Роберт Гейтс - Duty - Memoirs of a Secretary at War

On January 14, 2008, I sent Mike Mullen a very tough note that cited several examples “where a formal request addressed to me took numerous months (in one case over six) to wind its way through the Centcom/Joint Staff staffing process before it was brought to me for action.” I directed him to develop and implement a process by which I would be informed immediately of any request specifically addressed to me by our commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The immediate problem that provoked those expressions of impatience was the difficulty we were having in meeting our field commanders’ need for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities: a mix of unmanned drones, propeller-driven reconnaissance aircraft, analysts, linguists, and data fusion capabilities that collected and fed critical battlefield information—including intercepted phone calls of terrorist leaders and live video transmission of insurgents planting IEDs—to military commanders, who could then act on it.

In the case of the MRAPs, accelerating production and delivery was essentially a matter of empowerment and finding the money. In the case of ISR, I encountered a lack of enthusiasm and urgency in the Air Force, my old service.

The fusion of extraordinary technical intelligence capabilities with military operations in real time and in direct support of small units in both Iraq and Afghanistan produced a genuine revolution in warfare and combat. While aerial intelligence support for commanders on the ground dates back at least to the Civil War and the use of balloons, over the last quarter of a century this support has taken on an entirely new character. I saw an early example of this as deputy at the CIA in the spring of 1986, when we were able to feed real-time satellite information about Libyan air defense activity directly to the pilots who were conducting the attacks on Tripoli. That was horse-and-buggy technology compared to what has been done in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While I was CIA director, in 1992, I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in developing technologically advanced drones, because of their ability to loiter over a target for many hours, thus providing continuous photographic and intercepted signals intelligence coverage. The Air Force wasn’t interested because, as I was told, people join the Air Force to fly airplanes and drones had no pilot. By the time I returned to government in late 2006, the Predator drone had become a household word, especially among our enemies, though the Air Force mind-set had not changed. In Iraq, the Army had converted small two-engine propeller planes into intelligence-collection platforms that could provide live video coverage—“full-motion video”—of an area over a prolonged period. This capability, Task Force ODIN (Observe, Detect, Identify, and Neutralize), became a critical asset not only in spotting individuals planting IEDs but in allowing analysts to track people and vehicles and thus to identify the networks producing and planting bombs. It was amazing to watch a video in real time of an insurgent planting an IED, or to view a video analysis tracing an insurgent pickup truck from the bomb-making site to the site of an attack. It was even more amazing—and gratifying—to watch the IED bomber and the pickup truck be quickly destroyed as a result of this unprecedented integration of sensors and shooters.

A number of other intelligence-collection platforms—various kinds of manned aircraft, aerostats (dirigibles), fixed cameras, and many other sensors—were developed. Initially, the full panoply of these platforms was used primarily by Special Forces in their operations, but over time, as other commanders saw what these ISR capabilities were, the demand for more of them for regular combat operations and for force protection grew exponentially.

There were impediments to meeting the demand. One was the limited production capacity of the single company that was making both the Predators and the ground stations necessary to process the collected information. Another was the need for more linguists to translate collected communications. A third was the limited number and availability of other kinds of collection capabilities. For example, one highly effective platform was the Navy’s P-3 aircraft, designed principally for hunting enemy submarines. Unless we essentially deprived ourselves of that capability in Pacific Command and elsewhere, only a handful of these aircraft would be available for Iraq and Afghanistan. They were also getting very old, limiting the number of hours they could fly.

The small number of trained crews available to pilot the drones, particularly in the Air Force, was another significant problem. The Army flew its version of the Predator—called Warrior—using warrant officers and noncommissioned officers. The Air Force, however, insisted on having flight-qualified aircraft pilots—all officers—fly its drones. The Air Force made clear to its pilots that flying a drone from the ground with a joy stick was not as career-enhancing as flying an airplane in the wild blue yonder. Not surprisingly, young officers weren’t exactly beating the door down to fly a drone. When I turned my attention to the ISR problem in mid-2007, the Air Force was providing eight Predator “caps”—each cap consisting of six crews (about eighty people) and three drones, providing twenty-four hours of coverage. The Air Force had no plans to increase those numbers; I was determined that would change.

There was an unseemly turf fight in the ISR world over whether the Air Force should control all military drone programs and operations. The Army resisted, and I was on its side; the Air Force was grasping for absolute control of a capability for which it had little enthusiasm in the first place. I absolutely loathed this kind of turf fight, especially in the middle of ongoing wars, and I was determined the Air Force would not get control.

In the ISR arena, each military service was pursuing its own programs, there was no coordination in acquisition, and no one person was in charge to ensure interoperability in combat conditions. The undersecretary of defense for intelligence, the CIA with its drones (mainly flown by the military), and the director of national intelligence all had their own agendas. It was a mess.

Whatever the complications, the surge of troops in Iraq and mounting difficulties in Afghanistan required a surge in ISR capabilities. Indeed, in nearly every one of my weekly videoconferences with Dave Petraeus, first in Iraq and later in Afghanistan, he would raise the need for more ISR. I asked Ryan McCarthy of my staff, a former Army Ranger and combat veteran of Afghanistan, to be my eyes and ears in this effort—and my cattle prod when necessary.

The first order of business during the summer of 2007 was to scour the world for additional capability. I was prepared to strip nearly every combatant command of much of its ISR to provide more to Petraeus. Every region of the globe is assigned a regional four-star headquarters. These commanders—sometimes compared to proconsuls during the Roman Empire—are loath to give up any military assets assigned to them. Nonetheless we rounded up every drone we could find that was not already deployed in Iraq and grabbed P-3 aircraft from around the world to send to Iraq and Afghanistan. An even more capable drone than the Predator was its larger cousin, the Reaper, and we worked to maximize its production and deployment to the theater as well. At the same time, we had to ramp up new production and accelerate training of new crews. I directed the Air Force to increase its Predator capacity from eight caps to eighteen, and I told its leaders that I wanted their plan by November 1.

Several developments late that fall confirmed for me that the Air Force leadership didn’t accept the urgency of the need for ISR “down-range” or the need to think outside the box about how to get more. This was especially puzzling to me because the Air Force was making an invaluable contribution to the war effort by providing close air support to ground troops under fire, in medical evacuations, and in flying huge quantities of matériel into both Iraq and Afghanistan. In late October 2007, Air Force Chief of Staff Mike “Buzz” Moseley directed a study on how the Air Force could get to eighteen caps by October 2008—far too slowly, in my view. Then, at a time when we were trying to put every intelligence platform possible into the war, the Air Force proposed ending all funding for the venerable U-2 spy plane by the end of summer 2008. The U-2, the same kind of spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers and shot down by the Soviets in 1960, was still providing remarkable intelligence. I thought proposing to ground it at this juncture was just plain crazy. Further, nearly every time Moseley and Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne came to see me, it was about a new bomber or more F-22S. Both were important capabilities for the future, but neither would play any part in the wars we were already in.