Predator (45 page)

As would later emerge, Roberts was soon dead, slain by an Al Qaeda bullet to the head. But a little more than two hours after he fell from the helicopter, the six others in his SEAL team returned in another MH-47 to try to rescue him. Though this Chinook, too, came under fire as it descended, it successfully dropped the SEALs on the ridge before flying away with serious damage. The SEAL team immediately got into a firefight with the Al Qaeda fighters; outnumbered and outgunned, the SEALs were soon forced to retreat down the side of the mountain with one of their number killed and three wounded.

Just over an hour later, a third Chinook—the helicopter that had caught the eye of the Predator team at Langley—descended toward the ridge in a second attempt to retrieve Roberts. Manned by a crew of seven, this Army MH-47E had flown Captain Nate Self, eight other Army Rangers, four Air Force Special Tactics men, and an Army medic to the mountain on the rescue mission. But because of command, control, and communications failures, Self and his Ranger-led quick reaction force were also ambushed the moment they arrived; under heavy enemy fire, their Chinook crashed, injuring some of Self's team when it hit the ground. Then, as its crippled rotors whined to a stop, the aircraft was perforated by small arms and RPG fire from multiple directions. Four men were dead before Self and other survivors could get out of the helicopter and fight back.

At the Trailer Park, contractor pilot Big saw the Chinook crash from the second ground control station, which had a video feed from the original GCS. Big, piloting a second Predator, was just handing over his own drone to the launch-and-recovery element in Central Asia to land. Already due to relieve Ghengis after that handoff, Big immediately walked over to the original GCS. There, Ghengis told him she had radioed an AWACS that was controlling the airspace to ask permission to take up station above the mountain where the Chinook was down and see if the Predator could help. She had been denied permission because a third Predator—this one unarmed—was there already, but she was trying to make the AWACS controllers understand that her Predator was armed. Finally, minutes after Big relieved Ghengis and took the controls of Predator 3037, the AWACS cleared him to put the drone into an orbit above Takur Ghar. The AWACS also gave him the Ranger team's radio call sign, Slick Zero One, which was being used by Air Force Staff Sergeant Gabe Brown, an enlisted tactical air controller, to call in close air support for the Rangers.

Over the rest of that Monday, the Wildfire team put all the Predator's powers to work for the troops battling for their lives on Takur Ghar. The Predator's video, fed to the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command on Masirah Island, near Oman, and a tactical operations center at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, provided a live view of the battle, which for some commanders was a revelation. In the end, though, Predator 3037's Hellfire missiles played an even more important role as the firefight raged near the fallen Chinook.

After the Rangers scuttled away from their disabled helicopter, they took cover behind some rocks a few feet to one side of the aircraft. Their redoubt was only about seventy-five yards from an enemy bunker under what Self and Brown quickly dubbed the “bonsai” tree; the Rangers were taking fire from both the bunker and Al Qaeda positions farther up the ridge. Soon after the Rangers asked the AWACS for air support, two F-15E Strike Eagles and two F-16C Fighting Falcons streaked over the mountain several times firing 20-millimeter cannons, but the fighter planes' strafing runs failed to take out the Al Qaeda positions. The Rangers tried to assault the hilltop themselves, even though only five of the men who had landed on the Chinook were still able to pull a trigger. Self ordered a retreat when he realized the enemy had a heavy machine gun in a bunker shielded by thick logs.

When the Rangers got back down the ridge and behind the rocks again, they came under mortar fire. Self had Brown call on an F-16C to try to hit the enemy position under the bonsai tree with a five-hundred-pound bomb; the target was so close to Self's men that the pilot asked Brown for Self's initials so he could later prove that Self had approved the strike. Three bombs missed, and the last rained gravel on his men, leading Self to decide that the risk was too great. Then, shortly after calling off the bombing, the Ranger captain heard Brown talking to the Predator. Worried about enemy movement, Brown was asking Big to tell him what the Predator's camera was seeing to the east.

