As the Bull of Heaven snorted a pit opened up,
One hundred men of Uruk fell down it.
The second time it snorted a pit opened up,
Two hundred men of Uruk fell down it.
TABLET VI, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
The epic battle between the army and the air force started as most fights do, with a big misunderstanding. Troops were dying and getting torn apart by IEDs daily—hourly—and the air force wouldn’t give more. It wasn’t aircraft or bombs that were most needed: it was intelligence. That was how the army saw it. And that was how the new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, saw it, labeling the standoff between the two military branches an “unseemly turf fight” in which the air force wanted “absolute control of a [drone] capability for which it had little enthusiasm in the first place.”1
In the first place goes back to an anecdote Gates loves to repeat, which is that, as CIA director in 1992, he had tried to enlist the air force in the Agency’s secret drone program, only to be rebuffed. People join the air force to fly airplanes, Gates later wrote, a “mind-set” he found still prevalent when he came to the Pentagon in December 2006.2 Further, Gates found life in the Pentagon to be “largely business as usual,” a “damnable peacetime mind-set” oblivious to two wars going on.3 He openly took the army’s side in an ongoing fight over Predator support, aligning himself with the troops on the ground. Gates loved being known as the Soldiers’ Secretary, the regular-Joe advocate, and the un-Rumsfeld, even if in truth he was every bit the Washington animal and still very much stuck in predigital turf. Part of that role for Gates was to actively align himself with everyone’s preconceptions of the enduring problem. He attacked government waste, dismissing gold-plated weapons and obstreperous bureaucrats. But his own understanding of the military was stale, oblivious to the new truth of the unmanned, which was that the flying service wasn’t stuck in the past and the army really yearned to be more like the air force, which ultimately meant less tethered to the ground and closer to the heart of the Data Machine.
The army. A single archetype can represent that gigantic institution as well as “silk scarf” can accurately portray the air force. Fewer than .5 percent of the people in the air force actually fly fighter jets, even if they are a self-selected elite. The army has its own power elite—commanders of infantry and the other combat arms—and “boots on the ground” is a national purpose that seizes everyone even as the army has changed and the military has become a tangled mass of soldier, civilian, contractor, and technician. But for the army commanders, the direct supporting cast also includes the air force, the youthful invention of the twentieth century, the adolescent who broke away from military history, an institution that can be misread as only coveting the latest swoosh when in fact it wants whatever technology does the job—even if that means without the troops. Unbound by the constraints of distance and even geography, the airpower ethic is to use the information advantage—going above and beyond the territory of ground forces, going behind enemy lines, even penetrating into the mind of an enemy. When a quicksand-stuck army adopted “attack the network” as its counter-IED strategy, it was merely pursuing the air force aesthetic boiled down to its very essence. And this was the aesthetic not just of the air force but of the modern fighting force in general, dominated as it is by the Data Machine and its army of unlaborers and technicians, who vastly outnumber those flying fighter jets or actually doing combat in ground units.
If “attack the network” was going to be the task, and counterinsurgency tactics were emerging that valued synchronized and heartfelt action over combat, not-killing over killing, winning hearts over stopping hearts, then what was really behind the army–air force tension was a result of years of history. As far back as late 2003, said Lieutenant General Richard Sanchez, the first postcombat commander in Iraq, the army admitted to itself that it was completely unprepared for the task beyond invasion and conventional war. We were “completely lost in a totally different operational environment,” Sanchez said.4 Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, then a brigade commander in Baghdad and later chairman of the Joint Chiefs, agreed, saying that the frustration in this new kind of nonwar was that “we’re either fighting for intelligence or we’re fighting based on that intelligence.”5
Intelligence, specifically tactical intelligence—that which takes place at the company, battalion, and brigade level—had to shift from merely being a part of operations to leading operations—and creating actionable opportunities to kill the target. Everything from basic analysis, human intelligence, and network connections to the Data Machine was beefed up as the army scrambled to adjust.6
And the army looked around: with Predators above and thousands of ROVERs peeping into someone else’s window, constantly reminding the GIs that they were the lowest on the totem pole, they coveted the big eye that would allow persistent surveillance and the entire targeting cycle all the way to their own kill. And they wanted the capability to see and kill at a distance. And there was this centralized air force operating completely at the beck and call of the ground commander and political masters, and yet seemingly unable to support the troops while the army was just trying to get through the day, dependent on others for its intelligence and airpower. Surveillance desperately shifted to the unmanned. And drones began to arrive in greater numbers. It wasn’t seamless; accident rates were high, as becoming more like the air force demanded different skills. The troops were also scared. “We don’t go out the gate without our drones,” the rule for today became. Said one army general: “We can send a UAS down an alley, use it to look around corners, or look on a roof to see what’s up there, dramatically increasing Soldier protection and preserving the force—a vital force multiplier in this era of persistent conflict.”7
“Over time, as other commanders saw what these ISR capabilities were, the demand for more of them for regular combat operations and for force protection grew exponentially,” Gates later wrote.8
And that was the point: looking outside the gates, the air force had its own set of eyes—but for what? Special operations forces had their own everything, with their own budgets, as did the counter-IED task forces, which weren’t focused on every individual combat outpost’s protection but on some bigger (almost air force–like) ephemeral network, while soldiers were dying. Even the marines were able to sustain wall-to-wall drone coverage of Fallujah for months on end in 2004, and they had their own full-spectrum aviation. And the CIA and the DEA had their own reconnaissance. The poor army guys at the bottom just had model airplanes.
If all of these incongruities weren’t enough to appeal to the new secretary, he started in office with two troubled wars and a bad taste in his mouth regarding the basic health of his military. Though to many he was a godsend, especially after Rumsfeld, he just seemed oblivious to the true struggle and the resulting larger transition that was occurring as the Data Machine exerted greater influence. First, he should have understood that the dogfaces on the front lines are always bitching and that dealing with what they think they need at any moment is a sensitive and almost parental balancing act. Second, he should have fully understood that no amount of blaming bureaucrats was going to change the immediate circumstances on the ground. And third, he should have had an inkling that the true crisis wasn’t with machinery or data—which meant the corporeal side of ISR—in other words, there was now so much data and so many eyes, the true problem wasn’t even the size of the Machine but its appetite, an appetite that excreted an abundance of intelligence, none of it clearly pointing to a losing endeavor.
In the ways of Washington, on June 28, 2007, Gates received a bracing letter from two powerful senators, Joe Biden and Republican Kit Bond, a communication from outside the family that forced him to take some kind of action. “We are concerned that the Department is failing to respond to urgent warfighter requirements because of unconscionable bureaucratic delays in Washington,” the two said.9 From commercial radios and GPS units to homemade armor needed for army vehicles, soldiers were still scrounging around and going outside normal channels to get what they needed. The battle against IEDs consumed all—the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization was reaching $10 billion annually in emergency expenditures. But now that “attack the network” was the strategy, along with the surge of troops and the new charismatic commander in Iraq practicing something called counterinsurgency, what they needed more than anything else was intelligence. Or so it seemed. And that meant drones.
Maybe it was the army’s still-simmering resentment that it had lost Predator control a decade earlier,10 maybe it was its attitude that the air force existed solely to support it, but the whispering campaign began: the air force wasn’t providing the troops with sufficient Predator sorties or hours. And now the cerebral general David Petraeus, the field commander and matinee idol, was raising the need for more ISR, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, in every conversation with the new secretary.11 “While investments had been made in remotely piloted vehicles (drones),” Gates observed, “there were no crash programs to increase their numbers or the diversity of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities for commanders.”12
It was a ridiculous statement given the clattering flock that was emerging, given the directions that the air force was already heading in.13 But unbeknownst to Gates, the army was already flying its own version of Predator, having established Task Force Observe, Detect, Identify, and Neutralize (Task Force ODIN) in Iraq, an organization that would use manned and unmanned platforms together to provide persistent surveillance and what the army was now calling manned-unmanned teaming (or MUMT). An army aviation commander described MUMT as the “preferred method for supporting dangerous missions in today’s conflicts.”14 The misunderstanders wrote that ODIN existed precisely because of “the limited numbers of USAF Predator UAVs in Iraq, and consequent refusal of many Army requests” for support.15 Many in Congress and the Pentagon became convinced of some intentional slight in not supporting the troops. More surveillance, the attitude was, would mean “more lives would be saved and the fight against insurgent led IEDs could be defeated.”16
Did Gates not know that the army was completely focused on building the flock of smaller drones like Raven to issue them to every company?17 Did he not see the army’s own compartmented developments, or the way the counter-IED and special operations worlds were just going in their own directions? Did he not know that by the time he became secretary, there were still only 150 various drones, including Predators, deployed forward, a decision made not by the air force but by higher-ups in the operational chains and a decision driven by the capacities of the Machine? And as for the air force, did he not see that when US forces invaded Iraq in 2003, the air force flew Predators as much as it could out of Kuwait and that a single Global Hawk named Grumpy had worked tirelessly on behalf of the troops? Did he not know that overall, over 90 percent of all air force intelligence collection worldwide was being thrown into the fight?18 This is the ultimate scourge of black box policies and technologies: that no one really knows the totality of the system. Gates came into office with his own history and biases, and responded to the squeakiest political wheel. The troops and their sense of neglect in the new world of the Data Machine were the squeakiest, and the most politic to go the extra mile for.
The army’s move to acquire its own Predator started in 2001, before 9/11 and before “IED” was even a term. The service was defining requirements for a replacement for Hunter, which then was less than a decade old but was considered to be an intelligence asset of limited usefulness in network-centric warfare. Various alternatives flocked about, but in March 2003, the same month the second Iraq war started, the army purchased three Improved-Gnat Extended Range (IGnat-ER) drones from General Atomics, an upgrade of the CIA Gnat-750 flown over Bosnia a decade earlier. It did so not because it anticipated deadly roadside bombs or the fight ahead; on the contrary, the army was doing what Gates said he abhorred about the air force—it was planning for the future. That meant the Future Combat System, a digital-network-centric force still of boots, but in which the ground was more ephemeral and expansive. IGnat-ER began flying in Iraq in early 2004.19
Extended Range/Multi-Purpose (ER/MP), the army’s formal name for its generic and formal requirement to replace Hunter, emerged the next year. Again, this was just the normal flow of modernization, but amidst a declining situation on the ground in Iraq, everyone outside the army thought it might be seeking to duplicate existing capabilities, and though the army argued it was entitled to replace an aging and obsolete system, it actually rebuffed a formal “analysis of alternatives,” happy to use magic adjectives to tug at the heartstrings of troop-loving Washington—urgent requirement, quick reaction—that would push their way through the bureaucracy and Congress.20
ER/MP continued forward to fill the operational requirements and specifications set down on paper for the far future, but in August 2005, General Atomics won an army contract and seventeen Warriors were purchased. Warrior was a green version of Predator and was more capable than IGnat-ER and in many ways more capable than even early air force Predator models. Again, the army and the air force argued over the new model—its capabilities, its controllers, how fancy all of the black boxes needed to be. And by early 2007, the disagreement over these big drones and central control had reached a boiling point. At an April 19 hearing, Representative Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, chairman of the armed services subcommittee dealing with airpower, complained that no one was in charge, that no one in the Pentagon was exercising control over competing programs.21 Sky Warrior Block 0 emerged during this interservice battle, with the army flying a dozen of them in Iraq.
All of this went down before Gates even became secretary, before he demanded anything. Air Force chief General T. Michael (“Buzz”) Moseley, who had been the air commander working with the army during the invasion, went public with a tone-deaf argument that the air force should become the overall “executive agent” for all medium-and high-altitude drones flying above 3,500 feet. “Demand for UAVs currently exceeds supply, and it will continue to do so even after all the Services have fielded all their programmed” capabilities, he wrote. “My proposal… is all about getting the most ‘joint’ combat capability out of these limited Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) resources, while promoting Service interdependence and ensuring the best stewardship of America’s tax dollars.” 22 On September 28, 2007, Gates called a meeting of senior department officials “to read them the riot act” and urged them to apply “a sense of urgency and a willingness ‘to break china’ to get more materiel to the field faster.”23 According to Gates, the problem was that the air force was only providing eight Predator “caps” (combat air patrols)—each cap twenty-four hours of coverage with three drones—and had no plans to increase that number. “I was determined that would change,” he said.24 He directed an increase in the number of caps to eighteen, demanding a plan by November 1.25 After Moseley directed a study on how this order could be implemented, Gates thought the air force was still moving far too slowly. And the secretary says he was further frustrated that all Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne could seem to talk about was a new bomber and more F-22 stealth fighter jets, neither of which, he said “were playing any part in the wars we were already in.”26
Standardization, deconfliction, elimination of duplication, avoiding friendly fire, all the more magic Washington arguments were put forward, but it was a conflict already reduced to the simplistic explanation that the air force was lacking in support for the troops. “I’m pursuing the UAV EA [executive agent] role to make the Joint Force—not the air force—more combat capable,” Moseley responded.27 Joint Chiefs chairman General Peter Pace, US Marine Corps, agreed that it made sense to have all flights in common airspace under one authority as long as that did not “override the needs of the troops on the ground.”28 The Joint Requirements Oversight Council agreed, forwarding its recommendation that executive agency be assigned to the air force.29 But the army mounted a vigorous and effective rebuttal, arguing that its Shadow drone, organic to the division, already flew over 3,500 feet and that flying in accordance with a centrally controlled schedule would shortchange the troops. Deputy Secretary Gordon England, the man generally responsible for the business side of the Pentagon, sided with the army, and that was the end.30
But after visiting the Predator and Reaper home base in Nevada on January 8, 2008, Gates became even more convinced of a lack of enthusiasm and urgency in the air force.31 Drone personnel assignments were sluggish and seemingly second-tier; quality of life for his troops, even these video monitoring unlaborers, was shockingly subpar. A week later he wrote to Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he wanted any materiel requests from Iraq and Afghanistan ground commanders brought to his attention. The “immediate problem,” Gates said, “was the difficulty we were having in meeting our field commanders’ need for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities: a mix of unmanned drones, propeller-driven reconnaissance aircraft, analysts, linguists, and data fusion capabilities that collected and fed critical battlefield information—including intercepted phone calls of terrorist leaders and live video transmission of insurgents planting IEDs—to military commanders, who could then act on it.”32
Even though the flock migrating to the battlefield was mind-boggling in numbers and diversity, that picture of want—not control or numbers—drove the crisis. “The true metric that gauges the power that these systems bring to our current fight is the insatiable demand by our commanders for these assets,” a top army general observed.33 Now that unmanned systems and the Data Machine had become the latest superweapon, there was no way of saying that enough might be enough. Or more pointedly, there was no way of challenging the trend of the army slowly turning itself into a self-contained killing machine, usurping centralized functions into the ground combat forces and transforming itself into an intelligence-dominated (and unmanned) Machine.
On April 28, 2008, Gates appeared before the students and faculty at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, and let loose on the service for not doing its part, for being “stuck in old ways of doing business.” With respect to drones, he said he insisted that more Predators needed to be deployed but that getting them has been akin to “pulling teeth.” He announced the creation of a high-level ISR Task Force above the services, one that would “find more innovative and bold ways to help those whose lives are on the line.”34
To refute Gates, the air force said it was already doing everything he complained it wasn’t: reprogramming over $2.3 billion for fiscal year 2007, opening the way to double its Predator coverage for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a move initiated before he became secretary. On May 1, the air force said, it would be providing twenty-four Predator caps, and it was working to expand to thirty-four caps by the end of 2008.35
But Gates was on a tear. He formed a new ISR Task Force, with a mandate of commonality and resolving the army–air force dispute, another ad hoc institution given rapid acquisition authority.36 And so while the air force was redoubling its efforts, while JIEDDO was still buying every new product coming its way, and while the army was already independently buying the outlines of its own Predator force, the task force became yet another offline slush fund. In August, Gates approved seventy-two new drone and black box initiatives at a cost of $2.6 billion, more off-the-books programs that he later bragged about, saying he was able to maneuver spending without congressional approval for three years.37 By 2012, the task force had spent over $10 billion.38
