Predator (27 page)

There were also two legal hurdles to the project, no matter what weapon Jumper chose.

First, to modify the Predator this drastically, the Air Force might need to ask key members of Congress to approve a so-called New Start Notification, a legal requirement for significant and unanticipated changes in defense programs made between annual appropriations bills. Air Force leaders were especially sensitive to this issue in 2000 because members of Congress and the news media had severely criticized them in 1999 for ignoring that legal requirement with respect to other programs.

The second legal issue was the 1987 INF Treaty, which was still in effect. A committee of government lawyers would have to decide whether an armed Predator fit the INF Treaty's definition of a ground-launched cruise missile. If it did, Jumper's “next logical step” could be a violation of a major international agreement.

Jumper couldn't resolve the legal issues, but he knew a good military idea when he saw one. At the conclusion of Dehnert's briefing, he directed his staff to work with Big Safari to come up with a detailed plan for arming the Predator with the Hellfire.

Just over three weeks later, on July 14, Dehnert returned to Jumper's headquarters with the three Big Safari majors who had prepared the presentation that the ACC commander was about to receive. The conference room was packed with more than forty Air Force officers, senior enlisted experts, and officials and engineers from General Atomics and other companies, all crowded around a long table or seated in chairs against the walls. Standing beside a screen at one end of the conference room, Dehnert went through a series of slides that outlined two possible plans for arming the Predator with the Hellfire.

“The immediate objective is to fire a Hellfire missile from a Predator and hit something,” one of the first slides said. The first option Dehnert described would take nine months, cost an estimated $1.3 million, and offer “medium technical risk.” The second option was a twelve-week “Accelerated Demo” expected to cost $1.5 million and disrupt all other Predator projects. This quicker option would also come with “high technical risk,” for it would be done the Big Safari way: with the least possible government regulation and paperwork.

Three-quarters of the way through Dehnert's briefing, Jumper turned to Tom Cassidy of General Atomics, who was seated next to him, and quietly asked, “What do you think about all this?”

“Let's go in your office,” Cassidy suggested.

The general and the former admiral excused themselves and left the room, leaving the others exchanging puzzled looks and curious whispers. Once they were alone, Cassidy told Jumper, “You give us two million bucks and two months and it'll be a done deal.”

“Done,” Jumper replied.

Cassidy went back to the meeting, leaving Jumper in his office. The ACC commander didn't return to the conference room for some time; when he did, he told the gathering he had just phoned General Michael E. Ryan, the Air Force chief of staff, and General William J. Begert, assistant vice chief of staff. Then Jumper gave those attending the briefing a surprise. Big Safari, he said, would get three million dollars to arm the Predator with the Hellfire—about double the cost of either option Dehnert had outlined, and two hundred thousand dollars more than the two combined. He also directed Big Safari to execute both the accelerated demonstration and the more cautious one.

Ryan would find the funding. Begert would get the required congressional approval. Big Safari and General Atomics were to arm the Predator and get it tested in flight as quickly as possible. Wrinkles could be ironed out later. The Air Force, Jumper explained, “wants to make rapid progress on weaponizing UAVs.”

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In his private conversation with Jumper, Cassidy made it sound easy, but marrying the Hellfire to the Predator was no simple matter. A week after getting Jumper's order, Big Safari Director Grimes hosted a meeting at his tightly secured headquarters in Dayton to discuss technical and other issues with representatives from the Hellfire program office at the Army's Redstone Arsenal, engineers from General Atomics and other companies, and various Air Force experts.

“My first question is can I fire your missile off Predator without knocking it out of the sky?” Grimes asked the Army contingent.

No one was entirely sure. Whether the thrust from the Hellfire's launch would throw the Predator into a spin when fired, or whether the missile's plume—1,050 degrees Fahrenheit at its hottest—would damage the aircraft's composite wings, tail, or fuselage, were questions that required engineering analysis, the team decided.

