Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare Read online

  Hundreds of thousands of maintainers and scientists and analysts and technicians (unlaborers, I’ll call them) are involved in the process, which isn’t unmanned at all. And we have made it global: we have extended the battlefield to every corner and expanded the target lists beyond just terrorists. In this domain wholly given over to targeting, waiting for (or creating) an opportunity to find and to kill has become the preferred and seemingly the only option, whether at the American border or in the remotest corner of Syria or Pakistan. Loitering facilitates and even encourages a perpetual effort. Though humans operate the Data Machine, with collection and analysis and collaboration occurring at all levels, the only real intervention of decision-making occurs when production falters. On a typical day, there is high anxiety, and there are real dangers for many, but if everything goes right, if a prospective operation doesn’t portend too much danger, if a prospective strike doesn’t equal x-number of calculated potential civilian deaths, if no public controversies arise and there are no leaks, then no real decisions are made.

  No one would dispute that warfare has become more information-centric. This data-centric, keyboard-oriented style of warfare also happens to suit the cadre of digital natives who have supplanted the bricks-and-mortar warriors of the previous era: young people who joined the military after 9/11 now make up well over 90 percent of everyone in uniform.17 Military studies point out that 80 percent of these natives, sometimes called millennials—people born between 1980 and 2000—live in households with 24/7 computer and online access, and that 92 percent play video games. By college graduation, the typical digital native has logged 10,000 hours with a joystick of some sort. The military labels these digital natives “information hounds” with “lofty expectations.”18

  When you talk to military elders about their cadre of digital natives, they describe them as those who “want to do, not to be told.” With connectivity as their hallmark, they expect to jump right into a new piece of equipment, a new website, or a new game, learning the controls through trial and error. And not only that—digital natives value team learning, and they achieve and improve naturally through social media. When you visit a military unit or a command post these days, it’s quite noticeable to a grease-pencil-trained analyst like me that the ubiquitous accoutrement of modern-day war-making is social media, from the common operating picture to the multiple open chat sessions connecting highly dispersed information workers. And yet this instant messaging, which has all of the immediacy, abbreviation, and fleetingness of teenage texting, goes on in a secure and hidden world and concerns matters of life and death.

  These digital natives are supported by hundreds of thousands of devices—handhelds, tablets, laptops, smart thises and thats—and are in constant contact with each other through gigantic communications networks. Every soldier everywhere is called a sensor and a contributor. Each of them sits at his or her console, and collectively they drive a transformation of the world’s premier hierarchical institution into one of open information and egalitarian involvement, with civilian leaders at the top and generals commanding the information machine, automated and increasingly autonomous, tended to by a cadre of war-surfers. In fact, for the modern military, almost every aspect of recruitment and training, and increasingly the way operations themselves are carried out, caters to the expectations of these digitally addicted multitaskers.19

  In the decade following 2001, almost any contraption or method that might help the US military combat terrorism with less human exposure was also accepted into this fight. Predators and their brethren were acquired to penetrate denied physical space. The mini-and microdrones and the robots and the myriad associated appliances operated at all other altitudes and in all other conditions to put “intelligence” everywhere: the hidden, buried, flying, crawling, and riding sensors peering over the next hill, sniffing and warning of dangers, pulling guard duty, scouting the roads to provide warning for convoys, approaching improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and unexploded bombs.

  In Afghanistan and Iraq, and then in new battlefields in Yemen and Pakistan, everyone was told that this was going to be a new kind of war. The United States wasn’t going to win the fight against terrorism through defeating an army on the battlefield or attacking some set of traditional targets with bombers. The new mission was going out and hunting. Special operations forces and secret agents—that is, the small-scale and elite fighters like the Navy SEALs of the individual commando variety—would lead the fight, and more activity would take place in the shadows than in the light. Information would be as valuable as any bullet. Humans are engaged in this effort, and there are those individuals who actually go out there and risk their lives. But the irony is that this very human-centric design of hunter-killer special operations, these particular types of boots on the ground, require far more exhaustive preparation and microscopic-level intelligence information than industrial armies ever needed. Thus the technological effort and the human effort demand the same data, a circular requirement that has become the dominant activity.

