War With Friends: Pentagon Eyes a Drone App Store

An MQ-1 Predator instructor with the California Air National Guard remotely controls his drone. He might control more than one, if a new Pentagon project comes to fruition. Photo: National Guard Bureau

The US military has dozens of different types of drones in its arsenal. Each one has its own unique controller. And each of those various controllers flies a single robot. There's no system that controls multiple drones at once. One Pentagon office thinks that's an archaic way of doing business.

Inside the Pentagon's Acquisition, Technology and Logistics directorate, a team is working on ways to operate different types of drones with a single controller. It's a big technical challenge ' one that's failed in the past ' since the different manufacturers of different drones each have proprietary control software. But the official in charge of the effort envisions a new drone software architecture that's agnostic about what kind of drone it controls; and allows human controllers to think in terms of drone fleets rather than individual robots, including fleets comprising different kinds of drones. That would enable a dramatic expansion of the possibilities of drone warfare.

Step one is to get a kind of universal remote for the drones ' that is, a controller that can operate, say, an armed Predator and a jumbo Global Hawk spy. It's a major challenge.

'The objective is to be able to 'shop' for mission specific applications and services from a single 'App Store',' says Rich Ernst, the Pentagon's lead officer for what's called the Unmanned Aerial Systems Control Segment, or UCS, in an emailed statement to Danger Room. 'The methodology is akin to the commercial 'smart-phone' industry, wherein applications are down-loaded to suit individual user taste and productivity. The repository allows small software businesses to compete on a level playing field' with the major defense conglomerates.

The first such company is California-based DreamHammer. DreamHammer has developed software that can operate numerous robots from the same tablet or laptop. Known as Ballista and first reported by Kashmir Hill at Forbes, it's a layer that sits on top of the proprietary software governing Predators, Global Hawks, and the rest of the military's robotic aviary, using application programming interfaces, or APIs.

DreamHammer's CEO, Nelson Paez, has brought Ballista to Ernst's attention. Ballista aims to be the first-ever multi-drone operating system ' basically, the universal remote. And that would cut through what Paez and Ernst see as an expensive irony. 'Currently,' Paez tells Danger Room, 'it takes more people to operate unmanned systems than it takes to operate manned systems.'

The user interface for Ballista, DreamHammer's multi-drone operating system. Image: DreamHammer

Consolidating the controllers has frustrated the military in the past. The Air Force has tried and failed to create control stations that are agnostic toward the types of drones they fly. Nor has it been able to control multiple drones from the same control station. All that has required a level of autonomy that the current drone fleet doesn't possess.

'It's like we're going to pull a rabbit out of the hat in the next three years in terms of automation,' a frustrated drone engineer told Defense News in 2009. The following year, the Navy quietly asked the defense industry if a 'common control system' for drones could even be built.

Ernst's job is to make that a reality. He wouldn't discuss how much money is going into constructing a common drone architecture, when it might come online, or even how many drones a single controller ought to control. But it appears that DreamHammer has an edge in this space.

Paez demonstrated Ballista to me a few weeks ago at a Washington, D.C. restaurant. He wasn't actually controlling any drones while drinking his coffee. But anyone using Ballista would be able to, using the display loaded onto Paez's MacBook. The majority of the screen is a 3-D rendered map showing a swath of territory that the drone flies over. Icons show the positioning of the drones, ostensibly in real time via GPS, with color-coded flight paths that a remote pilot can customize. Tabbed browsing shows layers with the mission plan, imagery recorded by the drone, additional aircraft nearby and other relevant data. Switching from one drone to another is a matter of a mouse click.

'Ballista needed the ability to fuse multiple dissimilar data sources (structured or unstructured, real-time or static) from any system into an open, consistent data model,' emails Chris Diebner, DreamHammer's chief technology officer and one of Ballista's main designers. Efforts over the course of months by Danger Room to see Ballista in action using Navy drones were unsuccessful.

