What a Busted Robot Airplane Tells Us About the
American Empire in 2012 and Beyond

By Nick Turse
TomDispatch.com
December 21, 2011

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175482/

The drone had been in the air for close to five hours
before its mission crew realized that something was
wrong. The oil temperature in the plane's turbocharger,
they noticed, had risen into the "cautionary" range. An
hour later, it was worse, and it just kept rising as
the minutes wore on. While the crew desperately ran
through its "engine overheat" checklist trying to
figure out the problem, the engine oil temperature,
too, began skyrocketing.

By now, they had a full-blown in-flight emergency on
their hands. "We still have control of the engine, but
engine failure is imminent," the pilot announced over
the radio.

Almost two hours after the first signs of distress, the
engine indeed failed. Traveling at 712 feet per minute,
the drone clipped a fence before crashing.

Land of the Lost Drones

The skies seem full of falling drones these days. The
most publicized of them made headlines when Iran
announced that its military had taken possession of an
advanced American remotely piloted spy aircraft,
thought to be an RQ-170 Sentinel.

Questions about how the Iranians came to possess one of
the U.S. military's most sophisticated pieces of
equipment abound. Iran first claimed that its forces
shot the drone down after it "briefly violated" the
country's eastern airspace near the Afghan border.
Later, the Islamic Republic insisted that the unmanned
aerial vehicle had penetrated 150 miles before being
felled by a sophisticated cyber-attack. And just days
ago, an Iranian engineer offered a more detailed, but
as yet unsubstantiated, explanation of how a hack-
attack hijacked the aircraft.

For its part, the United States initially claimed that
its military had lost the drone while it was on a
mission in western Afghanistan. Later, unnamed
officials admitted that the CIA had, in fact, been
conducting a covert spy operation over Iran.

The drone crash that led this piece did occur in
Afghanistan -- Kandahar, to be precise -- in May of
this year. It went unreported at the time and involved
not a sleek, bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel, but the older,
clunkier, if more famous, MQ-1 Predator, a workhorse
hunter/killer machine of the Afghan war and the CIA's
drone assassination campaign in the Pakistani tribal
borderlands.

A document detailing a U.S. Air Force investigation of
that Predator crash, examined by TomDispatch, sheds
light on the lifecycle and flaws of drones -- just what
can go wrong in unmanned air operations -- as well as
the shadowy system of bases and units scattered across
the globe that keep those drones constantly in the
skies as the U.S. becomes ever more reliant on remote-
controlled warfare.

That report and striking new statistics obtained from
the military offer insights into underexamined flaws in
drone technology. They are also a reminder of the
failure of journalists to move beyond awe when it comes
to high-tech warfare and America's latest wonder
weapons -- their curious inability to examine the stark
limitations of man and machine that can send even the
most advanced military technology hurtling to Earth.

Numbers Game

According to statistics provided to TomDispatch by the
Air Force, Predators have flown the lion's share of
hours in America's drone wars. As of October 1st,
MQ-1's had spent more than 1 million hours in the air,
965,000 of those in "combat," since being introduced
into military service. The newer, more heavily armed
MQ-9 Reaper, by comparison, has flown 215,000 hours,
180,000 of them in combat. (The Air Force refuses to
release information about the workload of the RQ-170
Sentinel.) And these numbers continue to rise. This
year alone, Predators have logged 228,000 flight hours
compared to 190,000 in 2010.

An analysis of official Air Force data conducted by
TomDispatch indicates that its drones crashed in
spectacular fashion no less than 13 times in 2011,
including that May 5th crash in Kandahar.

About half of those mishaps, all resulting in the loss
of an aircraft or property damage of $2 million or
more, occurred in Afghanistan or in the tiny African
nation of Djibouti, which serves as a base for drones
involved in the U.S. secret wars in Somalia and Yemen.
All but two of the incidents involved the MQ-1 model,
and four of them took place in May.

In 2010, there were seven major drone mishaps, all but
one involving Predators; in 2009, there were 11. In
other words, there have been 31 drone losses in three
years, none apparently shot down, all diving into the
planet of their own mechanical accord or thanks to
human error.

Other publicized drone crashes, like a remotely-
operated Navy helicopter that went down in Libya in
June and an unmanned aerial vehicle whose camera was
reportedly taken by Afghan insurgents after a crash in
August, as well as the December 4th loss of the RQ-180
in Iran and an even more recent crash of a MQ-9 in the
Seychelles, are not included in the Air Force's major
accident statistics for the year.

Group Effort

The United States currently runs its drone war from 60
or more bases scattered across the globe. They range
from sites in the American southwest with lines of
trailers where drone pilots "fly" such aircraft via
computer to those far closer to the battlefield where
other pilots -- seated before a similar set up,
including multiple computer monitors, keyboards, a
joystick, a throttle, a rollerball, a mouse, and
various switches -- launch and land the drones. On
other bases, aspiring drone pilots are trained on
simulators and the planes themselves are tested before
being sent to distant battlefields.

The May 5th Predator crash about a half-mile short of a
runway at Kandahar Air Field drives home just how
diffuse drone operations have become, with multiple
units and multiple bases playing a role in a single
mission.

That Predator drone, for example, was an asset of the
3rd Special Operations Squadron, which operates out of
Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, and ultimately is
part of Air Force Special Operations Command, based at
Hulbert Field in Florida. When it crashed, it was being
flown by an in-country pilot from the 62nd
Expeditionary Squadron at Kandahar Air Field, whose
parent unit, the 18th Reconnaissance Squadron, makes
its home at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, ground
zero for the military's drone operations. The crewman
operating the sensors on the drone, on the other hand,
was a member of the Texas Air National Guard based at
Ellington Field in Texas.

