Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (10 page)

Lewis was a good friend to General Atomics and the Predator. As a colleague no less practiced in the lubrication of defense contracts, the late Jack Murtha (D-Pa), remarked in a 2003 hearing, “The chairman [Lewis] is too modest when he talks about the Predator. If it hadn’t been for him there wouldn’t be no Predator. He was the guy that pushed it. He was the guy that got criticized and he was the guy that they tried to stop from putting it out in the field. And he persisted and that Predator is one of the most important systems that we have.”

Thus it was that Lewis, in his capacity as vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, inserted a provision in the 1998 intelligence authorization bill mandating that all authority over the Predator and all its funding be transferred to the air force. Simultaneously, Michael Meermans, an influential intelligence committee staffer, made sure that Big Safari, a semi-secret air force development office empowered to cut corners on development funding (and, coincidentally, Meermans’ previous employer), be assigned to oversee Predator development. A Big Safari team accordingly moved into the General Atomics plant in an effort to make the machine perform some useful function, which, as we shall see, was not entirely successful. Meanwhile, General John Jumper, the head of Air Force Combat Command, deputed staffers to begin drawing up official requirements for what the Predator was actually expected to do. Jumper, who would succeed Fogleman as chief of staff, firmly believed that drones were the wave of the future as far as the air force was concerned and was ordering his priorities accordingly.

By 1999, when the Clinton administration led NATO into an air campaign against Serbia, the Predators were ready to play a part.

The three-month war on behalf of the insurgency in Kosovo, an ethnically distinct province of Serbia, put the revolution in military affairs on full display. NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley K. Clark was confident enough at the beginning to predict victory in three days. As in the 1991 Gulf War, “critical nodes”—bridges, TV stations, power plants—were targeted along with Serb army units. Also hit were businesses belonging to President Milo
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’s friends; strategists assumed that “crony targeting” would generate enough pressure on the Serbian leader to cave. As Deptula, by now a brigadier general, later remarked, particular targets had been attacked “to achieve a specific effect within the parent system.” Deptula himself was away in Turkey commanding the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, but as an admiring biographer stresses, “Deptula’s ideas guided planning and execution, though he was not present in the command structure.” Stealth bombers were once again given a leading role although one was shot down and another badly damaged (Serb radar could track it after all), along with every available tool of ISR, which now included a growing fleet of Predator drones.

Despite Clark’s confident prediction of imminent victory at the outset of the Kosovo operation, days turned into weeks as bombs rained down on a steadily expanding list of targets. Eventually, after eleven weeks and one day, President Milo
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agreed to evacuate Kosovo. That made it easy for airpower partisans to claim victory, especially as not a single airman had been lost to enemy fire. In fact, Milo
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caved only when his indispensable ally, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, withdrew his support following high-level U.S.–Russian negotiations in Moscow. As General Michael Jackson, commander of the British contingent, said afterward, Yeltsin’s desertion “had the greatest significance in ending the war” because Milo
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had banked everything on keeping Moscow’s support.

Nevertheless General Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quickly announced that the happy result was due to NATO bombs and missiles, which, according to Clark, had destroyed “around 120 tanks … about 220 armored personnel carriers,” and “up to 450 artillery and mortar pieces.” Subsequent investigation on the ground by a specialized bomb-damage assessment team concluded that the Serbs had lost no more than 12 or 13 tanks and equally few of the other vehicles and weapons. Clark was outraged and sent the team back to Kosovo for further research. Once again, the team found no evidence that the air strikes had in any way discommoded the Serb military occupation. Ultimately, a U.S. Air Force general, without conducting further research in the field, produced a report with numbers that were close enough to the initial claims to be acceptable and were so recorded as the final, official tally.

NATO staff members were in no doubt as to what had happened. As U.S. Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor, who was director of joint operations at NATO military headquarters throughout the war, later told me, “Pressure to fabricate came from the top … the [Air Force] senior leadership was determined that whatever the truth, the campaign had to confirm the efficacy of airpower and its dominance.”

Treating the enemy as an inanimate object, something that could be addressed by destroying a set number of targets, had failed once again. The Serb military, it turned out, had followed in the footsteps of General Nguyen in Vietnam. They had put dummy tanks on display, laid out sheets of black plastic to simulate roads, and deployed microwave ovens that emitted decoy signals on the same wavelength as the air force’s anti-SAM, radar-homing missiles. None of this was apparent to General Clark as he peered eagerly into his drone video monitor, or to the serried ranks of allied intelligence officers masterminding the “critical node” targeting and bombing.

Unlike the conflicts to come, the Kosovo war caused no bitter debates and left no searing memories. Yet the political effects of the instantly falsified history had far-reaching consequences. The war had been popular with liberals, both the Clinton administration and center-left governments in Europe. The campaign’s apparent confirmation that precisely targeted bombs and missiles could achieve victory at no cost in friendly casualties, and in a good cause, too, prepared the political landscape for the wars of the next century.

More hawkish factions were naturally gratified by the vindication of their strategic projections in combat. In September 1999, George W. Bush, then a presidential candidate, introduced his defense program at the Citadel military school in Charleston, South Carolina. Richard Armitage, the former Andrew Marshall subordinate who had cowritten the report on transforming national defense, wrote the speech. “Our forces in the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable,” said the future president, pledging to “begin creating the military of the next century.… Our military must be able to identify targets by a variety of means, then be able to destroy those targets almost instantly. We must be able to strike from across the world with pinpoint accuracy … with unmanned systems.” The opportunity to do this, he stressed, had been created by “a revolution in the technology of war. Power is increasingly defined, not by mass or size, but by mobility and swiftness. Influence is measured in information, safety is gained in stealth, and force is projected on the long arc of precision-guided weapons.” The lucrative technology dreams of William Westmoreland, John Foster, William Perry, and those they spoke for had now been endorsed at the highest level.

