attack of the drones

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Sun Sep 20 09:45:59 PDT 2009


http://www.newsweek.com/id/215825/output/print

Attack of the Drones

Now that congress has killed the F-22, the Air Force is facing another shock
to the system: planes without pilots.

By Fred Kaplan | NEWSWEEK 

Published Sep 19, 2009

>From the magazine issue dated Sep 28, 2009

For more than 60 years, the Air Force has trumpeted itself as the service of
glamour, its pilots ruling the skies, soaring, diving, bombing, and strafing
from far abovebyet still commanding the clash of armies on the ground. In
movies, they wore white scarves and set the girls' hearts aflutter.

But all that is changing in ways that few outsiders understand. A fierce
fight is on for the mission, culture, and identity of the Air Force, and the
Top Guns are losing. This is the real story behind a passionate political
struggle this past summer over a major weapons system, the F-22 Raptor, the
world's most sophisticated fighter plane.

On its face, the F-22 debate was a straightforward budget battle. The Air
Force had 183 of the stealth fighters in its fleet, and another four on the
way. It wanted $4 billion for 20 more planes in the next yearba down payment
on 200 more it hoped to build in the next decade, for a total of 387.

For years, senior Air Force officers had pushed for the F-22 with an intense,
almost messianic passion. Congress complied, largely because huge sums of
money were at stake. (The Air Force had shrewdly spread the plane's contracts
and subcontracts across 46 states.) But the request came at a time of
economic calamity, mounting national debt, and a shift in thinking about
military requirements. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said no, and President
Obama announced he would veto the entire defense budget if it contained money
for even one more F-22. The project was killed, story over.

But the struggle goes much deeper than that, and its consequences are more
profound. To understand why, you need to go back to the beginning: 1981, the
height of the Cold War, when the F-22 was born.

Its mission was air-to-air combatbkeeping control of the sky during a major
war, so that bombers could reach their targets, and soldiers down below could
fight without worrying about enemy aerial attacks. With its stealth
technology (making it much less visible to radar) and high-tech electronics
(making it more powerful at longer ranges), the plane was designed to shoot
down the latest Soviet combat planes with greater ease than anything else in
the sky.

But the first operational F-22 didn't roll onto a runway until the end of
2005, after nearly a quarter century of delays, technical setbacks, and
massive cost overruns. By that time, the Cold War was long over.

No country on earth had an air force remotely capable of going up against the
latest versions of the U.S. F-15 and F-18 fighter planes, much less something
newer. Many in Congress, and some civilian analysts in the Pentagon, wanted
to cut our losses and kill the F-22 outright. But defenders of the plane were
more powerful. To them, the Air Force meant fast, agile planes dogfighting
high in the sky. To kill the most advanced fighter plane was tantamount to
killing the Air Force. So they did what they do best: they put up a fight.

They were fighting against history. From 1947 to 1982, all 10 generals who
served as Air Force chief of staff were bomber pilots. From 1982 until last
year, all nine generals who occupied that position were fighter pilots. In
2008, a new era in warfare was beginning, and Secretary Gates asked President
Bush to appoint a different kind of chief of staff: Gen. Norton Schwartz. He
came up through the ranks flying neither bombers nor fighters but C-130s, the
bulky cargo planes that haul troops, weapons, and supplies from bases and
supply depots to the battlefront. "Airlift," as this duty is called, is a
vital mission; the Army, Marines, and Special Forces couldn't mobilize
swiftly without it. But it's unglamorous. The Air Force brass had never
valued it as highly as missions that involve fast combat planes or bombing
targets deep behind enemy linesbuntil now.

Just as the Vietnam War paved the way for the rise of the fighter
pilotbbefore then, much higher status was given to pilots of nuclear
bombersbthe Iraq and Afghanistan wars are demanding a new Air Force culture.
"War is the great teacher of innovation, the great stimulus to thought in
military affairs," says Ashton Carter, undersecretary of defense for
acquisition and logistics. The present wars, he adds, "have challenged the
cultures in all the servicesb&There's a heated competition to be relevant."

