Drone Warfare Read online

  While much of the reporting on drone attacks is classified, it does seem that some of the problems of accuracy and reliability have to do with weather conditions. Clouds, rain, fog and smoke can reduce their accuracy. Then there are equipment errors and design defects, such as problems with laser targeting where some of the laser energy is reflected back from the target, confusing the laser seeker.

  In order to compensate for these deficiencies, the Air Force developed a tactic called “double tap,” firing two Hellfire missiles at each target. But this increases the possibility of more civilian deaths, as individuals who rush to help those who were hit from the first strike are themselves blown up with the second attack. A study by the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism found evidence that at least fifty civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims.31

  Of course, when the target is falsely identified, even the most accurate bombs will result in tragedy. From Afghanistan to Somalia, the US is operating in regions where it has a limited understanding of the intricacies of those complex societies. Faulty intelligence can be the product of deliberate misinformation from local informants who are trying to either settle old tribal feuds or simply make some cash by selling phony tips.

  Faulty intelligence can also be the product of simple mistakes. Despite all the super-duper cameras, video images can be misinterpreted. A truck carrying boxes of pomegranates can look just like a truck carrying boxes of explosives. A tall bearded man in a robe can look just like another tall bearded man in a robe. In February 2002, a drone pilot reportedly killed a tall Afghan who he thought was Osama bin Laden but turned out to be an innocent villager gathering scrap metal.32 During the 2003 Iraq invasion, semi-automated Patriot missiles were fired at what were supposed to be Iraqi rockets: the result was downed allied planes. Their human operators were supposed to override in such cases but failed to do so.33

  And in the first known case of friendly fire deaths involving unmanned aircraft, a drone strike in Afghanistan on April 6, 2011 accidentally killed a US Marine and a Navy medic. Marine Staff Sgt. Jeremy Smith, 26, and Navy Hospitalman Benjamin D. Rast, 23, were killed by a Predator drone after Marine commanders mistook them for Taliban. When Jeremy Smith’s father, Jerry Smith, was shown video images of the attack, he didn’t see the high-resolution images one might expect from sophisticated drones. All he could make out were blobs in really dark shadows. “You couldn’t even tell they were human beings—just blobs,” said the bereaved father. The report found no one culpably negligent or derelict in their duties, but faulted poor communications, mistaken assumptions and “a lack of overall common situational awareness.”34

  Unfortunately, gravesites throughout Asia and the Middle East are filled with testaments to drone attacks gone bad. And drones are not named Predators and Reapers for nothing. They are killing machines. With no judge or jury, they obliterate lives in an instant, the lives of those deemed by someone, somewhere, to be terrorists, along with those who are accidentally—or incidentally—caught in their cross-hairs.

  Think how terrifying it must be to live under the constant threat of a drone attack. Sometimes you’d see them flying menacingly overhead; sometimes they’d disappear but you could still hear their frightening, buzzing sound.

  Drone attacks leave behind trails of human suffering—grieving widows, orphaned children, young lives snuffed out, lifetime disabilities. They enrage local populations, stoke anti-American feelings and prompt violent acts of revenge.

  As Pakistani-American attorney Rafia Zakaria wrote, “Somewhere in the United States, a drone operator sits in a booth with a joystick and commandeers a pilot-less aircraft armed with deadly bombs. Much like in a video game, he aims, shoots and fires at targets he sees on a satellite map…. Sometimes the target is killed and sometimes the intelligence is faulty and a sleeping family or a wedding party bears the brunt of the miscalculation. At all times, however, the Taliban capitalize on the ensuing mayhem and gain new recruits and re-energize old ones. Terror thus spreads not simply in the village where the drone attack has taken place but far and wide in the bazaars of Peshawar and the streets of Lahore and the offices of Islamabad where these recruits avenge their anger against the drone attacks.”35

  And while lots of people are being killed by drones, a few people are making lots of money.

  It’s a Growth Market

  “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.”

  —Noor Behram, Pakistani photographer36

  The US manufacturing sector is struggling, if not quite dead yet. Thanks to tax breaks and misleadingly labeled “free trade” agreements, corporations have been given every incentive to look abroad for cheaper sources of labor, eliminating middle-class jobs even as wealthy CEOs get wealthier. Large swaths of Detroit, once a bustling city home to the country’s largest employers, now resemble a ghost town.

  But there’s one manufacturing sector that’s not hurting: the companies that profit from building the high-tech tools of modern warfare, America’s last great export. Indeed, what former President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” has made it through this age of austerity largely unscathed. And when it comes to drones, the complex is booming.

  “It’s a growth market,” crowed the Defense Department’s chief weapons buyer, Ashton B. Carter.37 And he should know, with the Pentagon’s $5 billion war chest for drones. Global spending on the research and manufacture of drones is expected to total more than $94 billion between 2011–2020, according to one analyst who monitors the aerospace industry. Other countries, particularly Israel and China, will take a piece of the pie. But this is one area where, so far, US companies are still in the lead.

