Predator (21 page)

*   *   *

One Friday afternoon in early April 1999, Colonel Snake Clark was trying to wrap up work in his Pentagon office and head home for the weekend when his phone rang. Clark's caller that day was General Mike Ryan, who had succeeded General Ron Fogleman as Air Force chief of staff in October 1997. Before Fogleman retired, he and Ryan had a conversation about staff, and Fogleman told his successor, “You don't know Snake Clark, but you need to get to know him, because he can do things for you. But he will piss people off, so you've got to provide some top cover for this guy.” Fogleman explained to Ryan that Snake Clark was the sort of person who knew how to accomplish things the Air Force as an institution had “antibodies against.” Ryan took Fogelman's advice and soon came to depend on Clark much as Fogleman had done.

Ryan told Clark that NATO air commander Short was “real concerned” that the Predator lacked the necessary technology to provide Allied pilots with an accurate position of a target spotted by the drone's camera.

“I know,” Clark replied. “It doesn't exist.”

“Invent it,” Ryan ordered.

Short had discussed the problem with the commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe, General John P. Jumper, a fighter pilot with a knack for innovation. Jumper had in turn called Ryan and suggested several ideas.

Clark started arranging to fly to Vicenza immediately to discuss the problem with the staff at the CAOC. Then he phoned Werner, now under contract to Big Safari. As Clark knew, the technoscientist had been working off and on for three years with software engineers from General Atomics on an improvement to the Predator's video system that might ease General Short's problem, if not entirely solve it. Werner's idea was to embed metadata—information about an image that can't actually be seen in the image, such as geographic coordinates—in the Predator's video. Formatted so a computer could read it, the embedded metadata could be extracted and used to generate a moving digital terrain map with a graphic overlay, shown on a separate screen. The graphics consisted of a trapezoid showing the precise spot on the ground being viewed by the Predator's sensors, plus a symbol representing the location of the Predator itself, both overlays generated in real time. To generate this exploitation support data, as Werner named it, all the operators needed was a laptop computer, two devices to encode and decode data in video images, and a few cables. And Werner knew the system worked: he had had it installed in a Predator ground control station and tested it three times before Operation Allied Force kicked off. Because no official requirement for such a system existed, though, Air Combat Command had made Werner uninstall the experiment within thirty days each time he tested it.

Before Clark left for Vicenza, he also called Bill Grimes, who had another idea for a way to help allied aircraft see and strike mobile targets in the Balkans. “We could put a laser designator on this thing,” the Big Safari director told Clark.

Equipping a drone with a laser designator wasn't a new idea. The Army's ill-fated Aquila, cancelled in 1987, was supposed to carry a laser designator to guide artillery shells to targets. More recently, some in Congress had proposed putting laser designators and even weapons on drones, including the Predator. Obvious as the idea might be, however, adding such a device to an existing aircraft was no simple matter, which made the order to do so more than daunting when Grimes gave it to Captain Brian Raduenz and added, “You've got to find something you can put on in two weeks.”

Raduenz (pronounced “RUH-deens”) was an eleven-year Air Force veteran who had just turned thirty-three. A native of Eveleth, Minnesota, home of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, Raduenz had ranked second academically out of 105 students in his 1984 graduating class at Eveleth High School but won an appointment to the Air Force Academy primarily to play hockey. The academy's hockey coaches at the time, who recruited him, were also from Eveleth. Raduenz graduated from the academy in 1988 and four years later earned a master's degree in electrical engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology, located near Big Safari's headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. More brainy than brawny for a hockey player, Raduenz was also unusual for an engineer: gregarious, cheerful, and endowed with a puckish sense of humor. His 110-page master's thesis bore the technically severe title “Digital Signal Processing Using Lapped Transforms with Variable Parameter Windows and Orthonormal Bases.” The paper's preface, however, ended with this sentence: “Finally, I must thank my wonderful parents, whose love and devotion made me the great guy that I am today.”

