Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn
Authors: Andrew Cockburn
Tags: United States, History, Military, Political Science, Weapons, Political Freedom, Security (National & International)
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way … to use the unmanned vehicle for forward air control, much more efficiently and at much lower risk” than would be the case with manned aircraft. Just as carefully selected video clips transmitted from optically guided bombs and missiles had thrilled audiences during the 1991 Gulf War, snippets of Predator video footage “looking like it was shot from the roof of a fifteen-story building” now performed the same function. As one officer told a reporter, “Kosovo showed that UAVs are perhaps even more useful and can have more missions and roles than we may have thought.” Jumper himself excitedly reported to Congress how “toward the end of the war, we equipped the Predator with a laser so that it could place a beam on a target—this identified it so a loitering strike aircraft could destroy it … we developed a capability with great potential for rapid targeting.”
Such enthusiastic hype, earnestly expressed, is traditional in high-technology defense programs, as demonstrated by the triumphant PR successes of the stealth aircraft and guided-missile systems assiduously promoted to the public during and after the 1991 Gulf War. As we have seen, the actual performance of these technologies was not quite as advertised: stealth planes were not invisible to radar, and precision missiles did not unerringly destroy their targets. It should therefore come as little surprise that the true story of Predator performance in the Kosovo War followed the same path.
Apart from that one incident hailed by Jumper in which an experimental drone laser had assisted in the destruction of a target—an empty barn—the Predators in Kosovo were concerned purely with reconnaissance. As yet unarmed, they beamed streaming video to the JSTARS radar planes, designated to sift information from their own radar scans, from intercepted communications, and from other intelligence sources, and then disseminate the results across the NATO command. In a significant step along the road to remotely controlling the battle via headquarters on three continents, much of this intelligence was transmitted in real time to U.S.-based staffs for analysis and then relayed back to Europe.
Meanwhile, thanks to the same expansion in communications bandwidth that made drones themselves feasible, the generals and admirals running the war were spending much of their days conferring with each other and Washington via video link. When not talking to each other they could watch the drone videos as they were being streamed directly into their offices, inevitably encouraging them in the belief that they had a close-up understanding of the ongoing war. General Clark himself, according to officers on his staff, was fascinated with drone TV and amid his busy days spent many hours glued to the monitor in his office. The general and his micromanaging habits were not universally popular with his brother officers, who were happy to circulate the story of how, one day, he called General Michael Short, the U.S. three-star commanding the allied air fleets. “Hey, Mike,” said the supreme commander, “I’m sitting here at my desk watching the UAV feed on the monitor. When are you going to do something about those two Serb tanks sitting at the end of that bridge?”
In fact, Clark may not even have been seeing any tanks at all. Despite all the high-level enthusiasm and the release of carefully chosen videos, the all-seeing eye in the sky didn’t really work very well. We know this because, while Washington was still echoing with those rapturous reports, an organization immune to technohype was taking a cold, hard look at Predator. They were not impressed by what they found.
In the right hands, the director of the Office of Operational Test and Evaluation is the most unpopular person in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Traditionally, the services have cast a benign eye on the actual performance of weapons programs they have fostered and do not welcome independent assessments of
Such enthusiastic hype, earnestly expressed, is traditional in high-technology defense programs, as demonstrated by the triumphant PR successes of the stealth aircraft and guided-missile systems assiduously promoted to the public during and after the 1991 Gulf War. As we have seen, the actual performance of these technologies was not quite as advertised: stealth planes were not invisible to radar, and precision missiles did not unerringly destroy their targets. It should therefore come as little surprise that the true story of Predator performance in the Kosovo War followed the same path.
Apart from that one incident hailed by Jumper in which an experimental drone laser had assisted in the destruction of a target—an empty barn—the Predators in Kosovo were concerned purely with reconnaissance. As yet unarmed, they beamed streaming video to the JSTARS radar planes, designated to sift information from their own radar scans, from intercepted communications, and from other intelligence sources, and then disseminate the results across the NATO command. In a significant step along the road to remotely controlling the battle via headquarters on three continents, much of this intelligence was transmitted in real time to U.S.-based staffs for analysis and then relayed back to Europe.
Meanwhile, thanks to the same expansion in communications bandwidth that made drones themselves feasible, the generals and admirals running the war were spending much of their days conferring with each other and Washington via video link. When not talking to each other they could watch the drone videos as they were being streamed directly into their offices, inevitably encouraging them in the belief that they had a close-up understanding of the ongoing war. General Clark himself, according to officers on his staff, was fascinated with drone TV and amid his busy days spent many hours glued to the monitor in his office. The general and his micromanaging habits were not universally popular with his brother officers, who were happy to circulate the story of how, one day, he called General Michael Short, the U.S. three-star commanding the allied air fleets. “Hey, Mike,” said the supreme commander, “I’m sitting here at my desk watching the UAV feed on the monitor. When are you going to do something about those two Serb tanks sitting at the end of that bridge?”
In fact, Clark may not even have been seeing any tanks at all. Despite all the high-level enthusiasm and the release of carefully chosen videos, the all-seeing eye in the sky didn’t really work very well. We know this because, while Washington was still echoing with those rapturous reports, an organization immune to technohype was taking a cold, hard look at Predator. They were not impressed by what they found.
In the right hands, the director of the Office of Operational Test and Evaluation is the most unpopular person in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Traditionally, the services have cast a benign eye on the actual performance of weapons programs they have fostered and do not welcome independent assessments of
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