Predator (49 page)

some in Congress were talking
: David A. Fulghum, “Tier 2 UAV Aborts First Test Flight,”
Aviation Week & Space Technology
, July 11, 1994, p. 22.

motor used in ultralight sport aircraft
: The manufacturer's plant in Austria also built snowmobile engines, giving rise to an oft-repeated myth that the Predator was powered by an “Austrian snowmobile engine.” The Rotax 912 and other engines used in the Predator have all been specifically designed for use in aircraft.

fourteen seconds
: Author interview with Frank Pace, November 3, 2010.

5: PREDATOR'S PROGRESS

Stratakes called up
: Jay Stratakes, “Medium Altitude Endurance UAV Program Briefing,” January 11, 1995, copy in the author's possession.

astounded by what they were watching
: Author interviews with Allan Rutherford.

intelligence analysts dismissed color video
: Author interviews with “Werner.”

set a new UAV endurance record
: “Tier II UAV Sets Endurance Record,”
Aerospace Daily
, January 24, 1995, p. 109.

boiling point in the Balkans
: Lon O. Nordeen,
Air Warfare in the Missile Age
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), pp. 241–46.

O'Grady parachuted safely
: Department of Defense news briefing, Adm. William Owens, vice chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, June 9, 1995.

first combat deployment
: Details of the arrival come from an author interview with former Mibli Predator pilot and retired Army Chief Warrant Officer Greg Foscue.

all the Predator could do
: Author interview with Col. Scott Sanborn, commander of the Predator detachment at Gjader, Albania, July–October 1995.

“We're at risk”
: The dialogue is as remembered by both Greg Gordy and Scott Sanborn.

Tanjug reported
: “Army Shoots Down Two Croatian Aircraft,” Belgrade Tanjug in English, August 12, 1995, Foreign Broadcast Information Service transcribed text.

Washington Post
reported
: Bradley Graham, “Pentagon Loses Two Unmanned Spy Planes over Bosnia,”
Washington Post
, August 15, 1995, p. A10.

cost only $1.5 million apiece
: On October 18, 1995, the deputy director of the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office sent a memo to the Pentagon's Budget and Finance Directorate authorizing Rutherford's office to pay three million dollars to replace the two Predators lost in Bosnia. A copy of the memo is in the author's possession.

“You proved the inherent”
: “Bravo Zulu for a job well done. Admiral Smith sends,” unclassified message dated November 20, 1995, copy in the author's possession.

At the National Defense University
: “On Fogleman's Watch,”
Aerospace Daily
174, no. 55 (June 19, 1995): 435.

A month later
: Stacey Evers, “Big Changes in Store for DOD Intelligence Collection,”
Aerospace Daily
175, no. 13 (July 21, 1995): 102.

Misty Fast FAC
: Rick Newman and Don Shepperd,
Bury Us Upside Down: The Misty Pilots and the Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail
(New York: Presidio Press, 2006). The figures on Misty Fast FAC losses come from
Bury Us Upside Down
.

Most were rescued
: Author interview with Gen. (Ret.) Ronald Fogleman.

last regular Air Force RF-4C flight
: Stacey Evers, “Big Changes in Store for DOD Intelligence Collection,”
Aerospace Daily
, July 21, 1995.

just voted to reactivate
: “SR-71 Blackbird Back in Business,” U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command news release, January 24, 1997.

Joint Chiefs committee recommended
: Joint Requirements Oversight Council, “Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, JROCM 151–95, Subject: Assignment of Service Lead for Operation of the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV),” December 16, 1995, copy in the author's possession.

Perry agreed to give
: William J. Perry, secretary of defense, “Memorandum for Secretaries of the Military Departments, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Under Secretaries of Defense, Subject: Assignment of Service Lead for Operation of the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV),” April 8, 1996, copy in the author's possession.

held in a huge conference room
: Dr. James M. George, “Predator Comes to Air Combat Command (1994–2005),” Office of ACC History, Headquarters, Air Combat Command, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, August 2006.

pilots openly showed their contempt
: Author interviews with General (Ret.) Richard E. Hawley, Rutherford, and Capt. (Ret.) Steve Jayjock, USN.

the drone's engine failed
: Author interview with Lt. Col. Eric Johnson, June 29, 2009.

