Alec Bierbauer, The Man Who Armed Robots
The Hellfire-equipped Predator was as much a bureaucratic victory as it was a technical one
When Al Qaeda hijacked commercial jetliners and slammed them into the Twin Towers and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, they demonstrated how fanatical terrorists can use technology in unconventional ways to further their evil designs.
But the good guys can play that game, too. Less than a month after 9/11, a U.S. drone piloted from a double-wide trailer in northern Virginia fired a Hellfire missile into a group of terrorists six-thousand miles away in Afghanistan.
This was righteous payback and the beginning of a new era of warfare. It happened thanks to an unlikely bird of prey known as the MQ-1 Predator, a small team of Airmen and CIA spooks, and one young case officer in particular: Alec Bierbauer. Perhaps more than anyone, Bierbauer ushered in the era of drone warfare.
The CIA, in particular the Bin Laden Issue Station to which Bierbauer belonged, had been on the terrorist’s trail for years before 9/11. When the Millennium turned, Bin Laden was already the most wanted man on Earth. His hands were drenched in American blood, from Al Qaeda bomb attacks on the World Trade Center, the USS Cole, and U.S. embassies and military bases overseas. But he was elusive as a shadow, flitting between terrorist camps in the most remote corners of the world.
In January 2000, frustrated with the slow pace of progress and with an election looming, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger tasked the Intelligence Community with a seemingly impossible task: shake up your methods and find Bin Laden—in nine months. That political football fell in a lot of people’s laps. Ultimately, far down the chain of command, it fell into Bierbauer’s. He took it and ran.
The first challenge he faced was daunting enough: how to get eyes over Afghanistan, a landlocked country on the far side of the world, surrounded mostly by countries unfriendly to the United States? Human sources were unreliable. Signals intelligence was sparse, in a country little removed from the Stone Age. Satellites were an option, but they moved in fixed orbits that limited their versatility and could be defeated by a savvy enemy that knew the schedule. Manned aircraft were off limits, politically.
Bierbauer’s solution was seductively simple: “If we can’t send a pilot into harm’s way, can we just send the plane?” That brainwave led Bin Laden’s hunters to the Predator.
The Predator drone was an ISR platform that traded speed for endurance. Its tiny engine and propellor invited comparisons to lawnmowers and golf carts, but it could loiter over a target for more than a day, streaming video and infrared to its operator via the sophisticated sensor ball in its nose.
Predator had been invented by a legendary Israeli aerospace engineer, Abraham Karem, and adopted by General Atomics. It had then been fast-tracked into service as an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration, circumventing DoD’s standard, glacial procurement process and shaving the time from first contract award to first test flight to just six months. Predator felt the need for speed. Thank goodness it did.
To that point, the military had only used Predator in limited surveillance roles in the Balkans—always within easy flying distance of its operator. Bierbauer and company now proposed to radically expand Predator’s capabilities, so it could fly and send live video to an operator literally on the other side of the planet.
This feat required a tremendous technical and logistical operation—a kind of digital D-Day. The artificial, nine-month deadline made matters even hairier.
But the operational scheme came together. Predator would fly into Afghanistan from a secret ground base in a partner country, maintained by a CIA skeleton crew. It was piloted from a glorified, high-tech trailer on the other side of the world: first at Ramstein Air Base in Germany and then in CIA’s backyard in Langley. The drone and its outposts were connected by a data link worthy of MacGyver, bouncing off a satellite and then zipping through an undersea cable.
To bring these pieces together, Bierbauer’s team had to wage a guerilla war against the bureaucracy. As Bierbauer’s Air Force partner in crime, Mark Cooter, put it, “It was the endless battle, Agency versus the DOD, ops versus intel. We just needed shit to work.” So they forced it to work.
There were few satellite antennae large enough for the mission, so they “purloined” one from their base. The Air Force and CIA’s top-secret networks wouldn’t talk to each other, so they created their own high-side network, with a patchwork of access privileges worthy of Dr. Frankenstein.
Thanks to hustle and unorthodox tactics like these, Predator embarked on its first mission into Afghan airspace in September 2000. Seven missions later, in an almost unbelievable stroke of fortune and good intel-gathering, Predator ended up directly over Osama Bin Laden at a known terrorist compound known as Tarnak Farms. Far overhead, the Predator streamed the first live images of the “man in white” the IC had seen in years.
This could’ve been the moment of reckoning for Bin Laden. Instead, it turned into one of the great shots not taken in the War on Terror. The decision was made, above their heads, not to launch a Tomahawk strike against the compound because of the uncertainty and risk of collateral damage. Alec and his team could do little more than watch while the most notorious terrorist on earth plotted attacks beneath them.
Heartburn over this incident led to the second heretical evolution in the Predator’s mission in Afghanistan. The Air Force had long toyed with the idea of putting weapons on a drone. Alec and his team helped to turn that idea into reality.
Strapping a missile to a drone may seem elementary. It is anything but. The Predator could only carry about 100 pounds under each of its wings, so first a suitable weapon had to be found. The 105-pound Hellfire, an anti-armor missile initially intended for helicopters, fit the bill. Then the drone’s wings had to be redesigned with hard points and tested so they wouldn’t rip off on launch. Eventually, the weapon itself had to be improved so it was better suited for soft targets and un-armored vehicles, like the pickup trucks terrorists favored. The Predator team eventually came up with a jerry-rigged solution: a heavy-metal, diamond-etched sleeve that encased the missile and fragmented into thousands of white-hot fragments on impact, in effect turning the shaped-charge weapon into a massive hand grenade.
Normally, this kind of modification would’ve required months or years of trials to ensure its reliability and safety. But they exploited a loophole, arguing that the testing requirements were only necessary for piloted platforms. No pilot, no risk—and no need for delay. The requirements were waived, and Hellfire got its upgrade in six weeks.
A year and a half of hard work and shortcuts paid off in the months after September 11, when America declared Game On and restrictive rules of engagement came off. Predator was ready to hunt and kill.
The platform would go on to transform the military. The Predator drone flew more than 2 million combat hours in the Global War on Terror. It spawned more sophisticated and capable successors like the MQ-9 Reaper, which has 10x the power and payload, as well as a constellation of smaller cousins, like the quadcopters delivering hand grenades over Ukraine today. And it changed the nature of the Air Force itself, which now trains more drone operators than pilots.
Alec Bierbauer and the rest of the Predator team saw the immense possibilities of the drone. They reached into the future and delivered an incredible platform for their country, decades ahead of schedule.
Further Reading
Never Mind, We’ll Do It Ourselves by Alec Bierbauer and Col. Mark Cooter, USAF (Ret.), with Michael Marks
Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle