Angry Planet - ICYMI: The drone that almost killed bin Laden

Episode Date: December 29, 2016

Months before 9/11, U.S. Air Force captain Scott Swanson patrolled the skies over Afghanistan with a Predator drone. Swanson and his team were hunting Osama bin Laden. And they found him. But this was months before the new drones could fire missiles, and the pilots could only watch as bin Laden walked away. On Jan 23, 2001 – just three days into George W. Bush’s presidency – a Predator drone test fired a Hellfire missile for the first time. A new age of war had begun. Swanson is the first human to use a Predator-fired Hellfire missile to take a life. From a trailer truck in a garage behind CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Swanson loosed a missile from a drone roughly 7,000 miles away in Kandahar. The missile struck its target – a pickup truck outside a building that intelligence said was hiding Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. The missile hit and killed two of Omar’s bodyguards. This week on War College, we replay our conversation with Swanson. He walks us through the early years of the drone program, how it changed him, and how it changed the world. (Corrects distance from Langley to Kandahar from 2,500 miles to 7,000 miles in fourth paragraph)Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. When this tall gentleman in white robes walked out of a building in Tarnack farms just outside of Kandahar, It was obvious it was him. Just months before the September 11th attacks, Scott Swanson was piloting an early version of the Predator drone over Afghanistan.

Swanson and his team were looking for Osama bin Laden, and that day it looked like they'd found him. The Predator, though, was unarmed. This week on War College, Swanson takes us through the early history of the Predator program, and he tells us how a Skunk Works project ended up being a central park. of the U.S. War Machine. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt.

Hello, and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters' opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor at War's Boring. Today, we're talking with Scott Swanson. He's a retired Air Force pilot. And Swanson was an early predator pilot and the first to fire hellfire missiles in a combat strike. Scott, thanks for joining us. Thank you.

Glad to be here today. So that's actually kind of an odd distinction. And it really speaks to how long you were with the program. When did that first strike take place? That was the opening night of the air war in Afghanistan. So 2001, I guess, right? That is correct. That would have been October 2001. Let me ask you, how did you actually get into the drone program?

I mean, you were actually an Air Force pilot, right, and you flew helicopters? That's correct. I had spent the first half of my career flying special operations and rescue helicopters, most of the time flying the MH-60 Pavehawk, I had actually been on an assignment to a rescue unit in Iceland, and it was getting time for me to return to the states and end my assignment there. At that time, the Air Force actually was working with a assignment program for officers, where they had essentially a bulletin board on a website. I guess the closest thing I can relate it to today would be almost like a Craigslist, where they would have all the assignments that were available.

And they were trying to meet the needs of the officer cadre, but making it a little more friendly so you could go look for different assignments that were available in shoes. At the time, I was thinking of returning back to Hurlbert Field, but unfortunately the unit I had left Eisen for was in the process of drawing down in order to stand up the V22 Osprey. Needless to say, that didn't happen in a hurry. And as I was searching the board, I found a flying assignment in a non-traditional area for the Predator UAS.

And this intrigued me because it was Vegas, a two-year assignment. They were telling us we would get our follow-on assignment of choice. and at the time they were also pushing a companion trainer as a possibility so that the crew dogs could get a chance to fly a small aircraft and maintain their traditional flying skills. And decided to volunteer for that. And shortly thereafter, I ended up at Indian Springs to begin my training. And that would have been the summer of 1998. And so did you have any idea what exactly it was that you'd signed up for at that point? I did. I was always a aviation nut growing up as a kid. I remember from my 13th birthday, I'd ask my parents for subscription to Aviation Week and Space Technology. To this day, I still have a subscription. So I was an avid reader of the latest industry news and had read about, you know, and was familiar with the induction of the drone technology into the Air Force, in particular the Predator program.

So were you excited to be doing this? It was interesting. It was different. It was going to be a break for me from the helicopter community. So I knew I would miss the traditional flying. But I also knew that it had potential for being new, interesting, and, opportunities in another area within the Air Force. And what were the drones like back then? When I got there, they were still flying the original 12 or so, if I recall, ACTD. That's the Advanced Capability Technology Demonstrator Aircraft.

