The Tulsa World January 5, 2003
Spy vs. fly
By RITA SHERROW
Flying more than 20,000 feet above most commercial airliners, Global Hawk can take images of an area the size of Illinois in just 24 hours, day or night, in all weather conditions. U.S. Air Force
PBS show looks at unmanned military vehicles, from the big planes to the tiny spies Tiny flying vehicles equipped with a digital camera the size of a penny. High-flying jets that can roam halfway around the world without a cockpit or a pilot, all the while sending real-time video back to a pilot miles away.
No, these aren't movie spies. They are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), remote-controlled airborne robots that may change the way wars are fought. Or will they?
That's the question raised in "Nova's" newest documentary "Spies That Fly" airing at 7 p.m. Tuesday on KOED, channel 11.
Using newly declassified footage, the hour-long film traces the history of UAVs.
From the manned U2 plane -- which was America's best-kept secret during the Cold War -- to models used in Vietnam, to those being developed by the military for full combat that can withstand G-forces human pilots could hardly bear and can go into areas affected by biological chemical or nuclear weapons. From hand-launched vehicles for use by military commanders in the field to ambitious plans for a robotic stealth bee that might fly slowly through a building, relaying footage of potential adversaries hiding within or reading enemy maps carelessly left on a desktop.
Already put to use in the war in Afghanistan, the current UAV "star" -- the Predator model -- has been leading American strike planes to targets and has also destroyed critical sites with its own missiles. UAVs also have been used by U.S. forces in every aerial operation since the Gulf War in 1991, according to "Nova" research. Why? Because they can fly to places and perform missions that are often too dangerous to risk the lives of human pilots.
As the film shows, the technological power of UAVs can be daunting to an enemy.
During the Gulf War, some Iraqi soldiers surrendered to a UAV being used by battleships to find their targets. The soldiers had learned the hard way that the sound of the plane (like a lawnmower engine) meant incoming shells would follow and began waving white flags.
War by laptop? It's a possibility that may or may not happen, according to John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.com, an Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit, nonpartisan organization which focuses on approaches to emerging security challenges.
"It's a case of 'on one hand and then on the other hand,' " said Pike, who is featured in the film."I think there is a considerable amount of promise in UAVs, but that promise has not yet been realized. Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean it going to happen."
Historically, the problem with UAVs, he explained, has been that they are cheap -- by Defense Department buying standards -- and that they are, well, cheap.
"I think the the attraction is, in principal, that there is considerably less cost (in UAVs) than in alternative solutions," he said.
"The bad news is that means they have been built by small programs that have had difficulty getting funding when they got into trouble and there was the tendency to cancel instead of throwing money at them until they work. As opposed to spending a big amount on a big airplane built by a big company. Those are the ones that got the (government) dollars. Part of what has happened with UAVs is they have finally gotten big enough and complex enough for big companies to be interested and they have gotten too big to cancel."
The result of their successful use in places like Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq is what Pike calls a "sort of, like, overnight success after half a century of effort."
Realization of what UAVs can do has come with the information revolution, he explained.
Before, the vehicles had limited capabilities. There were no digital cameras, lightweight but powerful computers and cheap wideband satellite communication back in the days of Vietnam and President Lyndon B. Johnson. Heck, a computer back then filled an entire room. And, there was no Internet.
The technology of today has "enabled the little airplanes to do things they couldn't do years ago," he said.
"The problem is making (a UAV) do something useful and with sufficient reliability, not crashing faster than you can built them. That's a little more difficult."
Their future development depends on how well they actually work, he emphasized.
"It is certainly an innovation in the sense that they do things that would have been physically impossible a few years ago. If you think about web cameras and cheap digital cameras and laptop computers, these are the fundamental enabling technologies that didn't exist 10 years ago and were big and clunky even five years ago. The question is whether or not UAVs will turn out to be militarily useful in the real world.
"We will see if this turns out to be the thing that wins the battle of Baghdad or kills a bunch of soldiers who are spending too much time looking at laptop instead of at the end of their guns."
Copyright © 2003 The Tulsa World
