Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (28 page)

Fortunately, as of 2014 the Border Patrol had not been required to buy and operate the most expensive drone of them all. “Northrop took billions and billions of dollars off us, and gave us a piece of junk,” said a high-ranking Pentagon weapons acquisition official as we breakfasted at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Pentagon City (the social ground zero of the military-industrial complex). Our topic was Global Hawk, manufactured by the Northrop Grumman Corporation, the largest drone ever developed, lauded for its reach and endurance, touted as a giant step toward total situational awareness. A best-selling 2009 book on drones enthusiastically summarized its salient attributes, including the ability to “stay in the air up to 32 hours. Powered by a turbofan engine that can take it up to 65,000 feet, the stealthy Global Hawk carries synthetic aperture radar, infrared sensors, and electro-optical cameras.… Global Hawk can fly from San Francisco, spend a day hunting for terrorists in the entire state of Maine, and then fly back to the West Coast.”

At the time of our breakfast, the $26 billion Northrop Corporation had plastered billboards situated at strategic locations, such as the Pentagon Metro station, with advertisements extolling its prowess, while Raytheon, the $30 billion defense electronics corporation responsible for its radars and other sensors, unreservedly claimed: “Day or night, on land or at sea and in all weather conditions, Raytheon’s Enhanced Integrated Sensor Suite (EISS) on the Global Hawk air vehicle pinpoints stationary or moving targets with unparalleled accuracy. It transmits imagery and position information from 60,000 feet with near real-time speed and dramatic clarity—empowering warfighters to respond quickly and decisively.” The fact that the cost, including research and development, had risen from an original target of $10 million to a sobering $223 million per copy did not feature in these encomiums.

“Junk is right,” grumbled an air force officer who had long grappled with the aircraft’s shortcomings. “On the first flight the rear access door fell off. It’s made of composite plastic with adhesives instead of nuts and bolts to keep the weight down, but that glue doesn’t work so well, so internal parts, fuel lines and electrical conduits, come apart in flight. That just shouldn’t happen.” After pausing for breath he resumed his doleful litany. “Northrop had hopes that with all the sensors on board it would replace JSTARS, but the basic aircraft was slow, underpowered, and the sensors were poor. The infrared can pick out campfires, but that’s about it, and that’s only when it’s directly over the target, and you need the target’s cooperation for that. The radar suffers from the plastic airframe twisting and flexing at high altitude, so the picture shifts with it.”

Even those campfires can escape scrutiny when the weather is bad. The three Hawks stationed in Guam (flown by pilots in California) since 2010 have a primary mission to monitor North Korea’s nuclear and other military initiatives. Unfortunately the rainy season lasts six months in the northern Pacific, and when fast-moving storms blow in over Guam, Global Hawk stays on the ground, unable to fly over them or, since it lacks the ability to see clouds ahead, go around them. Entire months have gone by without these massive aircraft leaving the ground.

By 2012, even the air force had had enough, announcing that the sixty-year-old U-2 spy plane, developed by the CIA for a total cost of $19 million in the mid-1950s, could fly higher and take better pictures than its purported successor and that the Global Hawk version, then under production, would be scrapped. In a 2011 report, the Pentagon’s test office announced that the drone was “not operationally effective,” citing such drawbacks as its inability to carry out assigned missions three-quarters of the time. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, weighed in, telling Congress that Global Hawk “has fundamentally priced itself out of our ability to afford it.” The White House took the same position.

It made no difference. Congress, led by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon and Democratic Congressman Jim Moran (whose northern Virginia district hosted the headquarters of both Northrop and Raytheon) effortlessly brushed aside these pleas, forcing the air force to keep buying the unwanted drone. No fewer than twenty-six lobbyists cited Global Hawk or surveillance issues on their required lobbying reports, including Letitia White, the longtime aide to the Predator’s godfather, Congressman Jerry Lewis. Now they swung into action. This potent team was commanded by Northrop Grumman’s vice president for government relations Sid Ashworth, who had spent fourteen years on the Senate Appropriations Committee staff, serving as staff director for two subcommittees, including defense. In recognition of his stellar performance in saving Northrop’s profitable, if largely useless, product,
The Hill
, a widely read journal covering Congress, nominated Ashworth to a slot on its prestigious list of top lobbyists two years in a row, 2012 and 2013.