Ernst declines to talk about Ballista, or any competitors it may have. But whether the solution is Ballista or another piece of software, Ernst's UCS Architecture, if successful, has the potential to dramatically change robotic warfare.

First, there are tactical implications for single-drone controllers. Units tend to fly one robot at a time. While that's often a function of drones' limited availability, especially for small units, the inability of controllers to toggle from one drone to another doesn't help. Individuals who remotely pilot one system can't necessarily transfer those skills to another. That keeps the military services buying redundant robots, instead of consolidating control, and flying them solo.

It also means the robots can't talk to one another. The information their sensors collect is transmitted ' apparently without encryption ' to distinct ground control stations. With a common drone OS, all that data ' full-motion video of a suspected insurgent hideout; a stretch of road known for a high concentration of insurgent bombs ' could show up on a single screen.

And that sets up perhaps the most dramatic change of all. With a common controller, remote pilots can put together fleets of drones, including multiple types of drones, for a single mission. Admittedly, that's not just a software problem, it's a hardware problem: not many military commands control, say, a robotic helicopter scout and an armed Predator. But if there's a common drone OS, then it's possible in theory for a unit to use both at once for different aspects of the same mission, and control them all from the same machine. Picture a commander ordering one of the Air Force's forthcoming bird-shaped micro-spies to scout an urban area for an enemy while keeping a Predator loitering 30,000 feet overhead, waiting for the robo-bird to find its prey.

All this represents a very big technological step, with accordingly large implications for the future of drone warfare. Ernst doesn't say how long it'll take. But if his office can pull it off, the military won't just get all its drones run by a standardized piece of software. It may get the ability to control whole fleets of deadly flying robots at once.

Satellite Spots Lockheed's Mystery Drone

An overage image of Lockheed Martin's "Skunk Works" facility: Photo: Google Earth

A commercial satellite has spotted a mysterious Unmanned Aerial Vehicle parked at Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. The orbital snapshot was reportedly taken on Dec. 4, but became public only last week in a blog post by George Kaplan, a self-described 'open-source' intelligence analyst who relies solely on publicly available imagery.

Wrapped in what appears to be plastic, parked at an angle next to an F-16 on a concrete apron near the U.S. Air Force's top-secret Plant 42, the supposed UAV shares the basic dimensions and overall flying-wing shape of many of today's jet-powered drones. Using the 50-foot-long F-16 as a yardstick, it seems the UAV has a wingspan of around 60 feet.

Beyond that, anything we say about the 'new' drone is conjecture. We emailed a Lockheed spokesperson asking for comment, but the company does not habitually comment on the goings-on at the Skunk Works, whose other products have included the F-117 stealth fighter and the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes.

That said, the mystery drone's wingspan seems to match the consensus figure for the wingspan of Lockheed's secretive RQ-170 Sentinel, also a Skunk Works design. The stealthy RQ-170 was first spotted at Afghanistan's Kandahar Air Field in 2007. Two years later the Air Force confessed to operating a small number of Sentinels for 'reconnaissance and surveillance.'

On Dec. 4, coincidentally the same day Kaplan's snapshot was taken, Iranian forces captured a crashed Sentinel near the Iran-Afghanistan border, provoking a diplomatic row. As revealed by the Iranians, the crashed Sentinel's maintenance logs indicated that it, or at least parts of it, had been sent back to Palmdale from Afghanistan for maintenance. Noted aviation journalist David Cenciotti connected these dots in his own search for the mystery drone's identity. 'I think it's a Sentinel,'  he tells Danger Room. 'A damaged one.'

But the nameless UAV could also be the long-rumored, but previously unseen, prototype for the stealthy P.420 drone bomber that Lockheed patented way back in 1997. At least, that's what the reporters at Flight think. Very little is known about the P.420, though it's possible some of the old drone's design elements made it into the operational RQ-170.

