Predator (20 page)

“Are you crazy?” his professor sputtered. In the Air Force, he warned, being a helicopter pilot was a career killer.

“I don't care,” Swanson told him. “I'm just looking forward to flying and having a good time.”

That was what Swanson had done ever since, pretty much, and his professor had been right about the effect that flying helicopters would have on his career. After twelve years in the Air Force, Swanson should have been a major. Instead, he was still just a captain; worse yet, he had been passed over for promotion, a sign he might never make higher rank. Even so, Swanson was happy in the Air Force, and he knew he would be happy with another assignment flying helicopters, if he could find one. But he also had another keen interest, one that even predated his fascination with flight and made the idea of operating the Predator more appealing to him than it would be to most pilots: Swanson was a computer geek.

Thanks to an innovative program created in 1968 by suburban Minneapolis school districts and the University of Minnesota College of Education, with help from IBM and other big information technology companies, Swanson had been fascinated by computers since first grade. Under what became the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, students at his elementary school were among those allowed to use teleprinters and phone modems to do dial-up time-sharing on a Hewlett Packard computer so they could learn the rudiments of programming. They could also play primitive computer games. Scott's favorite was
Lunar Lander
, in which he had to fly a spacecraft he couldn't see—computer display screens were still in the future—and land the vehicle on the moon. A player flew the Lunar Lander by reading its altitude and speed on a teleprinter and changing the space vehicle's position by typing commands on a keyboard, which sent code to the computer. Scott also liked a game called
The Oregon Trail
, which required a player to drive a Conestoga wagon across the frontier by typing in commands such as “cross the river.” As they traversed the frontier, players had to “hunt” and “kill” wild game for food, in an early version of the game, by typing in words such as “Bang” or “Pow,” and in a later edition by using a mouse to put crosshairs on images of wild animals.

Steering a craft he wasn't inside, therefore, was not a novel concept to Swanson; he was always interested in innovative technologies. Besides, after two years of flying helicopters in rough weather out of Reykjavík, including in two frigid Iceland winters, and with the promise that he could choose his own assignment after a tour with the 11th RS, the Predator job sounded appealing on a lot of levels.

Single guy living in Vegas? New and interesting technology? Yeah,
Swanson thought,
I could go do this
. So he volunteered.

*   *   *

Three weeks into April 1999, Swanson was chatting with Major Bob Monroe in the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron operations director's Indian Springs airfield office when the telephone rang. Monroe didn't ask Swanson to leave; since joining the Predator squadron nine months earlier, the former helicopter pilot had earned Monroe's trust.

Swanson had transferred in from Iceland the previous June and, after twelve weeks of Predator training, deployed with a small 11th RS detachment to Taszár, Hungary, to fly surveillance missions over Bosnia. The unit was getting ready to come home for the winter in October 1998 when the Serb military and rebellious ethnic Albanians in Kosovo started a new round in what had become a chronic series of clashes between the two. The fighting stopped after the UN Security Council called for a cease-fire and threatened military action to make both sides comply, but the Predator deployment was extended to monitor what was happening in Kosovo and to help NATO prepare for another possible air campaign against the Serbs. U.S. commanders also began discussing whether to move the Predator's base south to Tuzla, Bosnia, to be closer to Kosovo.

From Hungary, the Predator needed eight hours of flight time just to
get
to Kosovo, flying south over Croatia, down the Adriatic, and across Albania to reach the Serb province. Swanson found that both his years in cockpits and his old
Lunar Lander
skills came in handy during such missions. A Predator pilot could see where his aircraft was going only by looking at a video screen, and even then his view was limited to a nose camera that peered straight out the drone's nose, supplemented by the view provided by sweeping the sky with its surveillance camera. Predator pilots couldn't feel the aircraft's motion, hear its engine, smell a fuel leak, or see what was in the air around their machine. Many of their commands to the aircraft, moreover, weren't made by moving the control stick and throttle on their console or the rudder pedals at their feet, but by typing on a keyboard.

Swanson proved adept at flying with only one of his five senses able to help. Beyond that, his ability to conceptualize, plan, and execute intricate missions—skills he had learned flying helicopters for Air Force Special Operations Command—gave him a leg up on many of his fellow Predator pilots. He excelled at flying missions out of Taszár, and when winter weather forced the detachment to return to Indian Springs around Christmas 1998, Swanson's superiors at the 11th RS immediately made him both a pilot instructor and the squadron's weapons and tactics officer—which was why Swanson was sitting in Monroe's office in April 1999 when the operations director's telephone rang.

“Wow,” Monroe said quietly as he hung up. “They're gonna throw a laser designator on the Predator.”

“Do you know what they're going to use?” Swanson asked.

“An AN/AAS-44(V),” Monroe replied, reciting the first five letters individually but finishing up with “forty-four Victor.”

Swanson wasn't familiar with that particular laser designator, a device that pulses a laser beam at a target to mark it for bombs or missiles, which then home in on the reflected light, or “sparkle,” bouncing off the target. As a special operations pilot, though, he had learned to use a different laser designator.

As Monroe explained, the phone call was from Big Safari, which on April 14 had been directed to install laser designators on four Predators, the number of drones that usually accompanied a ground control station. Equipped with such a device, the Predator should be able to “buddy-lase”—that is, shine its laser beam on targets that higher-flying fighter planes couldn't see and thus guide their bombs or missiles to those targets. The order to install the laser designator, approved by the Air Force chief of staff, gave Big Safari a tight deadline: three weeks. Monroe had been called, he told Swanson, because Big Safari would need a pilot to fly the Predator in tests of the device once it was installed, and perhaps in combat missions.

Swanson's inner geek was aroused. After his conversation with Monroe, he went straight to the 11th RS's “vault,” a room where classified information could be stored or accessed by computer, and downloaded and printed the manual for what insiders called the Forty-Four ball. The device, he learned, was actually a turret containing both a laser designator and an infrared camera to find targets. Raytheon Corporation had developed it for the Navy's Sikorsky SH-60 and HH-60 Seahawk helicopters—birds of a feather with the Sikorsky MH-60 that Swanson had flown as a special operations pilot.

“Whoever's going will need to read this,” Swanson told Monroe, plopping the manual for the Forty-Four ball down on the major's desk.

Monroe looked up and grinned. “You just volunteered,” he said.

A few days later, Swanson was working for Big Safari. At the time, he thought it was a temporary assignment.

*   *   *

Swanson and Monroe knew exactly what combat need had generated the laser designator order. A month earlier, the United States and its NATO allies had launched a new air campaign against Serbia's military; the seething conflict in Kosovo had boiled over again that winter despite the UN ceasefire imposed the previous fall. So far, Operation Allied Force had been less effective than hoped. When Serb troops perpetrated further atrocities against ethnic Albanians, NATO was willing to respond, but only with air strikes, for no member nation wanted to send troops and risk casualties in a quasi-civil war. The desire to avoid casualties extended to aircraft and their crews as well, and Air Force leaders were wary of Serbia's formidable, mostly Soviet-made antiaircraft defenses. “These guys are very good,” Chief of Staff General Michael E. Ryan testified to Congress before the operation began, warning that Allied air losses were “a distinct possibility.” The risk was confirmed on March 27, the fourth day of the air strikes, when a Serbian surface-to-air missile battery brought down a U.S. F-117 stealth fighter, whose pilot safely ejected and was rescued. Even before that, the NATO air commander, Air Force Lieutenant General Michael Short, imposed a fifteen-thousand-foot “hard deck” on how low Alliance planes could fly over Yugoslavia, a floor designed to keep crews out of antiaircraft gun and shoulder-fired SAM range. But from fifteen thousand feet or higher, and with mountainous Kosovo frequently blanketed by fog and clouds, pilots were soon having trouble finding mobile military targets or verifying that they could hit them without harming civilians. U.S. commanders were still groping for ways to adapt.

To some, the Predator seemed an obvious solution. With no one aboard, a Predator could fly beneath the hard deck with no risk of casualties, and its camera could zoom in on objects miles away. In theory, Predator video would make it much easier to find and validate targets; it would also help reduce civilian casualties. A handful of Predators—the same ones Swanson's detachment had flown from Hungary the year before—had deployed to Tuzla just a few days before Operation Allied Force, and the CAOC in Vicenza immediately tried to use them to guide pilots to targets. The controllers in Vicenza quickly learned, though, that doing so wasn't as simple in practice as in theory.

Predator video could be seen live on screens at NATO's southern headquarters in Naples, at the CAOC, at the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, at the “Jack” in England, even on a nineteen-inch television on a table in the Mons, Belgium, office of U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, the Supreme Allied Commander. Clark even had a TV that could receive Predator video at his official residence in Mons, a Flemish-style mansion called Château Gendebien, whose grounds covered twenty-three acres. Predator video could also be seen in certain offices at the Pentagon and in the Situation Room at the White House. But pilots flying strike missions over Yugoslavia had no Predator screens in their cockpits, and their controllers at Vicenza found it nearly impossible to talk pilots onto targets they could see on Predator screens at the CAOC. Even a flier who could spot a Predator in the air had no way of knowing exactly what the cameras housed in drone's sensor ball were seeing or even what direction the lens was pointing. Part of the problem was the “soda straw” view offered by the drone's cameras; part of the problem was the homogeneity of houses and roads in that part of the world. Air controllers might tell a pilot to look for a tank or armored car hiding behind “that house with the orange roof in the cul-de-sac,” but lots of neighborhoods had cul-de-sacs and nearly every house had an orange tile roof.

The Allied air commander himself, Lieutenant General Short, had experienced this problem firsthand. Short was in his Vicenza office about 5:00 p.m. one day when the red phone on his desk rang. That meant someone senior to him was calling—in this case, General Clark, who was peering at a Predator screen and “trying to figure out why the system wasn't working,” as Clark put it years later.

“Mike, I'm … looking at live Predator video,” Clark told Short.

As Short recollected it later, his immediate response was to think:
Don't you have something better to do? Isn't there a president or a prime minister or somebody you ought to be talking to?
But then Clark said he had just seen three Serb tanks on a road outside Kosovo's capital, Pristina, and he told Short that it was “imperative” that those tanks be destroyed before dark.

“Sir, I'm not normally in the business of getting involved in attacks on individual tanks, but I'll certainly go down and take a look,” the air commander responded.

When he got to the CAOC, Short found a young major with a Predator screen tracking the tanks Clark had seen. By radio, the major was trying to help an A-10 Warthog fighter pilot find and attack the tanks. But the A-10 pilot couldn't find what the Predator was seeing even when given geographical coordinates for the target; the Warthog's inertial navigation system lacked GPS and tended to drift into imprecision after a couple of hours in the air. The young captain in the cockpit and the major in the CAOC were getting ever more frustrated and testy—especially after Short arrived and told the major that General Clark “wants those three tanks killed.”

“A lot of interest in killing those tanks, four twenty-one,” the major told the pilot. “I'd like you to work on it.”

“Roger,” the young pilot replied, but after another couple of minutes, he still couldn't find the tanks.

“ComAirSouth and SACEUR are real interested in killing those tanks,” the major pressed, referring to Short and Clark by the acronyms for their titles. “Have you got them yet?”

“Negative,” responded the pilot.

Short embellished the story at an Air Force Association meeting the following winter, telling the gathering that after the major told the A-10 pilot that “General Short really wants those tanks killed,” the pilot finally grew so exasperated that he sputtered over the radio, “God damn it, Dad, I can't see the fucking tanks!” Years later, after that tale had been repeated as gospel in books and doctoral dissertations, Short admitted that the A-10 pilot was not, in fact, his son. But the incident occurred and the point was the same. The high altitude/low collateral damage imperative frustrated pilots over Kosovo that spring and was a major hindrance for NATO. Especially after the phone call from General Clark, Mike Short and other commanders knew they had a problem to solve, and they were in the market for creative solutions.