and other commanders in Iraq knew what the Predator was capable of. Gorenc described this technology as allowing him to “put a weapon on a target within minutes,” and he authorized a strike. The Predator operator, seated at a console next to Gorenc, launched a Hellfire missile from the Predator’s weapons bay, killing all three of the men in a single strike. “This strike,” explained Gorenc, “should send a message to our enemies that we’re watching you, and we will take action against you any time, day or night, if you continue to stand in the way of progress in Iraq.” Eyes in the sky, dreamed up in the 1940s, had become swords in the sky in the new millennium. Reconnaissance and retaliation had merged into one.
Simultaneous with the early drone strikes in Iraq, the CIA and the Air Force had begun comanaging a covert program to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in the tribal areas in the northwest of Pakistan, on Afghanistan’s border, using drones. To get the program up and running required effort, just as the U-2 and the Oxcart had. A drone wing, like a U-2 detachment or a squadron of Oxcarts, involved building more Predators and Reapers, training drone pilots, creating an Air Force wing, building secret bases in the Middle East, hooking up satellites, and resolving other support-related issues. From 2003 to 2007 the number of drone strikes rose incrementally, little by little, each year. Only in 2008 did the drones really come online. During that year, which included the last three weeks of the Bush administration, there were thirty-six drone strikes in Pakistan, which the Air Force said killed 268 al-Qaeda and Taliban. By 2009 the number of drone strikes would rise to fifty-three. Since the Air Force does not release numbers, and the CIA does not comment on being involved, those numbers are approximate best guesses, put together by journalists and researchers based on local reports. Since journalists are not allowed in many parts of the tribal areas in Pakistan, the actual number of drone strikes is unknown.
As much publicity as drones are getting today, there is a lot more going on in the skies than the average citizen comprehends. According to T. D. Barnes, “There are at least fifteen satellites and an untold number of Air Force aircraft ‘parked’ over Iraq and Afghanistan, providing twenty-four-hour-a-day coverage for airmen and soldiers on the ground. The Air Force is currently flying surveillance with the U-2, Predator, MQ-9 Reaper, and Global Hawk. These are just the assets we know about. Having been in the business, I would expect we have surveillance capability being used that we won’t know about for years.” The majority of these platforms, all classified, are “in all probability” being built and tested at Area 51, says Barnes.
In April of 2009, reporters with a French aviation newspaper published drawings of a reconnaissance drone seen flying over Afghanistan. With its long wings, lack of tail, and two wheels under its belly in a line, like on a bicycle, what became known as the Beast of Kandahar looks reminiscent of the Horten brothers’ flying wing of 1944. What was this new drone built for? It seemed not to have a weapons bay. Eight months later, in December of 2009, the Defense Department confirmed the existence of the drone, which the Air Force calls the RQ-170 Sentinel. Built by Lockheed Skunk Works and tested at Area 51 and Area 52, the newest drone appears to be for reconnaissance purposes only. As such, it follows in the footsteps of the U-2 and the A-12 Oxcart, comanaged by the Air Force and the CIA at Area 51. Save for its name, all details remain classified. It is likely flying over denied territory, including Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia. Fifty-five years after Richard Bissell set Area 51 as a secret place to test-fly the nation’s first peacetime spy planes, new aircraft continue to be built with singular design and similar intention. Despite the incredible advances in science and technology, the archetypal need for reconnaissance remains.
Quick and adaptable, twenty-first-century surveillance requirements means the future of overhead lies in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. The overhead intelligence take once provided by CIA spy pilots like Gary Powers, Ken Collins, Frank Murray, and others now belongs to remotely piloted drones. The old film cameras, which relied on clear skies, have been replaced by state-of-the-art imaging systems developed by Sandia and Raytheon, called synthetic aperture radar, or SAR. These “cameras” relay real-time images shot through smoke, dust, and even clouds, during the day or in the dark of night. But as omnipotent and all-seeing as the drones may appear, there is one key element generally overlooked by the public — but certainly not by the Pentagon or the CIA — when considering the vulnerability of the Air Force’s most valuable asset with wings. Drones require satellite links.
