Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (6 page)

The project was publicly justified by the assumption that Soviet forces vastly outnumbered NATO defenders, whose only hope supposedly lay in “force-multiplier” high-technology weapons. The military bookkeeping was in truth highly suspect: readily available evidence showed that the numbers were almost even, while Soviet troop and weapons quality was far inferior. Nevertheless the defense lobby effortlessly ignored such discordant notes right up until the day that the USSR finally crumbled, laying bare the sorry state of its vaunted military.

The new barrier fostered by the Pentagon’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in conjunction with the air force and army, was called Assault Breaker. There were no carpets of sensors strewn among the trees this time, but the basic idea was faithful to General Westmoreland’s promise in 1969 of “surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy” and “first round kill probabilities approaching certainty.” Instead of the sensors, airborne radar would peer far behind enemy lines and detect suspicious movements of Soviet “second-echelon” reinforcements moving up behind the front line. An on-board computer would process the information and sort out which signals revealed a genuine target. On the basis of this information, missiles would be launched in the general direction of the enemy. At ten thousand feet above the targeted armored formations, the missiles would burst open and dispense a carpet of self-guiding bombs equipped with heat seekers and tiny radars that would drop down and then search out their armored targets. A variant added a further layer of complexity with “skeet” projectiles that would fly off from the bomb canisters at speed to impact on the tanks. Proponents claimed Assault Breaker could destroy “in a few hours” sufficient vehicles in (Soviet) reinforcement divisions “to prevent their exploiting a breakthrough of NATO defenses,” without—and this was an important selling point—anyone having to resort to nuclear weapons, all for a bargain price of $5.3 billion.

Task Force Alpha had used powerful software programs to try and distinguish trucks from elephants, soldiers from peasants. Assault Breaker followed the same concept: ambiguous sensor signals were processed into coherence by massive computing power, thereby discriminating a tank army from traffic on the autobahn, tanks from East German tractors, and armored personnel carriers from Volkswagens. Even the bombs homing in on the final targets had to be able to decide if a hot spot was really a tank or a smoking bomb crater or some other distraction. Everything depended on recognizing preset patterns. A tank, for example, would be expected to have a distinctive pattern of hot spots to distinguish it from some other heat-emitting object, such as a bus. To disorient the weapon, an enemy merely needed to rearrange the pattern, just as General Nguyen had hung buckets of urine on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Presiding over the entire operation was a man destined to exert a potent influence on U.S. defense for decades to come. In 1977 President Carter appointed William J. Perry, an affable Californian defense contractor, to John Foster’s old job overseeing all Pentagon research and development. (Foster had moved to defense contractor TRW Inc. in 1973.) Like Foster before him, Perry loved esoteric weapons projects, and he outmatched his predecessor in his ability to charm all comers. He was soon a popular figure in Washington, conveying an air of deeply considered expertise in the mysteries of defense technology that served him well in selling his agenda while dispensing billions of dollars on development programs that might, if actually put into production, yield contracts worth multiples of the development money. Politicians appreciated his gentlemanly and patient explanations of technological mysteries. The military, though occasionally irritated by his interference in their prerogatives, appreciated his ability to extract money from the politicians. Liberals warmed to his unmilitaristic demeanor, not least his support for strategic nuclear arms limitation agreements.

Before entering government, Perry had spent his career exclusively in the defense-electronics industry, initially for a firm deeply involved in the highly classified ballistic-missile early-warning system. In 1964, he founded Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory (ESL), Incorporated. Located close to Stanford University, the firm grew and prospered in the business of processing digital information from sources such as sensors, radars, and reconnaissance pictures for the U.S. military and National Security Agency.

Perry thus arrived in office with an enduring interest in the ability of technology to cut through the fog of war. “The objective of our precision guided weapon systems is to give us the following capabilities: to be able to see all high value targets on the battlefield at any time; to be able to make a direct hit on any target we can see, and to be able to destroy any target we can hit,” he told a senate committee in 1978. Pentagon officials began referring to Assault Breaker as “Bill Perry’s wet dream.” Comprehensive testing was deferred on the grounds that the system was urgently required in the field. On the few occasions individual components were tested, they tended to fail, and the whole system, with its many steps, was never tested all at once. The General Accounting Office, the watchdog agency that monitors government programs on behalf of Congress, reported in 1981 not only that the system could not tell the difference between armored vehicles and “lower value targets” (trucks or automobiles) but also that these distinctions were “not designed into the advanced development radar and is not part of DARPA’s planned testing.” In other words, the interests behind the program appeared not to care whether it actually worked.

Assault Breaker was formally canceled in 1984, felled by a combination of ballooning costs, failed tests, and bad publicity. But in its dying days it garnered powerful endorsement from a gilt-edged source. “Precision weapons, smart shells, electronic reconnaissance systems,” commented a Soviet military writer in a
Pravda
article about Assault Breaker in February 1984, “could enable NATO to destroy a potential enemy which is still in its rear staging area.” The Soviets even coined a helpful catchphrase to describe this claimed ability to see everything, strike anything—the “military technical revolution”—and proclaimed their intention of producing their own versions. In no time, talk of this revolution was gathering momentum in U.S. military commentaries, largely thanks to assiduous promotion by an already legendary Pentagon official, Andrew Marshall. Trained as an economist, Marshall had spent his early career at the Rand Corporation, the famed Santa Monica–based think tank staffed with brilliant minds devising nuclear war strategies for the U.S. Air Force, which financed the undertaking. In retrospect it is clear that Rand’s core mission was to devise strategies justifying and whenever possible enhancing the air force budget. When, for example, the navy’s development of invulnerable ballistic-missile submarines threatened the air force’s strategic nuclear monopoly in the early 1960s, Rand quickly served up a rationale for a “counterforce” strategy. According to this theory, the Soviets could be deterred only by precisely targeted nuclear warheads, which would necessitate a crash air force program for new intercontinental missiles with an accuracy that the navy could not deliver.

