By talking to Interceptors and their network, I got an idea what the programs that could have aided in Darkstar’s creation might be. One program was the Senior Prom stealthy cruise missile that had been tested at Dreamland. Another was Tier III itself, which the Lore said was also called “Q.” According to various accounts, it was a successor to the Aurora debacle, an offspring of Lockheed’s unsuccessful, alternative design for what became the B-2 bomber. It was a flying wing with a 150- or 220-foot wingspan. Others said that it, too, was a debacle. Two had been constructed and flown, manned, from the Groom Lake runway, but the program had been canceled because the cost of the individual aircraft had risen to nearly a billion dollars.
After the smoke and the oohs and aahs faded away, I talked to Maj. Gen. Ken Israel, the head of DARO, which along with DARPA, the agency that gave us the original Stealth fighter, had developed Darkstar.
General Israel used to fly in an EB-66 electronic spy plane probing Soviet electronics defenses. Now he quotes Shakespeare and touts the future of UAVs as a revolution in aviation. Israel’s leading arguments for UAVs are humanistic: “In the next century, we will definitely rely more on pilotless aircraft to place people out of harm’s way.” But he also speaks in the terms of the new Pentagon fashion—“infowar.” “We need to know what’s on the battlefield before we get on the battlefield.” With its ability to linger over an area, Israel says, a UAV can “view the battlefield with impunity.” It can give the generals not just desktop infowar but real time infowar.
Look, too, he says, at “cost of ownership.” The SR-71 Blackbird costs $38,000 an hour to fly, and a U-2 $6,000 an hour; a UAV costs only $2,000 an hour. These were craft for the post — Cold War world: cost-conscious, self-promoting, and aimed at very different enemies than Curtis LeMay’s bombers had been.
The logic for UAVs had been obvious to some for years. Kelly Johnson predicted twenty years ago that they were the future of military aviation.
“UAVs are part of the great American tradition of substituting technology for human beings,” says Randy Harrison, a member of the Darkstar team at Boeing. The Gulf War, and especially the difficulty of locating SCUDs on the ground, gave impetus to UAV proponents.
While for most American TV viewers the Gulf War seemed a model of information efficiency and intelligence gathering, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and other generals complained about their lack of “real time” information. The images we saw of smart bombs riding lasers down air vents were actually films, carried back to base and developed. Real information about enemy targets was much harder for the generals to get from space or the air. By the time satellite and other images reached the field from Washington, the tanks had often moved, the SCUDs shifted.
To be sure, this was the classic case of fighting the last war, but it also offered a look at the information war of the future.
General Israel and his friends imagine a war fought with batlike robot planes. Their strategy for overcoming conservative resistance is clever: “We are like Billy Mitchell,” he said, invoking the prophet of airpower and his struggle for acceptance. The aspirations of UAVs to be real fighting aircraft are hinted at by their names: Hunter, Raptor, Talon, and Predator — pretty aggressive for mere reconnaissance craft. There is no reason at all, Israel says, that UAVs could not take over the job of the manned interceptor — that Captain Nolo could not supplant Chuck Yeager. And if the Pentagon goes to war with UAVs, won’t the TV networks need them too? They will act as the high-tech equivalent of the news chopper.
The next step will be to use UAVs as target designators: eyes in the sky that will “paint” targets with lasers for smart bombs to ride down. The incentive for the UAV to replace the fighter, despite our affection for the chivalry and heroism of the dogfight, also comes as a result of the Gulf War. The Vietnam syndrome has been replaced by the Gulf War syndrome: total intolerance of casualties or the national humiliation of having pilots become prisoners displayed for the TV cameras.
Cases in point go back as far as Francis Gary Powers in 1960. But another conveniently popped up the very day after the Darkstar unveiling, when an F-16 was shot down over Bosnia carrying pilot Scott McGrady. With UAVs, there would be less need to send manned aircraft over such areas, and considerably less chance of pilots becoming hostages or pawns. A couple of days after McGrady was rescued, the decision was made to send the Predator over Bosnia. Had it been used earlier, it might have warned of the SAMs on the ground.
Studying Darkstar at the unveiling was a man in a blue fatigue cap and a leather A-2 jacket of the sort pilots wear. Lt. Col. Jim Greenwood was an RSO — the observer or backseat man in an SR-71—from 1986 to 1990. Now that America’s dearth of aerial reconnaissance tools had led the Pentagon to pull the Blackbird out of mothballs, he was getting ready to fly again.
In the meantime he had become a proponent of UAVs — one of the few within the Air Combat Command, the fighter pilot’s command. “Hey, it’s a pilot’s air force,” Colonel Greenwood admits. Some pilots will resist UAVs to their last breath. But as for computers replacing the “human element” at the controls, Greenwood notes, that began happening long ago.
Computers fly airplanes much more often than pilots like to admit. Commercial airliners full of passengers are more readily trusted to computer systems than to human pilots during bad weather landings. Many aircraft, such as the F-117 Stealth fighter, are unstable without controlling computers.
The first controllers for Darkstar, Greenwood told me, would be trained pilots. “But in the future, you might take people straight off the street and give them pilot training, instrument rating, and then have them stop flying real planes and go to UAV school.” The prospect of video-game stars taking over for the Top Gun hotshots did not seem to faze the colonel. “Gotta go,” he said. “I’ve got a date with a T-38.” Not half an hour later, he was arcing skyward at a steep angle, in the sort of airplane that may one day seem as quaint as a Sopwith Camel.
No one was quite sure yet whether the operator of a UAV should still be called a pilot. Captain Nolo flew the drones of the past, but today’s UAVs don’t necessarily need any pilot at all. Darkstar is programmed to roll out of the hangar, take off, fly its mission, land, and return to the hangar without human intervention. The Predator, by contrast, is directed by a joystick kind of mechanism. Darkstar uses Global Positioning System satellites to determine its location. Its flight plan can be changed in mid-course, but its interface is a series of maps and graphs of way points, a software system manipulated by mouse and keyboard.
The first official squadron of Air Force UAVs, I learned, the Eleventh Reconnaissance Squadron, commanded by Col. Steven L. Hampton, was already taking shape at Indian Springs. This, by happy chance, was also where Bob Lazar was debriefed. It was one of the places where legend said saucer wreckage was stored.
How many UFOs were UAVs? I still couldn’t say, nor could anyone. But the Air Force was about to give confirmation of the existence of one of the strangest shapes that had ever been spotted in Dreamland.
19. The Remote Location
“Long ago,” the general’s speech began, “in a galaxy far, far away”… It was a reference to Star Wars that may or may not have been freighted with implicit criticism of the $40 billion weapons program of the same name. He was introducing a plane that the Interceptors had seen and talked about for years, though the military had denied its existence. A black plane that had flown only at Dreamland was coming into the light.