Episode 5: War Against Terror – The Predator Age

>> Julia Macdonald: Episode 5, war against terror, the predator age.

>> Speaker 2: Former Secretary Rumsfeld said, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had. And people made fun of him when he said that. And I could never quite understand that, because, in fact, I mean, what he was saying was a central challenge of the military profession, which is that militaries in peacetime place bets against an uncertain future.

 

And it's only when war comes that you find out whether those have been good bets or colossally bad bets. And what are the two things that you can use to place bets? Well, one is history, right? Particularly your own, you know, received history. And then the other is theory.

 

It's ideas. Because aside from theory and aside from history, got nothing to go on.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Welcome to the Hand Behind Unmanned, a podcast about how America fights war without human beings, told from the perspective of the human beings making those choices. I'm Jackie Schneider.

>> Julia Macdonald: And I'm Julia Macdonald.

 

In this podcast, we take you inside weapons budget lines and behind classified program doors to understand not only what unmanned technology the US military bought, but why. For those of you who came for the technology, we hope you'll stay for the people. Because this really is a story about remarkable humans, historical junctures, and our beliefs about the future of war and what that means for unmanned weapons we buy.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Along the way in our unmanned journey, we'll learn valuable lessons about how technology shapes the winners and losers in war, how humans and technology interact at a time when the march of technological progress seems inevitable, how public funds get invested when it comes to warfare, and above all, the human hands at the heart of unmanned technology.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: Last episode, we covered the end of the Cold War and into the early 1990s, where the Swift victory in the Gulf War showcased a new generation of cruise missiles and precision guided munitions that could enable the US to fight wars of choice without risking human life. We also heard how conflicts in Somalia and Bosnia served to sideline the military revolution.

 

Advocates like Andy Marshall in favour of investments in technologies like cruise missiles that could minimise political risk. But by 2000, the deck chairs had changed again. With the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and the appointment of the Office of Net Assessment old hand Jim Roche as Secretary of the Air Force, the time was ripe for military revolutions to finally fulfill its vision.

 

This all changed on September 11, 2001.

>> Speaker 4: This just in. You are looking at, obviously, a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade center, the CNN center right now is just beginning to work on this story, obviously calling our sources and trying to figure out exactly what happened.

 

But clearly something relatively devastating happening this morning there.

>> Julia Macdonald: Suddenly the United States was at war again and needed defense budgets and weapons to fight that war. And it was a very different kind of war than those who had advocated for military revolutions had envisaged. September 11 was a critical juncture in the proliferation of unmanned technologies.

 

It shifted the focus from cruise missiles and long range strike to loitering remote controlled unmanned systems with high precision smart munitions and cemented that dominance with a huge increase in military budgets. The global war on terror and a previous decade of economic growth brought with it the largest increase in defense spending since the Cold War.

 

American leaders previously focused on high tech transformation of the US Military to combat a rising China needed new options to wage war against a low tech Taliban in remote and mountainous Pakistan and Afghanistan.

>> Speaker 5: On my orders, the United States military. Has begun strikes against against Al Qaeda.

 

Terrorist training camps and military installations of. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack. The military capability of the Taliban regime.

>> Julia Macdonald: Luckily, the military had an option. While the Predator debuted in the 1990s, providing overhead coverage in Bosnia and Kosovo, it cemented its breakout role in modern conflict after 9 11.

 

Leading up to 9 11, the Predator was a niche project, funded almost completely out of hide by a small defense industrial based company that believed in the revolutionary role of these unmanned technologies. But after 9 11, the predator moved out of its fringe role and bolted into one of the most iconic weapons platforms of the global war on terror.

 

For years, US leaders like Air Force Chief of Staff Fogelman had played with the idea of arming the Predator, but there had been resistance within the services. 911 changed everything. In the hunt for a platform that could fly in politically fraught airspace for long periods of time, there was now a clear imperative to arm what had been a reconnaissance only unmanned system, thereby introducing to the battlefield one of the first armed unmanned platforms.