General Atomics already knew the wings needed to be beefed up to withstand the strain of carrying missiles. “Hardpoints” in the current wings could carry payloads of up to one hundred pounds, but each Hellfire would need a launcher—a metal rack with a rail to carry and fire it from—and electrical equipment to make it function. The Army experts said their Hellfire launchers were in short supply, so Big Safari might have to borrow a couple from the Navy and modify them to carry only one instead of the usual four missiles per launcher used by helicopters. The engineering team would also have to find a way to reduce the thrust needed to trigger a release spring on the rail whose function was to hold a missile in place until fired. The spring's standard 600 pounds of resistance would have to be cut to about 235 pounds, or else a launch might rip the wing right off the aircraft.

The Hellfire's software would have to be modified, too, to launch the missile properly from the Predator's normal operating altitude of about fifteen thousand feet, for the AGM-114 was designed to be launched at tanks by helicopters flying two thousand feet or less above the ground. Test firings—first from the ground, then in the air—would be necessary. New tactics for launching Hellfires from the Predator would have to be devised, too.

Beyond all that, the engineers would have to integrate the missile's circuitry and software with the Predator's flight control computer and a new sensor turret, or “modified Kosovo ball,” which Raytheon Corporation was developing. The new turret would add the daylight camera lacking in the laser ball used in Kosovo.

On July 28, Big Safari received formal approval from Headquarters Air Force to do what Jumper wanted, but the instruction said no Predators were to be modified until the service got both congressional approval and a ruling that arming the drone was acceptable under the INF Treaty. Under the circumstances, the Big Safari team did as much analysis and made as many modifications as they could.

Engineers at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base analyzed the Hellfire's rocket plume and came up with encouraging results. Because the Hellfire would get away from the Predator so fast—it would be sixteen feet past the drone's nose within 250 milliseconds—and its rocket plume was so compact, the aircraft's tail would only “see” (in engineering jargon) a high temperature of 440 degrees Fahrenheit as the missile departed, and that only briefly. The wing and fuselage would see only 170 degrees, and the air pressure change around the plume would present no problems.

General Atomics, meanwhile, conducted analyses showing that a Hellfire could indeed be launched from a Predator without breaking the aircraft apart or throwing it into a spin. Engineers at the General Atomics factory in California began writing the software needed to wed the Hellfire to the Predator. They also designed new ribs and cross brackets to go inside the Predator's wings at their hardpoints, allowing them to carry a single-rail launcher derived from a multi-rail launcher that Big Safari had quickly gotten from the Navy. The engineers were still barred, though, from making any changes to the aircraft chosen to become the first armed Predator, tail number 97-3034. Predator 3034 had been built the previous year but flown only seven times, always at El Mirage, for a total of thirteen hours.

On August 11,
Inside the Air Force
reported that the Predator “will rain Hellfire this fall” upon the practice bombing areas at Nellis Air Force Base, a sprawling installation north of Las Vegas. Lieutenant Colonel Dan Novak, ACC's weapons requirements branch chief, told the publication that the Air Force first wanted to “see if it is feasible for a Predator to do this.” The article noted that the Air Force “may have to inform Congress of a new start because the test will add a new capability to the UAV.” According to the newsletter, the Air Force expected to fire a test missile at Nellis for the first time later that year, probably in October or November.

Less than three weeks after the article appeared, the schedule Novak had described to
Inside the Air Force
fell apart. On August 30, Air Force lawyers issued a legal opinion forbidding all “touch labor” to arm the Predator prior to getting approval from Congress. Now the team working on Jumper's project was barred from modifying not only Predator 3034 but any of the other equipment needed for the project. All they could to do was look and analyze, not act. It was frustrating.

Eight days after the Hellfire project came to a halt, the Summer Project team at Ramstein Air Base in Germany began flying an unarmed Predator over Afghanistan via satellite in the CIA's secret search for Osama bin Laden. Soon they would learn that all anyone was going to do when they found the terrorist leader was look and analyze, not act. It was more than frustrating—it was infuriating.