Assigned to work on the Compass Call program at Wright-Patterson after finishing his master's, Raduenz joined Big Safari in 1994, his first green door assignment, and was sent to Detachment 2 at an airfield in Greenville, Texas, where secret modifications to RC-135s of various configurations were done. As in hockey, an aptitude for creative, unselfish teamwork was an asset in Big Safari, and Raduenz thrived there. Raduenz's work in Greenville led Grimes to take him along to Saudi Arabia in May 1997 to talk to officials in Riyadh about a version of Rivet Joint the Saudis were to buy from the United States, and their first stop was Bahrain. They arrived on May 9 and, after checking in at the Bahrain Hilton, met in the hotel's swanky bar for drinks and dinner. After they'd both had a couple of cocktails, Raduenz seized the opportunity to talk to the boss about his future—and got a welcome surprise.

After more than four years with Big Safari, Raduenz told Grimes, he was due to be reassigned to a regular Air Force job unless he could line up another green door assignment, which was what he wanted. Raduenz didn't say so, but sitting in Bahrain in a sport jacket and open-collar shirt having drinks with Bill Grimes, whose wispy gray beard and wrinkled khaki trousers were good camouflage for a mind crammed with important secrets, was a hell of a lot more fun than sitting in uniform behind a desk in an office building at some dreary Air Force base or in the Pentagon.

The bar was nearly empty, but Grimes cast a conspiratorial glance to either side, then leaned toward Raduenz and told him in a low voice, “I have something I've been working on. I briefed Congress on how we would do it, and I told them I could run it with a captain and a couple of good enlisted guys, and if that happens, I want you to go head that up.”

Raduenz felt a tingle go up his spine.

“I can't talk about it right now in any detail, but it's a UAV program,” Grimes added, prompting Raduenz to give him a quizzical look. UAVs were supposed to be anathema in Big Safari after the way DarkStar and Global Hawk had siphoned off money in recent years.

“This one's different,” Grimes said, as if reading Raduenz's mind. “This one actually works.”

“You mean the Predator?” Raduenz whispered eagerly.

Now Grimes gave Raduenz a look. “That's the one,” he said, “but you can't breathe a word of this to anybody. If it gets out what's going on, it could kill the whole thing. Nobody knows I went up there and briefed Congress on how we would do this. If they find out, it could really mess things up.”

No one found out, and in August 1998 Raduenz and five other engineers and technicians—“I cherry-picked them,” Grimes said years later—opened what Big Safari called its Operating Location Detachment 4 in a corner of the General Atomics manufacturing plant at Rancho Bernardo, California. Now, a mere eight months later, Raduenz's tiny team had been given two weeks to put a laser designator on the Predator. There wouldn't be a moment to spare.

*   *   *

On Saturday April 17, three days after Raduenz and his team got under way, four Raytheon engineers arrived at the General Atomics facility in Rancho Bernardo with their company's AN/AAS-44(V), a gray device that vaguely resembled the head of some disembodied
Star Wars
robot. Unlike the smooth, round, white Wescam Model 14, the standard camera-carrying “sensor ball” beneath and just behind the Predator's bulbous nose, Raytheon's Forty-Four ball was a rugged sphere with sliding surfaces and two round and two rectangular apertures in its aluminum skin. The round apertures were very different in size, and instead of allowing light to enter a camera, the smaller aperture allowed the Forty-Four ball to shine a laser designator's beam at a target. After propping the Forty-Four ball up on a stand atop a conference room table, the four Raytheon engineers gave a small group of General Atomics engineers and the Big Safari team a tutorial on how the ball's infrared camera and laser designator worked.

A laser—the word is actually an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”—emits a stream of electromagnetic pulses in a fashion similar to radar but on a far shorter wave length. A laser designator beam is pencil-thin, allowing it to be aimed, rather than broadcast like a radio signal, but the beam is a narrow cone that expands as it travels, and when it hits an object the light scatters in every direction. A bomb or missile carrying a seeker tuned to the same wave length and programmed to recognize a code embedded in the designator's beam picks up this so-called sparkle and follows it to the target. It's a highly accurate way to guide a weapon, and both beam and sparkle are invisible to the naked eye.

An officer at Big Safari's headquarters in Dayton had discovered the Forty-Four ball in a phone call to Raytheon after rejecting other possibilities from conventional Air Force sources. The Forty-Four was bigger and heavier than the Predator's normal Wescam sensor ball, but its laser designator was cutting edge. There were only two drawbacks. First, the Raytheon ball lacked a daylight camera, so Predators carrying it would lose their color video capability. Second, although Raytheon was manufacturing seventy of the balls, the Navy owned them all and was installing them on antisubmarine warfare helicopters.

Breaking into a service bureaucracy's schedule to borrow or buy even a few laser balls was a tall order, but after some high-level phone calls the Navy agreed to sell the Air Force four Forty-Four balls—at a premium of roughly 40 percent. For the engineers, meanwhile, there was a lot to do. The Forty-Four needed a slightly different tray to sit on inside the Predator's fuselage to accommodate its greater weight and keep its laser and infrared beams steady as the drone flew. Electrical and other connections between the ball and the aircraft and the aircraft and its ground control station had to be altered. A small cadre of company and Air Force pilots and sensor operators had to learn to use the laser ball. Mechanics had to be shown how to service and repair it.

Like many of the others, Raduenz was at work every morning by seven and knocked off at midnight, day in and day out, for the next five weeks. There were no Saturdays, no Sundays. Sometimes he didn't even know what day it was. He was running on adrenaline. He was working harder than ever before. He was also having the time of his life.

Raduenz and the other engineers creatively noodled their way through a thicket of software and electrical dilemmas. The General Atomics facility was too small to test the ball's infrared sensor, so Raduenz and Jeff Hettick, a senior company software engineer, put the ball on a cart, wheeled it back against a wall, opened a door on the other side of the lab, and aimed the infrared camera at the side of a distant building. By six days into the project, the team had installed the ball on a Predator and shipped it to El Mirage to test its aerodynamics. After a General Atomics crew flew a Predator carrying the new ball on a test flight there, the project moved to Indian Springs in Nevada, where Captain Scott Swanson and a couple of Air Force sensor operators would fly tests.

Big Safari had to borrow Swanson, Major Scott Hill, and the sensor operators because Air Combat Command, the Predator's putative operator, wanted nothing to do with this “hobby shop” project, as Grimes heard one of ACC's people disdainfully call it. Big Safari and ACC had long been butting heads over their utterly opposite philosophies. Big Safari was about innovation; ACC was about regimentation. When Big Safari and General Atomics proposed gluing two-inch-by-two-inch blocks of half-inch-thick plywood inside the wheel wells of early model Predators to stop the landing gear wheels from chafing the fuselage's composite walls, ACC took four months to approve the “modification.” ACC approved it, moreover, only after Big Safari and General Atomics wrote a technical order specifying how many tenths of an inch of plywood must rub away before mechanics replaced the wood patches. Now the 11th RS commander refused to let his crews in Tuzla fly the Predators with laser designators because the modification lacked an Air Force manual to guide operators and mechanics—all the crews had was a Navy manual. Grimes was still fuming about the incident more than a decade later. “You're at war and you won't fly a new capability?” he said. “That's not my kind of warrior.”

On May 4, 1999, just one day shy of three weeks after Big Safari got the assignment, General Atomics pilot Edwin Kimzey flew the first Predator carrying a Forty-Four ball from Indian Springs over a Nellis Air Force Base test range, where an Air Force sensor operator lased mock targets for F-15E and A-10 ground attack aircraft. No bombs were dropped, but an A-10's laser tracker verified that the Predator's laser spot was on target. The Big Safari and contractor teams were elated—until the Predator landed.

When it did, the drone's spidery front landing gear collapsed. Raduenz watched in horror as the Predator's nose and the Raytheon ball smacked onto the concrete, bounced three times, then skittered down the runway as the aircraft rolled to a stop. The only Forty-Four ball they had was intact but damaged beyond immediate repair—a serious setback. When the team later watched video recorded by the Predator's nose camera during the accident, the view began straight ahead, suddenly fell to the ground, shook as the drone's nose bounced, then showed a steady but jittery image of concrete while the Predator rolled to a stop. The camera kept recording for a bit, showing nothing but a small square of concrete, until an out-of-focus bug of some kind crawled through the picture, an oblivious and unharmed passerby.