 

As then Secretary of the Air Force James Roche recounted in the last episode, there was a lot of resistance to arming the predator before 9 11. But then two buildings fell over and suddenly arming the Predator didn't seem nearly as risky or revolutionary as it had previously. The Predator, armed with Hellfire missiles, enabled warfare that was precise, limited and persistent.

 

The Hellfire, originally an anti tank helicopter fired missile, was initially part of a suite of precision guided munitions. Spurred by former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry's second offset. Accordingly, the first few iterations of the missile focused on destroying Soviet tank masses, and subsequent modifications focused on firepower and warhead improvements.

 

By the early 2000s, its laser guidance had been adapted to a fire and forget system, making it ideal for the unmanned Predator, as Leon Panetta, former Secretary of defense and director of the CIA, explains.

>> Leon Panetta: And so, because of 9 11, we clearly made the decision we were going to go to war against those who were responsible for the attack on 9 11.

 

And we did, obviously went into Afghanistan, et cetera, but those that were principally involved with that plot disappeared into the tribal areas of Pakistan. And when the United States tried to use either fighter planes or boots on the ground, Pakistan objected to that. And so in many ways, our hands were tied.

 

And then President Bush, along with Mike Hayden, made a decision to try to use drones as a weapon to go after those individuals. And it was pretty rudimentary at the beginning, but by the time I arrived as secretary or as director, CIA, we had developed a very sophisticated operations center at the CIA made up of a number of other intelligence agencies that were helping us.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: The Predator and then its replacement. At the Reaper became an integral part of campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and a selling point by Department of defense leaders to Congress as they advocated for continued support in the wars. As Secretary Rumsfeld told Congress, unmanned surveillance and attack aircraft like Global Hawk and Predator offered a glimpse of their potential in Afghanistan.

 

The 2003 budget increases the number of unmanned aircraft being procured and accelerates the development of new unmanned combat aerial vehicles capable of striking targets in denied areas without putting pilots at risk. On the success of these platforms, Secretary. Panetta adds,

>> Leon Panetta: and using the drone capability, we were able to do a tremendous amount of surveillance.

 

We were able to sight some of the targets, and obviously with the drone capabilities, we were able to actually hit those targets. And I would say, looking back on it, that because the reason we were successful at winning this war on terrorism and going after Al Qaeda and really undermining their leadership, they were trying to develop other plans and other attacks.

 

I think because of the drones, we were able to destroy that capability. So I think history will look back on that period and really use it as an example of how effective drones can be in confronting our enemies.

>> Julia Macdonald: The remotely piloted aircraft provided two new capabilities to the US Military which became key to counterinsurgency operations.

 

First, these systems could loiter over targets for long periods of time. Equipped with full motion video and near real time data transfer, tactical units, ground commanders, and campaign leaders could watch the battlefield and targets almost constantly. Second, these remotely piloted systems kept pilots out of risk and increased the distance between the shooter and danger, thus decreasing the chance for another Somalia Black Hawk Down.

 

Eventually, as former chief of staff Norman Schwartz argued, In my mind, the remotely piloted aircraft, or rpa, is the single most significant advance since radar. This goes back centuries to the bow and arrow, the spear artillery aircraft. There's been a momentum to extend the distance between combatants from the very earliest days.

 

The difference is that now we have the ability to fly lethal aircraft without the risk of physical danger to the pilot. It's monumental. The United States had come to a fork in the road for unmanned systems and weapon investments for the information revolution. And the US military decided to plunge headlong into tactical reconnaissance, unmanned systems that were remotely controlled and persistent.

 

In past episodes, we introduced two dominant beliefs in the evolution of unmanned technologies. Those of casualty aversion and force protection on the one hand, and beliefs in military revolutions on the other. Nine, eleven and the subsequent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan significantly shifted the trajectory of unmanned systems and created the impetus for a noteworthy evolution of beliefs in casualty aversion.

 

In particular, after the initial campaigns, it became clear that despite the United States desire for short and overwhelming wars, it would be difficult to win quickly, decisively, or with a light tech enabled footprint in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The two decades long conflicts seem to debunk the myth of the new American way of war.

