Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn Page B

when deployed. As noted, the office was not popular with the military or with defense contractors, mainly because it regularly disproved claims by contractors and their service sponsors regarding the efficacy of lavishly funded systems.
    Even as the smoke of the Balkan battlefields cleared and the Pentagon echoed with claims regarding the success of Predator, a gravel-voiced Floridian mathematician named Tom Christie was taking over as director of the testing office. Christie was a friend and longtime associate of Boyd’s, having worked closely with him in the 1960s formulating a theory of air-combat tactics that many years later became official air force doctrine. Analyzing weapons effects at the Air Force Armaments Center at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, Christie had a front row seat as colleagues worked to implement the high command’s obsessive determination to destroy the Thanh Hoa Bridge in North Vietnam. “They even wanted to turn a B-47 (a strategic nuclear bomber) into a drone,” he told me. “They’d load it up with high explosives and fly it into the bridge. That never got anywhere, just like all the other crazy schemes they had.”
    Technically able and skilled in bureaucratic maneuver, Christie managed to advance through the ranks of air force and defense department officialdom. By 1995 he had become director of the Operational Evaluation Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Pentagon’s semi-independent think tank. In this capacity he reviewed an air force report on the sterling qualities of the performance of the JSTARS surveillance plane in the Balkans. As an example, the report cited an operation in which the system had detected the movement of a Serb armored unit while it attempted to hide in a cemetery. “We had built this beautiful topographical map of that whole area,” Christie told me, “and we knew exactly where the JSTARS had been at any particular time. So we were able to show that at the time they said they had spotted the Serbs in the cemetery, they were on the other side of a fairly substantial mountain. Even the air force couldn’t claim the thing could see through a mountain.”
    When Christie took over the testing office, the very first system that came up for review was the Predator. So, in the mountains and desert that make up the vast Nellis Air Force Base complex in Nevada, Christie’s team put the machine through its paces.
    The tests, carried out over nine days, mostly in a corner of the Indian Springs drone airfield, which had been activated five years earlier to preempt the army, did not go well. In fact, they were a disaster. One of the weaknesses revealed by earlier tryouts in the Balkans had been the aircraft’s vulnerability to ice on its wings, a fatal condition. In response, the technicians at Big Safari had developed a “wet wing” that could theoretically de-ice the wings in flight, and two of the four machines consigned to the tests were so equipped. But they didn’t work, a failure, as the testers later reported, that prevented “transition through clouds.” In fact the plane could not land or take off in any kind of bad weather, “including any visible moisture such as rain, snow, ice, frost, or fog.”
    Assuming it did manage to take off and reach enemy territory, the plane had a variety of cameras for viewing the ground and detecting targets. One of these, a “day TV continuous zoom,” looked at a 300-yard-wide area of territory in daylight from 15,000 feet. A second, the “day TV spotter,” could see in greater detail, but only over a narrower area of 50 yards. An infrared (IR) camera enabled night vision, while a synthetic aperture radar made it possible to see through clouds. To grade the cameras, the testing team relied on the National Imagery Interpretation Rating Scale, which runs from 1, the ability to pick out a large aircraft, such as a Boeing 737, to 9, the ability to recognize a human face. Though the Predator cameras were