Flight of the Warbots

A U.S. soldier in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, launches a Raven drone Bryan Denton

By Brad Stone

The members of Apache Troop couldn’t see a thing. It was August 2010, 0200 hours. About 120 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers were silently spreading out over a remote farm in northwestern Iraq. Their objective: a mud hut where, according to intelligence reports, two suicide bombers were planning an attack on a checkpoint to coincide with the end of Ramadan. But the allied soldiers, even wearing night vision goggles, couldn’t locate the hut; eight-foot-tall sunflowers obscured their view.

As the troops searched for their target, two U.S. cavalrymen set up on the edge of the squadron, reached into their packs, and withdrew the components of a 4-lb. miniature airplane called the Raven-B. They assembled it in seconds, revved its motor until it buzzed like an angry bee, and threw it into the air. With a hand-held control unit, the soldiers put the aircraft into automatic orbit a few hundred feet above the field. Watching the video transmission from the Raven-B’s infrared camera, they spotted the hut and directed the plane to light up the roof with an infrared laser, which guided the team through the sunflowers to their target. Without firing a shot, they arrested the saboteurs, who were sleeping inside. The suicide vests were buried nearby in a vegetable garden.

When civilians think of the new class of mechanical warriors aiding troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the high-priced, high-tech airplanes that come to mind have names like Predator and Global Hawk, made by General Atomics and Northrop Grumman, respectively. These unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, operate over the Middle East, conducting in-depth surveillance of potential targets. Some of them are armed. In September, senior al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen by two CIA-controlled Predators launching Hellfire missiles. On Dec. 4, Iran claimed it recovered a RQ-170 Sentinel, the top-secret stealth drone that was used in the May raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

But aircraft such as the MQ-1 Predator, which has a wingspan of 49 feet and costs up to $30 million, constitute only a sliver of America’s expanding drone fleet. The rest are portable, far less expensive models like the Raven-B. Made with durable composites and packed with electronics, these smaller devices serve as binoculars in the sky for soldiers on the ground. Small UAVs “provide ground commanders with intelligence that five years ago was only available as a general-officer or corps-level asset,” says U.S. Army Captain Keith Benoit, who commanded Apache Troop’s assault through the sunflower field. “They in essence saved the lives of my soldiers because we were able to stage the operation covertly.”

In 2002, U.S. ground forces brought only a few prototype UAVs into Afghanistan. They allowed soldiers to see around the next village block or over the next hill without having to call up the chain of command for air support. As of July of this year, according to the Defense Dept., nearly 7,000 small UAVs were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Any time you empower an individual soldier, seaman, or airman with the ability to gather a little bit of reconnaissance information that he controls, you empower him to make decisions quickly,” says Jeffrey Kline, program director of maritime defense and security research programs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

Even as the U.S. military budget declines in the face of ballooning deficits and the wind-down of two wars, spending on unmanned systems has grown from near nothing two decades ago to a projected $6.2 billion in 2012. Not surprisingly, defense contractors have refocused their efforts. They’re preparing for warfare waged by unmanned vehicles—robots controlled by a combination of artificial intelligence and remote human input.

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