Why I Wrote The Book About Predator

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/09/why-i-wrote-the-book-about-predator/

Why I Wrote The Book About Predator
By Richard Whittle on September 12, 2014 at 4:29 AM

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In 1993, CIA Director James Woolsey and Undersecretary of Defense John Deutch broke ranks with many in their agencies by deciding they needed endurance UAVs to find Serb artillery that was bombarding civilians in Bosnia. One result was the Predator, whose first war was Bosnia. A shortage of airborne reconnaissance planes led Gen. Ronald Fogleman, then Air Force chief of staff, to break with his service’s ingrained disinterest in UAVs and wrest control of the Predator away from the Army and Navy. The cast of iconoclasts also includes another fighter pilot, Gen. John P. Jumper, who saw the Predator’s potential as a “hunter-killer scout” and decided to arm it.

I discovered the largely unsung roles in the Predator story played by Fogleman and Jumper after I met a senior Air Force civilian named James G. Clark, a bureaucratic operator who prefers to be called by his nickname, Snake. In another of my early interviews, former Air Force Secretary Whit Peters had pointed out that when the Predator emerged in the mid-1990s as a simple eye-in-the-sky, it was a bit like the first personal computers – a new piece of technology that some people found interesting but most couldn’t see much use for. Over time, however, creative thinkers came up with innovations — new software, new hardware, new communications architectures – that transformed the personal computer into a revolutionary technology. As Peters observed and my book documents, much the same thing happened with the Predator.

Snake Clark helped me see that, in the Predator’s case, much of that transformation was accomplished by a secretive Air Force technology shop called Big Safari, officially the 645th Aeronautical Systems Group – an outfit built on innovation and iconoclasm. With some pivotal contributions from an inventive technoscientist Snake Clark calls “The Man With Two Brains,” and in my book I call by the alias “Werner,” Big Safari transformed the Predator from a novel way to watch a battlefield into a wonder weapon able to strike targets on the other side of the planet. A largely secret war with Al Qaeda that unfolded after Big Safari began modifying the Predator in 1998 led to the Air Force being assigned two years later to fly the unarmed version over Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden for the CIA.

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When the war in Afghanistan began in the fall of 2001, the U.S. military had two armed drones. (Three armed Predators were deployed after 9/11 but one crashed before the conflict began.) A Pentagon report that year predicted that by 2010, the nation might have 290 UAVs of three types. But arming the Predator changed the way people thought about UAVs. When 2010 rolled around, the U.S. military had nearly 8,000 drones of fourteen types and the CIA was being accused of an addiction to drone strikes against terrorists.