Less likely, the shrouded 'bot could be related to Lockheed's undisclosed new design for the Navy's Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike drone fighter competition. Four companies ' Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics ' are competing to build potentially hundreds of ship-launched UCLASS strike drones for service in the 2020s. Northrop's entry will almost certainly be based on its X-47B demonstrator, and Boeing's on its similar X-45C. Both the X-47B and the X-45C are flying wings with spans between 40 and 60 feet. It wouldn't be surprising if Lockheed's proposed robotic fighter were similar, and therefore a close match with the mystery drone seen at Palmdale.

But a brand-new UAV prototype would never be left outside in full view of satellites, according to two drone-industry insiders who spoke to Danger Room on condition of anonymity. 'If it had any value it wouldn't be sitting there like it is,' one insider says.

Maybe not, but the Pentagon and its industrial partners don't have the best track record keeping its secret drones such as the RQ-170 under wraps. Just ask the Iranians. It's not inconceivable that Lockheed is putting the finishing touches on a new, top-secret robotic warplane ' and accidentally left it out in the open for the world to see.

Video: Secret Space Plane Shatters Orbital Record as Chinese Rival Looms

The second copy of the Air Force's X-37B robotic space plane landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California early Saturday morning, ending a record-breaking 469-day orbital mission that began atop an Atlas rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on March 5, 2011. The safe landing of Orbital Test Vehicle 2 after more than 15 months in space is an indisputable triumph for the U.S. military and space industry. Much less certain is the X-37's future. Budget cuts, labor woes and the looming specter of a Chinese rival could blunt the diminutive robo-shuttle's orbital edge.

The Boeing-built X-37B, in development since the 1990s, was designed to operate nine months at a time between refueling and refurbishment. But with just two copies of the roughly billion-dollar space plane in the inventory, the Air Force wanted to get as much mileage as possible out of each. After OTV-1's proof-of-concept flight from April to December 2010, OTV-2's mission became an endurance test. 'One of the goals of this mission was to see how much farther we could push the on-orbit duration,' said Lt. Col. Tom McIntyre, the Air Force's X-37B program manager.

The key to the X-37's marathon flight: fuel and energy management. 'It sips fuel like a Prius,' one space insider said of the mini-shuttle. Even so, Air Force controllers on the ground had to pay close attention to the X-37's orbital profile and its use of engines, batteries and extendable solar panels.

Officially, the 29-foot-long X-37 is a research vehicle, meant to carry small experiments in its payload bay, which is roughly the size of a pickup truck bed. But the winged vehicle's maneuverability and flexibility mean it's capable of much more: spy missions, cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, even sneaking up on and tampering with enemy satellites. Some observers speculated that OTV-2 was monitoring China's Tiangong space station, a notion that Secure World Foundation analyst Brian Weeden dismissed. 'If the U.S. really wanted to observe Tiangong, it has enough assets to do that without using X-37B.'

In any case, the X-37 partially fills a gap left by the retirement last summer of the much larger NASA Space Shuttle. 'The X-37B OTV program brings a singular capability to space technology development,' McIntyre said. Boeing has proposed to build a bigger X-37C version that could carry more experiments, more cargo ' and even astronauts.

But it's not clear that the existing X-37s will survive much longer in the cash-strapped Air Force, which is struggling to pay for new bombers, new aerial tankers and the trillion-dollar F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. In September, Air Force Space Command boss Gen. William Shelton questioned the space plane's worth. 'It's very flexible, in that you've got a payload bay in which you can launch, then it comes down, then you can launch it back ' but whether or not it's cost effective is the question.'

Complicating the Air Force's budgetary calculations, Boeing is in the process of shutting down the cutting-edge facility in Huntington Beach, California, where the X-37s were hand-assembled. In recent years Building 31, as the facility is known, has been a labor battleground between Boeing management and its rank-and-file engineers. The company plans to shutter the facility next year. Possible future X-37s could be built elsewhere, but the loss of Building 31's skilled workforce could drive up the cost.

