Drone Warfare Read online

  Some say the name “drone” comes from the constant buzzing noise that some of the machines make in flight. According to other military lore, the name derives from a use of robotic aircraft as training targets for World War II gun crews.7 The United States manufactured 15,000 small drones for anti-aircraft practice during the war at a plant in Southern California. Many were marked with black stripes along the tail part of the fuselage, making them look like drones (the bees).

  The technology for flying remotely has existed for decades. Unmanned aerial vehicles were first tested by the military way back during World War I. In the 1930s the US, UK, and Germany, later joined by the USSR and others, all began to use drones for anti-aircraft targeting exercises. Unmanned crafts were used as guided missiles by the US military in World War II and the Korean War. In a tragic World War II experiment gone awry, President Kennedy’s older brother Joe, a Navy pilot, died at age 29 in a secret drone operation against the Germans. It wasn’t until the Vietnam War that unmanned aircraft were used to gather intelligence.8

  Anyone who wants to build an unmanned aircraft can order the parts at a hobby shop and assemble them in their garage. In fact, the prototype for the most popular modern-day drone, the Predator, was built by Israeli aviation engineer Abraham Karem in his garage in southern California in the 1980s.9

  Abraham Karem had worked on developing unmanned aircraft for an Israeli defense contractor in the 1970s, and then moved to southern California in 1980 to develop his own company.

  With grants from the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the CIA, Karem began building a new model at home in his three-car garage. In 1981 he unveiled what he called the Albatross, an unmanned plane that could stay in the air for up to 56 hours, and later a new version with a powerful flight control computer called the Gnat 750.

  But Karem was financially strapped and decided to sell his company to Hughes Aircraft, which then sold it to General Atomics, keeping Karem on as a consultant.

  In 1993 CIA director James Woolsey, unhappy with the intelligence he was receiving from satellites flying over Bosnia, turned to Karem and General Atomics for help. A year later, the Gnat 750 was flying over Bosnia with a crew that was not in the aircraft but launching it from an abandoned airfield in neighboring Albania.

  The data it gathered still had a circuitous path to reach the CIA—traveling from the drone to a manned aircraft to a ground station to a satellite. So the engineers re-rigged the drone with its own satellite communications system, adding the now characteristic bulbous nose to the fuselage.

  Thus the Predator drone was born and was used in the Balkan wars to gather information on refugee flows and Serbian air defenses. It was not until the 1999 NATO Kosovo campaign, however, that someone came up with the idea of equipping these planes with missiles, transforming them from spy planes into killer drones.10

  Today drones are used for both lethal and non-lethal purposes. Outside the military, unmanned aircraft are being drafted for everything from tracking drug smugglers and monitoring the US–Mexico border to engaging in search operations after earthquakes and spraying pesticides on crops. But the military is the driving force behind drones.

  The Israeli military has a long history of using drones to gather intelligence, as decoys, and for targeted killings. Their use of drones dates back to the occupation of the Sinai in the 1970s, and was further developed in the 1982 war in Lebanon and the ongoing conflicts in the Palestinian territories.

  The Israeli unmanned aircraft pioneered in the late 1970s and 1980s were eventually integrated into the United States’ inventory. Impressed with Israel’s use of UAVs during military operations in Lebanon in 1982, then-Navy Secretary John Lehman decided to acquire UAV capability for the Navy. One of the UAVs purchased from Israel, the Pioneer, was used to gather intelligence during Desert Storm. According to a Congressional Research Report in 2003, “Following the Gulf War, military officials recognized the worth of UAVs, and the Air Force’s Predator became a UAV on a fast track, quickly adding new capabilities.”11

  But it was the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks that led to an explosion in the US military’s use of drones and a host of other robotic weapons. The hundreds of billions of dollars that Congress allocated for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made the Pentagon flush with funds to buy up all manner of robotic weapons that military contractors from General Atomics to Northrop Grumman had been developing.

  The various branches of the military filled their shopping carts with every robot they could find: tiny surveillance robots that can climb walls and stairs, snake-like robots that slither in the grass, unmanned tanks mounted with .50 caliber weapons, and ground robots to carry the soldiers’ heavy loads.

  They snatched up every type of drone on the production lines and commissioned new ones. They bought the 38-inch-long Raven that is launched by simply throwing it into the air; the 27-foot-long Predator with its Hellfire missiles, and later the more powerful Reaper version; the 40-foot-long Global Hawk with sci-fi surveillance capabilities.