  Arguments are put forward in policy circles around Washington and by the drone manufacturers that unmanned systems merely offer gigantic cost savings or protect the lives of soldiers. Unbelievable advances in information technology, nanotechnology, and even genetics, together with the continued miniaturization of nearly everything, propel unprecedented and constant acceleration. The future already promises personal drones of amazing sophistication weighing just a gram.20

  Some might say that these advances merely repeat the historical cycles of technological innovation that every war produces. But that is dangerous thinking. Every element of what has emerged in this increasingly unmanned world is dependent on civilian technology and, in fact, civilian infrastructure. Nothing happens in this world without the Internet, even if private pipelines and superencryption are the way that the military facilitates its own secure enclave within the network. As a result, private and public communications have become one. Developments in the processing and handling of big data, the use of the cloud, and information analysis move forward in parallel military and civilian worlds and at breakneck speed; the best of what is civilian is readily adapted for the military, whereas the robustness of what is military is desperately needed to protect networks that are no longer just civilian.

  As civilian melds into military, naturally the number of civilians in the fight also increases. (Some technologies are just too new or too complex for a cadre of eighteen-year-old military gamers to master.) Civilian expertise, though, even when it’s from dragooned academic and civilian specialties like anthropology or sociology, hasn’t resulted in a better understanding of any country, nor of radical Islam or terrorism. But there has definitely been a mastering of the task of hunting as more and more of the old human tasks—finding and tracking, translation, navigation, even killing—are done more competently, even if in the service of an ultimately automatic Machine.

  Though there is a pretense of flattening and greater collaboration through networking, in reality a two-tiered system has emerged. Centrally controlled information and networks akin to public transportation grids deliver big data and the big picture while every digital native gets their own equivalent private vehicle, not only constantly connected but also in control of their own little dashboard, with their own headphones, and their own high-powered flashlights to surf into the unknown. Everyone serves to defeat al Qaeda and other terrorists and enemies, but the actual effort is multitiered, the elite (and truly the few) doing the hunting and killing while the rest busy themselves in social net-warring: guard the bases, secure the supply lines for the convoys that deliver the water and fuel, thwart the IED networks that exist to thwart them, reduce human exposure. Warfare hasn’t completely transformed into an endeavor where everyone on the battlefield is merely there to sustain being on the battlefield, but the ratio of those actually doing the fighting to those processing the information and operating the Machine is at historical extremes. It is hard to quantif
y, but during the Afghanistan war, only 1.6 percent of the supplies shipped to the battlefield comprised ammunition, and less than 1 percent was repair parts. Fuel, on the other hand, constituted almost 39 percent; water, food, clothing, and personal items made up another 55.4 percent.21

  Although the intelligence produced by this phantasmagorical network is constantly depicted by Hollywood as having brought anything and everything just a mouse click away, or, more ominously, as having achieved a comprehensive and undifferentiated police state sprung from Edward Snowden’s worst nightmare, the facts are contrary to both of these common pictures. The size of the Data Machine reflects its immaturity and the struggle to tame its subject matter more than its omniscience. Few inside the military or the world of public policy seem to be able to pinpoint this core problem because today’s data collectors—military and civilian, government and commercial, public and private—all have one thing in common: whether through personal smartphones or through the most sophisticated hyperspectral imaging sensors, they accumulate unprecedented amounts of data. Think about your own information glut: texts, e-mails, photos, videos, music, paper mail, lists, and books residing on multiple appliances that are impossible to shut off, ponderous to categorize, and difficult to find.

  The government effort costing hundreds of billions of dollars, constituting tens of thousands of sensors and hundreds of thousands of human operators and analysts, is barely able to keep up with the task of finding and monitoring a few thousand people. And that’s the point: monumental leaps have occurred, both in technology and in the ways of war, but they have all been to achieve a very limited objective. The military has been transformed and become hyperprecise, but it also has become able to do only one thing: drill down to the individual—a terrorist, a car, an armored vehicle, a window in an office, the most hidden or fragile heart or brain of a machine or a network. Data feeds this incredible targeting machine, which goes about its work with such economy that it is sometimes not even apparent what is being destroyed, let alone why. It is such a new way of warfare that every death—friendly and enemy—is enormously magnified. Ours is a numerically anomalous tragedy; theirs an exaggerated and overmagnified victory.