Meanwhile, the U.S. mini-shuttle could soon have competition. China is developing its own space plane called Shenlong ' and apparently test-flew it for the first time in January last year. 'Beijing may be entering the spaceplane era faster than many would have predicted,' warns Andrew Erickson, a Naval War College analyst.

Currently the Air Force plans to launch OTV-1 on its second mission this fall, with OTV-2 possibly to follow on its own sophomore launch sometime next year. If the Air Force continues improving the X-37's performance, these coming missions could be even more amazing than the just-completed record-breaker. But that's assuming the money keeps flowing.

CIA Refuses to Confirm or Deny Drone Attacks Obama Brags About

Armed MQ-9 Reaper drones like this one are used by both the US military and the CIA. Photo: USAF

The Central Intelligence Agency continues to refuse to confirm or deny the covert military use of drones to kill suspected terrorists overseas, despite President Barack Obama's and even a former CIA director's admission of the agency's targeted killing program.

Despite numerous public comments on the CIA's drone attacks in far-flung locales such as Yemen from various government officials, including former CIA Director Leon Panetta and President Obama, the CIA is taking the position in court that it would have to eliminate you with one of its drones if it acknowledged the program.

So on Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal appeals court to expedite a hearing (.pdf) on its Freedom of Information Act request seeking details of the drone program. Hours later, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit set a September 20 oral argument. (.pdf)

The development comes as 26 members of Congress asked Obama, in a letter, to consider the consequences of drone killing and to explain the necessity of the program. The use of drones to shoot missiles from afar at vehicles and buildings that the nation's intelligence agencies believe are being used by suspected terrorists began under the Bush administration and was widened by Obama to allow the targeting of American citizens. Drone strikes by the Pentagon and the CIA have sparked backlashes from foreign governments and populations, as the strikes often kill civilians, including women and children.

The FOIA litigation, meanwhile, dates to 2010, when the ACLU sued in federal court seeking records concerning the legal basis for carrying out targeted drone killings; any restrictions on those who may be targeted; any civilian casualties; any geographic limits on the program; the number of targeted killings that the agency has carried out; and the training, supervision, oversight, or discipline of drone operators.

A federal judge sided with the agency's so-called 'Glomar' response which said that it would neither confirm nor deny the existence of responsive records because doing so would expose national security secrets. The same appeals court that set the September drone hearing had last month upheld the National Security Agency's decision, citing Glomar, to withhold from the public documents confirming or denying any relationship it has with Google concerning encryption or cybersecurity.

In the drone litigation, the ACLU appealed, citing a bevy of public comments (.pdf) by government officials that the rights groups maintains amounts to a government acknowledgment of a CIA drone program. One quote the ACLU submitted was from then-CIA Director Leon Penetta, who spoke frankly to ABC News after a 2010 drone strike had killed al-Qaeda's third in charge:

'But having said that, the more we continue to disrupt al-Qaeda's operations, and we are engaged in the most aggressive operations in the history of the CIA in that part of the world, and the result is that we are disrupting their leadership. We've taken down more than half of their Taliban leadership, of their Al Qaida leadership. We just took down number three in their leadership a few weeks ago.'

Last year, Obama acknowledged particular CIA drone strikes at a Joint Chiefs of Staff ceremony. Within hours of the CIA drone strike that killed U.S. citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan in Yemen, the president publicly lauded the move as 'another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates' and then acknowledged the U.S. government's role, stating that 'this success is a tribute to our intelligence community.'

Mike Scarcella, at the Blog of Legal Times, points out that Catherine Hancock, the government's lawyer in the case, told the appellate court in a filing that it should reject the ACLU's attempt 'to cobble together an official CIA acknowledgment by combining together the substance of various news reports, unofficial statements and imprecise statements by former CIA Director (Leon) Panetta and President Obama.'