  The Pentagon was ordering these machines faster than the companies could produce them. In 2000, the Pentagon had fewer than fifty aerial drones; ten years later, it had nearly 7,500. Most of these were mini-drones for battlefield surveillance, but they also had about 800 of the bigger drones, ranging in size from a private aircraft to a commercial jet. Then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the next generation of fighter jet, the F-35 that took decades to develop at a cost of more than $500 million each, would be the Pentagon’s last manned fighter aircraft.12

  From 2002–2010, the Department of Defense’s unmanned aircraft inventory increased more than forty-fold.13 Even during the financial crisis that started brewing in 2007 and led to the slashing of government programs from nutrition supplements for pregnant women to maintenance of national parks, the Defense Department kept pouring buckets of money into drones. At the height of government deficit-reducing cuts in 2012, the US taxpayer was shelling out $3.9 billion for the procurement of unmanned aircraft, not counting the separate drone budgets for the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security.14

  Most military drones are still used for surveillance purposes. The photo sensors the UAVs carry have become increasingly powerful, allowing the on-the-ground pilots to watch individuals from an aircraft 30,000–60,000 feet up in the air. The infrared and ultraviolet imaging captures light outside the spectrum visible to the human eye. UV imaging is useful in space and for tracking rockets; IR imaging shows heat emitted by an object, making it ideal for identifying humans in the dark.

  One reason for the great demand in drones was that they graduated from simply tracking and monitoring targets to actually killing them. In Afghanistan, drones were credited for killing senior Al Qaeda and Taliban militants. In the Iraq invasion, they were used for everything from tracking supporters of Saddam Hussein to blowing up government agencies. In 2003, US Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley said, “We’ve moved from using UAVs primarily in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance roles before Operation Iraqi Freedom, to a true hunter-killer role.”15

  Another reason that drones were in such demand was the very nature of the Afghan and Iraqi wars. The US military had a hard time even finding its enemies, as many local fighters blended in among the civilian populations. Drones gave the military a way to conduct persistent surveillance and to strike quickly.

  Armed drones are used in three ways. They supply air support when US ground troops attack or come under attack; they patrol the skies looking for suspicious activity and, if they find it, they attack; and they conduct targeted killings of suspected militants.

  The main advantage of using drones is precisely that they are unmanned. With the operators safely tucked in air-conditioned rooms far away, there’s no pilot at risk of being killed or maimed in a crash. No pilot to be taken captive by enemy forces. No pilot to cause a diplomatic crisis if shot down in a “friendly country” while bombing or
spying without official permission. If a drone crashes or is shot down, the pilot back home can simply get up and take a coffee break.

  Drones are considered ideal for “3D missions”—actions that are too “dull, dirty, or dangerous” for manned aircraft. On daring missions, they can fly low and slow over hostile terrain, hovering for several hours or all day, if need be. With their astonishing sensors, from several miles in the air they can follow the route of a suspicious-looking pick-up truck or track a sniper on a rooftop. The Predator’s infrared camera can even identify the heat signature of a human body from 10,000 feet in the air. From 8,000 miles away in Nevada, a drone pilot can watch an Afghan as he lights up cigarettes, sits talking to friends on a park bench, or goes to the bathroom—never imagining that anyone is watching him.

  Without the need to provide space for aircrew, and without a human crew to become tired, unmanned aircraft can have extremely long endurance. The Reaper can linger in the air for about eighteen hours and hybrid air vehicles have an endurance of weeks. In the future, high altitude UAVs using solar power––or powered by ground-based lasers, or using air-to-air refueling––will be able to remain airborne indefinitely.

  Unmanned aircraft can fly to remote areas where our troops, and those of the host country, are unable or unwilling to go. They can share data immediately with troops on the ground. They can weave and dive and perform high-speed aerobatics that would cause a human pilot to lose consciousness.

  Drone proponents insist that their ability to linger for hours over their target allows for a thorough assessment of potential collateral damage before acting, and their ability to guide weapons to designated targets with pinpoint accuracy means fewer civilian casualties. Certainly compared to the carpet bombing of World War II or the aerial bombardment of Vietnam or even the “dumb bombs” used by the US military in the Gulf War, drone missiles are more precise––but these same missiles can be used by manned aircraft.

  Drones are also significantly cheaper to purchase than the manned aircraft they are replacing. Lockheed Martin’s F-22 fighter jets cost around $150 million apiece, while F-35s clock in at $90 million and the F-16s at $55 million. By contrast, the 2011 price of the Predator was $5 million and the Reaper was $28.4 million––but the (slow, vulnerable) Reaper hardly replaces the (fast, stealthy, air-air combat dominant) F-22.16

  Even these figures can be misleading. The cost of fueling, operating and maintaining drones is not fully known, as the CIA, which is responsible for their increasing use in undeclared wars in places like Pakistan and Yemen, includes those costs in its classified “black budget.” But every hour a drone is up in the air is estimated to cost between $2,000 and $3,500, and the number of flight hours has skyrocketed. Between 2001–2010 the time the Air Force devoted to flying missions went up 3,000 percent. In Afghanistan and Iraq, Predators and Reapers were in the air 24/7. And they were firing thousands of Hellfire missiles at $68,000 a pop.

