Free Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn Page A

“From Douhet to Deptula, a History of Failed Promises” in which he referred scathingly to “those who espouse much of the current nonsense” coming from “organizations within the armed forces that are generally far removed from the confusion and horror of the close-in fighting that occurs in real war.… ‘Fighting’ for them revolves around the movement of icons and tracks on a screen.” A Vietnam combat veteran who had made a name for himself as a junior officer for “leading from the front,” Van Riper was amazed, as he told me later, “that people who were smart could believe this stuff. The hubris was unbelievable.”
    Such critiques had little effect, partly because the most influential figure in U.S. defense policy for most of the 1990s was William Perry, who returned to the Pentagon as deputy defense secretary in 1993 and was promoted to secretary the following year. Among his first acts was to direct and subsidize a series of mergers among the major defense contractors on the grounds that the end of the cold war rendered a spending famine inevitable. As it turned out the relatively small decline that did occur lasted only for a brief period in the 1990s, after which spending began once again to edge up and then soar far above even the cold war’s bountiful levels. Meanwhile Perry continued to pursue the dream, unrealized in Desert Storm, of seeing “all high value targets on the battlefield at any time.”
    Perry’s undeviating objectives were of course a reaffirmation of those pursued by his predecessor, John Foster, ardent proponent of Task Force Alpha. But Foster, the model-airplane enthusiast, had felt no less strongly about the ultimate weapon that would not only see all those high-value targets but also destroy them. In 1973, in his final session of congressional testimony before a deferential house committee, Foster was asked about his priorities for defense. “To improve surveillance” over land and sea, he answered, and “to get remotely controlled vehicles that can perform that surveillance and the attack missions .” The age of drones was not far off.
    Foster had hoped that unmanned aircraft might play their part over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but the effort had proved unsuccessful. Even so, money continued to sluice into drone development for some time after the United States had pulled out of Vietnam, but it was difficult to pretend that drones could defend themselves against Soviet antiaircraft missiles and fighters. For that, a thinking pilot on the scene was obviously necessary. Even so, Boeing and other defense corporations mobilized support in Congress for various drone projects, including Condor, an enormous high-flier proposed by Boeing, with a wingspan wider than that of a 747. None got further than the test stage.
    But with the Soviets gone, the U.S. military would now be operating where there was little or no danger from unfriendly fire in the air, a perfect time for drones to flourish. Civil wars in defenseless Somalia, Bosnia, and elsewhere provided a strong rationale for ever more surveillance, for which drones were thought to be ideal.
    Perry helped speed the process along by setting up a special office under his direct control called the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office to develop and buy a whole new generation of drones. Most of these projects never came into service. One that did was called Predator, the weapon that in the eyes of large parts of the world would one day come to define America.

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    PREDATOR POLITICS
    The various drone programs that blossomed during the cold war decades before fading away again in the face of military irrelevance and technical unfeasibility had been supervised by major defense corporations such as Boeing and Northrop, with impressive price tags to match. The machine that captured the twenty-first-century world’s imagination, however, originated with an Israeli immigrant with an impressive record of quarreling with employers, and a