What's more, Hancock added some doublespeak into the argument, (.pdf) writing that,'even if there is speculation about a fact, unless an agency officially confirms that fact, the public does not know whether it is so.'

Try telling that to the family of Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, America citizens killed by the CIA on the secret orders of the President, with no due process.

'Gray Eagle' Drone Fails All the Time, But Army Still Wants More

The Army's Gray Eagle at an unknown airfield. The Army's ambitious drone program is suffering from poor reliability and repeated delays, according to a Pentagon report. Photo: U.S. Army

The Gray Eagle is supposed to be the Army's own version of the Air Force's famous Predator drone. The Army wants its own version of the Predator so much, it's spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and buy 164 of the things through the year 2022. Problem is, the Army is having trouble getting the drone to, y'know, work.

Beginning in March 2011, 'poor reliability across all major subsystems' led to delays that would seemingly never end, according to a report from Edward Greer, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for developmental test and evaluation. During the same month, a Gray Eagle drone crashed in California after a faulty chip blocked a subsystem from sending commands to 'a portion of the aircraft's flight control surfaces,' Col. Timothy Baxter, the Army's project manager for unmanned aircraft systems, elaborated in an e-mail to Inside Defense.

'Flight testing was suspended,' Greer's report added. The faulty chip was replaced and testing resumed, but the Army was now left with fewer available flight hours. The drone's mean times between failures ' or the average time the drone or a component works without failure ' is also short. First, the drone itself has an average failure every 25 hours, short of a required minimum of 100 hours. The drone's ground control station has a rate of 27 hours before a failure, short of a required 300. The Army has since lowered the requirement to 150 hours. The Gray Eagle's sensors fare a bit better: 134 hours to 250 hours required.

Then the Gray Eagle was delayed again last October. The report concludes that for the 2011 fiscal year, the Gray Eagle is meeting only four of seven 'key performance parameters,' and the drone's 'system reliability continues to fall short of predicted growth,' which could be a problem for the upcoming tests scheduled for August. The Gray Eagle is also necessary for the Pentagon's plans to double its unmanned air force.

Like the Air Force's (now discontinued) Predator and its successor, the MQ-9 Reaper, the General Atomics-designed Gray Eagle is intended to operate for long periods at medium altitude while packing missiles and advanced sensors. A squadron of four Gray Eagles has been sent to Afghanistan, which 'continues to provide vital support to our soldiers in combat and continues to exceed the 80 percent operational available requirement every day,' Baxter wrote to Inside Defense.

But while the Army is also preparing to test its giant surveillance airship, the Gray Eagle is all the Army has for a Predator-esque hunter-killer drone.

Drones are the centerpiece of how the U.S. fights terrorists, with U.S. warplanes 31 percent ' or 1 in every 3 ' now robotic. The Navy is developing its own drone that can launch from an aircraft carrier, though it won't be ready until 2018 at the earliest. And in a time of relative budget austerity, the Air Force is funded for 65 Predator and Reaper squadrons of up to four drones per squadron, with the option of increasing to 85 squadrons. The Army is losing 100,000 soldiers, but funding for the Gray Eagle is going strong, with $150 million budgeted for construction costs and another $518 million to buy them.

Meanwhile, Greer's report mentions that the Gray Eagle's software is unstable, and fixes to problems 'have led to 11 unplanned software revisions.' But in general, software reliability has improved. Nonetheless, testing should be resumed 'only when the system demonstrates adequate readiness and satisfies [testing] entrance criteria,' notes the report.

Navy May Need to Design Ships With Laser Guns in Mind

Unless the Navy starts building destroyers like the USS Spruance that can generate the power necessary to operate a laser gun, the Navy might never get its forthcoming focused-light weapons, according to a congressional study. Photo: U.S. Navy

After more than 20 years of research and development, the Navy's dreams of laser weapons are about to come true. But like the dog who chases the car and doesn't know what to do when he catches it, the Navy's thoroughly unprepared for its coming arsenal of focused-light weapons. A new congressional study warns that the Navy runs the risk of outfitting its surface ships with laser guns that their on-board power systems can't handle.

