Defending Against Drones

Cover via Amazon

How our new favorite weapon in the war on terror could soon be turned against us.

By P. W. Singer | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Mar 8, 2010

The unmanned spy plane that Lebanon's Hizbullah sent buzzing over Israeli towns in 2005 was loud and weaponless, and carried only a rudimentary camera. But the surprise flight by a regional terror group still worried U.S. analysts, who saw it as a sign that the unmanned vehicles were falling into the wrong hands.

Today that concern appears to have been well founded. At least 40 other countries—from Belarus and Georgia to India, Pakistan, and Russia—have begun to build, buy, and deploy unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, showcasing their efforts at international weapons expos ranging from the premier Paris Air Show to smaller events in Singapore and Bahrain. In the last six months alone, Iran has begun production on a pair of weapons-ready surveillance drones, while China has debuted the Pterodactyl and Sour Dragon, rivals to America's Predator and Global Hawk. All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.

You wouldn't know it to hear U.S. officials talk. Jim Tuttle, the Department of Homeland Security official responsible for safeguarding America against nonnuclear weapons, downplays the idea that drones could be used against us. "What terrorist is going to have a Predator?" he scoffed at a conference last winter. More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported, the U.S. ignored a dangerous flaw in its UAV technology that allowed Iraqi insurgents to tap into the planes' video feeds using $30 software purchased over the Internet.

Such arrogance is setting us up for a fall. Just as we once failed to imagine terrorists using our own commercial aircraft against us, we are now underestimating the threat posed by this new wave of technology. We must prepare for a world in which foreign robotics rivals our own, and terrorists can deliver deadly explosives not just by suicide bomber but also by unmanned machine.

The ease and affordability of such technology, much of which is already available for purchase commercially, means that drones will inevitably pass into the wrong hands, allowing small groups and even individuals to wield power once limited to the world's great militaries. There is, after all, no such thing as a permanent, first-mover advantage—not in technology, and certainly not in war. The British may have invented the tank during World War I, but the Germans wielded it better in the blitzkrieg more than two decades later.

For now, however, America remains at the forefront of the robotics revolution—superiority that has come at considerable effort and expense. We've channeled billions into UAVs, initiating what has been called the largest shift in military tactics, strategy, and doctrine since the invention of gunpowder. This year the Pentagon will buy more unmanned aircraft than manned, and train more UAV pilots than traditional bomber and fighter pilots combined. As Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, put it in January, "We can't get enough drones."

But neither can our adversaries—who don't need their own network of satellites and supercomputers to deploy an unmanned plane. Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson built a version of the military's hand-tossed Raven surveillance drone for $1,000, while an Arizona-based anti-immigrant group instituted its own pilotless surveillance system to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border for just $25,000. Hitler's war machine may have lacked the ability to strike the American mainland during World War II. But half a century later, a 77-year-old blind man from Canada designed an unmanned system that in 2003 hopped the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland.

Today, the lag time between the development of military technology and its widespread dissemination is measured in months, not years. Industrial farmers around the world already use aerial drones to dust their crops with pesticides. And a recent U.S. Air Force study concluded that similar systems are "an ideal platform" for dirty bombs containing radioactive, chemical, or biological weapons—the type of WMDs that terrorists are most likely to obtain. Such technologies have the potential to strengthen the hand not only of Al Qaeda 2.0, but also of homegrown terror cells and disaffected loners like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. As one robotics expert told me, for less than $50,000 "a few amateurs could shut down Manhattan."

The United States has not truly had to think about its air defenses—at home or abroad—since the Cold War. But it's time it did, because our current crop of weapons isn't well suited to dealing with these new systems. Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles; Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, but at $3 million apiece such protection comes at a very steep price. Even seemingly unsophisticated drones can have a tactical advantage: Hizbullah's primitive planes flew so slowly that Israeli F-16s stalled out trying to decelerate enough to shoot them down.

To succeed in this revolution, we need something many competitor countries already have: a national robotics strategy. That means graduate scholarships, lab funding, and a Silicon Valley–style corridor for corporate development. Otherwise we are destined to depend on the expertise of others. Already a growing number of American defense and technology firms rely on hardware from China and software from India, a clear security concern.

Equally important, we need a military and homeland-security strategy that considers not only how we use these unmanned systems but how others will use them against us. That means widening the threat scenarios our agencies plan and train for. It also means new legal regimes to determine who should have access to such dangerous technologies—lest our greatest new weapon come back to bite us.

Singer is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution and the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.

Obama Signs $680 Billion Military Bill - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By CHRISTOPHER DREW

When the Obama administration proposed canceling a host of expensive weapons systems last spring, some of the military industry’s allies in Congress assumed, as they had in the past, that they would have the final say.

But as the president signed a $680 billion military policy bill on Wednesday, it was clear that he had succeeded in paring back nearly all of the programs and setting a tone of greater restraint than the Pentagon had seen in many years.

Now the question is whether Mr. Obama can sustain that push next year, when the midterm elections are likely to make Congress more resistant to further cuts and job losses.

White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Wednesday that the plan was to threaten a veto over a prominent program — in this case, the F-22 fighter jet — “to show we were willing to expend political capital and could win on something that people thought we could not.”

Once the Senate voted in July to stop buying F-22s, Mr. Emanuel said in an interview, that success “reverberated down” to help sustain billions of dollars of cuts in Army modernization, missile defense and other programs.

Mr. Emanuel said the strategy emerged when the defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, told Mr. Obama they needed to “shake up sacred cows and be seen as taking on fights.”

Military analysts said Mr. Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, also aimed at the most bloated programs. And Senator John McCain of Arizona, the former Republican presidential candidate, who has criticized the Pentagon’s cost overruns, provided Mr. Obama with political cover to make the cuts without being seen as soft on the military.

