Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (26 page)

For the HVT industry, the benefits of hunting down leaders of the “IED networks” appeared self-evident, as had assassinating Hitler, Patrice Lumumba, or Pablo Escobar in years gone by. Since the elimination of formerly critical nodes such as Saddam and Zarqawi had paid little dividend, the target list was expanding, as such lists always do. Toward the end of 2007, Rivolo, already dubious about the presumptions behind the strategy, began to look for data that could reveal whether or not the strategy worked. He found it in the SIGACTS.

With full access to the SIGACT database, Rivolo extracted the records of 200 cases in which high-value targets had been killed or captured between June and October 2007. Then he went through the records again to see what happened in the neighborhood where each leader had operated. This was the crucial question. Had his elimination made a difference in the fight against the insurgents? Rivolo counted the number of IED attacks against Americans in the 30 days following each high-value target death or arrest within a given distance from the event and compared it to the number in the 30 days before the death or arrest as a percentage of change. Repeating this procedure for different distances, Rivolo plotted the results on one axis of a graph and the distance on the other. When complete, the graph delivered a simple, unequivocal message: the strategy was indeed making a difference but not the one intended. Hitting HVIs did not reduce attacks and save American lives. It
increased
them. Each killing had quickly prompted mayhem. Within 3 kilometers of the target’s base of operation, attacks over the following 30 days shot up by 40 percent. Within a radius of 5 kilometers, a typical area of operations for an insurgent cell, they were still up 20 percent. Summarizing his findings for Odierno, Rivolo added an emphatic punch line: “Conclusion: HVI Strategy, our principal strategy in Iraq, is counter-productive and needs to be re-evaluated.”

How could the removal from the scene of ringleaders of attacks on Americans generate such a counterintuitive result? Just as the field officers had told Hickey and Rivolo during their 2005 trip, dead leaders were invariably replaced quickly, “usually in twenty-four hours, always in forty-eight,” recalls Rivolo. For a variety of reasons, new commanders were almost always eager to press the fight harder. Often, they would be relatives of the dead man and hot for revenge. In addition, having just succeeded to the command, they would feel the need to prove themselves, especially if the late leader’s martial energies had been faltering due to battle fatigue or other interests, highlighting the need for a new broom. Always, they were more deadly.

A week or so after submitting his findings, Rivolo asked Odierno if he had read the study. “Yeah,” replied the powerful commander shortly, “there’s a limit to what I can do.” Bureaucratic politics, it seemed, superseded empirical truth. Odierno’s reliance on Hickey’s operation to tell him what was going on rather than the elaborately staffed formal apparatus was ruffling feathers. “Hickey was going directly to Odierno every day and Odierno was just ignoring the other people and they knew that and they weren’t happy about that.” Returning to Washington in February 2008, Rivolo presented his conclusions on the strategy to his superiors at IDA. Unfortunately, IDA Director Dennis Blair was gone, having been replaced by former air force chief of staff Larry Welch, who appeared disinclined to challenge established doctrine; there were by now too many vested interests involved in targeted killing. Some thought it didn’t matter anyway. “When you mow the grass,” the senior counterterrorism official who had drawn my attention to Israeli influence on the strategy remarked offhandedly to me, “you don’t expect the grass not to grow again.”

As the American war in Iraq wound down—Rivolo’s scrutiny of IED statistical trends gave early warning that the majority of Sunni insurgents were changing sides—the targeting machinery redeployed with renewed vigor to Afghanistan, its masters convinced that they had found the key to victory.

10

A PIECE OF JUNK

Despite accounting for almost half the world’s arms spending, in much of the country the U.S. military establishment is largely invisible. There are exceptions where landscape and politics have resulted in an evident military presence. One of these is Virginia’s Southern Neck, the long peninsula jutting out into the Chesapeake Bay. An archipelago of bases and forts, as well as the CIA’s Camp Peary, it stands as a testament to the enduring power of the state’s congressional delegation. Whole communities were swept away in the headlong militarization of the area during the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century, periodic outbreaks of peace occasioning only minor shrinkage before a fresh cascade of appropriated dollars rained down to irrigate the area’s economy.

In July 1921, General Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Corps took off from the corps’ Langley Field at the tip of the peninsula to prove his theories regarding the omnipotence of airpower by bombing and sinking a number of surrendered German warships anchored in the bay. Mitchell is one of the patron saints of the U.S. Air Force, as it was founded on the presumption that airpower can win wars unaided by interventions from armies and navies. Down through the years, this conviction has underpinned the doctrines and budgets of the service. For true believers, presumptions about technology embodied in the revolution in military affairs and David Deptula’s theory of effects-based operations, and further expressed in the drone-assisted manhunts of the twenty-first-century wars, merely reaffirmed Mitchell’s contentions. “Find, fix, finish,” Deptula remarked to me one day over lunch. “We spent a hundred years working on finish. We can now hit any target anywhere in the world, any time, any weather, day or night.”

So it was fitting that when I visited Langley Air Force Base it was on an introduction from Deptula himself, who had retired in 2010 and was appointed dean of the Air Force Association’s Mitchell School of Airpower Studies two years later. I came to the base to view the Langley “node” of the Distributed Common Ground System, the “system of systems” that General Deptula had been promoting since 2003. In essence, the DCGS is the repository of the oceans of data flowing from “platforms,” drones, spy planes, and satellites in an endless stream of video as well as electronic signals and conversations.

Earlier, we saw analysts at the DCGS node at Florida’s Hurlburt Air Force Base in Florida monitor video from a Predator drone as it stalked a little convoy of Afghan civilian vehicles in the mountains of Uruzgan. But DCGS (pronounced
D-sigs
) does more than that, collating imagery from different platforms in order to identify targets or just watching a house, a vehicle, or a person to monitor “pattern of life” or logging archived material for later reference. There are five principal and forty subsidiary sites within the network. Each of the principal system “nodes” is co-located with a specific air force unit, thus the site at Hurlburt Air Force Base pairs with the air force special operations headquarters in support of Special Forces missions. Even so, this is a network in which all the parts are interchangeable, all having equal access to the same material, all enabled to coordinate lethal strikes. The air force calls this a “weapons system,” with a unit cost of $750 million for each of the principal sites. At $4.2 billion for the air force—and $10.2 billion across all services—when completed, it will represent a far more substantial financial prize for major corporations than drone programs. The contractors who shared in programming and building those “weapons”—Raytheon, Lockheed, L-3 Communications, Northrop, Hughes—are among the titans of the defense complex. Further monies are being garnered (at least $63.5 million in 2013) to support the enterprise. Recipients are many of the above as well as General Dynamics, SAIC, CACI, and Booz Allen along with smaller fry. “It’s the key to the whole system,” Deptula told me, “drones are just fiberglass in the sky.”

Prior to his retirement, Deptula had risen high in the air force, gaining his third star by 2005. Along the way, he had continued to spread his gospel, encouraging Wesley Clark in the air strategy of the Kosovo conflict and for two months directing the air operations staff doing the targeting for the 2001 air campaign against Afghanistan. An admiring air force biographer summarized that war as one in which “small teams of special forces on the ground had supported airpower as it dispersed Taliban forces.…” Ground forces
supporting
airpower rather than the other way around was the fulfillment of a dream going back to Mitchell himself. Subsequent developments appeared no less gratifying. Deptula’s friend General Michael Moseley, supervising the air component of the 2003 Iraq invasion, had, according to that same biography, very properly “employed stealth with precision weapons” in the initial attempts to kill Saddam. Thereafter, as implemented by Moseley, Deptula’s “vision of parallel warfare and effects-based operations resulted in devastating the Iraqi ability to defend itself.”

With the ensuing insurgency having dashed American hopes for a trouble-free occupation, Deptula was nevertheless confident that he had the answer to this very different kind of war. “Like a liquid that gravitates toward our weakest points, they aim to defy our grasp,” he wrote in 2007. “Because they infest urban areas and hide among the civilian populations, finding the enemy has become a great challenge. In this sense knowledge is assuming precedence over kinetics as the prerequisite ‘weapon’ of war … victory will go to those who create and exploit knowledge faster than their opponents.” If knowledge were more important than “kinetics,” meaning physical force, then whoever collected, analyzed, and distributed the knowledge would be in a very powerful position and worthy of a commensurately sized budget. “When we took out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Deptula liked to tell audiences, “that operation consisted of over 600 hours of Predator time, followed by about ten minutes of F-16 time.” Traditionally, the collection of intelligence, especially about underground insurgents, had been in the hands of signals and human intelligence collectors, that is, NSA, CIA, and DIA. The advent of drones with their enticing streams of video, not to mention their ability to collect signals intelligence and track people through Stingray technology, meant that the air force was expanding its role and therefore entitled to a bigger share of the pot.

Offered the powerful position of deputy chief of staff for intelligence in 2006, a position traditionally occupied by a mere two-star general, three-starred Deptula had successfully negotiated an expansion of the title to deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. This was more than just an exercise in title inflation. In air force terminology,
reconnaissance
has heavy implications of space and satellites, usually the purview of other agencies, including the young and expanding National Geospatial Agency, which supposedly had responsibility for analyzing and distributing satellite pictures.
Surveillance
also had interesting implications, since it was traditionally associated with monitoring the borders by land and sea. Indeed, at this time Deptula was also leading a push for the air force to be nominated as the “executive agent” for all medium- and high-altitude drones, meaning that it would hold the purse strings on other services’ drone programs. This was not, obviously, an initiative welcomed by the other services, which lobbied furiously and effectively to kill the proposal.

Central to the argument that these activities and responsibilities be combined was the notion of
jointness
, a term that might suggest a spirit of benign interservice cooperation. Deptula invoked it to mean, among other things, “an arrangement where one service oversees the acquisition and standardization of theater-capable UAVs.” Simply put, this meant that the air force should own all the important drones. As a serving air force officer familiar with this approach remarked to me, “Deptula was one of the generals in the air force that were at war, first and foremost, with the other services. More than Russians or Chinese or Al Qaeda or anybody else, Deptula’s main enemy was the United States Army, and after that the Marine Corps, and after that the Navy.”

Deptula’s attitude toward the marines may have been colored by rhetorical salvos regularly loosed off in his direction by his old nemesis, retired marine general Paul Van Riper. In a 2005 email exchange between the generals, Van Riper once again derided the airman’s claims to have changed the nature of war with choice observations such as “let me say that your description of an approach based on ‘control of the enemy’ demonstrates, at least to me, your lack of understanding of non-linear or structurally complex systems.” Van Riper’s friend and fellow marine General James Mattis, who had been appointed to lead the Joint Forces Command formerly humiliated by Van Riper in the Millennium Challenge war game, gave what he thought was a death blow to Deptula’s
effects-based operations
doctrine by issuing an order banning the use of the term in his command. Among other pungent critiques of the concept (“Assumes a level of unachievable predictability”) Mattis pointed out that its wholehearted embrace by the vaunted Israeli Defense Forces prior to the 2006 Lebanon War had proved disastrous. “Although there are several reasons why the IDF performed poorly during the war,” noted the general, “various postconflict assessments have concluded that overreliance on EBO concepts was one of the primary contributing factors for their defeat.”