Isegoria

Ever since radios have been used in warfare, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), there have been efforts to interfere with them:

Britain’s Royal Navy experimented with broadcasting signals to interfere with enemy communication as far back as 1902, just five years after the first radios were installed on ships. By WWI, the use of radio was more sophisticated, and so were countermeasures. The German Zeppelins used fixes from radio stations to navigate; so on the night of 19 October 1917, the French switched radio broadcasts from the Eiffel Tower to another station to send the airships off course. When the Germans started using their own transmitters for navigation, the Allies drowned these out with louder transmissions on the same wavelength, possibly the first attempt to deliberately jam radio reception.

[…]

The first radio-guided weapon to see action was the German FS-1400 or Fritz-X developed in WWII. This was a three-thousand-pound glide bomb designed to attack heavily armored battleships and cruisers. It was a simple bomb fitted with small fins worked by radio control. A flare on the tail of the bomb allowed the bomb aimer to follow its progress and adjust its course with simple up-down, left-right corrections.

[…]

The Allies captured Fritz-X missiles and control equipment, and had developed effective countermeasures within a matter of months.

The British Type 650 Transmitter, and jammers from the US Naval Research Laboratory and Harvard’s Radio Research Laboratory, nullified the Fritz-X. The jammer steered the bomb as far over in one direction as possible, overriding the operator’s commands. From being a guaranteed hit, it became a guaranteed miss. The Germans dropped the idea of radio guidance, and the next version of the Fritz-X was guided via a wire spooling out of the back of the missile.

[…]

At its simplest, jamming may simply mean broadcasting noise in the frequency band that the receiver is operating in. This sort of brute force jamming is rare in military circles, where communications tend to hop from one frequency to another at rapid intervals, and it is difficult to jam the entire spectrum with enough power. Smart jammers detect and analyze an opponent’s communications and can selectively jam only in the ranges where needed. Jammers are also likely to be directional, rather than blasting out noise in all directions.

In the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, tactical jamming took on a new urgency. Insurgents had started triggering bombs using cheap cell phones. Special countermeasures were fielded to block the signals; the Pentagon spent some $17 billion on electronic countermeasures with some fifty thousand jamming units being issued. These included portable Warlock Green units for foot soldiers, which are credited with saving many lives.

[…]

It is notable that the 2014 Black Dart exercise included an EA-18 Growler, the most modern electronic warfare aircraft in the Air Force’s inventory, equipped with a range of powerful jammers. When the radio signal to a drone is jammed, it is usually programmed to return to the last point where it could communicate or simply return to base.

[…]

There is a growing interest in free-space optical communications, sometimes described as “like broadband over optical fiber, but without the fiber.” The laser signal is beamed through the air to the receiver. This method only works over line of sight (obviously enough) and, because of atmospheric effects, the range tends to be limited to a mile or so. It can carry as much data as a broadband fiber optic cable and would be ideal for a swarm of drones forming a mesh network. Because it does not rely on radio waves, optical communication cannot be jammed or hacked into.

In a more low-tech version of optical communication, researchers at the Postgraduate Naval Center in Monterey have looked at communicating via QR codes as a form of “digital semaphore.”

[…]

The team found that QR codes could be read from over five hundred feet away. A swarm could pass messages between members to coordinate its actions.

[…]

An artillery shell is out of control as soon as it leaves the barrel, as is a heat-seeking missile when it leaves the rails. Some missiles, designed to target air defense radar, already pick their own targets. The distinction between controlled and uncontrolled is subtler than you might expect.

[…]

If blocking communications does not work, we can try another weak point, navigation. A human pilot has many ways of finding their way around, but most drones only have GPS. The power of the Global Positioning System’s signal has been compared to a car headlight over ten thousand miles away, making it an easy signal to jam.

However, anti-jamming measures are getting better. Raytheon has developed a sophisticated anti-jam device for GPS called Landshield built around a controlled pattern reception antenna. This has an array of receiving elements that combine to cancel out the jamming from any given direction. When a jamming signal is detected, the array automatically nulls it out. It is like looking through a cardboard tube so you can see a faint light in the distance without being dazzled by lights nearby.