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In early October, visitors to the General Atomics flight test facility at El Mirage were treated to a strange sight. Parked on the painted concrete floor of an aluminum hangar, the rubber wheels of its three-legged landing gear locked in bright yellow chocks, was Predator 3034, looking like a patient in the midst of drastic surgery. The drone's wings were missing. Amidships was the familiar U.S. Air Force star and bar insignia; just forward of the Predator's distinctive inverted-V tail was a short string of black numerals: 97-3034. A dozen feet to either side, sitting atop aluminum wing stands—trestles akin to sawhorses—were the Predator's unattached wings.

Midway along the underside of one wing hung a single rail cut from what once was a four-rail M299 Hellfire launcher. Hung from the rail was a sinister-looking black Hellfire. In fact, the missile was what Big Safari called a House Mouse, a term the team learned from the Army. Not only did this Hellfire carry no propellant to create thrust and make it fly, but it also lacked the shaped explosive charge a live missile would carry, a charge that could generate a jet of heat and pressure powerful enough to drill through a heavy tank's armor on impact. This mock Hellfire, however, held all the same electronics as a live one. Running from the launcher where the House Mouse hung on the unattached wing to the socket where the wing was meant to fit into Predator 3034's fuselage was a collection of gray wires. Stretched to their limit, the wires measured twenty-six feet.

This unorthodox sight had resulted from a phone call received by the Big Safari office at General Atomics on September 21, a call that brought good news and bad. The Air Force had secured congressional approval to spend money arming the Predator, meaning that touch labor would now be allowed. But the State Department general counsel's “initial opinion,” as a senior Air Force procurement officer reported in an e-mail to Jumper and others, was that a “weaponized Predator constitutes a cruise missile, hence an INF Treaty problem.” Lieutenant General Stephen Plummer added that the Defense Department's general counsel was “working with them to change that opinion.” But until the issue was resolved, no missile could be mounted on a Predator able to fly.

Jumper was irate. “Chief, we should not allow this opinion to stand or to ripen for any length of time,” the ACC commander e-mailed Chief of Staff Mike Ryan. “With your permission I would like to put together a briefing (case study) from Kosovo that explains what we are after and engage the lawyers,” Jumper added, signing the e-mail, “Your Junk Yard Dog (and happy to do it). John.”

Big Safari's solution, meanwhile, was to put the missile launcher on a detached wing and then wire it to the flight control computer in the Predator's fuselage to check whether the systems would work together once the wing was reinstalled. The tactic was legal, for a Predator unable to fly was clearly outside the INF Treaty definition of a cruise missile as “an unmanned, self-propelled vehicle that sustains flight.” It was also classic Big Safari. Being creative within the rules was part of the organization's culture, as suggested by the sign Bill Grimes had posted on Big Safari's door at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base: “Those who say it cannot be done should not get in the way of those doing it.”

On September 27, a week after the Big Safari office at Rancho Bernardo got the message that inspired the wing stand solution, the Summer Project team in Germany spotted bin Laden for the first time. Colonel Ed Boyle, the Summer Project commander for the Air Force, was just as surprised as Predator pilot Scott Swanson when they found their terrorist target and no cruise missiles were fired. A couple of hours after the sighting, with the Predator on its way back to Uzbekistan, Boyle had the ops cell make a videotape of bin Laden at Tarnak Farms, then jumped in his car with it and drove the three-quarters of a mile to the office of the USAFE commander, General Gregory “Speedy” Martin. After Martin watched the video, they had the imagery streamed to General Jumper at his ACC office at Langley. Then Martin phoned Jumper to talk about the video.

Boyle wasn't privy to their conversation, but he knew Jumper pretty well. Not only had Boyle been Jumper's director of intelligence when Jumper commanded USAFE, they had known each other since Jumper was a lieutenant colonel and Boyle was a captain. Boyle figured Jumper would climb the walls when he learned that the Summer Project team had found bin Laden and nothing was being done about it. Boyle also knew Jumper had a project under way to arm the Predator, for Boyle had been among the many officers in the June 21 meeting at Langley when Jumper chose the Hellfire. Boyle hoped the video of bin Laden that his old boss had just seen would speed that project up.