 

And any dream of a Powell or Weinberger doctrine of overwhelming force. Clear political aims and a swift exit was not going to materialize in Iraq or Afghanistan. Decision makers needed to update their beliefs about technology and casualty aversion with the United States. Once again, in a war of attrition against an insurgency, the idea of using unmanned technology to protect US Boots on the ground returned to vogue.

 

The new generation of casualty aversion beliefs was far more sophisticated, both in its beliefs about the ability to completely reduce the risk of casualties to US Personnel and in the ability of technology to decrease that risk. Unmanned aerial vehicles substituted for risk by removing manned pilots. However, over time, and as it became increasingly clear there were not significant threats to manned aircraft, the motivation behind the systems became less about substituting for human risk individually and instead about using unmanned sensors to decrease the chance of loss of life.

 

Across the conflict, this was important. Counterinsurgency operations required the military not only to protect its own forces from needless casualties, but also to win the hearts and minds of the wider population. On reducing civilian casualties, here is Peter Feaver, professor of political Science and public policy at Duke University.

 

 

>> Peter Feaver: First, let me talk about one other trade off that matters, which is up until now I've been talking about the trade off between our casualties and success. But there's another trade off that's involved our casualties and their casualties, or particularly their civilian casualties and there the picture is much more murky.

 

The laws of war say that we have to incur greater risk of our combat casualties to reduce the risk of their civilian casualties. And the public views on that is mixed. Policymakers over the last 80 years have become more and more attuned to this and the need to reduce civilian casualties as well.

 

And again, the contrast with the battles that were fought 80 years ago in 1945, the firebombing of Tokyo, the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, huge, huge numbers of civilian casualties that were inflicted so as to save U.S. combat casualties. That trade off policymakers today, or up until the Trump administration, at least, the American policymakers said we're not going to do that anymore.

 

So we are going to reduce our own combat casualties and we're going to reduce their civilian casualties. And that's required much greater precision in. Fires and in targeting

>> Julia Macdonald: unmanned aerial vehicles, precise and small effect missiles, and improvements to laser and Global Positioning System guided bombs all helped decrease civilian casualties and risk to U.S and allied forces.

 

They also provided situational awareness required to enforce tight rules of engagement. Investments in space based communications and navigation allowed for centralization and remote control of unmanned systems, while unmanned aerial vehicles and space intelligence assets previously used for strategic intelligence were pivoted to tactical collection. Meanwhile, on defense, the United States invested in unmanned ground vehicles to detonate IEDs and automated counter mortar systems like the C RAM to shoot down incoming mortar salvos.

 

This new COIN strategy substituted swift and overwhelming campaigns for a new theory of persistence enabled by technology both on the battlefield for tactical victory and strategically ensuring that public support to ensure the nation's staying power within a campaign. In a way, after the failure of Rumsfeld's transformation initiatives to create quick wins in Afghanistan or Iraq, the US Military had returned to an updated theory of attrition in which the United States would win not by creating more enemy body bags, but instead by winning a war of the attrition of political will.

 

This was a better version of Westmoreland's invisible fence. It was smarter, more integrated, more persistent, and more controlled than Westmoreland's failed unmanned experiment. In Vietnam, the intention was the same. However, the technological advances in those three decades allowed U.S. decision makers to adapt unmanned systems to attempt to win a war of attrition while maintaining public support.

 

This led to unmanned systems that were expensive, required significant logistical support, and sacrificed firepower for control and precision. Remote controlled strike capable unmanned aerial vehicles were perfectly suited to this kind of war. This was a new twist on unmanned systems strictly for force protection. Instead of focusing on protecting friendly lives on the battlefield, they were also insulating decision makers from international political ill will, providing a means of persistence in the face of international criticism.

 

So what happened to the military revolution advocates during this period? While the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq ushered in huge changes in unmanned systems, in particular the dominance of remotely controlled unmanned aerial systems and galvanized support and investment in these systems. But it was never what the original military revolution thinkers had envisaged.