  No company has benefited more from the drone boom than San Diego-based General Atomics. While not as well known as mega-military contractors like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, the company, which began in 1955 building nuclear reactors, has experienced massive growth from the military’s increased reliance on UAVs. In fact, the company’s Predator became the global face of the new age of robotic warfare. Its successor, the Reaper (originally called Predator B)—which can fly higher and faster and hold significantly more weapons—has become the Air Force’s primary unmanned aerial vehicle.

  General Atomics bought its way into the drone business in the 1990s, purchasing from Hughes Aircraft the original UAV company started by Israeli engineer Abraham Karem. While it’s a private company, General Atomics would go belly-up in no time if it weren’t for a constant stream of government contracts. Of the company’s $661.6 million in revenues in 2010—up from just $115 million in 1980—90 percent came directly from sales to the Pentagon.38 Between 2000 and 2010, it sold more than $2.4 billion worth of equipment to the US military. Most of that income is from drones.

  With the red-hot drone market, the company’s revenues are set to explode even more. And General Atomics is ready.

  As the Los Angeles Times reported, its seven buildings spread over a sprawling 85-acre base in Poway, California are “believed to be the world’s largest facility dedicated to drones.”39 General Atomics’ employees, who number around 5,000 in total, are busy just trying to keep up with the demand, while also working on the next generation of killer unmanned vehicles. “Donning bright-blue smocks, employees work around the clock, pounding sheets of metal into aircraft parts or fusing electronics onto circuit boards.”

  From 1994 to 2010, the company sold more than 430 of its Predator and Reaper drones to the US military. It also began sales to NATO allies.

  In 2011, the US Air Force ordered a test version of General Atomics’ latest, most souped-up drone, the Predator C Avenger, which can fly faster (740 km/h), higher (60,000 ft) and carry a bigger payload (over 2,000 pounds) than either the Predator or the Reaper.40

 
How did such a small company come to beat out its larger competitors in the drone-making game, despite the fact that its early UAVs that were used in the Balkans were difficult to control and prone to crashing?

  “For our size, we possess more significant political capital than you might think,” company CEO James Blue boasted to a trade publication back in 2005.41

  That political capital did not come based solely on the merits of the products Blue’s company makes. And it did not come cheap.

  For years, General Atomics carefully cultivated key members of Congress, spending lavishly on campaign contributions and junkets. As the Center for Public Integrity reported in 2006, the company spent more than any other corporation in America on financing trips abroad for lawmakers, their families and their staff.42 Between 2000 and mid-2005, it spent “roughly $660,000 on 86 trips” to everywhere from Turkey to Australia, where the company was trying to get US government approval to sell its latest UAVs overseas to non-NATO countries.

  “[It’s] useful and very helpful, in fact, when you go down and talk to the government officials to have congressional people go along and discuss the capabilities of [the plane] with them,” explained Tom Cassidy, CEO of the company’s drone-making subsidiary, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. A former Navy Admiral himself, which no doubt helps when selling his merchandise, Cassidy formed General Atomics’ drone-making subsidiary in 1992 with just a half-dozen engineers.

  General Atomics wasn’t looking just to sell to the US military and NATO allies, but was pushing for government permission to sell to other US allies, including repressive Middle Eastern regimes. “There’s interest from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates,” boasted Frank Pace, president of the company’s aircraft systems subsidiary, according to the Bloomberg news service. “Saudi Arabia is a huge country, and if they want to cover the country well, they alone could get 50 aircraft.”43

  In July 2010, the US government approved an export version of its flagship Predator drone model to the Middle East and South Asia. Prior to this, the sale of Predators was approved only to NATO countries, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. In theory, these export versions are designed only for surveillance and reconnaissance missions, but it wouldn’t take much adjusting to slap a bomb on them.

  It’s also helpful to have US congressmen in your pocket in order to help sell your wares back home, of course. The office of disgraced former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a San Diego Republican convicted of accepting bribes from military contractors, accepted more than $53,000 in trips to Europe and Australia from General Atomics between 2002 and 2005, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

  As chair of the powerful House sub-committee that appropriated military spending, Cunningham was a useful advocate for the firm, pressing then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in July 2001 to speed up funding for General Atomics’ Predator drone. Since then, the company’s revenues have skyrocketed, partly from a 2010 contract worth $195 million to build a drone for use by the Army and another $148.2 million contract in 2011 to provide another two dozen of its MQ-9 Reaper drones to the Air Force.

  Overall, the company has spent more than $21 million lobbying public officials since 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.44 But by 2008 this little company made it into the Defense News list of top one hundred defense firms. One would be hard pressed to find such an enormous return on investment outside the military-industrial complex.

  General Atomics is not the only little military contractor that could. While it may sound like a gentle air freshener—and it did start out consulting on air quality—AeroVironment has been gobbling up a giant-size piece of the drone pie.

  Like General Atomics, the company is relatively small. In 2001, AeroVironment’s annual revenue was under $30 million. Within a decade, its revenue shot up to nearly $300 million, 85 percent of that coming from the sale of drones to the US government.

