Up in the Sky, An Unblinking Eye

"The whole art of war consists of getting at what is on the other side of the hill," said the Duke of Wellington, conqueror of Napoleon at Waterloo. In the murky kind of fight that marks modern warfare against terrorists and guerrillas, knowing what's on the other side of the hill—or inside a building—takes on a whole new urgency and meaning. Lt. Col. Scott Williams, who leads a unit of Apache helicopters in Baghdad, is in the business of "servicing" targets, by which he means anything from blowing up a building with a Hellfire missile to helping local police make arrests. He must know when to shoot—and when not to.

Williams recently spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter after leading an airborne foray into Sadr City, where a drone—a pilotless craft generically known as a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)—had found a rocket emplacement and transmitted images back to the ground commander. Insurgents had attacked the Green Zone with rockets from the site and retreated into a nearby apartment block. Williams and his fellow Apache pilots swooped in for the kill, but pulled back. The UAV—known as a Shadow—had spotted children going in and out of the building. "We knew the bad guys were there," Williams said. "We saw them walk in and out, we saw them place the [missiles] … We could have serviced that building and we probably could have killed four or five of the guys that were involved in it.

But the decision was made at the command level—because of the women and children who were potentially in that building—not to service the target." Instead, the Apaches took out the rocket-launch site and a few of the men around it.

In the kind of counterinsurgency struggle fought in Iraq and in troubled places around the globe, winning hearts and minds is more important than body counts. There is no technological silver bullet that will help America win these wars. But in the cat-and-mouse game played by insurgents who mix freely with civilians, the ability to loiter over a target, to watch closely with cameras before the bombs begin to fall, is crucial. American forces call this "persistent stare capability" or "the unblinking eye"—and only drones have it.

The UAV is the "smart bomb" of the Iraq War, the latest turn in the unending offense-defense spiral that characterizes the history of warfare. Army units searching and fighting house-to-house are using hundreds of drones, some of them as small as a model airplane (the Raven), to track enemy movements. Patrols regularly use them to scout out the route ahead. Commanders position them over well-traveled roads to keep an eye out for insurgents planting IEDs—a task once performed by soldiers sitting in their Humvees for hours on end. The Army is even working on drones that can detect IEDs by seeing where the earth has been recently disturbed. Army drones alone flew more than 46,450 hours in March.

In complicated urban street fights like the recent battles to pacify Sadr City, UAVs have even taken the lead, seeking out targets so that U.S. troops didn't have to enter the area. They're the sharp end of a vast and invisible infrastructure, involving satellites and GPS and communications channels able to handle gigabytes of information every second—a network that only the U.S. military possesses. Images from a drone can be relayed instantly to a laptop with the ground unit, a command center located miles away, and (for birds like the Predator) to imagery analysts as far away as Germany or Nevada. Sometimes Apache pilots like Williams are called in to strike; other times the American gunners and bombardiers who carry out the hits are thousands of miles away, safe from rocket fire.