Despite the army’s continued scramble to get its own Predator no matter what, IGnat-ER cum Warrior cum Sky Warrior Block 0 cum Warrior Alpha cum Sky Warrior Block 1 moved forward.39 Block 0 was followed by Sky Warrior Alpha, one foot longer with engine, avionics, and data link enhancements, incorporating the automatic landing system, with a deicing capability. Weapons capable Block 1 became the next iteration.40 The objective model for the army, an improved Predator now renamed Gray Eagle, would be 100 percent soldier maintained instead of contractor operated. Gray Eagle was armed with four Hellfire missiles, not just the two on air force Predators, and had a complete point-and-click flight system, and high-definition TV—the very capability the army originally said it didn’t need. We’re just fulfilling the secretary’s desire to field “75 percent solutions” quickly rather than 100 percent solutions on some distant horizon, an army spokesperson said.41
In Iraq, it wasn’t really Predator-type drones per se that were needed or were making a difference. The very concept of “attack the network” connoted not just a shift from operations to intelligence, but also a lessening of the importance of the physical dimension of the battle. The army, like the air force, started to use the terms “effects based” and “strategic effects” to connote this shift. In the so-called Battle for Sadr City in April 2008, a Shia-dominated northeast slum of Baghdad, a variety of drones—army Ravens and Shadows, air force Predators and Global Hawks, special operations Predators and secret Green Darts—maintained overwatch and were sent forward to scout for Apache attack helicopters and other army ground-based precision guided weapons. No one thought for a moment that Predator or Global Hawk would be doing anything different than the army’s own drones. “Supporting this one brigade, 24/7,” General Petraeus later said, “were 2 [Air Force] Predators (armed with Hellfire missiles), Shadow and Raven UAVs, aerostat blimps with optics, RAID [surveillance] towers, three air weapons teams (of two AH64 Apache [attack helicopters] each), and two additional UAVs [drones] with special capabilities [the Green Darts and special operations drones].” Also in support were air force close air support fighter jets, Petraeus said, “and the national, strategic intelligence platforms,” including satellites, the fleet of large manned intelligence aircraft and U-2s. “We gave the brigade more ISR than any unit in history,” the “we” being the joint military, though not necessarily, or not particularly, the air force.42 That battle included no army IGnats or Sky Warriors, either; they were actually unavailable to the joint commander because they belonged to the counter-IED tribe and were withheld.
When Gates became secretary, the air force was able to provide a total of eleven caps over the battlefield, split between two countries and carefully marshaled for maximum availability. By the Battle of Sadr City, the same month that Gates would let loose on the air force institution, they were on schedule to triple the number of caps to thirty-three.43 Even Gates admitted that by June 2008, the air force was able to report it was “dramatically” increasing the number of Predator patrols.44 And in fall 2007, the air force had also deployed the first of a new generation of Predator-like drones, the MQ-9 Reaper, which was a vast improvement in capabilities and combat power over the original Predator models.45
By the start of the Battle of Sadr City, the army was also bragging about its drone accomplishments: in less than a year in Iraq, the army’s Sky Warrior A was involved in 148 sensor-to-shooter target handoffs, resulting in hundreds of IED emplacers being killed, injured, or detained. In fact, now, with its flock of everything from Ravens to Sky Warriors, the army could even say that it outpaced the air force in drone hours flown at the height of the insurgency from 2005 through 2007.46
The air force valiantly fought back against the slur to its honor (and the facts). Officials pointed to the fact that although Predator’s first 100,000 hours took over ten years to attain, increased operations tempo meant that the next 100,000 hours would be reached within six months.47 The first 250,000 hours took twelve years; the second 250,000 took eighteen months and were completed in 2008.48 It had become some strange battle of the numbers, this disagreement. And then in the middle of it all, with the situation in Iraq so dire, the army assigned its version of Predator to the 82nd Airborne Division in September 2007, to fly in Afghanistan.49 It was inescapable: the army drones would act on behalf of the Machine as well.
On June 5, in an unprecedented move, the secretary of defense unexpectedly relieved both the secretary and chief of staff of the United States Air Force. Gates insisted that the sole reason was a failure to safeguard the nuclear arsenal, a Washington nightmare scenario that trumped all others and became blaring headlines after a bomber unit in the United States mistakenly transported real live nuclear weapons from one base to another.50 The seed for the June massacre, though, was Predator and the unshakable view that the flying service provided inadequate support to the army. The nuclear mishap, Admiral Mullen wrote to Gates, “is representative and symptomatic of a greater decline, for which I believe our Air Force leadership has to be held accountable.”51 At the field level, the final break with the notion of a centrally controlled intelligence capability was made. Everyone was now their own intelligence service, intelligence of course meaning data and targeting, and service of course meaning service to the Machine.