U.S. Arms Unmanned Aircraft 'Revolution' in Sky Above Afghanistan

By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 18, 2001; Page A1

The United States is for the first time flying armed, unmanned aircraft into combat and controlling them with operators in the United States thousands of miles from the battlefield in Afghanistan, Defense Department officials said yesterday.

The use of the armed RQ-1 Predators is a revolutionary step in the conduct of warfare. The slow-moving, propeller-driven aircraft have been flown by the Air Force for six years to gather intelligence, most recently in combat during the Kosovo war in 1999. But now the Air Force has outfitted them with Hellfire antitank missiles, powerful weapons usually carried on helicopters, the officials said.

Not much is known about how the armed Predators have been used in Afghanistan, but a government official said they have fired their missiles several times. The attacks by the Predators mark a turning point in military history because they signal that the Air Force is now able to survey and then shoot at ground positions from lower altitudes without putting pilots at risk.

The armed drones also give the military enormous reach and flexibility, creating the real possibility that the United States could someday fly combat missions without having to put large numbers of military personnel on nearby land bases or aircraft carriers.

Military strategists said the Bush administration's war on terrorism could lead to the use of additional new technologies and methods, some of them still secret.

"I think this war is going to give you the revolution in military affairs," said Eliot Cohen, an expert in military strategy at Johns Hopkins University.

The Air Force is also believed, for example, to be trying to weaponize the RQ-4A Global Hawk, a much longer-range unmanned surveillance aircraft that might eventually be able to carry weapons from the continental United States to targets around the world. In April, the craft – which has a longer wingspan than a Boeing 737 – flew 8,600 miles from California to Australia.

Predators are usually operated by the Air Force. But in the Afghanistan conflict, the day-to-day operation has been handled by the Central Intelligence Agency because of its ongoing effort tracking accused terrorist Osama bin Laden, according to a source familiar with the operation. After the Predators take off, control is turned over to Air Force personnel in the United States. In case the satellite link is lost, the CIA has backup operators standing by to take over control.

"The more bouncing you have to do off of satellites and relay stations, the more potential trouble you have to prepare for," one official said.

Cohen, who has written extensively on military innovation, said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have altered the way the Defense Department thinks about technological change by injecting new funding and clearing bureaucratic obstacles. Most important, he said, the shock from last month's attacks has shattered the Pentagon's sense of the United States' military invincibility.

Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tried to force change on the military as part of a broad, strategic review. But he was rebuffed by top generals who argued essentially that the armed forces were so busy dealing with current threats that they did not have the resources to meet other, hazily defined future threats.

The deployment of the armed Predators was first reported in the Oct. 22 edition of the New Yorker magazine. At first Pentagon officials dismissed the report, saying that the Air Force was still experimenting with putting weapons aboard the aircraft.

Publicly, that is still the Air Force's position. Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, was asked at a congressional breakfast on Tuesday about putting weapons on drones. "We will have armed unmanned air vehicles in due course," he responded. "We don't want to push it any faster than it can reliably perform."

Tests on the unmanned aircraft run by the Air Force's Air Combat Command, which Jumper commanded until recently, culminated last February with a successful shot of a live Hellfire missile from a Predator against a discarded Army tank in the Nevada desert. At the time, officials said the test was artificial because the Hellfire is designed to be launched by an attack helicopter flying at treetop levels, while the Predator usually flies at 10,000 feet and would fire its missiles from a relatively high altitude as well.

Another impediment to flying an armed drone aircraft was that some State Department officials objected to the Pentagon effort, arguing that "weaponizing" any drone aircraft constituted a violation of the U.S.-Soviet treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. That 1987 accord calls for the elimination of, among other things, all ground-launched cruise missiles with a range of more than 300 miles. Some State Department officials argued that an armed drone was essentially a recoverable cruise missile.

But it emerged yesterday that soon after the Air Force test in Nevada was completed, the CIA took control of two armed Predators and began using them in its intelligence-gathering effort aimed at bin Laden. Photographic images taken by the Predators are routinely transmitted back to analysts in the United States.

The New Yorker article, by Seymour M. Hersh, said the Predator was tracking a convoy carrying Mohammed Omar, leader of the Islamic Taliban militia that rules most of Afghanistan. A request for an airstrike was turned down by officials at the Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, the magazine said. Instead, it said, the CIA was asked to have the Predator fire a missile just outside the building where the convoy stopped.

That account could not be confirmed.

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