In 1973, under the patronage of Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger (a fellow Rand alumnus), Marshall moved to the Pentagon to head a newly created Office of Net Assessment. He was still there, forty years later, in the second Obama administration. In the intervening period he had evolved into an object of reverence, perhaps because his proposals, despite their iconoclastic flavor, somehow never threatened established interests—and often required lavish additions to their budgets. Marshall’s sharp eye for ambitious talent and his skill in the careful deployment of study contracts ensured that, while administrations came and went, generations of mutually supporting graduates of his office were seeded throughout the defense establishment, orbiting between corporations, the bureaucracy, and think tanks.

The eye-catching feature of the revolution in military affairs as popularized by Marshall and others was the emphasis on “precision guidance.” This was a long-anticipated development. At the beginning of World War II the air force had claimed that its recently acquired Norden bomb sight, an instrument carried in the plane to enable the accurate launching of bombs, would ensure that 50 percent of its bombs would fall within 75 feet of their target. The boast went unfulfilled. On an infamous raid against the German ball-bearing works at Schweinfurt in October 1943, with the attackers suffering huge losses and little damage to the plants, only one in ten of Norden-aimed bombs fell within 500 feet of the target. (The device was still being used to drop sensors for the electronic barrier in 1967.) While the Norden sight was an attempt to position a bomber in the correct spot to drop a bomb, postwar efforts were concentrated on ways of guiding a bomb after it had left the bomber. In December 1968, John Foster told an interviewer that although bombing Vietnam had produced “meager results … we’ve recently developed a series of weapons that permit us to get incredible accuracies, as compared with normal aircraft delivery systems. Instead of having accuracies of hundreds of feet, we now talk in terms of ten feet.”

At the time, this had been another idle boast. Repeated efforts to hit “critical” targets in North Vietnam were still missing by hundreds of yards. One such target was a bridge over a river about one hundred miles south of Hanoi near a town called Thanh Hoa that was supposedly crucial to the enemy supply effort. The air force and navy bombed it obsessively with guided and unguided bombs between 1965 and 1972 to zero effect—apart from the loss of dozens of pilots. Finally, in May 1972, the bridge was cut with two laser-guided bombs. Though hailed as a momentous event then and since, it turned out that the Vietnamese had stopped using the bridge years before, while traffic flowed unmolested across an undetected river ford five miles upstream. Meanwhile the bridge itself was put to use as the center of what Pentagon wags termed “a flourishing anti-aircraft school.”

The notion that this triumph of precision might have been irrelevant found little favor where it counted. Under the tutelage of Perry and Defense Secretary Harold Brown (a former nuclear weapons lab director who had also had Perry’s job directing defense research and development), billions of dollars poured into variants of precision guidance, some focused on directing the missile via a little TV camera in its nose or by tracking hot shapes with a heat-seeking infrared camera. Others followed the reflection of an infrared laser beam shone at the target by a pilot or a soldier on the ground. Once Ronald Reagan replaced Carter in 1981, defense spending, already inflated, went into a steeper climb, with the costs of all the revolutionary new weapons systems predictably following suit.

Among these were various subsystems of Assault Breaker that took on independent but nonetheless prosperous lives after the program was officially ended. The heart of the original system had been the component that Perry hoped would make it possible to see “all high value targets on the battlefield at any time.” This radar was “side looking,” meaning that the antenna stretched along the plane’s fuselage and thus looked sideways, which, because of its size (bigger is better for radar antennae), promised to deliver sharper images. By filtering the data’s echoes to display only objects in motion, the system was billed capable of revealing Soviet tank armies moving up in the rear. Unfortunately, it proved all too efficient at detecting any moving object, not merely tanks, but also automobiles and even trees blowing in the wind. Though the problem proved intractable, the program lived on, to the recurring benefit of the Northrop Corporation, under a variety of code names that ultimately settled on JSTARS for Joint Surveillance Target Attack System.

Soon after his appointment by Carter, Perry began assiduously promoting an even more ambitious concept, pouring huge amounts of money into a technology called radar cross-section reduction. This was first invented by the Germans to make their World War II submarine snorkels harder to detect with special shaping to reflect radar waves away from the sender and special materials to absorb radar. Perry renamed the technology “stealth” and changed the security classification from a low-level “confidential” to the highest levels of “top secret.” Intimations that something new and incredibly sensitive was in the works helped to justify the massive funding while simultaneously making test data inaccessible to skeptics. Meanwhile, Perry pursued his grand vision of stealthy cruise missiles and large stealthy aircraft, even stealthy ships. The services were aghast at the impact the inevitably staggering cost would have on more cherished projects, but Perry calmed their fears by promising that the programs would be “technology driven, rather than funding driven,” meaning that there would be no limits on spending for any apparently promising advance in technology. Behind the cloak of secrecy the multibillion-dollar B-2 strategic bomber and the smaller F-117 proceeded slowly and expensively toward production, their performance and, more important, their budgets screened from the outside world.

While these technologically ambitious programs were under development, one program founded on radically different principles was quietly entering service. The A-10 Thunderbolt II, to give it its official name, was commissioned to provide “close air support” to troops actually on the battlefield rather than to attack enemy forces far in the rear. Pilots soon renamed it “the Warthog.” True to its core belief in waging war entirely independently of the other services, the air force had no interest in such a weapon, but there came a moment in the early 1970s when it seemed possible that the army might capture the close air-support mission for itself with a costly new helicopter, a development that would have deleterious effects on the air force budget. Consequently, the service turned to an analyst then working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense known for his unconventional view on the importance of the close-support mission.