So those were the original predators that were produced and fielded. They were an interesting technology, but they were certainly not. mature, neither in the hardware nor the software that you would expect to see in a traditional aircraft system. Those particular aircraft were built and fielded in less than a year, which is unheard of in a modern aircraft program. And they weren't built by Northrop Grumman, which at that point might have been Northrop and Grumman, and they weren't built by General Dynamics or another big company, right? That's correct.

they were built by a small division of general atomics called Aeronautical Systems Incorporated, and they were built in the General San Diego area. Again, small contractor, I think at that time they had a few hundred people designing and building the aircraft. So what could they do? I mean, what kind of capabilities did they have when you first encountered it, which was 97 or so? 98. 98, okay, thanks. When you first see these things, you look at it and go, wow, they're long wings, 50-some feet long, only about 25 feet long for the fuselage, very gangly.

I'd grown up around the home-built or experimental aircraft community had spent time out at the annual convention out at Ashkosh. And in many respects, it reminded me of those aircraft. And it really was because the technologies were very similar. It was using a ROTACs engine modified. What does that mean, a ROTACs engine? ROTX is a brand name engine. It's a small reciprocating engine that is used in many home-built aircraft. And what's interesting is they're also known for making snowmobile engines.

So it was a very small, very gangly, very lightweight aircraft. But what was unique is that at the time you could get 24 hours of endurance out of them, which was unprecedented. Yes, you can do that with a manned aircraft, but you're really stretching the crews and requires refueling. Here you're doing it with an aircraft that isn't being refueled and you don't have the same crew fatigue issues because they're on the ground and you can swap them out if you need to. So if I remember just sort of reading background about this, they were also very slow, right?

I mean, I mean, really slow. That's correct. When I flew Huey's, we used to talk about doing everything at 90 knots, and it was pretty much the same with the early predators. It was a 90-not or 90-mile-an-hour airplane. You don't get anywhere fast, but the advantage is you can stay there for a long time.

And what was really breakthrough with this is that it was live motion video that could be broadcast via satellite over long distances. So instead of your traditional reconnaissance system of the day, whether it's a national system, U2, the RF4s, which I think at that time we're just going to the boneyards, most of those were wet film and you needed to bring it back, run it through the processing, and then have. image analysts figure out what was going on in those pictures. With Predator, the sensor ball that was underneath was really an outgrowth of the technology that you'd seen on the news helicopters. So now we could stand off and film in live video what was going on on the ground at the time, which provided a different level of insight than those still pictures had. to that point. So what missions were the predators first being sent out on? They had initially been fielded in the Balkans. So it was at that time in the field. The very first

uses were out of Albania, monitoring the Serbs in that conflict. I actually was deployed right after my initial qualification training, and the unit had moved to Tazar. in Hungary, and we began flying missions in and around Bosnia. And the real change, I think, in the way Predator was used, was used, was that fall in in 98 when the Serbs moved into Kosovo. And the Operation Eagle Eye, which was the U.S. monitoring of the Serbs, happened. So we actually flew missions from Hungary down through Bosnia, out across over the Adriatic, across Albania, and then into Kosovo to monitor the Serbs and the Serbs withdrawal

from Kosovo at that time. So you were based in Hungary, which is not tens of thousands of miles away from the targets you were monitoring, right? Does that speak to the range that was available at the time? Well, at that time, we were limited of using a single satellite link. Now, those missions, just to get where we're going, was about eight hours of flying time. So it wasn't a short distance to get there. But it was within the theater and within that satellite footprint. And at that time, the predator, you had to take.

take off and land where your ground control station was located. So all of the crews and the launch and recovery was located at your home base. But the real change at that time was the move from those pre-planned target decks or pre-planned targets, much like the U2 or the RF4 when reconnaissance was requested. for the predator, there would be a laundry list of places we would go. So it'd be, you know, check out this particular encampment, check out this vehicle staging area, check out this particular crossroads. And it was a particular point at a particular time and you would plan your route out, fly that great circle and then go home. With the change to motion video,

the leadership and the commanders realized that we could loiter over targets and now give them live updates of what was happening on the ground in changes. So on those first missions, we'd get over somewhere, notice a number of Serbian tanks or armor personnel carriers, and they would immediately flush the target deck and say, no, stay there, we want to see what's going on, and then we had the opportunity to follow them. Where are they going to? What are they doing? It was a tool that really had never been utilized to that respect before. So that ended up leading to a very strange circumstance, at least it seems strange to me, because what the predator could do at that point was just watch, right? So not very long after Bosnia, after the USS Cole

was struck by al-Qaeda, if I told me, correct me at any point, but after the USS Cole was struck, you were part of the chase for Osama bin Laden, right? That's correct. To put a couple of pieces together as the predator developed through 98, 99, and early 2000, it became much more of that full motion video, change detection, watch a target and see where it goes, kind of use through the conflict in Bosnia and Serbia. And it was actually late in that conflict that I was involved with a special project to put a laser designator ball on the predator and fielded. The idea then was to get a vehicle that could spot targets without endangering

the cruise as a normal forward air controller type mission may have presented and allow the A10s, F-16s, F-15E's to drop laser-guided bombs on targets that we spotted in Serbia. Right, as opposed to necessarily having people on the ground with the laser pointers. Exactly. Or having that forward air controller, having to get underneath the clouds and exposing themselves to the Serb anti-aircraft fire. Now you've got an unmanned air. aircraft that they're willing to take the risk of it being shot down while they're hunting those targets. That caught the eye of some folks within the intelligence community, and they looked at that capability, and in the summer of 2000, we're looking at options in order to locate Osama

bin Laden within Afghanistan, in order to put eyes on so that he could be struck at the time we were thinking with probably cruise missiles, much like the attack had been a year or two earlier. Right, which Bill Clinton had launched, if I remember right. Yes, that would have been in the late 90s. So at the end of the mission in Bosnia, I was asked to take an assignment to the Big Safari Detachment, which was located at the Predator facilities in San Diego, and chose to take that as the deputy commander and move to Southern California. As part of that, I was approached to lead the flight operations for a team going into Afghanistan with the predator in order to search for and identify bin Laden. Let me just for people won't necessarily know what big safari is.

I just want to mention very quickly that it's almost a skunker. works, a skunk works, to try to get military equipment out there quickly, do experimentation, that kind of thing? Exactly. It's been around since the 1950s, and it is a special acquisition program that modifies fielded aircraft very quickly in order to meet intelligence needs. As soon as, as a couple of days in some circumstances, typically a couple of months to get new technologies fielded. And I'll plug a book. There's something called The History of Big Safari by a former director of Bill Grimes that

really goes in depth in some of the fascinating, fascinating programs that they did in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Well, that sounds fascinating. So, but there you were, and I'm sorry to have interrupted, but that's how you got on the trail of bin Laden. That is correct. And one of the things that was developed as part of this is that there was no convenient way to get the operational crews forward. So it was developed what's called remote split operations.

So they had a very, very small footprint forward with the maintenance people and a pilot to launch the aircraft. And then once it had launched, you would hand it up. over via a satellite link to the crews, which were on the far reaches of that satellite footprint. In this particular case, we were located in Europe. So thousands of miles away from where the aircraft was operating. And that's where we had our operations cell set up with all these support and intelligence folks. And we were flying missions through the fall of 2000. in order to locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and did spot him on at least two occasions. I know this is more of an emotional question, and this is sort of a high-level conversation looking at the program.

But did you have any strong feeling when you actually saw him? I was in the seat. My sensor operator, Jeff Gway, was next to me, and we looked at each other, and it's like, that's him. We had known the history of Al Qaeda. We'd had numerous briefings. We were familiar with the bombings in Africa that were al-Qaeda sponsored at the U.S. embassies. We knew it was a bad organization. And when this tall gentleman in white robes walked out of a building in Tarnak farms just outside of,

of Kandahar. It was obvious it was him. We watched for quite some times they walked through the compound down the street and into another building for a series of meetings. Just the way the security team, the other folks around him, the deference they paid to him, it was just obvious to us that that's who it was. And you passed the information along and I guess as you said earlier, You were expecting that maybe there would be a cruise missile strike. That's what we all thought. When we started this, we were under the impression that once they had positive eyes on, something would have been jinned up.