 

While the military revolutionists continue to push for transformation within the Department of Defense and many of Marshall's original group play prominent roles in the Bush administration, the ideas espoused in the Quadrennial defense review from 2001 were more often derailed than catalyzed by the realities of fighting and funding two wars in the Middle East.

 

Though there was a significant increase in weapons investments during the global War on Terror, not all systems were getting a push from it. Many of the systems envisaged by Military Revolution's believers struggled to survive the acquisition's valley of death. As Peter Dombrowski and Andrew Ross recount in their analysis of transformation and defense industrial based outliers during the Bush administration, what was labeled the Long War, roughly the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus an alleged global War on Terror, affected both the pace and extent of transformation.

 

Military spending increased rapidly and the Afghan and Iraq campaigns further tested on a much grander scale. Weapons and systems that first appeared within the Persian Gulf War and in the Balkans during the 1990s, broad based transformation goals may have suffered as the operational challenges of ongoing campaigns served to focus research and development resources on technologies and systems barely on the radar screen of early transformation advocates.

 

Perhaps the greatest example of the way in which 9, 11, and the global War on Terror affected the weapons and unmanned systems trajectory was the Army's Future Command System, or fcs. The FCS was perhaps the most ideal pursuit of the kind of weapons optimized for an IT revolution.

 

It included an integrated system of communications network capabilities, sensors, manned and unmanned systems, and smart munitions. The new force structure called for lighter, more mobile, manned, unmanned and robotic vehicles designed to track and outmaneuver enemies through effective information sharing. The final FCS included proposals for UAVs as well as small unmanned ground vehicles, intelligent munitions and and unmanned ground sensors.

 

But the program ultimately failed. Its system of systems design called for the most difficult and complex set of requirements the army had ever worked with. And a firmly entrenched army service culture focused not on how all these things linked together or the use of unmanned systems, but instead on the development of new manned ground vehicles.

 

When the threats to army vehicles changed, namely the prominence of IEDs and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the amount of unmanned systems and sensors required to support the lightly armored manned vehicles made the concept tactically moot. Finally, the focus on manned vehicles over the network systems required to link all the elements of the FCS made unmanned systems largely unusable, as they, unlike the manned components, needed networks to function.

 

Here's military innovation scholar Ben Jensen on the failure of the FCS.

>> Benjamin Jensen: You have this vision from really late 90s into early mid 2000s of how the army sees itself evolving. The challenge they ran into, though, is not just the normal, like, it's hard to be autonomous on ground because these could even be remotely piloted.

 

It was actually about bandwidth and secure communications. So one of the limiting factors to some of the autonomy push for the army at that time was actually that it was they were really struggling to figure out how to have a large enough bandwidth and the right amount of latency to have these like, encrypted digital battle networks at the size of space a brigade would imagine fighting.

 

And you can see this all in these, like, ridiculous FCS videos. I want to say it was Boeing and SAIC produced where it felt just like a bad episode of that old Jack Bauer show. It had that same feel of like a post 911 drama. But all of a sudden they had like, fictional characters like me and Swarovski are deployed and we're going to fight it out and they've got like, hovering drones that are fantastic.

 

None of that stuff came though, because again, the army found itself once again, just like Vietnam. All that modernization money dries up when you're begging Congress for what's called Okoko overseas contingency operation funds, because you're doing these kind of like counterinsurgencies and strange forms of stability ops and CT around the world.

 

So that FCS vision had both a technical limitation, but then it also had a funding limitation. With the realities of protracted conflict, it.

>> Julia Macdonald: Wasn'T just the services keen on pet platforms or the defence industrial base ill equipped for the itrma that Derailed the trajectory for unmanned systems envisaged by the military revolution.

 

It was also a push from the very top. Coming into the secretary of defense position in 2006 after five years of failed transformation efforts and knee deep in the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, Robert gates had no patience either for service pet projects or future technology investments over what the warfighters needed or wanted at that moment.