“They probably get an ‘A’ from the standpoint of their success on their major initiatives,” said Fred Downey, a former Senate aide who is now vice president for national security at the Aerospace Industries Association. “They probably got all of them but one or maybe two, and that’s an extraordinarily high score.”

Still, Mr. Obama said at Wednesday’s signing ceremony, there is “more waste we need to cut.”

The act authorizes $550 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget in fiscal 2010 and $130 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That compares to a total of $654 billion for both accounts in fiscal 2009.

The measure also includes a ban on hate crimes that Democratic leaders attached to the bill.

Mr. Obama has said that he does not intend to reduce military spending while the nation is engaged in two wars. But Mr. Gates also wants to cut more futuristic programs to free money for simpler systems like helicopters and unmanned spy planes that can help the troops now.

Winslow T. Wheeler, a military analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington analytical organization, said another key to Mr. Gates’s success was regaining control of the budget from the armed services.

But the administration has had to make some compromises, and some issues remain to be decided in a separate spending bill.

Mr. Obama had wanted to cancel an alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a new plane that is expected to be a mainstay for the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines. He had also threatened to veto the military bills if they took money from plane purchases to keep developing that engine.

But Congressional leaders say they believe that the second engine will provide crucial insurance for the $300 billion fighter program. And they say they will take money from other parts of the military budget to save it.

Mr. Obama has also threatened to veto any attempts to salvage an early version of a new presidential helicopter that the administration canceled. The policy bill that he signed Wednesday does not contain any money for it. But the House version of the spending bill does, and that issue remains to be resolved.

Still, even White House officials say they were surprised at how far they got in reshaping the weapons programs.

“In terms of sort of bringing fiscal responsibility to Washington and changing the way the place works, you couldn’t have picked a more challenging area than the defense budget,” said Rob Nabors, the deputy director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

A New Boeing Plant

The Boeing Company said Wednesday that it would open a second assembly line for its long-delayed 787 jetliner in North Charleston, S.C., expanding beyond its longtime manufacturing base in Washington State.

Boeing, based in Chicago, already operates a factory in North Charleston that makes 787 parts and owns a 50 percent stake in another plant there that also makes sections of the plane.

U.S. Ambassador Seeks More Money for Afghanistan Reconstruction

By Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The United States will not meet its goals in Afghanistan without a major increase in planned spending on development and civilian reconstruction next year, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul has told the State Department.

In a cable sent to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry said an additional $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending will be needed for 2010, about 60 percent more than the amount President Obama has requested from Congress. The increase is needed "if we are to show progress in the next 14 months," Eikenberry wrote in the cable, according to sources who have seen it.

Obama has asked for $68 billion in Defense Department spending in Afghanistan next year, an amount that for the first time would exceed U.S. military expenditures in Iraq. Spending on civilian governance and development programs has doubled under the Obama administration, to $200 million a month -- equal to the monthly rate in Iraq during the zenith of spending on nonmilitary projects there.

The State Department has reacted cautiously to Eikenberry's assessment, sent to Clinton in late June, even as senior officials say the administration is prepared to spend what is needed to succeed. The 2010 budget includes about $4.1 billion in State Department funding for nonmilitary purposes.

With massive amounts of money already flowing into Afghanistan, there are concerns about the country's ability to absorb it and the administration's ability to implement its programs, according to Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew.

"Right now, there is about $6 billion in the pipeline," including 2009 appropriations and a supplemental war-spending bill passed in June, Lew said in an interview. "We have a lot of money to spend right now. . . . We're not running out anytime soon."

Congress, currently on its August recess, would probably have similar concerns about whether the money could be effectively used.

"We've spent a lot of money there, not to great effect," a senior Senate staffer said. "We need to have a much clearer idea of what our goals are and what we can realistically achieve. It's premature to talk about dramatically increasing the budget."

Eikenberry, the staffer noted, is a retired three-star Army general and a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan who is used to working with far larger sums of Pentagon money.

Since 2001, the United States has spent $38 billion on reconstruction in Afghanistan, more than half of it on training and equipping Afghan security forces.

Obama's strategy will bring the U.S. military force in Afghanistan to 68,000 troops by the end of this year and will almost certainly include further troop increases next year. But the president has described U.S. military involvement as only one leg of a "three-legged stool" that includes development and competent governance.

Although spending on civilian programs pales beside the military budget, Obama has pledged substantial increases in U.S. civilian personnel and development funds, focusing on agricultural development and rule of law. The size of the U.S. Embassy is scheduled to grow this year to 976 U.S. government civilians in Kabul and outside the capital, from 562 at the end of 2008.

Eikenberry's $2.5 billion request includes an additional $572 million for the expanded agriculture program. U.S. Marines, who this summer launched an offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province, are working with civilian officials to try to persuade farmers there not to plant opium poppy this year. The program includes the supply of seeds and fertilizers for alternative crops, loans to farmers, and payment for work on roads and irrigation ditches.

Among the other elements of the request are an additional $521 million for stabilization efforts in conflict zones; $450 million in economic assistance funneled through the United Nations in Afghanistan; $190 million for roads, schools and civil aviation; $194 million for local government development; and $106 million in economic grants.

Lew said the State Department is working closely with the embassy to parse the request. "Frankly, at the level at which a request is made," he said, "we often go through this back-and-forth, adjusting to realities, the timing . . . in terms of absorptive capacity and all the issues around getting money out and used. Congress has to approve it.

"If the question is, did [the embassy] do a lot of good, thoughtful work, the answer is yes," Lew said. "Do we at this point have a definitive view of what their needs are? We're still working on it."