  A huge cost associated with drones is personnel. While it might seem counterintuitive, it takes significantly more people to operate unmanned aircraft than it does to fly traditional warplanes. According to the Air Force, it takes a jaw-dropping 168 people to keep just one Predator aloft for twenty-four hours! For the larger Global Hawk surveillance drone, that number jumps to 300 people. In contrast, an F-16 fighter aircraft needs fewer than one hundred people per mission.17

  UAVs need constant attention and control from ground crew. They need ground-based pilots and crews for take-off and landing, ground-based technicians and mechanics to maintain the heavily used aircraft, crews back in the US for piloting and operating the sensors. On top of that, they need intelligence analysts to scrutinize nonstop surveillance feeds and to analyze the massive amount of data they generate. Every day, the Air Force alone processes almost 1,500 hours of full-motion video and another 1,500 still images. By 2010, this required about nineteen analysts per drone.18

  This information overload will get significantly more labor intensive with use of even more sophisticated technology, such as the “Gorgon Stare” that can video an entire city, requiring 2,000 analysts to process the data feeds from but a single drone.19 By 2011, the Air Force had already converted seven Air National Guard squadrons into intelligence units to help analyze drone video and was training an additional 2,000 Air Force intelligence analysts.20 So the cost of drones must not only include this enormous expense, but the trade-off of seconding thousands of the National Guard and other personnel.

  The Congressional Budget Office in 2011 questioned the whole idea of “cheap drones.” Their study remarked that the original concept was that these would be very low-cost, essentially expendable aircraft. “As of 2011, however, whether substantially lower costs will be realized is unclear. Although a pilot may not be on board, the advanced sensors carried by unmanned aircraft systems are very expensive and cannot be viewed as expendable.”21 The electro-optical/infrared cameras on small UAVs cost several times the drones themselves. And on the other end of the size spectrum, the sensors on the massive Global Hawk make up over half the vehicle’s price tag. In general, as the technology becomes more and more sophisticated, the price of high-tech drones is expected to go up.

  The Congressional study noted another big problem with drones that greatly affects the ultimate price tag. They crash—a lot. “Excessively high losses of aircraft can negate cost advantages by requiring the services to purchase large numbers of replacement aircraft,” the report concluded.22

  In 2009, the Air Force made an astonishing admission: more than a third of their unmanned Predator spy planes had crashed, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.23 As of July 2010, 38 Predators and Reapers had been lost during combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, with another nine crashing during training operations in the US.24 Altogether, the US Air Force said there had been seventy-nine drone accidents.25

  A Predator crashed in the Afghan mountains in September 2010 after an oil system malfunction caused engine failure. A few months earlier, a crash was due to an electrical system failure. One disaster near Kandahar Air Base was attributed to a remote pilot pushing the wrong button. Another drone crashed just as it was landing in the Seychelles, the Indian Ocean nation where the US bases a fleet of drones. In the famous case of the Iranian government getting hold of the sophisticated US spy plane, the RQ-170, the Iranians claimed they brought down the plane by jamming its GPS, while the US claimed it was a “technical problem” with the aircraft.

  Air Force investigators reported a variety of reasons for all these crashes, including computer glitches, human error, coordination snafus, outdated technology and inadequate flight manuals. This was especially true during the first few years after 2001, when drones were pushed into the air without adequate testing and training.

  Drones can also “go rogue,” meaning that the remote control is no longer communicating with the drone. In 2009, the US Air Force had to shoot down one of its drones in Afghanistan when it went rogue with a payload of weapons. In 2008, an Israeli-made drone used by Irish peacekeepers in Chad went rogue. After losing communication, it decided on its own to start heading back to Ireland, thousands of miles away, and crashed en route.

  The Navy’s multi-million dollar drone has the unfortunate feature of starting to self-destruct if the pilot accidentally presses the spacebar on his keyboard. As Fox News reported, “An unmanned MQ-8B Fire Scout helicopter can launch by itself, fly by itself—and with a single slip, can nearly blow up by itself.”26 According to a June 24, 2011 report from the Defense Department, a Navy pilot operating an unmanned helicopter accidentally pressed the spacebar with a wire from his headset. The crisis was averted at the last minute, but the Navy’s MQ-8B has so many flaws that it failed ten of ten test missions at the Naval Air Station in southern Maryland. In fact, a glitch led one of the aircraft to fly uncontrolled from the station into restricted airspace near Washington, DC, before control was regained.27

  Another problem with drone systems is security flaws. Many R
eapers and Predators didn’t encrypt the video they transmitted to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, US forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi militants. A $26 piece of software allowed them to capture the video.28

  None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public Internet, which means they should be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats. But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives.

  In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. Three years later, the Pentagon was still disinfecting machines.

  In September 2011, a computer virus infected the Creech computers, logging pilots’ keystrokes as they remotely flew missions over Afghanistan and other war zones.29 Military network security specialists weren’t sure whether the virus was introduced intentionally or by accident. But they were sure that the infection hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech, raising the possibility that secret data may have been captured and transmitted over the public Internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

  Finally, there are also serious questions about exactly how precise the munitions dropped from these drones really are. Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula said that of more than 600 Hellfires fired by Predators, over ninety-five percent hit their targets, with the few failures attributed to mechanical fault, loss of guidance or a target moving at the last instant.30 But if Hellfires are so accurate, one has to wonder why Lockheed-Martin is being funded by Congress to upgrade the Hellfire to “Romeo II,” which is supposed to have a better guidance system, maintenance and mechanisms for preventing systems failures. How precise can these “precision munitions” be if they need so many improvements?