Earlier this month we shared the story of Alec Bierbauer, the CIA operative who put Hellfire missiles on the Predator and ushered in the modern era of drone warfare. Today we travel further back in time to share the story of Abraham Karem, the man who invented Predator in the first place.
Karem saw the value in “remotely piloted vehicles” (RPVs), as they were then called, at a time when most viewed them as little more than novelties or expensive model airplanes. He left his homeland and risked his career to prove that drones were the future—and that they could be built reliably and effectively in his own day.
Karem was born in Iraq and emigrated to Israel as a young boy to escape escalating violence against Jews. A tinkerer and engineer from an early age, he graduated from Technion, Israel’s elite engineering school, and served ably in the Israeli Air Force. Then he made a name for himself as an aeronautical engineer, climbing the ladder at Israel Aerospace Industries to become the state-owned firm’s director of preliminary design.
In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Karem was approached by the air force with a vexing problem: Israel was suffering terrible losses of valuable planes and still-more-valuable pilots from Soviet-built surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries. The Egyptians and Syrians had created a sophisticated, multi-layered air-defense network that used long-range radar to detect incoming Israeli fighters; SAM batteries close to the front then activated their targeting radar, illuminated the target, fired, deactivated the radar, and got out of Dodge before Israel could counterstrike. This “shoot and scoot” strategy proved lethally effective. Israel lost more than 100 airplanes and 60 aviators in the Yom Kippur War.
Karem’s solution, cooked up during an all-nighter at the drafting board, was an unmanned, unpowered decoy that could be carried and released from under the wing of an Israeli fighter. This “drone,” if the primitive object deserved the name, could fly at speeds similar to a fighter and was studded with spherical reflectors to increase its radar signature. The idea was to fool the enemy into activating its targeting radars and firing on the drone—allowing Israel’s manned fighters to swoop in for the kill with anti-radiation missiles.
Higher-tech versions of this decoy proved useful on future battlefields, such as the “Bekaa Valley Turkey Shoot” of 1982, where Israel got payback for its losses a decade earlier. But by then, Karem was long gone. Unhappy with IAI’s overly bureaucratic culture, he quit to build his own company, with drones as the focus. And when the IDF proved a fickle customer, he emigrated again to a country he thought might be better prepared to appreciate his ideas.
That’s how, in 1980, Karem became yet another idealistic engineer running a startup out of his garage in California. His logic was impeccable, even though his vision was radical for its time. RPVs had distinct advantages over their manned brethren, in theory. They were lighter and didn’t have to waste valuable space on a cockpit and life-support system. They could also fly as long as their fuel lasted, unshackled to the physical and psychological needs of a pilot. Karem aimed to exploit these advantages to the maximum by creating an RPV that would serve as the ultimate high-endurance tool of reconnaissance.
The only problem is that no RPV of this type had ever been built before. As early as the First World War, armies had experimented with pilotless aircraft, both for reconnaissance and attack. Almost without exception, these primitive drones had been accident prone and unreliable. For instance, the Lightning Bug drones that the Air Force deployed over Vietnam had an average lifespan of four missions. Karem believed, however, drones could become as reliable as jetliners and fulfill missions outside of the niche corners they currently occupied.
He went to work on a prototype, named the Albatross, with a high-aspect-ratio wing and high fuel ratio for endurance, a satellite dish in the nose for navigation, and a go-kart motor and propellor for propulsion. Despite its inauspicious name, the Albatross quickly showed its potential, buzzing in circles for more than a day at a time without landing to refuel.
Karem’s garage project came onto DARPA’s radar, and the agency funneled money to his company for rapid prototyping through a third party. As the journalist Richard Whittle recounts, DARPA used this sleight of hand because it feared DoD auditors “would object to funding an aircraft developed in a garage.” (It seems Karem wasn’t the only heretic and hero involved in this story!)
In the years that followed, Karem worked and advocated relentlessly for his ungainly bird, which underwent many upgrades and a name change, to “Amber.” But despite an impressive track record, Karem was swimming against the tide of opinion about RPVs.
Another RPV, the Lockheed Aquila, was under fire from Congress due to its unreliability. The drone crashed often—and its range and endurance were nowhere near those of Karem’s creations. Ultimately the Aquila was the victim of a broken procurement process: the Army imposed endless requirements on the system, larding it up with unneeded equipment and compromising its performance.
But the damage was done, for Aquila and other RPVs. When Congress slashed the budget for RPVs in 1987, Amber was caught in the crossfire. Despite heroic efforts by Karem to find a mission and a buyer for his drone, his company ran out of money and went bankrupt in 1990. The six surviving Amber prototypes were mothballed in a government warehouse in the desert, like the Holy Grail in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It seemed for a while like Amber was a technology ahead of its time.
Karem’s inventions were rescued from oblivion by two other inventors, Neal and Linden Blue of General Atomics, who had been working in parallel on a drone they dubbed “the poor man’s cruise missile.” Their drone was primitive, so when they heard a more capable craft was on the market, they bought it on the cheap.
And so Amber was reborn, with a new owner and a more intimidating name: Predator. It had taken a decade, a failed business, and a move halfway around the world, but Abe Karem had built his drone.
The Predator proved his point on countless distant battlefields over the next 30 years.
Further Reading
Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle
“The Dronefather,” The Economist