The final leg of the doomed mission -- in support of
elite special operations forces -- was being carried
out by a pilot who had been operating Predators for
about 10 months and had flown drones for approximately
51 hours over the previous 90 days. With less than 400
total hours under his belt, he was considered
"inexperienced" by Air Force standards and, during his
drone launch and recovery training, had failed two
simulator sessions and one flying exercise. He had,
however, excelled academically, passed his evaluations,
and was considered a qualified MQ-1 pilot, cleared to
fly without supervision.

His sensor operator had been qualified by the Air Force
for the better part of two years, with average or above
average ratings in performance evaluations. Having
"flown" a total of 677 hours -- close to 50 of them in
the 90 days before the crash -- he was considered
"experienced."

The fact that the duo were controlling a special
operations drone highlights the increasingly strong and
symbiotic relationship between America's two recently
ascendant forms of warfare: raids by small teams of
elite forces and attacks byremote-controlled robots.

The Life and Death of American Drones

During the post-crash investigation, it was determined
that the ground crew in Afghanistan had been regularly
using an unauthorized method of draining engine
coolant, though it was unclear whether this contributed
to the crash. Investigation documents further indicate
that the drone's engine had 851 hours of flight time
and so was nearing the end of the line. (The
operational lifespan of a Predator drone engine is
reportedly around 1,080 hours.)

Following the crash, the engine was shipped to a
California test facility, where technicians from
General Atomics, the maker of the Predator, carried out
a forensic investigation. Significant overheating had,
it was discovered, warped and deformed the machinery.

Eventually, the Air Force ruled that a cooling system
malfunction had led to engine failure. An accident
investigator also concluded that the pilot had not
executed proper procedures after the engine failure,
causing the craft to crash just short of the runway,
slightly damaging the perimeter fence at Kandahar Air
Field and destroying the drone.

The clear conclusion reached by accident investigators
in this crash stands in stark contrast to the murkiness
of what happened to the advanced drone now in Iranian
hands. Whether the latter crashed thanks to a
malfunction, was shot down, felled by a cyber-attack,
or ended up on the ground for some other reason
entirely, its loss and that of the special ops drone
are reminders of just how reliant the U.S. military has
become on high-tech robot planes whose major accidents
now exceed those of much more expensive fixed-wing
aircraft. (There were 10 major airborne mishaps
involving such Air Force aircraft in 2011.)

Robot War: 2012 and Beyond

The failure to achieve victory in Iraq and Afghanistan,
combined with a perceived success in the Libyan war --
significantly fought with airpower including drones --
has convinced many in the military not to abandon
foreign wars, but to change their approach. Long-term
occupations involving tens of thousands of troops and
the use of counterinsurgency tactics are to be traded
in for drone and special forces operations.

Remotely piloted aircraft have regularly been touted,
in the press and the military, as wonder weapons, the
way, not so long ago, counterinsurgency tactics were
being promoted as an elixir for military failure. Like
the airplane, the tank, and nuclear weapons before it,
the drone has been touted as a game-changer, destined
to alter the very essence of warfare.

Instead, like the others, it has increasingly proven to
be a non-game-changer of a weapon with ordinary
vulnerabilities. Its technology is fallible and its
efforts have often been counterproductive in these last
years. For example, the inability of pilots watching
computer monitors on the other side of the planet to
discriminate between armed combatants and innocent
civilians has proven a continuing problem for the
military's drone operations, while the CIA's judge-
jury-executioner assassination program is widely
considered to have run afoul of international law --
and, in the case of Pakistan, to be alienating an
entire population. The drone increasingly looks less
like a winning weapon than a machine for generating
opposition and enemies.

In addition, as flight hours rise year after year, the
vulnerabilities of remotely piloted missions are ever
more regularly coming to light. These have included
Iraqi insurgents hacking drone video feeds, a virulent
computer virus infecting the Air Force's unmanned
fleet, large percentages of drone pilots suffering from
"high operational stress," increasing numbers of
crashes, and the possibility of Iranian drone-
hijacking.

While human and mechanical errors are inherent in the
operation of any type of machinery, few commentators
have focused significant attention on the full spectrum
of drone flaws and limitations. For more than a decade,
remotely piloted aircraft have been a mainstay of U.S.
military operations and the tempo of drone operations
continues to rise yearly, but relatively little has
been written about drone defects or the limits and
hazards of drone operations.

Perhaps the Air Force is beginning to worry about when
this will change. After years of regularly ushering
reporters through drone operations at Creech Air Force
Base and getting a flood of glowing, even awestruck,
publicity about the glories of drones and drone pilots,
this year, without explanation, it shut down press
access to the program, moving robotic warfare deeper
into the shadows.

The recent losses of the Pentagon's robot Sentinel in
Iran, the Reaper in the Seychelles, and the Predator in
Kandahar, however, offer a window into a future in
which the global skies will be filled with drones that
may prove far less wondrous than Americans have been
led to believe. The United States could turn out to be
relying on a fleet of robots with wings of clay.
_____________

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com.
An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in
the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, andregularly at
TomDispatch. This article is the fourth in his new
series on the changing face of American empire, which
is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation. You can
follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on
Facebook.
______________

This article first appeared on TomDispatch.com, a
weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady
flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom
Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder
of the American Empire Project, author of The End of
Victory Culture, as of a novel, The Last Days of
Publishing. His latest book is The American Way of War:
How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books).

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