To operate a drone requires ownership in space. All unmanned aerial vehicles require satellites to relay information to and from the pilots who operate the drones via remote control. As the Predator flies over the war theater in the Middle East, it is being operated by a pilot sitting in a chair thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. The pilot is seated in front of a computer screen that provides a visual representation of what the Predator is looking at on the ground in the battlefield halfway across the world. Two sensor operators sit beside the pilot, each working like a copilot might have in another age. The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support. The Predator Primary Satellite Link is the name of the system that allows communication between the drone and the team. The drone needs only to be in line of sight with its ground-control station when it lands. Everything else the drone can do, from capture images to fire missiles, it does thanks to its satellite link.
Indian Springs is the old airstrip where Dr. Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, and all the other nuclear physicists used to land when they would come to witness their atomic bomb creations being set off as tests from 1951 to 1992. Indian Springs is where the atomic-sampling pilots trained to fly through mushroom clouds. It is where EG&G set up the first radar-testing facility on the Nevada Test and Training Range in 1954. Indian Springs is where Bob Lazar said he was taken and debriefed after getting caught trespassing on Groom Lake Road. And in 2011, Indian Springs, which has been renamed Creech Air Force Base, is the place where Air Force pilots sit in war rooms operating drones.
For the Department of Defense, the vulnerability of space satellites to sabotage has created a new and unprecedented threat. According to a 2008 study on “Wicked Problems” prepared by the Defense Science Board, in a chapter significantly entitled “Surprise in Space,” the board outlines the vulnerability of space satellites in today’s world. By the Pentagon’s definition, “Wicked problems are highly complex, wide-ranging problems that have no definitive formulation… and have no set solution.” By their very nature, wicked problems are “substantially without precedent,” meaning the outcome of them cannot be known because a wicked problem is one that has never before been solved. Worst of all, warned the Pentagon, efforts to solve wicked problems generally give way to an entirely new set of problems. The individual tasked with keeping abreast of the wicked problem is called a wicked engineer, someone who must be prepared to be surprised and be able to deal with unintended consequences because “playing the game changes the game.”
By relying on satellites to fight the war on terror as well as many of the foreseeable conflicts in the immediate future, the single greatest wicked problem facing the Pentagon in the twenty-first century is the looming threat of the militarization of space. To weaponize space, historical thinking in the Pentagon goes, would be to safeguard space in a preemptive manner. A war in space over satellite control is not a war the United States necessarily wants to fight, but it is a war the United States is most assuredly unwilling to lose.
“Over eighty percent of the satellite communications used in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility is provided by commercial vendors,” reads the Pentagon’s “Surprise in Space” report. And when, in 2007, the Chinese — unannounced and unexpectedly — shot down one of their own satellites with one of their own weapons, the incident opened the Pentagon’s eyes to a whole host of potential wickedproblem scenarios in space.
Around 5:00 p.m. eastern standard time on July 11, 2007, a small, six-foot-long Chinese satellite was circling the Earth 539 miles up when it was targeted and destroyed by a Chinese ballistic missile launched from a mobile launcher at the Songlin test facility in Szechuan Province, running on solid fuel and topped with a “kinetic kill vehicle,” or explosive device. The satellite was traveling at speeds of around sixteen thousand miles per hour, and the ballistic missile was traveling approximately eighteen thousand miles per hour. The hit was dead-on. As radical and impressive as it sounds, the technology was not what raised flags and eyebrows at the Pentagon. The significance of the event came from the fact that with China’s satellite kill, the world moved one dangerous step closer to the very wicked problem of weaponizing space. To enter into that game means entering into the kind of mutual-assured-destruction military industrial-complex madness that has not been engaged in since the height of the Cold War.
Actions of this magnitude, certainly by those of a superpower like China, are almost always met by the U.S. military with a response, either overt or veiled, and the Chinese satellite kill was no exception. Seven months later, in February of 2008, an SM-3 Raytheon missile was launched off the deck of the USS Lake Erie in the North Pacific. It traveled approximately 153 miles up into space where it hit a fivethousand-pound U.S. satellite described as being about the size of a school bus and belonging to the National Reconnaissance Office. The official Pentagon story was that the satellite had gone awry and the United States didn’t want the satellite’s hazardous fuel source, stated to be the toxin hydrazine, to crash on foreign soil. “Our objective was to intercept the satellite, reduce the mass that might survive re-entry [and] vector that mass into unpopulated areas ideally the ocean,” General James Cartwright,