Raytheon’s previous generation of anti-jam GPS was the Advanced Digital Antenna Platform, which weighed about ten pounds and was the size of a telephone directory. The new Landshield fits on a silicon chip and may be integrated with military GPS devices, from portable units used by individual soldiers to the GPS-guided Paveway bomb and, of course, drones.

[…]

On Monday, 22 January 2007, an electronic warfare exercise being carried out in San Diego harbor accidentally jammed GPS signals across the city. Disruption started almost immediately. The emergency paging system at a hospital stopped functioning. The automated harbor traffic management system stopped working, threatening to throw the port into chaos. Air traffic control at San Diego airport reported problems with their system for tracking incoming aircraft. Some bank ATMs reportedly stopped giving out money.

The reason for this disruption is that many modern systems use the precision time signal from GPS satellites. In some cell phone networks the signal is used to give each mast a unique identity; if it is lost, the mast drops off the network. GPS timing signals time-stamp financial transactions to prevent fraud, and this may be why the cash machines stopped working. Power utilities use the GPS time signal to keep alternating current from different power plants in phase across the grid. If this is lost, then attempts to switch power supplies to channel power to where it is needed become inefficient as the out-of-phase currents clash. This may ultimately produce blackouts.

GPS jamming looks more like a weapon for a swarm attacking an urban target rather than as a way of stopping a swarm.

This vulnerability is one reason why alternatives to GPS are a hot topic. One such is the system developed by Australian company Locata. This uses a network of ground-based ‘pseudo-satellites’ which give a more accurate fix and would require vastly more powerful jammers to block.

[…]

You can already navigate urban areas without GPS thanks to Wi-Fi. Each Wi-Fi hotspot has its own fingerprint, including a Service Set ID and Media Access Control address, and transmits them continuously. Service providers including Google and Navizon map out the location of each node; by identifying those closest to you, you can pinpoint your location within less than a hundred feet.

Other researchers are navigating using “signals of opportunity,” including not only Wi-Fi but cell phone signals, radio and television transmitters, and other sources of radio waves. These may not be as accurate as GPS, but they can be used indoors as well as out, and cannot be stopped except by jamming absolutely everything.

[…]

Tomahawk cruise missiles were originally equipped with terrain-matching radar to compare the scenery with an electronic landscape map to determine their location. The difference now is that every smartphone has the storage and processing power to scan the scenery and find out where it is.

Ukraine has a network of almost 10,000 acoustic sensors scattered around the country that locate Russian drones and send targeting information to soldiers in the field who gun them down:

Dubbed “Sky Fortress,” the concept was developed by two Ukrainian engineers in a garage who put a microphone and a cell phone on a six-foot pole to listen for one-way UAVs, said Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa.

“They put about 9,500 of these within their nation and now they get very accurate information that is synthesized in a central computer and sent out to mobile fire teams. And on an iPad, they get a route of flight of these one-way UAVs coming in, and they have a triple-A [anti-aircraft] gun and a person with six hours of training can shoot these down,” Hecker told reporters at the Royal International Air Tattoo on Saturday.

About three months ago, Russia sent a salvo of 84 UAVs into Ukraine, and the system helped the defending troops shoot down all but four, Hecker said.

The system was so effective that the engineers behind the system were invited to demo it at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Hecker said. Other countries are looking at acoustic sensors, he added, noting that Romania recently did a demo with the system.

Each sensor costs about $400 to $500, he said, which suggests that the entire network costs less than a pair of Patriot air-defense missiles.

On April 25, 1962, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the “Oxcart” was ready, and it was time for Lockheed test pilot Louis Schalk to suit up:

Two physiological support division officers helped Schalk into a flight suit, which looked like a coverall. There was no need for a pressure suit because today Schalk was only going to make a taxi test. Out on the tarmac, an engineer rolled up a metal set of stairs and Schalk climbed up into the strange-looking aircraft.

[…]

Lou Schalk fired up the engines and began rolling down the runway for the taxi test. To everyone’s surprise, including Lou Schalk’s, the aircraft unexpectedly got lift. Given the enormous engine power, the aircraft suddenly started flying—lifting up just twenty feet off the ground. Stunned and horrified, Kelly Johnson watched from the control tower. “The aircraft began wobbling,” Johnson wrote in his notes, which “set up lateral oscillations which were horrible to see.” Johnson feared the airplane might crash before its first official flight. Schalk was equally surprised and decided not to try to circle around. Instead he set the plane down as quickly as he could. This meant landing in the dry lake bed, nearly two miles beyond where the runway ended. When it hit the earth, the aircraft sent up a huge cloud of dust, obscuring it from view. Schalk turned the plane around and drove back toward the control towers, still engulfed in a cloud of dust and dirt. When he got back, the Lockheed engineers ran up to the airplane on the metal rack of stairs. Kelly Johnson had only four words for Schalk: “What in Hell, Lou?” For about fifteen very tense minutes, Johnson had thought Lou Schalk had wrecked the CIA’s only Oxcart spy plane.

The following day, Schalk flew again, this time with Kelly Johnson’s blessings but still not as an official first flight. Harry Martin was standing on the tarmac when the aircraft took off. “It was beautiful. Remarkable. Just watching it took your breath away,” Martin recalls. “I remember thinking, This is cool. And then, all of a sudden, as Schalk rose up in the air, pieces of the airplane started to fall off!” The engineers standing next to Martin panicked. Harry Martin thought for sure the airplane was going to crash. But Lou Schalk kept flying. The pieces of the airplane were thin slices of the titanium fuselage, called fillets. Their sudden absence did not affect low-altitude flight. Schalk flew for forty minutes and returned to Area 51. It was mission accomplished for Schalk but not for the engineers. They spent the next four days roaming around Groom Lake attempting to locate and reattach the pieces of the plane. Still, it was a milestone for the CIA. Three years, ten months, and seven days had passed since Kelly Johnson first presented his plans for a Mach 3 spy plane to Richard Bissell, and here was the Oxcart, finally ready for its first official flight.

[…]

Schalk traveled up to thirty thousand feet, flew around in the restricted airspace for fifty-nine minutes, and came back down. His top speed was four hundred miles per hour.

Some types of radar may be powerful enough to qualify as microwave weapons, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers:

The latest upgrade to the Active Electronic Steered Array (AESA) radar on the F-22 and F-15 fighters, known as APG-63(V)2, is said to be powerful enough to damage the guidance electronics on incoming cruise missiles at close range. This might be a better way for a fighter to tackle drones, as it has an unlimited supply of ammunition and can zap them one after the other.

[…]

It is possible to shield electronics against EMP by placing them inside a conducting “Faraday cage” and ensuring that any external receivers such as antenna are protected. This is easier with a small device, such as the control system for a small drone, than a large one. In addition, the dispersed nature of the swarm means the geometry of the attack will only be favorable for some of them, and much of the swarm is likely to survive a single pulse.

In November 1973, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), the USAF shot down a hapless drone with a carbon-dioxide gas dynamic laser:

Mobile laser weapons are currently in the range of tens of kilowatts. Unlike earlier lasers powered by chemical reactions, they are electric, so can keep firing for as long as they have power, giving them an effectively unlimited magazine. They are not powerful enough to burn through armor but are capable of destroying missiles or small drones.

The great thing about lasers versus small drones is that the cost-per-shot is so low. Shooting down a $1,000 drone with a $5,000 missile is not a winning strategy. A $1 burst of precisely-guided laser energy makes much more sense. Also, the laser does not have a limited ammunition supply, but can keep firing as long as the generator has fuel. In principle, it can keep firing for as long as the drones keep coming, though lasers still tend to overheat after a while.

[…]

Even if it does not destroy the drone outright or cause it to crash, the laser will burn out optics and damage sensitive control surfaces or other components.

[…]

Although the laser may have a range of a mile or more, as soon as it is spotted or starts firing, the drone swarm is likely to drop low and hug the ground for cover, limiting the laser’s effective range to a few hundred yards at best.

[…]

If it starts at a few hundred meters, it will be less than ten seconds before the drones are at point-blank range.

[…]

High-energy lasers operate on a single wavelength, so anything that reflects or absorbs that particular wavelength may reduce its effectiveness. The laser defense may be defeated by something as simple a mirrored nosecone, although this is not nearly as easy as it sounds. The reflective surface has to be tailored to the type of laser it is facing.

[…]

Laser protection does not need to be absolute. Protection that means that each drone takes several seconds rather than one second to destroy will guarantee success for the swarm.