 

And what the warfighters wanted was more predators and reapers to fight two hot wars happening right now, not high tech systems of autonomous long range strike munitions. In fact, Robert gates once referred to next war iters, Arguing that we must not be so preoccupied with preparing for future conventional and strategic conflicts that we neglect to provide, both short term and long term, all the capabilities necessary to fight and win conflicts such as we are in today.

 

The air force, having captured the UAV mission in the mid-1990s, was now struggling to find its place in a coin dominated world that relied increasingly on remotely piloted aircraft. A sharp departure from the theories of strategic air power that had dominated at the turn of the century. This is Jack Shanahan, a retired U.S. air Force three star general who stood up project maven and the joint artificial intelligence center in the pentagon.

 

 

>> Jack Shanahan: So of course you know that the air force had been moving along somewhat slowly with the beginnings of predator back in the days and osama bin Laden in that strike that could have happened, but didn't happen. Guy named snake Clark in the air force has a whole story about how the drones came about.

 

And snake's pretty creative and interesting sort of storyteller, But I think a lot of it, he actually had it right that it was sort of slow at first. There was a reluctance to do that, but some of it was a reluctance just because the technology was not ready yet.

 

But once you had this pressure from above, I mean, nobody put as much pressure on than secretary gates. I was there as a one star when there was just everyday pressure to put more and more. They called them combat air patrols, caps, but it was really orbits more predators and reapers up in the skies over Afghanistan and iraq.

 

At one point, I think we ended up with 65 simultaneous orbits that were going on Enormous pressure.

>> Julia Macdonald: To accommodate this push from the top and the reality of the wars in the Middle East. The Air Force accepted the ISR mission, but not at the expense of its core manned mission.

 

Jack Shanahan continues.

>> Jack Shanahan: So the Air Force is known as the ISR service. It's known as a very technically savvy force. But I think there was an understanding and almost an embracing of, we'll get this ISR thing right as long as we do not jeopardize this banned pilot world of F16, F15 fighter pilots, all that whole community.

 

As long as you don't come at the expense of the rest of the manned community, we're okay with this and we're going to be on board. Still, they were dragged along a little bit, a little bit of screaming about standing up. This really became a very big enterprise of isr.

 

In the former Predator Creech Air Force base.

>> Julia Macdonald: One individual in particular, General Michael Mosley, Robert Gates, chief of staff, was especially vocal in fighting for the Air Force's core manned missions and in continuing to promote the F22s and F35s the Air Force had been developing for strategic attack against a peer competitor.

 

But Gates was tired of facing cultural impediments to his mission of expanding the inventory of UAVs. He dismissed Mosley and replaced him with Norman Schwartz, a Special Operations Command pilot who was a big believer in unmanned systems designed to support ground conflict. Schwartz led a push for unmanned units and personnel from the top and appointed generals who supported his vision for the Systems.

 

This included General Deptula, a former F15 pilot, but now a true believer in unmanned systems and in charge of the Air Force's Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Unit. This is Jack Shanahan again on Gates push from the top.

>> Jack Shanahan: But the other pressure, of course, at the time was Secretary Gates telling in a not so polite way to the Secretary of the Air Force in Chief of Staff, the Air Force shut up in color on the F22.

 

You're not getting any more of those. And by the way, you've got other systemic problems you need to fix in your nuclear industry and all these other pieces of it. And so it was, you're going to get this right. And that's really what drove the ISR portion of this, which is really what most of this is.

 

It's ISR strike. The line is extremely blurred. If disappeared, one day it's isr, the next day it's strike. And then two hours later you're back and going in the other direction. There is a big cultural component to this, and there is no question there was resistance and reluctance to go down this path too far.