As Chris Partlow says to Marlo Stanfield in The Wire, this is one of those good problems.

Laser weaponry has progressed to the point where it's only a matter of time before they're disabling ships and burning missiles out of the sky. 'Over the next few years,' estimates a new Congressional Research Service report acquired by Danger Room, lasers 'capable of countering certain surface and air targets at ranges of about a mile could be made ready for installation on Navy surface ships.' Laser weapons with a 10-mile range aren't much farther away. If only the ships can handle them.

If the Navy hasn't come to grips with the imminence of its laser cannons, Congress needs to step in, the report suggests. One major issue: 'the potential implications of shipboard lasers for the design and acquisition of Navy ships, including the Flight III DDG-51 destroyer that the Navy wants to begin procuring in [fiscal year] 2016.' In plain English: Unless the Navy starts designing ships to carry laser weapons right from the shipyard, it may never get the futuristic weapons it wants.

The principle at work is pretty simple, from an engineering perspective, although it's largely been an obscure concern limited to Navy geeks. Unlike weapons that fire traditional ammunition, the Navy's coming inventory of laser weapons just need electrical power to fire. To get it, they've got to tap the on-board power generation systems of ships they'd be mounted on.

But the ships weren't designed with the expectation that they'd pack laser weapons. Their generators aren't built to create the kind of juice necessary to power laser guns without siphoning it away from their propulsion systems. It's a problem that gets worse when considering a laser gun's 'magazine' is as full or as empty as the fuel source it draws from. All that creates exactly the kind of choice the Navy never wants to confront: a choice between effective weapons and maneuverability. A wheezing, slow ship is a tempting target.

Current Navy shipbuilding plans hold shipbuilding basically steady at 285 ships for the next five years, after which the Navy plans to ramp up production in advance of about 70 ships aging out of service during the 2020s. The congressional study effectively asks if it's time to start baking the laser guns into the Navy's shipbuilding cake.

A laser is considered militarily practical if it can generate a 100 kilowatt beam ' which, as yet, no Navy laser under development can generate. The most powerful laser, the experimental Free Electron Laser, can potentially generate a megawatt's worth of pew-pew-pew. But the ships can barely handle that, at best.

'Some Navy ships might be able to support, under battle conditions, an SSL [solid-state laser] with a power somewhat above 100 kW,' the study finds. 'No existing Navy surface combatant designs have enough electrical power or cooling capacity to support an SSL with a power level well above 100 kW.' Worse yet for the Free Electron Laser, it's still so massive that it could only fit on an aircraft carrier or maybe a big-deck amphibious assault ship.

Accordingly, the study urges Congress to consider making the accommodation of laser guns standard for the next round of surface ships under construction ' much like how any decent car comes to the dealership already tricked out with power steering and other creature comforts. One option: 'design the new Flight III version of the DDG-51 destroyer, which the Navy wants to start procuring in [fiscal] 2016, with enough space, electrical power, and cooling capacity to support an SSL with a power level of 200 kW or 300 kW or more ' something that could require lengthening the DDG-51 hull, so as to provide room for laser equipment and additional electrical generating and cooling equipment.'

The report recommends the same power boosts for a potential new destroyer class if souping up the DDG-51 is unappealing. And it wants Congress to consider building the next big-deck amphibs and Ford-class aircraft carriers to generate 300 kilowatts or more.

Expensive? No doubt. Cheaper than building a ship and then retrofitting its power-generation systems to accommodate a laser gun? Almost definitely.

And the shipbuilding problems aren't the only obstacles Navy lasers still need to overcome. As the study points out, the Navy's lasers need to get much better at scaling up the power of their beams; managing all the heat they generate; improving 'target detection and tracking'; and integration into the rest of a ship's systems. These are 'not trivial' challenges, the study notes.

