Up in the Sky, An Unblinking Eye

Typically, though, after the war ended, the drone was nearly grounded by military bureaucracy and service parochialism. ICBMs were supplanting B-52s in the cold-war arsenal, and the rest of the Air Force never warmed to the concept of unmanned vehicles, preferring to keep a "man in the loop"—and ensure flying time for aviators. The Army plunged into procurement hell, developing a drone with so many bells and whistles that it barely got off the ground. Ill conceived from the start, the Aquila needed hundreds of tons of backup equipment, which required an hour to set up or take down. Crashing every 20 hours or so, its costs climbing to $3 million a copy, the Aquila was canceled in 1987 after burning through $1 billion.

While the Americans fussed and dithered, the Israelis moved quickly to develop cheap and reliable drones. The impetus was, as usual, the exigencies of combat—Israel was flummoxed by Egypt's Soviet-built air defenses in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Helped, in part, by studying the design of an American-made drone that crashed and washed up on its shores, Israel developed a topflight secret drone program. President Reagan's Secretary of the Navy John Lehman and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. P. X. Kelley were the first to discover how far the Israelis had progressed. On visits to Israel in the mid-'80s, Lehman was allowed to pilot a drone, and Kelley was presented with a kind of home video of his trip, shot by a circling drone.

Impressed, Lehman bypassed regulations to acquire Israeli drones called Pioneers to fly off ships and help them direct their guns. Noisy as a lawn mower, the Pioneer was scarily effective in the 1991 gulf war, when Iraqi soldiers learned to fear the barrage of missiles that would quickly follow its buzz. One Pioneer shot footage of a squadron of Iraqi soldiers waving their shirts in the air, likely the first unit ever to surrender to a drone.

When fighting in the Balkans broke out in the early 1990s, Jim Woolsey, director of the CIA, was in a jam. He did not have many (if any) spies on the ground. Desperate for imagery from Bosnia, he asked the Air Force what it would take to get a drone for the spooks. The answer, he recalls, was "six years and $500 million." Then Woolsey remembered a secret UAV project run out of the Pentagon's civilian Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency using the design skills of a brilliant Israeli expat named Abe Karem. Woolsey tracked down Karem in California. Karem told him his craft, code-named Amber, had been cut from the budget by the Army in 1990 and was now lying in pieces in a California warehouse. What would it take, Woolsey asked, to get it flying again? "Six months and $5 million," he recalls Karem's saying. (Karem says the story is a bit more complicated, but Woolsey's version is essentially correct.) The stripped-down craft that emerged was called the Gnat. Woolsey was so pleased by the videos it took that he arranged to have them piped back to a TV set in his office in Langley, Va. He would amaze congressmen with private showings. (Among the lawmakers who enthusiastically backed the Gnat was Charlie Wilson, the character played by Tom Hanks in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War.") The drone was back in business. In the late 1990s the Gnat evolved into the Predator, a drone that could not only take pictures but fire missiles.

Even that didn't happen overnight. For years the CIA and Air Force squabbled over control and funding of the project, missing the chance to use a Predator as an offensive weapon against terrorists in hiding. A crucial advocate for the project was Gen. John Jumper, who was commander of U.S. air forces in Europe during the Kosovo conflict. He was exasperated that the early Predators didn't have GPS. (Jumper is recalled by a colleague remarking about a recon photo of a Serbian tank hiding in a forest: "That's a very nice tank. Where the f––– is it?") When Jumper returned to the United States to run Air Combat Command in 2000, he made a new push to get a weapon under the Predator's wings.

The only missile small enough for the task was the Hellfire, an Army antitank weapon. But the missile was designed to fire over trees, so its initial trajectory was upward; it had to be rejiggered to shoot down. Later it was found that the warhead wasn't powerful enough. (In one instance, recalled by the then Air Force Secretary James Roche, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanded to know why after-action video showed Qaeda militants staggering alive out of a supposedly demolished bunker.) Because the weapon was designed to cripple tanks, it had a very focused blast. So designers added a sleeve around the warhead that would fragment upon detonation into thousands of flying razor blades. The first operational target for the new weapon was a Qaeda operative in Yemen, riding with five colleagues in an SUV on Nov. 5, 2003. After-action video showed that the only identifiable item in the remains of the blast was the vehicle's oil pan.