“Find out if it's armed,” Self told Brown.

“What do you mean?” Brown said.

“Just find out if it's armed,” Self replied. “Some of the Predators have Hellfires.” Self had picked up this bit of highly classified information during planning sessions for Operation Anaconda.

A couple of minutes later, after learning that the Predator circling nearby was indeed armed, Self told Brown to have the drone put a Hellfire in the bunker beneath the bonsai tree. The first missile launched by Big and a sensor operator named Will landed well short of the bunker; years later, participants disagreed on why. But the second Hellfire shot was perfect. As war correspondent Sean Naylor wrote in
Not a Good Day to Die
, a book about Operation Anaconda, “Rocks, dirt and branches flew over the Rangers' heads. They cheered. When the smoke had cleared from the top of Takur Ghar, the bunker had collapsed and part of the tree was missing. They took no more fire from there.”

As the day went on, the Rangers continued to take mortar fire and fight off assaults by groups of Al Qaeda fighting from a second bunker beyond the bonsai tree. The crews flying Predator 3037, now out of Hellfires, used the drone's cameras to help spot enemy movements and warn the ground troops. At one point the enemy began a major assault from the second bunker, and the Predator team buddy-lased two bomb strikes by two French Mirage 2000D fighter planes dispatched by the AWACS. The first bomb hit the bunker, but some of the Al Qaeda fighters survived and scrambled down the mountainside, taking cover under a tree. The Predator spotted them, and in short order buddy-lased another strike by the Mirages that apparently killed all the enemy hiding beneath the tree.

Late that afternoon, Self and his men—several wounded, one dying—waited anxiously for rescuers, but commanders refused to send help until after dark. By now, Scott Swanson was flying the Predator and Jeff Guay was operating its sensors; both were listening over the radio as the Rangers repeatedly asked to be picked up before more of their comrades died. Years later, Swanson was still haunted by the memory of the Rangers' pleas over the radio.

As darkness fell in Afghanistan, Guay began using a new Predator feature to help calm the desperate Rangers. The drone's MTS ball now included not only a laser designator but a laser illuminator—an infrared flashlight, in essence—whose beam expanded into an ever-larger cone as it traveled, and whose light could be seen through night vision goggles worn by the Rangers and by Air Force air controller Brown.

“Every time he'd get a little nervous, I'd illuminate the ground in front of him,” Guay told a Big Safari reunion later that year, describing how he used the laser light to reassure the trapped Rangers that he was watching out for them. Even more important, Guay said, he later shined the laser illuminator on a spot designated by the troops on the ground and thus helped guide two Chinooks to a safe landing when they finally flew onto the ridge after dark. The helicopters picked up all the Americans on the mountain, including Roberts and the six others killed.

Within military circles, word of what the Predator had done that day spread like wildfire.

“Roberts Ridge was our coming-out party,” Ed Boyle proudly recalled some years later. “That night, it was more than an experiment; it was saving American lives. We were a sideshow up until that point in time. People were talking about us, but not as something that was going to be a long-lasting thing. After that, Predator became what it is today. Nobody ever doubted us again.”

*   *   *

After genesis came the flood.

The arming of the Predator and its rigging for global remote control transformed a slow evolution toward wider military use of unmanned aerial vehicles into an outright revolution. In less than a decade, military drone technology proliferated to an extent that even its most ardent advocates never imagined, and an explosion in civilian drone technology followed. Given advances in the underlying technologies—lightweight composite material, smaller and more sophisticated cameras, digital communications, GPS, laser-guided weapons—UAVs would almost certainly have become more than a niche technology in time. But by radically changing the way people thought about drones, the Predator changed the military overnight.

As 2001 began, the U.S. military owned just 82 unmanned aerial vehicles and had three types in use: the Predator and two small reconnaissance drones, the Navy/Marine Corps Pioneer and the Army's Hunter. An April 2001 Defense Department study—after noting that the U.S. military had “a long and continuous history of involvement with UAVs” going back to 1917—estimated that by 2010 the armed services might own 290 in all, but the study predicted that there would still be only three types.

In fact, when 2010 arrived, the military owned nearly 8,000 UAVs of fourteen different types. Six thousand of these were camera-carrying drones the size of model airplanes, but the Air Force had 165 armed Predators, more than three times the 48 unarmed RQ-1s the service had planned to buy before 9/11. And the Air Force owned 73 armed MQ-9 Reapers (the official name for the Predator B introduced by General Atomics nine years earlier). Each Reaper could carry four instead of the Predator's two Hellfires, plus two laser-guided five-hundred-pound bombs. And as was suggested by the crash in Iran in 2011 of a previously secret unarmed drone designated the RQ-170 Sentinel, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies were surely using or developing other unmanned aircraft covertly.

In the decade following the development of the first armed drone, Predators and Reapers flew hundreds of missions during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in antiterrorist operations in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. By 2013 those two types of drones alone had logged more than two million flight hours. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, was flying unarmed Predators along U.S. borders to detect smugglers and other threats. And the FBI was using mini-drones to help agents track criminals and gather intelligence at crime scenes.

The drone revolution was fueled in part by innovations Big Safari and others continued to devise for the Predator. In November 2001, Big Safari asked technoscientist Werner to devise a way for Air Force AC-130U Spooky gunship crews to receive video in flight from a Predator already over their target. This allowed the Spooky crews to line up their cannons before Al Qaeda and Taliban militants could hear the big plane coming, a new tactic that proved devastating to the enemy. A few weeks later, in early 2002, Werner designed and Big Safari built a device dubbed ROVER (for Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver) that made it possible for ground troops to view live Predator video on a shoe box–size device they could carry in the field.

As the Predator evolved, so did the nature of warfare. In the decade following 9/11, the CIA and U.S. political leaders ordered an ever larger number of targeted killings of known or suspected terrorists. Before long, this new kind of intercontinental sniper rifle—and the nature of the conflict that helped spawn it—changed the character of America's spy agency as well, turning its focus from espionage to paramilitary operations.

The drone revolution also reshaped the military, whose UAVs were increasingly flown by a rapidly expanding force of “remotely piloted aircraft” operators specifically recruited and trained for the task. In August 2009 the Air Force stunned experts by announcing that over the coming year it would train more pilots to fly unmanned aerial vehicles than conventional aircraft. The same month, an Air Force study predicted that its fleet would one day include a wide range of unmanned aircraft, from moth-size nano-drones that would be able to flit through windows and spy inside buildings to largely autonomous bombers and fighters. This study—“Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan, 2009–2047”—even forecast that by the one hundredth anniversary of the independent Air Force in 2047, the service would have armed drones automated with artificial intelligence capable of deciding on their own when and whether to attack a target. The report admitted, however, that the development of such a capability would be “contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions” about such “lethal autonomy,” and the Air Force later backed away from the concept.

The other U.S. armed services also invested heavily in unmanned aircraft. By 2010 the Army was flying its own armed derivative of the Predator, the General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle; the Navy and Marine Corps, meanwhile, were flying drone helicopters. The Navy was also developing its own version of Northrop Grumman's high-flying RQ-4 Global Hawk reconnaissance drone.

The Predator's success also changed the defense aviation industry, whose interest in drones largely reflected the attitudes of its military customers. Northrop and Boeing began investing heavily in drones and related technologies. In 2009 Boeing, one of the largest manufacturers of military and civilian aircraft in the world, created a new Unmanned Airborne Systems unit within the Unmanned Systems Division it had created in 2001 and began buying or teaming with smaller companies to make UAVs of all types and sizes. By 2014, major defense industry players Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Textron, and more than fifty other U.S. companies, universities, and government agencies were developing, selling, buying, or flying more than one hundred and fifty types of drones ranging in size from forty to forty thousand pounds. At least fifty other countries were also making or buying drones and, in some cases, arming them.