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Sunday, Jul 5, 2009
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Inside the U.S. Air Force's Combined Air & Space Operations Center in the Middle East.
Inside a secret high-tech control center the U.S. Air Force targets enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan. But can they bomb them legally, and without killing innocents? A Salon exclusive.
By Mark Benjamin
Read more: War, Bombing, Politics, Afghanistan, News, Iraq, Mark Benjamin
Feb. 15, 2008 | UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, THE MIDDLE EAST -- The cavernous control room used by the U.S. Air Force to manage the air wars in Iraq and Afghanistan looks exactly how you'd expect it to look in a Hollywood movie. The lights are low. Around 50 camouflage-clad men and women lean forward in their chairs, staring intently at rows of computer screens glowing with multicolored graphs and fluctuating displays. They sometimes glance up from the banks of computer monitors to gaze at a sweeping panel of large television screens mounted on the front wall. Two massive, side-by-side screens in the center display digital maps of Iraq and Afghanistan. Swarms of U.S. aircraft above the war zones are represented by green labels that move about each map, gravitating toward wherever U.S. troops are fighting on the ground, in case they need backup.
To the left and right of those large maps are four smaller screens. Each is about 5 feet wide, displaying remarkably clear live footage from cameras mounted on the Air Force's un-manned Predator drones that buzz incessantly above Iraq and Afghanistan. The Predator drones, however, are not filming a raging firefight, or a bridge about to be strafed from the air.
They are stalking prey.
You see a man, walking through a shrub-dotted, dusty field. A small dog wanders behind him. Another screen shows a group of individuals, standing huddled together on a city street, looking like they could be chatting about a ballgame. A third Predator tracks a figure getting into a car, following as the car snakes through traffic. Yet another screen stays fixated on a single squat house surrounded by what looks like a low cement wall, as if someone is about to emerge from the front door.
The scenes look misleadingly pedestrian. The miniature people on the screens do not know they are being watched. "We are looking for individual people," Lt. Col. Walt Manwill says, as he stares up at the massive screens. "Especially when you are killing people, you want to make sure you do it right." Manwill, a blockish former pilot whose call sign is Fridge, is a chief of combat operations here, on what the Air Force simply calls "the floor." He handles one of three eight-hour shifts in a job that runs 24 hours a day.
Targeters here show me recent footage of two men on the ground in Iraq. The two men, far below the Predator drone's gaze, appear to be setting up a mortar on a city street. They are in the shadow of a building just feet away. Suddenly, the two men explode. Everything around the men, including the buildings, looks unharmed. But when the dust clears, the two men are wiped away. A small bomb, tailor-made for hunting single individuals, has done the job.
An Air Force colonel describes these operations to me as "getting Bubba." This has become a key component of the air wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and the Air Force has developed it into a science. Air Force officials say the operations are highly effective in targeting enemies of the United States, while minimizing civilian casualties in the war zones. But some experts on international law note that the U.S. has flown into legally murky territory, akin to the Israelis' controversial practice of "targeted killings" in battling Islamic militants.
The air wars the U.S. is fighting have escalated dramatically over the past few years. In 2004, the Air Force dropped 371 bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every year since then that number has increased. Last year, 5,019 bombs were dropped. (Air Force officials caution that those statistics may be misleading now in terms of a trend, since in recent weeks, they say, things have been much quieter with bombing operations in Iraq.)
The Air Force agreed to give Salon two days of unrestricted access in early February to what is officially called the Combined Air & Space Operations Center, the technology and personnel brain center controlling the air wars over Iraq and Afghanistan. The visit, allowed under the condition that some secret information be withheld from this article, included several hours on the floor over the two days, watching operations unfold.
From this dusty air base in the Persian Gulf region, rarely visited by nonmilitary personnel, the Air Force quietly manages nearly 2,000 sorties a day above perhaps the most complicated battle spaces in the history of warfare. The logistics alone are dizzying: The Air Force hauls 3.7 million pounds of fuel above Iraq and Afghanistan daily to refuel aircraft in flight.
When it comes to dropping bombs, most of the airstrikes carried out by the Air Force are executed to support troops on the ground pinned down in a firefight, called "troops in contact." Other branches of the U.S. military regularly conduct airstrikes; the Army and Marines have hundreds of attack helicopters working in the war zones, supporting U.S. ground troops much more often than does the Air Force. But the Air Force has also enthusiastically embraced what is called the Intelligence Surveillance, Reconnaissance part of its mission. In Iraq and Afghanistan, this means using advanced technology to locate individual people, and then tracking them using the cameras on the Predator drones and other aircraft. These operations can go on for long periods of time. The Air Force recently watched one man in Iraq for more than five weeks, carefully recording his habits -- where he lives, works and worships, and whom he meets.
The military may decide to have such a man arrested, or to do nothing at all. Or, at any moment they could decide to blow him to smithereens.
