Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn Read Free Book Online

jungle, the last sensors went on faithfully broadcasting sounds, movements, and smells that no one would hear, until their batteries ran down. Once the last raid on Laos had flown home—an average of one planeload of bombs had landed on that country every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, for nine years—the surviving So Tri emerged from the hidden dugouts where they had waited out the cataclysm and returned to rebuild their ruined villages amid the countless craters. They did not teach their children about the war.
    Among the items shipped home from the giant base on the banks of the Mekong was a tape recording. For years afterward it was a highlight at Christmas parties on air force fighter bases across the country, featuring as it did the unmistakable sound of someone out on the Ho Chi Minh Trail standing over an acoustic sensor and subjecting it to a long and leisurely piss.
    Given that the roughly $6 billion spent on the barrier overall (no one could ever agree on the exact total) had failed to achieve its purpose, that tape might have served as the final epitaph for the dream of war by remote control. But such was not the case. Its best days were yet to come.

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    TURNING PEOPLE INTO NODES
    “Don’t knock the war that feeds you” read a sign on the wall of a Lockheed plant in California in the late 1960s. The bitter struggle in Southeast Asia may have killed millions of people, including 58,000 Americans, but it had been very good for business. It therefore stood to reason that with the outbreak of peace and the withdrawal of the huge U.S. expeditionary force from Vietnam, Pentagon weapons spending would inevitably decline. But that was not what happened. Money authorized for buying weapons and developing new ones ballooned from $26 billion in 1975, as the last shots were fired in Indochina, to $40 billion three years later. Defense-industry profits marched in tandem. In 1976, McDonnell Douglas, then the largest contractor, announced that its profits had grown 75 percent in a year.
    The inspiration for the rearmament drive no longer came from third world peasants lurking under the jungle canopy but from something more ominous: the enormous forces of the mighty Soviet Union, supposedly ready, able, and eager to confront the United States across the globe. Intelligence reappraisals of Soviet intentions and capabilities smoothed the way for a readjustment of U.S. defense priorities. In this scenario, the specter of a Soviet blitzkrieg smashing into outnumbered NATO forces in central Europe occupied a central role. The Fulda Gap in the mountains of central Germany, the presumed route of a Soviet invasion, may have been a long way from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but the dream of remote-controlled warfare, which inevitably led to the drone strikes of the twenty-first century, never died. Five years after closing Task Force Alpha, the Pentagon began planning another electronic barrier.
    The project was publicly justified by the assumption that Soviet forces vastly outnumbered NATO defenders, whose only hope supposedly lay in “force-multiplier” high-technology weapons. The military bookkeeping was in truth highly suspect: readily available evidence showed that the numbers were almost even, while Soviet troop and weapons quality was far inferior. Nevertheless the defense lobby effortlessly ignored such discordant notes right up until the day that the USSR finally crumbled, laying bare the sorry state of its vaunted military.
    The new barrier fostered by the Pentagon’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in conjunction with the air force and army, was called Assault Breaker. There were no carpets of sensors strewn among the trees this time, but the basic idea was faithful to General Westmoreland’s promise in 1969 of “surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy” and “first round kill probabilities approaching certainty.” Instead of the sensors, airborne radar would peer far behind