He started clicking through slides, his pace reflecting the rapid advance of technology. “Development kept pace with every advance in aviation. Remote-control biplanes were tried in World War I, generally with disastrous results. Remote-control single-wing planes were tried in World War II, without much better luck. Joseph Kennedy, Jr., JFK’s older brother, was actually killed in a test flight of this program. Our enemy, the Germans, went a different route in an attempt to bring unmanned weapons to the skies: rocketry. Their success, and the success of rocketry in general, stalled drone development for many years.”
He put a new photo up, his first in color: a cigar-shaped missile with stubby wings and the word TOMAHAWK painted on the side. “As technology improved, the dream of unmanned aerial weapons took a new turn: cruise missiles. But these weren’t drones; they were weapons in and of themselves. They could be used once, and then they were destroyed along with, hopefully, their target. They couldn’t perform any other missions, like surveillance, and they could never return to base.”
New slide: a small, fragile-looking plane painted in desert camouflage. “Attitudes changed dramatically in 1982, when Israel deployed these, the Scout UAVs, with great success in their brief, triumphant war against Syria. While the Scout was unarmed, its use as both a decoy and for reconnaissance proved invaluable. For the first time, the drone had proved itself on the battlefield. The US military took notice.”
“Technology raced ahead,” said Pete. “Soon, it was obvious that drones could do nearly everything a manned plane could do. It could do many things better, like stay in the air for many hours and fly deep into harm’s way without risking an American pilot. The only thing holding back the wholesale deployment of drones were doctrinal conflicts, and squeamishness about the use of unmanned aircraft. It took another historical event to eradicate this squeamishness.”
He advanced the slides again, this time showing the World Trade Center, smoke pouring from both towers. “On September 11, 2001, all that changed. We had a new kind of enemy, and needed a new kind of weapon.” New slide: a new drone, bigger than the previous, and for the first time, it was holding on to a missile. It had odd, downward-facing tail fins, and a bulbous nose. It was immediately recognizable as an unmanned craft: there were no windows.
“This is the Predator,” said Pete. “On February 4, 2002, the Predator fired a Hellfire missile in the Paktia province of Afghanistan, near the city of Khost. It killed three men, the first time the CIA had ever used the Predator in a targeted strike. The modern era of drone warfare had begun.”
He flashed through a few slides, showing the rapid evolution that took place after the success of the Predator and its successor, the Reaper. Drones got larger, more heavily armed, and, critically, more automated. “Drones were no longer just an acceptable alternative,” he said. “They were a central part of military strategy and tactics.” Finally he showed a photo of the airfield at Eris Island, a thousand drones arranged in the sun.
“Modern drones, unlike the Predator, are completely autonomous. They use a complex algorithm to assess targets, and the viability of an attack. Bigger targets are more valuable than smaller targets. Faster targets are more valuable than slower targets. If a drone can’t kill a target by itself, it will gather help until a kill is assured. If it sees a viable target and can’t rearm in time, it will actually crash itself into it.”
He paused dramatically. “It is the Internet of weapons systems.” It was a metaphor he’d carefully chosen for this Stanford audience, at the place where so much of the actual Internet had been born. “It’s distributed all over the world. It’s survivable. If any one piece fails, the other pieces fall into place, making the system impossible to destroy.”
He showed a brief video clip of drones taking off and landing, ingesting new bombs in what even to Pete was the creepiest part of the entire cycle. That video stopped, replaced by an old black-and-white photo of a military ship. The long, flat deck gave it away as an aircraft carrier. Crosshairs marked the center of the ship: the photograph had been taken through a periscope.
“This,” said Pete, “is the Shinano. She weighed sixty-five thousand tons, and on November 29, 1944, she was sunk by the United States submarine Archerfish. Until recently, she was the biggest ship ever sunk by the United States Navy.”
The old imperial carrier disappeared and was replaced by modern video of a container ship — a giant one. She was cruising across a featureless ocean, unaware of what was about to happen to her, or that her death would be shown to a roomful of college students.
“This is the Taymal,” he said. “A container ship of the type I am sure you recognize. This is an enemy ship, fully laden with enemy cargo bound for an enemy port. Seven hundred and forty thousand tons in all, with about thirteen thousand containers. One side effect of our campaign is that nearly every enemy merchant ship is full, because their fleet is so depleted.”
This film, unlike the ubiquitous war porn they’d all gotten used to on the news channels, was not filmed from a nose camera onboard a drone. Rather it was filmed by a surveillance plane far above the battle that happened to be tracking the progress of the Taymal when the drones showed up, a fortunate accident. So, far more clearly than normal, they could see the full deadly formation of the drones as they arrived at a lower altitude, ready to attack. It was spectacular footage, and Hamlin had been saving it for an occasion like this.
Soon after the lead drone came into the frame, there were quick flashes of light as the first bombs dropped. A few of the neatly stacked containers were knocked askew. Another bomb exploded, and a container fell overboard with a large silent splash.
The ship made a panicked turn to starboard, but evasion was impossible. The drones that had dropped their payloads peeled off to reload and alert their brothers, and soon the sky was filled with drones, each dropping bombs with killer precision. A fire broke out in the forward part of the ship and spread rapidly aft as a fuel tank was penetrated.
Suddenly, men could be seen scurrying around the deck, trying to control the damage. Pete heard the audience gasp. Up to that point, it had just looked like machines versus machines. Even though he’d watched the clip a hundred times, Pete hadn’t noticed the crewmen before, too small to be noticeable on his computer screen, but here, expanded on the auditorium’s giant screen, they were impossible to ignore. Their movements were panicked, and at the same time, valiant. They were scurrying around trying to save the ship, themselves, each other. One man, in flames, fell into the sea.
The Taymal slowed and stopped, and began to sink. It listed severely to port, causing more of its containers to tumble overboard. The crewmen continued running around, fighting until the end, even though it must have, at that point, seemed as inevitable to them as it did to the audience in the thickly cushioned chairs of Memorial Auditorium. They were doomed.
Soon the Taymal was halfway under, then completely submerged. A dozen stubborn containers bobbed upon the sea, but these, too, were bombed by the drones until no trace of the ship, cargo, or crew remained.
The lights came back on as the video ended, and Pete looked out at the shocked crowd. He cleared his throat.
“Eight minutes,” he said. When he’d practiced the speech, without noticing the tiny men onboard the Taymal, this phrase had sounded so much more triumphant. “Eight minutes was all it took to sink one of the world’s largest cargo ships. Without risking a single American life.”