One underpublicized feature of the Kosovo war had especially ominous portents for the future. There had been less of the public bloodlust to “go after” the enemy leader than there had been during the Iraq War. Officially, the highest-priority targets were the enemy’s “command-and-control” facilities. But, as one former targeteer remarked to me, “that could mean any place with a phone.” So Slobodan Milo
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’s personal residence was duly destroyed. “We would have been happy to get him,” I was told by one former intelligence analyst who had been assigned to a “high-value target cell,” a new phenomenon in U.S. intelligence agencies dedicated to tracking the location of high-ranking human targets on an hour-by-hour basis. Assassination, officially forbidden and always denied, was still in the shadows but edging ever closer toward public respectability.

Sharing in the glory of Operation Allied Force was the Predator, which Pentagon briefers extolled as a “CNN in the sky” that “enables us to see things in the battle space in a more human way … to use the unmanned vehicle for forward air control, much more efficiently and at much lower risk” than would be the case with manned aircraft. Just as carefully selected video clips transmitted from optically guided bombs and missiles had thrilled audiences during the 1991 Gulf War, snippets of Predator video footage “looking like it was shot from the roof of a fifteen-story building” now performed the same function. As one officer told a reporter, “Kosovo showed that UAVs are perhaps even more useful and can have more missions and roles than we may have thought.” Jumper himself excitedly reported to Congress how “toward the end of the war, we equipped the Predator with a laser so that it could place a beam on a target—this identified it so a loitering strike aircraft could destroy it … we developed a capability with great potential for rapid targeting.”

Such enthusiastic hype, earnestly expressed, is traditional in high-technology defense programs, as demonstrated by the triumphant PR successes of the stealth aircraft and guided-missile systems assiduously promoted to the public during and after the 1991 Gulf War. As we have seen, the actual performance of these technologies was not quite as advertised: stealth planes were not invisible to radar, and precision missiles did not unerringly destroy their targets. It should therefore come as little surprise that the true story of Predator performance in the Kosovo War followed the same path.

Apart from that one incident hailed by Jumper in which an experimental drone laser had assisted in the destruction of a target—an empty barn—the Predators in Kosovo were concerned purely with reconnaissance. As yet unarmed, they beamed streaming video to the JSTARS radar planes, designated to sift information from their own radar scans, from intercepted communications, and from other intelligence sources, and then disseminate the results across the NATO command. In a significant step along the road to remotely controlling the battle via headquarters on three continents, much of this intelligence was transmitted in real time to U.S.-based staffs for analysis and then relayed back to Europe.

Meanwhile, thanks to the same expansion in communications bandwidth that made drones themselves feasible, the generals and admirals running the war were spending much of their days conferring with each other and Washington via video link. When not talking to each other they could watch the drone videos as they were being streamed directly into their offices, inevitably encouraging them in the belief that they had a close-up understanding of the ongoing war. General Clark himself, according to officers on his staff, was fascinated with drone TV and amid his busy days spent many hours glued to the monitor in his office. The general and his micromanaging habits were not universally popular with his brother officers, who were happy to circulate the story of how, one day, he called General Michael Short, the U.S. three-star commanding the allied air fleets. “Hey, Mike,” said the supreme commander, “I’m sitting here at my desk watching the UAV feed on the monitor. When are you going to do something about those two Serb tanks sitting at the end of that bridge?”

In fact, Clark may not even have been seeing any tanks at all. Despite all the high-level enthusiasm and the release of carefully chosen videos, the all-seeing eye in the sky didn’t really work very well. We know this because, while Washington was still echoing with those rapturous reports, an organization immune to technohype was taking a cold, hard look at Predator. They were not impressed by what they found.

In the right hands, the director of the Office of Operational Test and Evaluation is the most unpopular person in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Traditionally, the services have cast a benign eye on the actual performance of weapons programs they have fostered and do not welcome independent assessments of whether or not they actually work. That the office exists at all owes a lot in inspiration to John Boyd, the air force colonel who had arrived at Task Force Alpha in the waning days of the Vietnam War, shot the wild dogs, and closed down the essentially futile multibillion-dollar operation. Returning from Southeast Asia, Boyd had begun extrapolating the lessons he had deduced from earlier experiences as a supremely successful fighter pilot into a general theory of conflict that would ultimately earn him the title of the American Sun Tzu, after the legendary Chinese strategist. At the core of his conclusions was the concept of the OODA (the acronym for observation, orientation, decision, and action) Loop, the repeating cycle through which each side in a conflict passes. In air combat, for example, pilots see an enemy, orient themselves (meaning they subconsciously process their observation based on prior combat experience, intelligence, training, etc.), decide what to do, act on that decision, observe the results of that action, and continue retracing the loop. History shows that those who could adapt to changing circumstances—the antagonists’ own maneuvers and countermaneuvers—by continually moving through this cycle faster than their adversaries would prevail. Thus Boyd discerned that the F-86 fighter he flew in the Korean War outfought Soviet MiGs because its bubble canopy allowed the pilot a more complete view, while the plane could also transition from one maneuver to another faster than a MiG (partly because its power-assisted controls were easier to shift quickly than the muscle-powered controls on the MiG).

In applying his ideas to organizations, as opposed to one-man machines, Boyd found that the same principles applied and that the overarching need for rapid adaptability to changing circumstances had to be based on a system of command and control that was as simple and harmonious as possible. It was extremely dangerous for the higher commander to try to get involved in the rapid pace and details of the firefight and thereby lose his focus on and grasp of the overall battle. Above all, Boyd stressed the importance of the human, as opposed to the technological, factor in warfare. One of his favorite quotations was Napoleon’s: “In war, the moral is to the material as three is to one.”