Iraq and Afghanistan are very different wars from the war the F-22 Raptor was
designed to fight. (Not one of the advanced aircraft has flown a single
mission over either theater.) The enemy isn't a foreign government, but an
insurgency; there are few "strategic" targets to bomb and no opposing air
force to go after. So the main Air Force role is to support American and
allied troops on the ground. This means two things: first, airlifting
supplies (General Schwartz's specialty); second, helping the troops find and
kill bad guys.

For this second mission, the Air Force has been relying more and more on
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with names like Predator, Reaper, Global
Hawk, and Warrior Alpha. Joystick pilots located halfway around the world
operate these ghost planes. They pinpoint their targets by watching streams
of real-time video, taken by cameras strapped to the bellies of the UAVs.
Many of the aircraft also carry super-accurate smart bombs, which the
joystick pilots can fire with the push of a button once they've spotted the
targets on their video screens.

The first UAVs were used in Yugoslavia in the '90s and during the 2001
invasion of Afghanistan. They proved so effective that, when the war in Iraq
became an insurgency, every American soldier, Marine, and Special Ops officer
wanted one overhead to help find and destroy snipers' nests, roadside bombs,
and other threats. Gates noticed this growing demand for the unmanned planes
soon after taking over the Pentagon at the end of 2006, in the last half of
George W. Bush's second term as president. Gates's top priority was cleaning
up the mess in Iraq, and UAVs seemed to be a potent tool. He ordered a crash
program to build more of the planes, as well as the infrastructure to support
them.

But senior Air Force officers, including the chief of staff at the time, Gen.
T. Michael Moseley, didn't seem motivated to put the UAVs into action over
Iraq. Gates would grumble that the troops were at war but the Pentagon
wasn't. "Trying to get Moseley to move on this was like pulling teeth," a
senior Pentagon official recalls. "Gates was terribly frustrated." An Air
Force pilot who worked inside the Pentagon at the time agrees: "There was a
big resistance to unmanned systems within the Air Force because they're not
very sexy. The attitude was 'Airplanes without pilots in them? That's not
what we're about!' " (A half century ago, Gen. Curtis LeMay, the first head
of the Strategic Air Command, opposed development of the intercontinental
ballistic missile, which he feared would supplant the long-range bomber. He
didn't want the Air Force to become, he said, "the silent silo-sitters of the
'60s.")

Gates wanted to nudge the naysayers aside. He got his chance in June 2008,
when two Air Force scandals erupted. In one case, electrical fuses for
ballistic-missile warheads were mistakenly shipped to Taiwan. In another, a
bomber flew over U.S. territory carrying live nukes. Gates used the
opportunity to fire Moseley and the civilian secretary of the Air Force,
Michael Wynne. Gates, who had been a Minuteman ICBM crewman in his youth, was
genuinely shocked by the two incidents, says one senior military officer, who
did not want to be named because he did not want to be publicly drawn into
interservice politics.

"But," the officer adds, "they weren't the only reasons these guys were
fired. Gates was looking for some excuse, and this was a pretty good one."
(Moseley and Wynne did not respond to requests for comment.)

The Air Force lobbied Gates to appoint another fighter pilot, but Gates
wanted Schwartz for the job. Schwartz, who had intended to retire at the end
of the year, was just wrapping up a tour as head of the Air Force's
Transportation Command. (Just before that, he had been deputy commander of
the Special Operations Command.) Gates liked his pragmatic bent and his
eagerness to cooperate with the other services.

Gates had just forced the Army to buy a fleet of expensive new armored
personnel carriers, called MRAPs, and he needed the Air Force to get them to
Iraq quickly. Schwartz leapt to the task. Gates figured that, as chief of
staff, Schwartz would embrace unmanned aerial vehicles. He did.

In an e-mail, Gen. David Petraeus, who commands the U.S. military in Iraq and
Afghanistan, praised Schwartz for doing "a particularly impressive job of
accelerating" the deployment of UAVs, and helping the troops on the ground.
This sort of joint effort may sound unremarkable, but in the annals of
ArmybAir Force relations, it's practically revolutionary.

