In April of 2009, reporters with a French aviation newspaper published drawings of a reconnaissance drone seen flying over Afghanistan. With its long wings, lack of tail, and two wheels under its belly in a line, like on a bicycle, what became known as the Beast of Kandahar looks reminiscent of the Horten brothers’ flying wing of 1944. What was this new drone built for? It seemed not to have a weapons bay. Eight months later, in December of 2009, the Defense Department confirmed the existence of the drone, which the Air Force calls the RQ-170 Sentinel. Built by Lockheed Skunk Works and tested at Area 51 and Area 52, the newest drone appears to be for reconnaissance purposes only. As such, it follows in the footsteps of the U-2 and the A-12 Oxcart, comanaged by the Air Force and the CIA at Area 51. Save for its name, all details remain classified. It is likely flying over denied territory, including Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia. Fifty-five years after Richard Bissell set Area 51 as a secret place to test-fly the nation’s first peacetime spy planes, new aircraft continue to be built with singular design and similar intention. Despite the incredible advances in science and technology, the archetypal need for reconnaissance remains.
Quick and adaptable, twenty-first-century surveillance requirements means the future of overhead lies in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. The overhead intelligence take once provided by CIA spy pilots like Gary Powers, Ken Collins, Frank Murray, and others now belongs to remotely piloted drones. The old film cameras, which relied on clear skies, have been replaced by state-of-the-art imaging systems developed by Sandia and Raytheon, called synthetic aperture radar, or SAR. These “cameras” relay real-time images shot through smoke, dust, and even clouds, during the day or in the dark of night. But as omnipotent and all-seeing as the drones may appear, there is one key element generally overlooked by the public—but certainly not by the Pentagon or the CIA—when considering the vulnerability of the Air Force’s most valuable asset with wings. Drones require satellite links.
To operate a drone requires ownership in space. All unmanned aerial vehicles require satellites to relay information to and from the pilots who operate the drones via remote control. As the Predator flies over the war theater in the Middle East, it is being operated by a pilot sitting in a chair thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. The pilot is seated in front of a computer screen that provides a visual representation of what the Predator is looking at on the ground in the battlefield halfway across the world. Two sensor operators sit beside the pilot, each working like a copilot might have in another age. The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support. The Predator Primary Satellite Link is the name of the system that allows communication between the drone and the team. The drone needs only to be in line of sight with its ground-control station when it lands. Everything else the drone can do, from capture images to fire missiles, it does thanks to its satellite link.
Indian Springs is the old airstrip where Dr. Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, and all the other nuclear physicists used to land when they would come to witness their atomic bomb creations being set off as tests from 1951 to 1992. Indian Springs is where the atomic-sampling pilots trained to fly through mushroom clouds. It is where EG&G set up the first radar-testing facility on the Nevada Test and Training Range in 1954. Indian Springs is where Bob Lazar said he was taken and debriefed after getting caught trespassing on Groom Lake Road. And in 2011, Indian Springs, which has been renamed Creech Air Force Base, is the place where Air Force pilots sit in war rooms operating drones.
For the Department of Defense, the vulnerability of space satellites to sabotage has created a new and unprecedented threat. According to a 2008 study on “Wicked Problems” prepared by the Defense Science Board, in a chapter significantly entitled “Surprise in Space,” the board outlines the vulnerability of space satellites in today’s world. By the Pentagon’s definition, “Wicked problems are highly complex, wide-ranging problems that have no definitive formulation… and have no set solution.” By their very nature, wicked problems are “substantially without precedent,” meaning the outcome of them cannot be known because a wicked problem is one that has never before been solved. Worst of all, warned the Pentagon, efforts to solve wicked problems generally give way to an entirely new set of problems. The individual tasked with keeping abreast of the wicked problem is called a wicked engineer, someone who must be prepared to be surprised and be able to deal with unintended consequences because “playing the game changes the game.”
By relying on satellites to fight the war on terror as well as many of the foreseeable conflicts in the immediate future, the single greatest wicked problem facing the Pentagon in the twenty-first century is the looming threat of the militarization of space. To weaponize space, historical thinking in the Pentagon goes, would be to safeguard space in a preemptive manner. A war in space over satellite control is not a war the United States necessarily wants to fight, but it is a war the United States is most assuredly unwilling to lose.