To those who contended then, and still do, that MRAPs were unnecessary and a costly one-dimensional, one-time-use vehicle that detracted from more important long-term priorities, I offer only this response: talk to the countless troops who survived IED blasts because they were riding in an MRAP.
INTELLIGENCE, SURVEILLANCE, AND RECONNAISSANCE
Time and again I would have to tackle that damnable peacetime mindset inside the Pentagon. By fall 2007 my impatience was boiling over. On September 28, I called a meeting of all the senior department officials—civilian and military—to read them the riot act. I told them that for our field commanders and troops engaged in the fight, “the difference between getting a decision tomorrow versus next week or delivery of a piece of technology next week versus next month is huge. This department has been at war for over six years. Yet we still use the processes that were barely adequate for peacetime operations and impose a heavy cost in wartime.” I told them that whether the issue was MRAP fielding rates, increasing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) coverage, or fixing troop rotations, it was obvious to me that business as usual “rarely meets the needs of our troops in the field.” I challenged them to look for opportunities to apply a sense of urgency and a willingness “to break china” if it involved getting something to the fight faster or in larger quantities: “The difference between getting something in the hands of our combat forces next month versus next year is dramatic…. We must all show up every day prepared to look at every decision and plan affecting our combat operations through the lens of how we can do it faster, more effectively, and with more impact.”
A month later I told the secretaries of the three military departments: “I need you and your team to continue to poke and prod and challenge the conventional wisdom if that is what it takes to support our kids in the field.”
On January 14, 2008, I sent Mike Mullen a very tough note that cited several examples “where a formal request addressed to me took numerous months (in one case over six) to wind its way through the Centcom/Joint Staff staffing process before it was brought to me for action.” I directed him to develop and implement a process by which I would be informed immediately of any request specifically addressed to me by our commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The immediate problem that provoked those expressions of impatience was the difficulty we were having in meeting our field commanders’ need for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities: a mix of unmanned drones, propeller-driven reconnaissance aircraft, analysts, linguists, and data fusion capabilities that collected and fed critical battlefield information—including intercepted phone calls of terrorist leaders and live video transmission of insurgents planting IEDs—to military commanders, who could then act on it.
In the case of the MRAPs, accelerating production and delivery was essentially a matter of empowerment and finding the money. In the case of ISR, I encountered a lack of enthusiasm and urgency in the Air Force, my old service.
The fusion of extraordinary technical intelligence capabilities with military operations in real time and in direct support of small units in both Iraq and Afghanistan produced a genuine revolution in warfare and combat. While aerial intelligence support for commanders on the ground dates back at least to the Civil War and the use of balloons, over the last quarter of a century this support has taken on an entirely new character. I saw an early example of this as deputy at the CIA in the spring of 1986, when we were able to feed real-time satellite information about Libyan air defense activity directly to the pilots who were conducting the attacks on Tripoli. That was horse-and-buggy technology compared to what has been done in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While I was CIA director, in 1992, I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in developing technologically advanced drones, because of their ability to loiter over a target for many hours, thus providing continuous photographic and intercepted signals intelligence coverage. The Air Force wasn’t interested because, as I was told, people join the Air Force to fly airplanes and drones had no pilot. By the time I returned to government in late 2006, the Predator drone had become a household word, especially among our enemies, though the Air Force mind-set had not changed. In Iraq, the Army had converted small two-engine propeller planes into intelligence-collection platforms that could provide live video coverage—“full-motion video”—of an area over a prolonged period. This capability, Task Force ODIN (Observe, Detect, Identify, and Neutralize), became a critical asset not only in spotting individuals planting IEDs but in allowing analysts to track people and vehicles and thus to identify the networks producing and planting bombs. It was amazing to watch a video in real time of an insurgent planting an IED, or to view a video analysis tracing an insurgent pickup truck from the bomb-making site to the site of an attack. It was even more amazing—and gratifying—to watch the IED bomber and the pickup truck be quickly destroyed as a result of this unprecedented integration of sensors and shooters.
A number of other intelligence-collection platforms—various kinds of manned aircraft, aerostats (dirigibles), fixed cameras, and many other sensors—were developed. Initially, the full panoply of these platforms was used primarily by Special Forces in their operations, but over time, as other commanders saw what these ISR capabilities were, the demand for more of them for regular combat operations and for force protection grew exponentially.
There were impediments to meeting the demand. One was the limited production capacity of the single company that was making both the Predators and the ground stations necessary to process the collected information. Another was the need for more linguists to translate collected communications. A third was the limited number and availability of other kinds of collection capabilities. For example, one highly effective platform was the Navy’s P-3 aircraft, designed principally for hunting enemy submarines. Unless we essentially deprived ourselves of that capability in Pacific Command and elsewhere, only a handful of these aircraft would be available for Iraq and Afghanistan. They were also getting very old, limiting the number of hours they could fly.
The small number of trained crews available to pilot the drones, particularly in the Air Force, was another significant problem. The Army flew its version of the Predator—called Warrior—using warrant officers and noncommissioned officers. The Air Force, however, insisted on having flight-qualified aircraft pilots—all officers—fly its drones. The Air Force made clear to its pilots that flying a drone from the ground with a joy stick was not as career-enhancing as flying an airplane in the wild blue yonder. Not surprisingly, young officers weren’t exactly beating the door down to fly a drone. When I turned my attention to the ISR problem in mid-2007, the Air Force was providing eight Predator “caps”—each cap consisting of six crews (about eighty people) and three drones, providing twenty-four hours of coverage. The Air Force had no plans to increase those numbers; I was determined that would change.
There was an unseemly turf fight in the ISR world over whether the Air Force should control all military drone programs and operations. The Army resisted, and I was on its side; the Air Force was grasping for absolute control of a capability for which it had little enthusiasm in the first place. I absolutely loathed this kind of turf fight, especially in the middle of ongoing wars, and I was determined the Air Force would not get control.