“message to the field”
: “Griffith: Predator Not Responsive to Tactical Commanders in Bosnia,”
Inside the Army
, February 24, 1997, p. 10.

then provide top cover
: Author interview with Fogleman.

forty locations in all
: Peter H. Wiedemann, “On the Use of the Predator (MAE-UAV) System in Bosnia,” paper presented at the Unmanned Vehicle Conference, Paris, France, June 13, 1997.

system was created
: The new video dissemination system, developed specifically to get Predator video to commanders, is described in Maj. Mark Biwer, “The Joint Broadcast Service Supporting Bosnia: Value to the Warrior and Lessons Learned,” Air Command and Staff College research paper, March 1997.

didn't fly its Predators in wet weather
: Author interviews with Lt. Col. (Ret.) Jon Box and Lt. Col. Eric Johnson.

the rest were tests and check flights
: Jon L. S. Box, Pilot Logbook 1996–99, loaned to the author by Box.

Clark wrote in a report
: Col. James G. Clark, “Memorandum for AF/CVA, CV, CSAF, April 28, 1997, Subject: Predator,” copy in the author's possession.

“After my report was done”
: James “Snake” Clark, “Predator: A Personal History,”
U.S. Air Force,
Air Force Historical Association, Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, 2006.

6: WILD PREDATOR

Seventeen crew members
: “Shoot-Down of a USAF C-130 by Soviet Aircraft on 2 September 1958,” declassified National Security Agency report, accessed at
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/c130_shootdown.shtml
; and Bill Grimes,
The History of Big Safari
(Bloomington, Ind.: Archway, 2014), pp. 121–25.

Big Safari's game
: Knotts and O'Malley, “The Big Safari Program Story … as Told by the Big Safari People.”

taken by surprise
: David A. Fulghum, “Quiet USAF Organization Fields Covert Spycraft,”
Aviation Week & Space Technology
, July 24, 2000, p. 176.

Of forty U.S. aircraft
: David A. Fulghum, “Creating the Plan to Crack Iraq's Antiaircraft Defenses,”
Aviation Week & Space Technology
, July 24, 2000, p. 177.

Big Safari studied
: Author interviews with William D. W. Grimes.

DarkStar crashed
: “DarkStar—High Altitude Endurance UAV,” paper presented by Harry A. Berman, DARPA HAE UAV Program Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, at Unmanned Vehicles '87 Conference and Exhibition, Paris, France, June 12–13, 1997.

Meermans talked regularly
: Author interviews with former representative Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) and Letitia White, Michael Meermans, and William D. W. Grimes.

House Intelligence Committee's report
: The fiscal 1998 legislation also abolished the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office, an umbrella organization superimposed in 1994 over the Navy Joint Program Office to handle funding for all UAV programs.

committee's report
: House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “Report of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1998,” 105th Cong., 1st Sess., 1997, report 105–135, part 1, p. 30.

directed to install laser designators
: “Point Paper on Predator Laser Designator,” drafted by Maj. Mark Mattoon of Big Safari, April 19, 1999.

pilots were soon having trouble
: Benjamin S. Lambeth,
NATO's Air War for Kosovo
(Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corp., 2001), pp. 21–22.

Clark even had a TV
: Author interview with Gen. (Ret.) Wesley Clark, June 18, 2013.

General Clark, who was peering
: Ibid.

his immediate response
: Clark remembered the incident much as Short did, but with the key difference that Clark recalled being in Aviano at the time, while Short thought Clark placed the call from Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) headquarters in Belgium.

