two Predators simultaneously required 12 Mbps.34 Maintaining a quality link to Beale Air Force Base in California (where imagery was being processed) “remained problematic throughout the campaign.”35 Even with only a few drones operating, one study concluded, “communications systems were stressed to the point that operational trade-offs were required and some activities had to be delayed or cancelled.”36 Video teleconferencing also came of age in Kosovo and became all the rage for political consultation and micromanagement, sucking up additional satellite bandwidth, particularly when the meetings were held at the top secret level and took over specialized communications networks. And even simple networked changes in ways of doing business demanded more bandwidth; the shift from maintaining huge stockpiles of munitions and supplies to what is called “as needed” transport, even basic bar code and GPS tracking that provided greater visibility over supplies, demanded additional bandwidth.
In the weeks before Operation Enduring Freedom, the Afghanistan war, Central Command projected that its network data needs would peak at 500 Mbps—it was already routinely using about 100 Mbps before 9/11 just to support day-to-day operations and the Iraq no-fly zones. Yet shortly after Afghanistan operations commenced, the military realized that its forces would need much more than 500 Mbps and potentially more than one gigabit (one billion bits) per second (Gbps).37 In just two years, from Kosovo to OEF, the network requirement almost tripled. And that was while the “force” on the ground also declined by more than 95 percent in terms of the number of human beings.
More and more unmanned vehicles were also not just creators of information, but also voracious users. Within three weeks of 9/11, the Defense Department leased its first commercial satellite transponder just to accommodate the bandwidth demands of one drone—Global Hawk. Before the end of 2001, the commercial bandwidth capacity for CENTCOM support surged to more than half a gigabyte; and the Pentagon paid over $300 million to lease (and reserve) capacity on civilian satellites.38 On the East Coast, four commercially operated gateways were added to the existing military teleports, quadrupling capacity.39
One postwar lessons learned report says: “The dominant transformation feature throughout the campaign… whether technological, operational, or organizational in nature, was the contributory role of information over kinetics—‘brains over brawn.’”40 Some would confuse the change as a simple combination of airpower and special operations. Some would chalk up the victory to covert action, money, and some unique attribute of the Afghan people. Why wars are won and why this campaign signaled such a false picture of successful conclusion will be debated for years. What can’t be debated is that no one really understood what “brains over brawn” meant in practical terms.
By Thanksgiving 2001, planning for an Iraq war started, slowly beginning the process of bleeding away intelligence assets from Afghanistan.41 The network formed for the initial advance on Baghdad mostly built upon what had been created for the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban, and though few additional unmanned systems were fielded between two wars, a networked and fully tracked ground force of 350,000 soldiers to invade Iraq demanded 3.2 gigabits per second (3,200 megabits per second), four times the bandwidth that was used in Afghanistan.42 Lieutenant General Harry Raduege Jr., director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, said of the first few months of war in Afghanistan that “we’re supporting one-tenth the number of forces deployed during Desert Storm with eight times the commercial SATCOM bandwidth.”43 Compared to Desert Storm twelve years earlier, the data requirements per soldier in Gulf War II grew exponentially. The growing number of Predators44 and Global Hawks was greatly increasing the amount of data used, but it was more that each new black box upgrade demanded yet more data as well.
On August 1, 2003, the first of forty-eight initial Global Hawk production models rolled out at Northrop Grumman’s plant in Palmdale, California. The data rate requirement to process intelligence collected by Global Hawk was ten times the bandwidth demand of Predator.45 The next growth modification of Global Hawk would require 1.1 Gbps, per drone, ten times the total bandwidth used by the entire US military in the first Gulf war; double that used for operations in Kosovo.46 Fewer men, more links, more black boxes, more data, more unmanned collectors—the Machine itself was beginning to determine the design of the very campaign that would unfold.