In 2007, the year before Schwartz became chief, UAVs were performing 21
combat air patrols at any one time, for a total of just over 100,000 hours.
By 2011, they'll reach 54 patrols and almost 350,000 hours. For now, the
joystick pilots have to be certified fighter pilots as well.

But Schwartz says this requirement will be dropped, mainly because there
aren't enough fighter pilots to fill the growing demand for UAV crews.
"There's no need for them to be pilots," one senior Pentagon official says.
"It's sort of like a union regulation."

This year, the Air Force will train more joystick pilots than new fighter and
bomber pilots. "If you want to be in the center of the action, this is the
place to be," Schwartz says. "It's not a temporary phenomenonb&It's a
sustainable career path. I've made that very clear." Lt. Col. Travis Burdine,
a Predator pilot-from-afar, has gotten the message: "We all joined the Air
Force to go flying, but word on the street is that job satisfaction is very
high [manning a joystick]. Every day we're doing this, we're in the thick of
the fight. We fly 36 [combat air patrols] a day. Where they're happening, the
hottest 36 things are going on."

It's not hard now to imagine a time when the dominant combat leaders of the
Air Force have no physical contact with airplanes. "We're opening an
aperture," Schwartz says. "How do we define a warrior-airman? The definition
is expanding." Whatever happens, he says, "the trend lines are inescapable:
we increasingly will become less of a manned aviation force." C. R. Anderegg,
the Air Force historian, says that just as the generals of the 1950s and '60s
were predominantly bomber pilots, and the generals of the 1970s and '80s were
mainly fighter pilots, so a lot of the generals in the coming decades may be
UAV joystick pilots. "It's going to be pretty hard for a promotion board,
picking the next one-star generals, to pick a colonel who hasn't commanded a
UAV wing over a colonel who has. The UAV commander has the experience, and he
has a larger, less insular view of the battlefield than, say, an F-22 pilot
at Langley."

Many fighter-pilot generalsbthe most fervent advocates of building more
F-22sbcontinue to resist these changes. Their motives aren't entirely
parochial. Many worry that 187 F-22s simply aren't enough for the long-term
needs of national defense. "The concern among many leaders in the Air Force,"
says one general, "is that this obsessive focus on today's wars is
jeopardizing our security in the future." These generals imagine a future war
against, say, a resurgent China or a revitalized Russia.

Gates gets that. But the official Air Force studies that justify a fleet of
387 F-22s assume the United States fights two major wars simultaneously
against foes that each possess an air force nearly equal to ours. Such a
scenario is dubious and, in any case, very distant. It was, in fact, these
studies that convinced Gates that he was right to halt the program at 187
planes. "It's very difficult to come up with two very sophisticated threats
that might materialize at the same time," says a senior officer who has
supervised analytical studies about weapons needs. Even if the nearly
impossible came truebif the U.S. did fight two wars at once against major
powersbat least one Pentagon analysis concludes that F-35s could handle the
second threat nearly as well as F-22s, according to a senior officer who
participated in the study. The F-35ba smaller, cheaper plane, which Gates
wants to buy in large quantitybis not quite as good as the F-22 in shooting
down planes but much better at destroying surface-to-air missile batteries.

On July 17, the Senate voted to stop the F-22 program by a margin of 58b40ba
more lopsided margin than administration officials had predicted. It was not
a party-line vote: 15 Democrats voted to continue production; 15 Republicans
voted with Obama and Gates to kill it. (The F-22's floor managers were Sen.
Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., representing Lockheed Martin, the chief contractor,
and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., representing Pratt & Whitney, which makes the
engine.) The vote went the way it did because Gates, a widely respected
Republican hawk, provided cover for opponents of the program.

In a speech the day before the Senate acted, Gates declared that it was no
longer possible to design and buy the most sophisticated weapons systems "to
keep up with or stay ahead of another superpower adversary, especially one
that imploded nearly a generation ago." He might have added that the Air
Force has to change its culture to keep up with the times. The glamour days
are over, and a new era has begun.

Kaplan is the National-Security Columnist for Slate and the author of 1959:
The Year Everything Changed.





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