 

But there was also no choice that they had to get on board because people were dying in combat. That was the big difference. Secretary Gates was just had no patience for anybody that was not going to sign up to give more to the fight in the Middle east.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: And the US Air Force ultimately adapted to accommodate this change, adeptly linking military revolutions and force protection beliefs to argue that technology that distanced the human from the battlefield would not only create effectiveness, but but also decrease casualties in war. On the importance of the UAV pilots, Secretary Panetta adds,

 

 

>> Leon Panetta: even though you know. The air Force, obviously these guys love to fly their planes and to be pilots. With time they recognized and I told them this. When I spoke to a group of these pilots, I said, I realize, you know, this doesn't have a lot of the glory associated with being a fighter pilot, but I have to tell you, you are helping us accomplish a very important mission of going after those who would threaten our country, and you do it successfully, and you really deserve a lot of credit for that.

 

I actually, as secretary, decided that it was important for those that were really operating above and beyond the call of duty to even provide an award to those that were involved in piloting because I thought it was important to recognize their service to the country.

>> Julia Macdonald: Moving into the second half of the Obama administration, a push from above, from Gates, a glut of spending on two campaigns against insurgents and terrorists in the Middle east, and wartime experimentation transitioned remotely piloted aircraft into the dominant unmanned system for both research and procurement in the U.S. military.

 

And U.S. leaders believed in the results. This is president Obama defending the uptick in drone strikes during his time in office.

>> Speaker 6: Dozens of highly skilled Al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted that would have targeted international aviation, US Transit systems, European cities, and our troops in Afghanistan.

 

Simply put, these strikes have saved lives.

>> Julia Macdonald: But the focus was not on using unmanned systems as part of a system of systems to combat peer competitors, but instead on mitigating risk to US Military personnel and creating persistent and remotely controlled surveillance. But the belief in military revolutions wasn't dead.

 

Andy Marshall's influence was now embedded within the ranks of the military and civilian staff. Instead, military revolutions experienced a resurrection with a remarkable policy entrepreneur, Deputy Secretary of defense Bob Work, A former participant in Andy Marshall's 2020 Games who had served for 27 years in the marines. Bob Work's main contribution during this period is known as the third offset.

 

The name wasn't an accident. The Third offset strategy was explicitly premised on the perceived success of two previous offset strategies, nuclear deterrence in the 1950s and the guided munitions regime in the 1970s. In the first, the United States leveraged its technical advantage in nuclear weapons to offset a planned drawdown of conventional US forces in Europe.

 

In the second offset, when the conventional balance again troubled Washington, the United States sought advanced technologies for precision attack to whittle down Soviet tanks and other conventional forces to battle manageable levels. The success the Pentagon wanted to replicate in the third offset was reasonably clear. Military technical advantage in long term competition with any would be adversary.

 

As Work said, offset strategies are clearly driven by military technological competitions. One way to gain an advantage under conditions of military technological parity is to develop another technological offset. Here was Jack Shanahan again.

>> Jack Shanahan: It will help, I believe, to frame this with some things that Bob Work had on his mind as the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

 

So when Bob Work stood Project Maven up and he was the person that in the literal sense put his signature on the memo almost eight years ago now, it was about AI for the intelligence community and specifically full motion video analysis off of drones. Just like you have a hard time staying uncrewed, or the Air Force doesn't like drones, but we've all come to accept that it's drones.

 

But what Bob Work used to say related directly to his vision for this thing called the third offset strategy. But it was never going to be AI for AI sake, he loved Project Maven. He was, as I say, the patron saint of algorithmic warfare. He was the driving force behind it.

 

But he knew this was just a means to the end. The end for him was this thing called third offset. Terms come and go in dc. You know this very well that they fall out of favor. Nobody says third offset anymore, but I believe the core of his ideas still remains.

 

And it sort of got this new life in something called Joint all Domain Command and Control. JADC2 he would say, maybe not quite what he had in mind, but pretty close. And what he was always wanted to talk about was this idea of three grids. The sensor grid, which is kind of the ISR part, the C3I grid, think the command and control grid and then effects grid.

