Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare by William M. Arkin

Author:William M. Arkin [Arkin, William M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Science, Military, 21st Century, War
ISBN: 9780316323369
Google: sv6_BQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0316323357
Barnesnoble: 0316323357
Goodreads: 23507502
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2015-07-27T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ring of Fiber

[… How can I keep silent?] How can I stay quiet?

[My friend, whom I loved, has turned] to clay,

my friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has [turned to clay,]

[Shall I not be like] him and also lie down,

[never] to rise again, through all eternity?

TABLET X, EPIC OF GILGAMESH

In early 2009, General David Petraeus signed Joint Urgent Operational Need 336, a request to rapidly deploy the Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN). BACN was a system that filled an important gap in servicing soldiers operating at the very edge.1 It was a need specific to the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where peaks and valleys inhibited normal communications and created a vaporous and unacceptable nonnetworked space.2 BACN would link to everyone who found themselves out of range of the Data Machine. In addition, it would be the military’s own Internet to receive, bridge, and distribute data from satellite, radio, and data networks—a universal relay and intelligence disseminator for standard and nonstandard platforms alike.

To understand BACN, we have to take just a quick journey back to the beginning, to the parts that make up the unmanned machine. Every drone consists of four distinct elements: the platform itself (whether aircraft, ground, or waterborne robot), the payload (what I call the black box—that is, the sensor or weapon), the control station (where the flight is directed from, whether it is on the ground or not), and the communications network that is required to control the platform and receive its product. External to the drone world are the processors (analysts or computers) who scrutinize the product and then the users (political decision-makers, commanders, special operatives, soldiers) who take action, the manned element of the unmanned system, who are hardly trivial.

If all of this were a tactical system—that is, simply serving one user—then the entire system could be relatively self-contained. But think of drones instead as a set of computing appliances (smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, etc.), all overlapping: some are indeed used offline and are personal, but the majority are connected to some network and then to the Data Machine, which demands constant data flowing through it like blood flowing through a living body. In the olden days, the military erected its own terrestrial and then space-based communications networks, and it still has many such networks today. But today, most military communications demand access to a network to operate. Where the networks are robust or can be supplemented by military-only systems, communicating is manageable. But where the network is lacking, or when the number of appliances connecting to it surpasses capacity, something different has to be created. And just as in the mid-2000s, when no operation would be undertaken without some drone flying overhead, now no one can be out of network range.

BACN, like other black box systems, really has no simple definition or description, no birth date, and no single identity. On October 24, 2003, its manufacturer, the defense giant Northrop Grumman, conducted a first set of communications between a Global Hawk drone and a manned airborne command post in the skies above California.

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