  Almost a decade and a half after 9/11, when I look at the digital legions splayed out on a truly global battlefield, I see drones and the Data Machine they serve—the unmanned with all of its special and unique ways—as the greatest threat to our national security, our safety, and our very way of life. If drones instantly didn’t exist, the black boxes that are at the heart of the Data Machine would still equip manned aircraft and satellites, and would even be propelling themselves around on the ground. And yet drones are the proper place to start thinking about our illusory pursuit of this brand of perfect war, both the godlike endeavor to root out evil and the increased unwillingness to suffer human sacrifice in the course of making war.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Search of the Wind

  … Heaven cried aloud, while earth did rumble.

  The day grew still, darkness came forth.

  There was a flash of lightning, fire broke out.

  [The flames] flared up, death rained down.

  TABLET IV, EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  To really begin to understand drones, you have to understand Gilgamesh.

  The Epic of Gilgamesh is the world’s oldest work of literature, going back in Mesopotamian oral tradition more than 5,000 years.1 Though unknown to many in the West, its narrative has influenced countless themes of humankind: there is a great flood, and there was an ancient time that existed before the deluge; there is a serpent that upends immortality; there are parables and rules that suggest moral codes for living one’s life; and there are warnings of the dangers of absolute power on earth. Gilgamesh’s story is so universal that references to it reached thousands of miles away into Egyptian and Hittite courts, into Greek and Roman literature, and even into the two great Judeo-Christian and Islamic books. “Gilgamesh links East and West, antiquity and modernity, poetry and history,” writes one contemporary scholar.2

  The Epic begins by explaining that Gilgamesh, one part man and two parts god, thought he “was wise in all matters on land and sea,” but had to endure friendship, loss, and transformation to find a cautious peace with himself.

  Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk, striking in his looks, the fiercest of all warriors. But the young king was also a selfish and rapacious ruler. To teach him lessons of humility and mortal rule, the gods decided to create a friend and equal, Enkidu: a being made of clay and water and dropped into the wilderness, “innocent of mankind.”

  Let them contend together and leave Uruk in quiet, the gods said.

  Enkidu was feral and free-living with the gazelles and the beasts, knowing nothing of the world of men, an enduring figure of the primeval and an archetype that persists in stories through Tarzan of the Apes.3 One day a hunter spies the enormous and hairy Enkidu taking water with the wild animals and goes to tell Gilgamesh of this beast that is frustrating his hunt.

  A wild one, a star fallen from heaven, strong and free? Gilgamesh exclaims. He’s had a dream of this unconquerable equal, two parts man and one part wild creature.

  The king bids Shamhat, a courtesan of Ishtar’s temple, to go and embrace Enkidu, to teach him the art of the women “so that a man he will finally be.” The two lie together for six days and seven nights. When Enkidu is finally sated, he is also transformed. When he returns to the wild, the creatures run away. “Enkidu was grown weak, for wisdom was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart,” the Epic says.

  Shamhat then tells Enkidu about Gilgamesh, the king who is also perfect in strength and could be his equal in all respects. On the way to Uruk, Enkidu is literally transformed into a man—shaved, clothed, taught to speak, to eat, to enjoy the pleasures of beer—and he also learns of the king’s wicked rule. When he arrives, the first thing he does is intervene to stop Gilgamesh from taking a virgin bride from her betrothed on their wedding night, a privilege the king reserves for himself. The two wrestle in a titanic bout, knocking down walls and destroying buildings. And though Gilgamesh prevails, he is deeply moved by Enkidu’s courage and strength, and they immediately develop a profound friendship, becoming brothers-in-arms.

  Bored with his existence in Uruk, Gilgamesh then decides to challenge Humbaba, the devoted demon of the gods and protector of the great cedar forest. Gilgamesh and Enkidu journey many days to what is assumed to be today’s Syria or Lebanon to cut down the coveted trees to adorn Uruk’s palaces and temples. They encounter and then slay Humbaba, but only together, and then only really with the intervention of the gods.