It didn't happen. At that point, as the crew, we were spinning the numbers to figure out how long we could stay over target. Before we ran out of gas, we were assuming we weren't even going to bring the bird home so that we could provide overhead coverage. Do you have any insight into what was actually going on? Or, I mean, was that just a totally separate division? That was way above our pay grade up at the National Security Council level. At that point, we were just the stick operators.

And I want to emphasize here that I was just one part of the team that was doing that operation. Sure. You're the one that we get a chance to talk to today. So that's why you get stuck with all of the questions. So that changed the program a little bit. So how did Big Safari react to that? Were there changes to the predator? It was interesting.

After we came back that winter, it would have been close to Christmas time. We closed our flight operations, and that was just due to the severe winter weather over the Hindu Kush. We were working to make improvements to the aircraft and bring it back the following year. What had been going on in parallel was that big blue Air Force, mostly at the emphasis of General Jumper, who was commander of Air Combat Command

and then on to Chief of Staff of the Air Force, to bring back a capability beyond what we had with the wild predator. That was the version with the laser designator. Idea being that if we spot a target and there are not traditional assets available, we should be able to do something against it. And there was a top-level look at integrating some type of weapon system, whether it was the small diameter bomb, health fire, something that would fit on the predator at the time.

Those have been put on hold for the most part through that fall because of limitations with one of the arms control treaties and the lawyers looking at it and saying, well, predator being armed would actually be considered a cruise missile. Those got lifted late that fall and the big safari team along, with General Atomics was in the process of integrating Hellfire, and that was tested in the spring, January, February time frame for the first time. And those very first launches were very low level using the old analog model of the Hellfire. So they did not occur more than about 2,000 feet above the ground. Once that was successful, there was an emphasis from the National Security Council

to go ahead and very quickly develop the predator in an armed configuration to go back and hunt for bin Laden that following summer. So I spent the next six, eight months, along with the rest of the team running at a dramatic pace. We were integrating the prototype MTS ball, which was an improvement over the original ball that was on the predator with increased IR and camera capabilities. It had a built-in laser designator. We were working on integrating the Hellfire itself. At that point, we're flying about 250 pounds over the original gross weight of the aircraft. So we were learning how the aircraft flew operated, the kind of range in mission profiles, developing the tactics, the techniques, the procedures, all of this while doing essentially prototype

development to get this ready to go take it late that summer or, or, early that fall back to Afghanistan. You weren't the first pilot to fire a hellfire missile from an unmanned aircraft, but you were the first to do it in a combat situation. That's correct. Our team was actually packing up and getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan for missions when 9-11 happened. As such, the Air Force ordered a C-17 for the crews and the equipment, and we were picked up on the evening of the 12th in order to begin moving those assets forward.

And just a comment here, I was in the jump seat of that aircraft when we took off out of Palmdale and headed east. And I remember the air traffic controller gave us direct. to where we were going, which anybody that's flown on the national airspace system for those kind of flights, it's unheard of. It was eerie to be up in the airspace when there's nobody up, but AWACs, fighters, and us. We proceeded east. I was dropped to the East Coast where we were operating from. What was different this time was that we added a fiber optic. link. So to operate the predator, we were working at a ground control station and ops center on the east coast. It was controlled via a fiber optic link to a satellite terminal in Europe. It then went

23,000 miles to geosyncret orbit and then bounced back down to the aircraft over Afghanistan. So now you're talking two continents away, which was unheard of at the time, but as not now become routine for flight operations. We began flying missions into Afghanistan providing reconnaissance as early as September. I think the 18th was our first mission and we're overhead on the first night of the war providing reconnaissance for the other aircraft coming inbound. It was that night that we were alerted of a high value target in this particular case, we found out it was Mullah Omar, who was the leader of the Taliban in and around the Kandahar area.