But Ashworth’s greatest triumph was yet to come. On February 24, 2014, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced a series of stringent cuts to the U.S. military. Among them was the entire force of A-10s, the plane that uniquely allowed pilots a clear view of what was happening on the ground. Not all programs, however, were slated for Hagel’s axe. “In addition to the A-10,” said the secretary, “the Air Force will also retire the 50-year-old U-2, in favor of the unmanned Global Hawk system.” Sheepishly, Hagel conceded that the decision was a “close call,” given previous strenuous efforts to kill the huge drone. His feeble justification was that with its “greater range and endurance,” the Global Hawk makes a better high-altitude reconnaissance platform “for the future.”

Northrop Grumman is one of the “primes,” the too-big-to-fail contractors formed by merger and acquisition under Defense Secretary William Perry’s auspices in the 1990s. Thanks to its deep coffers and a manufacturing base spread across many states and congressional districts along with those of its suppliers, the corporation’s programs were always likely to survive the harshest budget cuts or the most damning evidence of technical incompetence. But the allure of manhunting surveillance technology, when lubricated by political connections, has provided similar buoyancy for smaller companies whose actual products are perhaps even less useful than Northrop’s giant drone. As an example, we can look to the Sierra Nevada Corporation of Sparks, Nevada.

On January 2, 2011, the
Washington Post
reported the imminent deployment of a “revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.” Major General James Poss, the air force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, was quoted as claiming that with the new tool, analysts would no longer have to guess where to point the camera: “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.” David Deptula was no less effusive, certifying that the system offered “many orders of magnitude improvement over existing sensors on drones in Afghanistan.… Instead of looking at a truck or a house, you can look at an entire village or a small city” with the multiple cameras, simultaneously.

Gorgon Stare was definitely the hit of the year in intelligence-surveillance circles. That October, the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation honored Sierra Nevada with its 2011 Industry Achievement Award, given annually for “outstanding accomplishments in GEOINT tradecraft.” A year later, Deptula’s successor as air force intelligence chief, Lieutenant General Larry James, was still extolling the system’s wide-area imaging as “very powerful in the [Afghan] battlespace” and relaying further tributes from American commanders in that country. Six months later, the general’s enthusiasm was undiminished. “The combatant commanders love it,” he told an interviewer. Earlier,
Air Force Times
had highlighted its utility in spotting “squirters,” as people fleeing for their lives in an air attack were popularly known in the ISR community. Civil libertarians, no less impressed by the Gorgon’s advertised capabilities, expressed alarm at the possibility that it might be put to use by domestic law enforcement.

First appearing in budget documents in 2008, as a response to Defense Secretary Gates’ insistent request for more surveillance systems, Gorgon Stare, developed and manufactured by Sierra Nevada, essentially consisted of five “electro-optical” TV cameras for daytime and four infrared cameras for night missions. These were mounted on a pod under the right wing of a Reaper drone, while another pod under the left wing processed the images, transmitting them to recipients on the ground and storing them for later retrieval. The intent was for the cameras to provide a four-kilometer-square picture with a six-inch resolution, meaning that a scan of a town would reveal objects as small as six inches. A “chip-out” feature allowed troops on the ground to receive a segment of the overall picture. Indeed, according to its developers, the system would be able to transmit a panorama of sixty-five different pictures to different users, as opposed to the single, narrow, “soda straw” images currently available from drones. Thus a single Gorgon-carrying drone could circle over a town, effortlessly delivering images of selected areas to ground units on request. Not only could the wide area under scrutiny monitor “squirters,” as discussed, it was one more attempt at the dream of being able to look back into the past to discover who planted a bomb. As Deptula himself explained, “You can review it and accomplish forensic study of the area by looking at movement and tracing activity. If you know where an improvised explosive device went off, you can ‘rewind the tapes’ and see where the activity was and what led to it.”

