Kill Chain by Andrew Cockburn

Author:Andrew Cockburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805099270
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

10

A PIECE OF JUNK

Despite accounting for almost half the world’s arms spending, in much of the country the U.S. military establishment is largely invisible. There are exceptions where landscape and politics have resulted in an evident military presence. One of these is Virginia’s Southern Neck, the long peninsula jutting out into the Chesapeake Bay. An archipelago of bases and forts, as well as the CIA’s Camp Peary, it stands as a testament to the enduring power of the state’s congressional delegation. Whole communities were swept away in the headlong militarization of the area during the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century, periodic outbreaks of peace occasioning only minor shrinkage before a fresh cascade of appropriated dollars rained down to irrigate the area’s economy.

In July 1921, General Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Corps took off from the corps’ Langley Field at the tip of the peninsula to prove his theories regarding the omnipotence of airpower by bombing and sinking a number of surrendered German warships anchored in the bay. Mitchell is one of the patron saints of the U.S. Air Force, as it was founded on the presumption that airpower can win wars unaided by interventions from armies and navies. Down through the years, this conviction has underpinned the doctrines and budgets of the service. For true believers, presumptions about technology embodied in the revolution in military affairs and David Deptula’s theory of effects-based operations, and further expressed in the drone-assisted manhunts of the twenty-first-century wars, merely reaffirmed Mitchell’s contentions. “Find, fix, finish,” Deptula remarked to me one day over lunch. “We spent a hundred years working on finish. We can now hit any target anywhere in the world, any time, any weather, day or night.”

So it was fitting that when I visited Langley Air Force Base it was on an introduction from Deptula himself, who had retired in 2010 and was appointed dean of the Air Force Association’s Mitchell School of Airpower Studies two years later. I came to the base to view the Langley “node” of the Distributed Common Ground System, the “system of systems” that General Deptula had been promoting since 2003. In essence, the DCGS is the repository of the oceans of data flowing from “platforms,” drones, spy planes, and satellites in an endless stream of video as well as electronic signals and conversations.

Earlier, we saw analysts at the DCGS node at Florida’s Hurlburt Air Force Base in Florida monitor video from a Predator drone as it stalked a little convoy of Afghan civilian vehicles in the mountains of Uruzgan. But DCGS (pronounced D-sigs) does more than that, collating imagery from different platforms in order to identify targets or just watching a house, a vehicle, or a person to monitor “pattern of life” or logging archived material for later reference. There are five principal and forty subsidiary sites within the network. Each of the principal system “nodes” is co-located with a specific air force unit, thus the site at Hurlburt Air Force Base pairs with the air force special operations headquarters in support of Special Forces missions.

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