  Compared to the likes of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, this southern California (Simi Valley) company is still the little brother. Finding its niche in mini-drones, AeroVironment has gotten into UAVs in a big way.

  On September 1, 2011, the company announced it was awarded a $4.9 million contract from the US Army to build a 5 ½ pound drone called the Switchblade. Like its namesake, the Switchblade is versatile. According to AeroVironment, it is designed to provide the warfighter with a “magic bullet” capable of being launched from the air or the ground and to lock in on a target within minutes.

  “The unique capabilities provided by the Switchblade agile munition for standoff engagement, accuracy and controlled effects make it an ideal weapon for today’s fight and for US military forces of the future,” said Bill Nichols from the Army’s Close Combat Weapons Systems office.

  But Nichols left out the juiciest detail: the mini-drone can also serve as the US military’s very own robotic suicide bomber. In the words of the New York Times, it is being designed not just to provide surveillance, but to “carry an explosive payload into a target.”45 In other words, the Switchblade is an unmanned kamikaze fighter, a technology the military frets “will not long be beyond the capabilities of a terrorist network.”

  Later in September 2011, AeroVironmnet received a $6.9 million order from the US Air Force for another drone, the Raven, which can fit inside a backpack, and another $16 million order from the Army to provide support for the Raven.46 The next month it got another boost: a $7.3 million Army order for its larger, 13-pound surveillance Puma drone.47

  AeroVironment’s itsy-bitsy surveillance Hummingbird Drone was featured by Time magazine as one of the best inventions in 2011. Built as a prototype for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, it can fly in all directions, even backward. It can hover and rotate clockwise or counterclockwise, and is equipped with a video camera. It’s shockingly light—weighing less than one AA battery—but carries, at least during the experimental phase, a shockingly hefty price tag of $4 million.

  With the Hummingbird, Raven, Wasp, Puma and Switchblade, AeroVironment has established itself as the giant of the mini-drones.

  But don’t think the big guns of the defense industry have been left out. Take Raytheon, which boasts more than 12,000 employees and is one of the top five largest federal contractors in the United States. Raytheon provides the US military with drone software enabling it to attain “real-time access to actionable intelligence” gathered by drones around the world.48 That’s the technology that helps a drone pilot in a Nevada desert decide when to fire a Hellfire missile. Since the system allows military personnel to gather intelligence from a range of drones manufactured by other companies, it gives Raytheon a chance to win even when it loses out on a UAV contract to a competitor.

  Raytheon also produces a 500-pound bomb called the Paveway for use by larger drones like the Predator.

  It’s developing a 100-pound missile called The Monsoon to challenge the dominant role of the 100-pound Hellfire made by competitor Lockheed Martin.

  But Raytheon is discovering that smaller may be better, and is now developing lightweight drone bombs. The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, where Raytheon’s missile and drone building is headquartered, reported in 2010 that the company was “quietly vying for a key role in America’s remote-control war on insurgents and terrorists” by engineering smaller and smaller missiles.49 It produced the Griffin, which weighs less than one-third of the 100-pound Hellfire missile. By 2010, Raytheon had already received more than $40 million in contracts from the US Army for the Griffin.

  Even smaller is the 13-pound, 2-foot-long Small Tactical Munition designed, in the words of program manager Cody Trestchok, to meet an “emerging need” for missiles to be strapped onto smaller drones that have been, up until now, only used for surveillance.50 Raytheon also designed its own Cobra drone to carry this little bomb.

  Reporting on Raytheon’s successful September 2011 test of the Cobra, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman remarked, “The guided munition has the potent
ial to expand the drone war dramatically, giving battalion-sized units that fly small drones the ability to kill people, like the remote pilots who fly the iconic Predators and Reapers do.”51

  Raytheon is also producing a system designed to shoot down enemy drones with lasers. But Raytheon, the largest employer in all of southern Arizona, is not content just providing the software, missiles and lasers for other company’s drones—and the ability to shoot them down. Indeed, the Daily Star reports it is busy at work on technology that would keep “drones in the air indefinitely,” having received a patent “for a system that would allow one unmanned aerial vehicle to communicate in order to safely refuel another drone in flight.”52

  And keep an eye out for what Popular Science calls a “Supersonic Shape-Shifting Bomber.” With a target completion date of 2020, a Raytheon unmanned bomber—also called Switchblade—will have adjustable wings that will purportedly enable it to “loiter just outside enemy territory for more than a dozen hours and, on command, hurtle toward a target faster than the speed of sound.”

  Raytheon better hurry up, as the market, and the sky, is getting increasingly crowded.

  Chicago-based military contractor Boeing, with more than 165,000 employees and revenues of over $64.3 billion in 2010, is not content losing out on the lucrative drone business to the likes of Raytheon, much less a company a fraction of its size, like General Atomics. First flown in April 2011, Boeing’s Phantom Ray prototype is roughly the size of a fighter jet. But unlike drones currently in widespread use, this one essentially flies itself.