  When they return to Uruk, even Ishtar, the goddess of love, is so stunned by Gilgamesh’s conquest and his beauty that she proposes that he become her lover. But Gilgamesh spurns and shames the deity of Uruk: “Which of your lovers did you ever love forever?” he asks, recounting a string of men and their pitiful ends at her hands.

  Ishtar is so incensed that she demands that her father send down the Bull of Heaven to teach Gilgamesh a lesson. When the bull arrives, he stamps the ground and opens a chasm to the underworld, killing hundreds in the city. He drinks of the Euphrates River and reduces its level by many feet. Another epic battle ensues. Fighting together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay the celestial bull. But Enkidu goes too far at the end and heaves its flank at Ishtar on her temple walls.

  Is it Gilgamesh’s contempt or Enkidu’s brutal act that provides the reason for punishment? In either case, the gods decide they must teach Gilgamesh a lesson, and Enkidu is given an illness that eats away at him. He dreams of the “house of dust” that awaits him, the netherworld. And on the twelfth day, as he is dying, he beseeches Gilgamesh: Do not forget how we fought together. “I shall not die like a man fallen in battle,” he cries, shameful that his end comes merely from a sickness.

  Gilgamesh’s heart is shattered with Enkidu’s death. He goes off in search of immortality, believing now that his life is meaningless u
nless it can be made eternal. He returns to the wild, clothing himself in animal skins and seeking out Utanapishti, the legendary man who reputedly survived the great flood with “the seed of all living creatures,” to find out how he too might escape death.

  At the edge of the world, Gilgamesh overcomes the scorpion men who guard the Mashu district, the mountains where the sun rises and sets. At the waters of death, he impetuously kills the odd stone oarsmen of Urshanabi, the ferryman, almost destroying all chances of crossing. During a great sea journey, Gilgamesh’s and Urshanabi’s punting poles are eaten by the death waters, and the two bind their clothing into sails. Finally arriving before the great prophet, Gilgamesh learns the knowledge of all the times before the great flood. And he learns that he cannot live forever. Defeated, he returns to Uruk with the knowledge of mortality and settles into his role as wise ruler, satisfied that his tale will live on in the stone tablets he leaves behind.

  Someone with a sense of antiquity, or irony, gave the name Gilgamesh to an actual device that is one of the top secret tools of the modern-day Data Machine. Developed and fielded for the National Security Agency in 2006 to hunt terrorists, Gilgamesh the black box is attached to unmanned Predator and even larger Reaper drones, where it performs a very specific task in “signals intelligence,” seeking out the faintest and most fleeting of buried digits emanating from the contemporary netherworld and performing the alchemy needed to precisely place them.

  By itself, Gilgamesh the black box is just a laptop-sized hunk of metal and circuit boards. But when combined with a host of other similarly named devices—ARTEMIS, Gemini, Nitro, Temptress, Nebula—the gathering horde of sensors, receivers, processors, direction finders, decoders, and recorders accumulates both a greater synergy and a higher vision. This is warfare truly transformed. Though many make the mistake of assuming that what has changed since 9/11 is global terrorism—nonstate actors or an Islamic jihad or even “asymmetrical” warfare—the enduring transformation, that which will affect human history from now until all eternity, is not the enemy but the world that Gilgamesh the black box represents.4 It is not a weapon per se, nor is it a game-changer of blatant historic note. Gilgamesh is also not merely the kind of joystick-controlled robot that so many have put forth to punctuate their distaste for war and ancient bloodlust. In fact, military historians and buffs will probably never speak of this Gilgamesh in the same way they speak of Enigma, blitzkrieg, Little Boy, precision, stealth, or any other war winners of any of the Great Wars. Gilgamesh’s setting, moreover, will never have the heroic distinction of a Waterloo or a Gettysburg or a Normandy. Not only is Gilgamesh virtually invisible due to crushing government secrecy, it also floats above and is disconnected from the very geography it meticulously catalogs; it is difficult to make concrete as what we think of when we think of an army, or warfare, or even a place.