It's About the Datalink, Stupid

In the remote shadows of today's global conflicts, it is increasingly all about the drone. But here's the thing: It's really not about the drone at all. It's not about the vehicle itself. It's about how well a drone can make sense of, exploit, and relay lots of information. It's about the datalink, stupid.

I'm borrowing a slogan adopted by James Poss, a retired Air Force major interviewed by Mark Bowden in an excellent long read from this month's Atlantic. Poss knows a thing or two about unmanned hunter-killer aircraft—he oversaw development of the Predator—and tells Bowden that he can't any longer stand general fascination with the Predator, say, with the look and contours of the drone proper.

He's got a point. Not a day goes by without the gadget press either shitting its pants or circlejerking over some slick new drone model. While this makes complete sense—"slow news day", or something—it's also pretty sad. Why? That slick new craft is a mere "conduit, an eye in the sky", Bowden writes. We've become obsessed with the eerie silhouette of the Predator or the Reaper, their Hellfire missile hung below on standby, even if it is just a means to an terrible end. The image of "the drone" is emblazoned in the collective conscious as the all-seeing, sometimes lethal eye. But what's an eyeball without a brain and a bunch of nerves? Blind.

Here's the rub: Drones are cut off from the back end, so to speak. They are cut off from myriad satellite links and data processors, and of course from a cadre of intel analysts and controllers perhaps thousands of miles removed from the drone. Drones are useless without all the good stuff downrange. In Air Force jargon, this is what's known as Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination, or PED, and is what Bowden says "makes the system remarkable". Forget all the attention placed on missiles, he continues: "[W]hat gives a drone its singular value is its ability to provide perpetual, relatively low-cost surveillance," to indefatigably gaze on a target for up to months at a stretch.

This data-package scooping generally takes three forms. Writes Bowden:

[Drones collect] straight visual; infrared (via a heat-sensing camera that can see through darkness and clouds); and what is called SIGINT (Signals Intelligence), gathered via electronic eavesdropping devices and other sensors.

You could spend days gwaking over imaging capabilities, LIDAR and freakishly precise pixel arrays and facial-recognition software and the rest of it. But the point is we're talking huge amounts of data here. So as you'd expect, it takes a lot of bandwidth and, perhaps ironically, manpower to pull needles from haystacks. This, Poss tells Bowden, is the biggest technical challenge, particularly video:

ESPN has all kinds of tools where they can go back and find Eli Manning in every video that was shot over the last year, and they can probably do it in 20 minutes. So how do we bring those types of tools [to intelligence work]? Okay, I want to find this red 1976 Chevy pickup truck in every piece of video that I have shot in this area for the last three months…

This accounts for a good deal of the research and development going on right now at the Defense Department. What tools will best allow you to find that red Chevy? Whatever they are, the datalink is the message. It's also an Achilles heel. The datalink is precisely what opens up the drone, the conduit, to hacks. "Its datalink can be disrupted, jammed, or hijacked," Bowden adds. "It’s only slightly harder to shoot down than a hot-air balloon."

In other words, we've got drones to thank for there being little threat, for now, of enemy dronings on US soil.

@thebanderson