There was one problem. Gorgon Stare didn’t work, a fact of which the air force was perfectly well aware. In the last months of 2010, the system had been subject to an intense program of tests by a specialized air force testing unit, the 53D Wing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The results were damning. The final report deemed the system “not operationally effective” and “not operationally suitable,” breaking down, apart from anything else, on average, 3.7 times every sortie. Officially, Gorgon Stare generated “motion video,” which turned out to be just 2 frames a second (as opposed to “full-motion video” at 24 frames a second). While it was possible to make out cars and other vehicles, it was impossible to distinguish “dismounts” (people) from bushes. One of the test team’s briefing slides that I looked at compared aerial pictures of an air base. One was a Gorgon Stare infrared “full image.” In other words, it showed the widest area of which it was capable. The other came from Google Earth, the free online service available to all. They were identical, revealing buildings and roads, and airfield runways, but nothing smaller and more detailed. Another slide showed a “subview,” a sample of what troops in the field would get if they were to make a request to the drone overhead. It was just possible to make out the cars. People were another matter, merely the faintest of blobs and certainly indistinguishable from bushes.

The bad news continued. The wide-area images, for example, were made up of multiple smaller images taken by individual cameras and stitched together in the processor pod before being transmitted to earth. However, as the test unit reported, the imagery “is subject to gaps between stitching areas which manifests itself [
sic
] as a large black triangle moving throughout the image.” Not surprisingly, “this causes loss of situational awareness and the inability to track activity when the ‘black triangle’ covers the area of interest.” In addition, the system had difficulty in determining where it was and hence the precise location of any targets it might spot. True, daylight images from the pod that were downloaded when it was on the ground rather than transmitted were clear enough to allow the tracking of individuals “to their point of origin or destination, providing analysis of IED detonations.” But unfortunately, said the report, “GS experiences ‘dropped frames’ during download—making it impossible to track moving targets over that period.” The testing unit strongly recommended that Gorgon Stare not be deployed to Afghanistan.

The air force test unit was not the first informed critic to take a dim view of the vaunted surveillance device. In a withering report on the air force’s request for $78.9 million to spend on Gorgon Stare in 2010, the Senate Armed Services Committee had already suggested that there did not seem to be much point for “moderate-resolution” (i.e., poor-quality) motion imagery and that increasing the camera’s resolution would lead to a “dramatic reduction” in the size of the area that could be covered by one Gorgon-carrying drone, which would consequently require more drone flights, which would make the whole exercise too expensive. Adding insult to injury, the Senate report went on to point out that no one to date had “produced sufficient evidence that forensic analysis of moderate-resolution wide-area motion imagery is productive enough to justify a large investment in sensors and platforms—especially in the absence of effective automated analytic tools.” In plain English, this meant that the idea of using the slow motion video to “rewind the tapes” and unmask the IED layers, as suggested by Deptula, wouldn’t really work, especially as the quantity of imagery would be too vast to be analyzed by humans and so would have to be done by computers (“effective automated analytic tools”) that did not exist. The committee recommended “no funds to continue Gorgon Stare development.”

These harsh verdicts made no difference whatsoever. Gorgon Stare was dispatched to Afghanistan a little over a month after the test report. Safe from prying eyes, it could now bask in uncritical plaudits from General James and others. At the end of 2011, I emailed a marine officer deployed in the battleground of northern Helmand and asked if his experience justified General James’ confidence in the system’s ability to help the troops. After detailing the routine IED injuries inflicted on his unit in the previous four days (one double leg amputation, one foot, one arm below the elbow), he went on: “I’ve never even heard of Gorgon Stare, let alone seen it in use. We’re essentially using the same technology that men used in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam to defeat mine and booby-trap threats—the eyeball and metal detector.”