Short admitted
: The story as Short told it to the AFA was repeated in Maj. Todd P. Harmer, USAF, “Enhancing the Operational Art: The Influence of the Information Environment on the Command and Control of Airpower,” master's thesis, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, June 2000, p. 87; and again in Lt. Col. Michael W. Kometer, USAF, “Command in Air War: Centralized vs. Decentralized Control of Combat Airpower,” doctoral dissertation for the degree of doctor of philosophy in technology, management, and policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 2005, p. 100n54.

“Invent it”
: Author interviews with Col. (Ret.) James G. “Snake” Clark and Gen. (Ret.) Michael E. Ryan. The account of Ryan's phone call was recalled by Clark and was verified by Ryan.

some in Congress had proposed
: H.R. 3230, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997, as passed by the House; also letter from Rep. Curt Weldon to Lt. Col. Sean M. Frisbee, USAF, May 24, 2004, provided to the author by Frisbee.

His 110-page master's thesis
: Capt. Brian Dean Raduenz, “Digital Signal Processing Using Lapped Transforms with Variable Parameter Windows and Orthonormal Base,” thesis presented to the faculty of the School of Engineering of the Air Force Institute of Technology, Air University, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of science in electrical engineering, December 1992.

Bahrain Hilton
: The date and hotel information were supplied by Raduenz from travel vouchers and airline boarding passes he kept.

officer at Big Safari's headquarters
: Mattoon, “Point Paper on Predator Laser Designator.”

at a premium of roughly 40 percent
: Author interview with William Casey, the Raytheon Corp. engineer who managed the company's work on the projects to adapt the AN/AAS-44(V) and MTS laser balls for use on the Predator, November 8, 2013.

commander refused to let his crews
: Grimes,
The History of Big Safari
, p. 331.

“not my kind of warrior”
: Author interview with Grimes. The 11th Reconnaissance Squadron commander at the time, Lt. Col. Dana Richards, declined several requests for an interview, but in an e-mail exchange with the author replied that Grimes's “comment displays his ignorance in what authorities I had. Big Safari trained a select group to employ the WILD Predator. The software was different, the hardware was different. I did not have the authority to decide who could and could not fly the aircraft.” Richards also suggested the chief of staff of the Air Force would have had to issue a waiver to permit a “conventional crew” from the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron to operate an aircraft using “red line” technical orders, meaning maintenance and crew manuals that have not been “validated and verified.” Others involved in the WILD Predator deployment side with Grimes on the question.

On May 4, 1999
: Details of the tests at Indian Springs come from an e-mail from Raytheon engineer William M. Casey sent to Air Force Lt. Col. Sean Frisbee on May 3, 2004, when Frisbee was working on a master's thesis about the Predator. Frisbee provided this e-mail from Casey and dozens of other documents related to his thesis. The author is deeply grateful.

When the team later watched
: A copy of the nose camera video is in the author's possession.

Snake Clark used his pull
: Author interview with Werner.

Only on June 2
: The June 2 date comes from a Bronze Star justification narrative for Col. Stanley Shinkle. A document provided by Snake Clark pinpoints the date as June 4. Neither document, unfortunately, is definitive.

never got closer to combat
: In a 2011 academic paper for the Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies, the author incorrectly reported, based on documents that included Shinkle's Bronze Star medal citation and on interviews later determined to be misinterpreted or inaccurate, that the WILD Predator crew followed a tank or some other armored vehicle to the building bombed by the A-10 and buddy-lased the target. (Richard Whittle, “Predator's Big Safari,” Mitchell Paper 7, Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies, Mitchell Institute Press, August 2011, pp. 15 and 41n.) Subsequent interviews have established to my satisfaction that no actual enemy target was ever buddy-lased by the WILD Predator team, but an A-10 was directed to and bombed a derelict building in a proof-of-concept exercise. The author regrets the error in the Mitchell Institute paper.

daily maintenance report for June
: “Operation Joint Forge WILD Predator in Action, Bosnia-Herzegovina European Resort Travel Provided by Big Safari Maintenance Report, Current as of 2 July 1999,” copy in the author's possession.