 

What was actually delivering the effects kinetic, non kinetic. He was thinking about that all the way back to World War II and Hugh Dowding in the Battle of Britain and put the same sort of sensor effects and C3I grids together. And what he envisioned, the way the United States would stay ahead of its adversaries long into the future would be this idea of using AI to build a more intelligent force.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: The third offset doubled down on the independent role of technology, specifically autonomy. As a producer of massive changes in military effectiveness. The concept envisaged unmanned systems as increasingly automated sensors, platforms and munitions designed to increase the range of first strike capability, increase situational awareness, and ultimately decrease decision time between sensor and shooter.

 

As Bob Work explained, at some point you would reach a tipping point and entire battle networks would begin to operate at a higher speed. We thought these would be the leading edge of a new warfighting regime called algorithmic warfare. We then envisioned a new military technical revolution, which the proportion of unmanned systems to manned systems shifted in favor of unmanned systems.

 

We anticipated the character of robotic warfare would be much, much different from what we see today. This is Jack Shanahan again.

>> Jack Shanahan: So AI is a way to get that more intelligence force, which for him was going to be a lot more autonomy, that you'd have many more autonomous systems in every domain, just like you've looked at all different ones.

 

This isn't just airplanes. It would be everything. You'd have autonomous systems doing global sensing, what we would call isr, but ISR and beyond, but also the communications piece of it, but also the effects piece of it, where you would have many more intelligent systems that would put fewer lives at risk, but still be able to do all the things that humans in theory are able to do, but do them probably cheaper, probably equally well, maybe sometimes better, many times sometimes not quite as good, but you'd make up for it by sheer volume.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: From his mentor and former colleague Andy Marshall, Work learned about how to create narratives and influence. He knew that he needed a story to convince Congress and the White House to invest in the kinds of technologies that had languished during the last two decades of conflict. He needed a good name for what was essentially another RMA works spread the word about the third offset in Washington D.C. think tank circles and among members of the White House and Congress.

 

Meanwhile, networks of second and third generation ONA thinkers began to fill out the strategy with think tank reports and publications and blogs and journals. The strategy, the narrative and the influence campaign worked. Work got his funding from Congress and got to work, no pun intended. In particular, Work's Strategic Capabilities office became a catalyst for unmanned system investments focused on manned and unmanned pairings, swarming artificial intelligence systems and unmanned systems utilizing machine learning.

 

Even after Work's tenure ended, his influence lived on as his Proteges rose in the Department of Defense and future strategy documents such as the National Defence Strategy echoed his narrative and created a jumping off point for the large scale unmanned system investments across the services. The third offset reinvigorated the military revolution narrative, while almost two decades of counterinsurgency eroded beliefs about ground combat and long campaigns of political attrition.

 

Air sea battle bolted the old air Force identity and strategic attack back to the forefront of the Pentagon and budgets. After investing so heavily in Predators and Reapers, spending on these systems stagnated in the new China focused budgets. Instead, the Air Force co opted narratives again taking the third offset and Revolutions in Military affairs redux to invest in unmanned technologies that both enabled its premier fighters and replaced them counterintuitively.

 

While the fighter pilot remained the dominant occupational identity, the growing influence of civilian policy wonks like former head of air force acquisitions, Dr. Will Roper created incentives to develop unmanned systems that mimicked or replicated an airplane's function. Roper's focus on automated dogfighting revealed the service's desire to retain airframes, even if unmanned, as the core Air Force weapon.

 

Once again, the quest to preserve service identity in the face of occupational identities shaped the trajectory of Air Force unmanned investment. So where does this all leave us? At the turn of the century, military revolutions had created a strategic narrative about the purpose of unmanned systems that should have created a trajectory towards autonomous unmanned systems across domains of missions linked intimately with networks of munitions and sensors that enabled long range first strike.

 

And then 911 occurred, derailing the military revolution's vision for unmanned technologies and plunging the US into over a decade of counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East. In this context, the Predator provides a counter narrative to the success of military revolutions and unmanned weapons investments. The Predator and the Reaper, two remotely controlled armed long range tactical UAVs, dominated the United States unmanned arsenal in the decades after 9 11.