But they're also direct consequences of something the Navy may not have suspected it would ever have with laser technology ' success. Laser cannons are no longer science fiction. But the report points out an important distinction. Just because a weapon is increasingly realistic doesn't mean it's increasingly practical.

U.S. Outsources Its Africa Spying

Air Force Lt. Col. Douglas Lee, commander of the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing's MC-12 squadron, displays one of his Beechcraft spy planes in Afghanistan, 2010. Photo: Spencer Ackerman/Wired.com

Africa is important enough to the United States to spy on. Just not with official U.S. military personnel. The military's Africa Command is outsourcing dramatic amounts of surveillance missions. And if something should go wrong, the contractors are on their own.

That's what the Washington Post's Craig Whitlock found after poking through an obscure program called Tusker Sand. Starting in 2009, Africa Command, known as AFRICOM, began paying private firms to fly MC-12 Beechcrafts outfitted with sensitive cameras to perform sensitive spy missions in places where the military doesn't typically operate, like Uganda or Burkina Faso.

As some of those contractors learned, if their planes went down, AFRICOM wouldn't go to any effort to recover American citizens. And there was a strong possibility those Americans would be captured or killed.

'Among the jobs to be outsourced: pilots, sensor operators, intelligence analysts, mechanics and linguists,' Whitlock writes. 'The expectation was that the personnel would be veterans; most needed to certify that they had passed the military's survival, resistance and escape training course, because of the possibility of aircrews being downed behind enemy lines.'

MC-12s have several virtues for spy missions. They're relatively cheap, and they're inconspicuous: as retrofitted Beechcraft civilian passenger planes, they're indistinguishable from the small planes that take off and land from tiny airstrips around the world. That's largely why the U.S. military turned to them in 2007 and 2008 when it needed to rapidly surge airborne intelligence systems.

AFRICOM crafted Tusker Sand precisely to be inconspicuous. Political sensitivities make it so that AFRICOM publicly says its primary mission is to train African militaries. In truth, it's vastly expanding its counterterrorism work in East Africa ' a complimentary spy program aimed at al-Qaida's affiliate in the Sahel is called Creek Sand ' regularly striking and raiding Somalia, and deeply involved in the hunt for the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. But to stay discreet, AFRICOM decided many of its routinized spy missions would get outsourced, flying from non-discript African airfields that few would suspect are surveillance hubs.

Until something goes wrong.

In the summer of 2010, the New Jersey firm R-4 flew an MC-12 over the Central African Republic, looking for Kony. Something mechanical went wrong. The mostly-American crew had to make an emergency landing in a place called Obo. Trouble followed.

'The unexpected appearance of two foreign soldiers and some Americans aroused the suspicions of tribal leaders, who had been kept in the dark about Tusker Sand by their national government,' Whitlock recounts. 'They detained the crew for several hours as they debated what to do.' One of the contractors remembers: 'We felt like we were going to prison.'

R-4 'had difficulty' tracking down AFRICOM officials to get out of the mess. State Department and United Nations contacts weren't much help, either. So they did what contractors are good at doing: they paid off their captors and went free.

That was a near-miss. And, some fear, a portent of what's to come. Outsourced spy missions in Latin America resulted in U.S. nationals getting held captive by Colombian narcotraffickers for five years.

'From a purely political standpoint it is obvious the fallout of such an incident would be immense, especially if hostile forces reached the crash site first,' one contracting firm wrote to AFRICOM in 2010, according to Whitlock. 'This could turn into a prisoner/hostage situation at worst, or at the least a serious foreign relations incident highly damaging to both AFRICOM and the U.S.'

If there's an alternative, it might not involve the Beechcrafts. There's a move in the Senate to urge the military to send drones to AFRICOM to aid the Kony hunt. If those crash, at least the military won't have to pretend not to know why Americans were spying on Africans.