NATO Just Spent $1.7 Billion On Five Giant Spy Drones

Well, the joke's on you if recent video of an unmanned aircraft allegedly spotted 40 miles outside Chicago had you fooled. The clip shows something resembling a Predator drone screaming across overcast suburban skies. And while that may not be an uncommon sight in the near future – the FAA is now greenlighting domestic civilian drones – the brief YouTube hit is probably just a hoax.

But even if spoofed, what's eerily wacked, here, in the cold, hard, automatonic sense, is that user 'MisterBees' couldn't possibly have known (right?) he was upping the video with damn near impeccable timing: Mere days later a gaggle of defense ministers, alongside the head of Northrop Grumman and officials from various European defense-tech companies, would ink a deal at the 25th NATO summit in Chicago to add five hulking spy drones to the alliance's sprawling surveillance and intelligence network.

This bit of wheel-'n-deal wasn't even the first order of business at NATO 2012. (Declaring that intercontinental missile defense system operational? Way, way more pressing.) But it's shortsighted to not look at Sunday's drone deal as a sort of flashpoint in the threaded narratives of wired warfare and perpetual intelligence trolling. Reuters reports that the contract not only netted Northrop a cool $1.7 billion, but actually kickstarts NATO's Alliance Ground Surveillance system.

The AGS is not new. Established in late 2009, the “Eyes in the Sky for Boots on the Ground” was borne of a need to “look at what’s happening on the earth’s surface”. The idea was — and still is — to chuck some drones up into the air, and to have these unmanned aircraft work in tandem with mobile ground stations to provide mission-tailored “situational awareness” before, during, and after NATO ops. All good. NATO just needed some high-altitude, long-endurance drones to pull it off.

It needed three Northrop Block 40 Global Hawk planes, to be exact. No, five. Yeah, definitely five. “Ongoing discussions,” Northrop Chief Executive and Chairman Wes Bush told Reuters, made it clear that an extra pair of the Block 40’s — these things have 130 foot wingspans, 8,700 nautical mile ranges, and 28-plus hour endurances — would “provide the optimal capability.” But Sunday’s contract doesn’t stop there. A surveillance drone isn’t worth a damn without eyes that can pierce stone. So to each of NATO’s five new drones Northrop will strap the Multi-Platform Radar Technology Insertion Program, a leading-edge ground surveillance radar that tracks moving targets and provides radar imagery of “target locations and stationary objects,” according to Reuters.

In a somewhat telling move, all unsexy work developing AGS’ transportable ground bases — the stations from which drones literally run out of, to where loads of real-time data and reconnaissance pour in from far beyond line-of-sight — has been contracted to a dozen or so European funder-companies whose leaders stood shoulder to shoulder in Chicago with Northrop’s Bush and the military brass of 28 NATO states.

So not to pick on just these four, or anything, but joke’s on you, Cassidian, Bianor, Selex Galileo and Kongsberg, and ComTrade d.o.o.

It sounds like a lot, because it is. AGS won’t be fully operational until 2017.

In the meantime, 14 countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the United States) will fund the new drone deal, according to a White House fact sheet. All 28 member nations are expected to chip in to long-term AGS upkeep, though. It’s this shared responsibility that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says maintains maximum, world-encompassing vigilance, the importance of which was writ large during the Arab Spring. "During our operation to protect the people of Libya," Rasmussen told reporters following Sunday’s North Atlantic Council session, “we learned how important it is to have the best possible intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. So we realized that we need more of this capability. We are now filling that gap.”

Which is it, right there. Did MisterBees maybe pull a fast one to try and force the drone hawks to slow down a bit? There’s no telling. But if indeed a hoax, his video could certainly be read that way: Should we be filling that gap? If so, how fast? And with what? And for what?

The United States, for its part, would likely answer ‘yes,’ ‘quickly,’ ‘with more and more drones, baby’ and, just maybe, ‘for oil.’ Guess who the U.S. said just this morning, less than 24 hours after the great NATO-Northrop drone deal, is all set to start buying American drones to patrol precious Middle East oil platforms? Iraq.

Joke’s on you, NATO.

• The Highs and Lows of Being Watched
• American Drones Go Gray
• The Drone Motherboard

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson