We sat in a cramped room with cement floors, working off a makeshift desk built out of plywood. Jake, an Air Force tactical controller, sat next to me; he was my shadow. We had our laptops out, running a sophisticated chat program that allowed us to have about twenty different conversations with every intelligence agency running at once, our ground force elements, senior officials in the US government, and the technical side of the operations in Iraq and across the globe.
As I called out instructions—zoom orders, latitude, longitude, altitude, vehicle pursuit directions—Jake chatted everything to a camera sensor operator and Predator pilot, two different Air Force personnel sitting next to each other in a trailer in Nevada who actually flew the drones at my every command. The bongo truck, similar to a pickup truck but with a wider body, was heading southeast now from the Syrian border—fast. They were definitely transporting something. On the monitors, the bongo was kicking up dust everywhere and creating a huge signature visible from the sky.
We had the bird at a two-nautical-mile standoff from the target, trailing our target at around 12, feet to keep it out of sight. Months of our intelligence work destroyed. The guys coming across the Syrian border typically followed a predetermined smuggling route, moving their illicit explosives or suicide bombers between the villages on the way to their ultimate destination. Sometimes the first stop was the nearest major town, where the vehicle would be used to blow up the closest U.
I had been up now for twenty hours. This was when my eyes always began to blur a bit. The empty Rip It cans were piled at my elbow. It was another twenty minutes before the vehicle came to a stop outside a village. Jake went back and quickly reviewed the drone feed, like a replay on ESPN, showing full views of both sides of the truck.
Suddenly, the passenger began to walk out of view of our camera and into the open desert, while the driver walked around to the back of the bongo.
The driver began digging into the bed of the bongo and now I could see there were barrels in the back with a bunch of garden-size hoses sticking out. I had them switch the camera from electro-optical, or daytime, TV, which shows everything in brown and gray, to infrared view.
Both men were now on the monitors. Their bodies were suddenly a bright, ghostly black against the white fall desert. When the passenger lit a cigarette, a huge light exploded, like a house on fire. Within a few minutes another white bongo pulled up and three men climbed out. I took note of how they greeted the others. All of them kissed the hands and hugged the driver of the first truck: Bashir. The men began cautiously offloading thick jugs about three or four feet tall to the first truck.
Just like the ones already in the back. Maybe the first truck was just getting gas or maybe he was transporting the village water source. These guys could simply be locals not connected to the Al Qaeda network at all. What set our team apart was knowing this: nothing in this business is a coincidence. These were explosives and, knowing Bashir, they could be rigging the truck to blow up like the Fourth of July.
At twenty-five years old, I had the power to decide whether a man lived or died. I was part of a handful of people in the American military at the time with the responsibility to pick drone targets and issue the order for their deaths. It is designed for rapid servicing and autonomous flight operations with minimal ground crew. It exploits the use of a proven airframe and off-the-shelf commercial components rather than the custom-made electronics of military drones.
More recent developments have seen this type of synthetic aperture radar shrunk to two pounds. Something like the five-pound SwitchBlade precision munition , well proven in Afghanistan and elsewhere against vehicles and individuals, might be an effective lightweight alternative.
The Predator, originally little more than a powered glider with a camera, morphed into something closer to a standard Air Force plane in terms of performance and cost — making it hopeless for the mission it was supposed to perform. Perhaps, given a clean sheet, the Air Force will succeed in procuring a smarter, high-tech, low-cost, long-endurance drone it can buy in large numbers and afford to lose, a cheaper Reaper to get the job done. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here.
More From Forbes. Nov 12, , am EST. Nov 11, , pm EST. Nov 11, , am EST. Nov 10, , pm EST. Nov 10, , am EST. Edit Story. Predator number flew operational missions over Afghanistan between September and January Between August and November , during the middle of its operations from Uzbekistan, number undertook a detached deployment to another operational site where it flew 32 missions. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. It has been used in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and other global locations.
The U. Given the small number of strikes made by Predators compared to manned aircraft, the impact was enormous. Its success in locating top enemy leaders made it a favorite tool of national security advisors and military commanders alike. In April , the U.
The other 15 were Predators. Four years later, the number had tripled. Ten years after that, the U. The Predator alone does not account for this increase, but it unquestionably established the potential of the UAV to shape the battlefield and geopolitics in ways that no aircraft, manned or unmanned, had done before. Previously, military strikes consisted of fast jet pilots arriving over a chaotic scene with little time to understand the situation, releasing heavy ordnance, and then quickly departing.
Accuracy in such engagements could be problematic, particularly with terrorists or insurgents who blended with the local populace. Instead, with the ability to remain airborne for up to 40 hours though operational missions rarely go much beyond 20 , Predator pilots and sensor operators could understand the ground situation far more clearly than in any previous aerial platform. The Hellfire missile, while powerful, also has a narrow blast effect, which made possible precision strikes that were impossible from manned aircraft.
At a typical operating altitude of 15, feet above the terrain, the Predator was silent and invisible to those on the ground though not stealthy to radar. Air Force's unmanned Predator aerial vehicle visited the Steven F.
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