 

But this was never the kind of unmanned system envisioned by Marshall's followers. The systems are expensive, not survivable and not autonomous. They function often as centrally controlled platforms. Hardly the networked system of unmanned technologies enabling long range strike laid out in the military revolution narratives. How strange then that their success was only possible because the belief in the technological impetus for military revolutions created space for the initial experimentation with unmanned systems.

 

Furthermore, when Marshall's networks of believers in military revolutions were promoted through the ranks, they ultimately found themselves in positions to arm and proliferate the Predator and its successors when 911 knocked the possibility of true military transformation off its feet. But true belief in the revolutionary potential of unmanned systems never died.

 

Marshall's long term strategy of influence allowed the belief in military revolutions to survive multiple decades despite significant external shocks. From the demise of the Soviet Union to the lean years of the 1990s, through unsympathetic administrations focused on small scale conflicts to finally surviving the biggest shock of all, nine, 11 and two decades of defence budget glut focused away from military revolutions.

 

Each of these events created critical junctures, some of which derailed unmanned systems on trajectories completely divorced from military revolutions. But Marshall's network of influence stayed the course, adapting these trajectories and often co opting them to ultimately preserve the belief system. One of those true believers was of course Bob work with his third offset but and bringing us closer to today.

 

Even as unmanned platforms prospered under the auspices of the third offset, unmanned systems like munitions, communications relays and satellites did not experience the kind of unbridled exponential growth. Instead, they experienced a series of stutter starts as a post Cold War US military struggled to meet the technological needs of the military revolution in the face of acquisition and budget cost reform.

 

Despite the clear relationship between these systems and the military revolution narrative, Marshall's networks of influence couldn't overcome bureaucratic sclerosis to save the unmanned systems that the services themselves wouldn't prioritise. This led to a very sticky path dependency for expensive, persistent remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicles that was hard to change.

 

Here Mike Brown, former director of the Defence Innovation Unit, discusses the difficulty in an early attempt to transition from the large expensive UAVs like the Predators and Reapers to smaller first person view drones that could be launched quickly and cheaply by soldiers on the ground. Much like what we have seen on the battlefields in Ukraine.

 

 

>> Michael Brown: One of the most challenging, actually, during the same time we were creating Blue UAS was an army program. They were trying to make that transition to small drones that an individual would be responsible for. Obviously with a multimillion dollar drone, you'd have a team of folks in an Air Force base outside Las Vegas that are basically piloting this drone, often overseas.

 

But now we're talking about what's now called fpv, first person view drone. And something could be launched by an individual soldier. So in that transition, the army was making one of its earlier attempts at that. It was called the short Range Reconnaissance Program. And I'd say what made it challenging was we approached it with a very traditional military mindset as opposed to a consumer mindset.

 

What I mean by that is in addition to wanting to make sure it was safe, cyber hardened, we also wanted to add additional features which made it a unique military item again versus burying off the shelf. And unfortunately this meant that it took several years to develop rather than just evaluating what was off the shelf today.

 

And the cost of it went from, you know, the target of $1,000 to $17,000. So now we have a unique military item. Not leveraging the benefits of scale of, you know, consumer based product that we've made a custom product now it's so expensive, it now crosses into the area of an asset we need, really need to take care of as opposed to something that's attritable and we should be willing to launch three of them and not care if two of them fail and one meets its mission.

 

So I'd say that was a early challenging attempt.

>> Julia Macdonald: Ultimately, the trajectories of these unmanned systems reflected the power of external catalysts, namely 9, 11 and counterinsurgency, which saved many of the tactical user satellite programs and led to extremely expensive, precise airborne munitions. What came at a cost to this catalyst was upgrades and procurement of munitions better suited for a peer competitor in the information revolution era.

 

Ground based and shipborne conventional strike, robust and resilient communications and strategic early warning cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and mines largely stagnated as the services turn towards unmanned platforms to substitute for manned missions. What this trajectory means for the US today and the conflicts it faces will be the focus of our next episode.

 

I'm Julia.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I'm Jackie. This is the Hand Behind Unmanned podcast. If you liked it, buy the book. It's by Oxford University Press and available on Amazon. Thanks for listening.