And we were able to locate him and his escort convoy and followed them for a number of hours until they reached a small compound 15, 20 miles or so, outside of, out of Kanahar. and that is the location where the first hellfire strike took place during the opening night of the war. If these craft are only traveling at something like 90 miles an hour, how come they don't get shot out of the sky all the time, or do they? We have had quite a number of losses with the Predator. I had one shout out from underneath in the Balkans from anti-aircraft fire. They are absolutely vulnerable when you look at a predator class vehicle.

However, the majority of places they are flown today are what we'd call either permissive or semi-permissive environments. So that allows you to use them in situations where you may not want to put a manned air but allows something with long duration of a predator that you might be willing to lose. So when you're sitting in a pilot seat, and that's essentially what it is, even if it's located thousands of miles away from the actual aircraft, right? I mean, it's got a similar layout. Or does it have a similar layout? I should just ask. It does.

Predator and its Big Brother Reaper are actually hand-flown aircraft. you have a throttle, a control stick, rudder pedals, but instead of a windscreen, you've got TV screens in front of you. So it is a very traditional cockpit. Even the more, I don't want to say advanced, but more recent aircraft drones, they're all manned and operated by crews. What is slightly different with those

is you're going to be drawing lines on the map in telling the aircraft where to go. and you may not have hands on the stick and throttle like you do with Predator. This is actually a really geeky question, but is there force feedback? I mean, was there any way to get a feel for the aircraft, or was it you really relying on visual? It's just visual, whether it's your instruments or through the camera. That's all you've got. You'd actually flown previously in combat, and is there a different feeling to squeezing the trigger on a Predator?

on a predator than other circumstances you'd been in? You don't have the same seat of the pants feeling. You don't get the feel of the engine, the smells, the hot and the cold, the geez. But I will say that you are as much mentally in the seat, in the cockpit, as any other man's system that I've flown. Do you think that the lack of these things that Jason's talking about the G's, the resistance. Does this feed into these stories that we read about the military not being able to keep

pilots or get good unmanned aircraft pilots? Is that difference part of why we have trouble keeping them? Perhaps. I think when you grow up as a kid and you say, you know, I want to be a pilot. It's in a very traditional role where you're in the seat and you're flying and you're experiencing all of that. The world is changing and there are folks growing up now that go, yes, I have an opportunity to fly an unmanned system. That's something that appeals to me as well as a manned aircraft. I will give that a try. It affords opportunities for people

that may have physical restrictions from flying a manned aircraft. So there are opportunities there for folks that have the real desire, whether or not or how the Air Force comes about that or the other services to meet those crew needs. There's other pieces to that picture that they've got to figure out. When's the last time that you flew a drone yourself? It's pushing 10 plus years now. Do you miss it? There's days that I miss the mission.

and the camaraderie and the sense of teamwork that you had in those types of missions? Right, because that's something interesting you were talking to, you were speaking to earlier, is that these machines require a lot of people. There are way more people, like you were talking about the ground crew and the launch crew. There's a lot going on here. There's a lot of people involved in these missions. Absolutely. They are heavily crewed aircraft besides.

the pilot and the sensor operator, you're going to have mission commanders and intelligence analysts and other folks that are tied in within the flight operations chain, as well as all of your communications technicians, maintenance people, launch and recovery crew. So it makes for a relatively high footprint. Unmanned only means nobody in the airplane. Right. still plenty of people involved. So just one last question, which is, what have you seen in terms of advancements?

Do you still pay attention to what's going on, and have there been major changes since you left the program? I try to keep up with the open source media. I think what you're seeing is a transition to more heavily integrated systems. So the design is going to be from the ground up to be an unmanned system, but they are being developed to have much greater lifespan, greater redundancy, greater capabilities than what we had with Predator, which was really initially just a development system that ended up being fielded. Scott Swanson, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much. It was wonderful conversation. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you.