While a hovering drone a few tens of feet away is an easy target, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), one approaching at a hundred miles an hour is virtually impossible to hit:

Hunters have difficulty hitting flying geese at more than about eighty yards, even with the spread of shot from a shotgun. Hitting one with a rifle is harder and putting a bullet through the Kevlar wing of a drone may only make it wobble. Unlike a goose or an airplane with “wet wings” containing fuel, a drone can only be seriously damaged by hitting a vital part.

A lethal drone like Switchblade will cover that last eighty yards to the target in around two seconds and its body presents a target four inches across. It can fly at low altitude, putting it below the horizon and making it difficult to see against a cluttered background. It can attack in complete darkness, and as it was seen in the section on swarming hunters, drones will come in from several directions at once. Some may even come from vertically above the target.

[…]

Before [World War 2], it was estimated that [anti-aircraft] guns would score one hit for every two hundred rounds. In reality it took closer to twenty thousand. A shell takes ten seconds or more to reach its target at high altitude, in which time a WWII bomber will have travelled about fifty times its own length. The slightest mis-estimation of range or speed means the shell has no chance of hitting. Anti-aircraft batteries fired a curtain of shells into the path of oncoming bomber formations rather than aiming individually. The mass of shell bursts did at least act as a deterrent.

[…]

Air defenses rarely shot down attacking aircraft. Shells did not hit planes, but sprayed them with high-velocity shrapnel fragments. The shrapnel generally caused minor damage or injured crew members, but this could force an aircraft to abort its mission and send it limping home. It took a lucky hit, or the cumulative damage from several near-misses, to down a plane.

Air defenses rarely shot down attacking aircraft. Shells did not hit planes, but sprayed them with high-velocity shrapnel fragments. The shrapnel generally caused minor damage or injured crew members, but this could force an aircraft to abort its mission and send it limping home. It took a lucky hit, or the cumulative damage from several near-misses, to down a plane.

[…]

One approach was to make every fourth bullet from a machine gun a phosphorus tracer round that leaves a glowing trail. This showed the path of the bullets so the gunner could adjust his aim, directing the visible stream of bullets towards the target. Like the wall of shell bursts from larger guns, the stream of tracer was also a deterrent: it takes a steely nerve to deliberately fly into a hail of bullets.

[…]

Unlike other aircraft, the kamikazes were not deterred by slight damage. Machines guns and 20mm and 40mm cannon consistently failed to prevent a kamikaze from hitting his target. Only the big five-inch naval guns could destroy a plane with one hit.

[…]

One analyst calculates that, because they scored so many hits compared to the casualties suffered, kamikaze attacks cost the Japanese fewer planes per hit than other types of attack.

[…]

Admiral Halsey’s solution to the kamikazes was an intensive program of air strikes on their airfields. Navy carrier air wings and Army Air Force B-29s destroyed large numbers of kamikazes on the ground, ending a threat that could not be stopped by anti-aircraft guns.

[…]

The guided missile was the air-defense equivalent of the smart bomb. Instead of firing thousands of rounds and hoping for a lucky hit, a single projectile homed in on the target and guaranteed a shoot-down. Heat-seeking missiles were effective at close range, while bigger and heavier missiles with radar guidance took over at longer ranges.

In the 1960s, the US foot soldier had his personal air defense in the form of the Redeye missile. This was a portable heat-seeking missile that could take out a fast jet two miles away, an almost impossible feat even for a quadruple heavy-machine gun that had to be carried on a truck. The main problem with early versions of the Redeye was that it was purely a “revenge weapon” – it could only lock on to a jet’s exhaust from behind, so you couldn’t shoot down a plane until it had already flown over and bombed you.

In the same period, protection from heavy bombers was provided by the Nike Hercules. This missile stood forty feet high and flew at Mach 3 and had a range of eighty miles. While the Redeye carried two pounds of explosive, Nike Hercules was armed with a twenty-kiloton atomic warhead capable of bringing down a whole formation of bombers in one go.

[…]

The plan was to take the existing M48 Patton tank and fit it with a new turret armed with a pair of WWII-era 40mm guns. Manual aiming was not enough; it would be guided by the radar from an F-16 aircraft with a new computerized fire-control system. On paper, the Sergeant York looked like a sound proposition.

The result was a billion-dollar fiasco. The Patton tank chassis were worn out, giving up after three hundred miles of road tests instead of the four thousand planned. The 40mm guns had been stored badly and were in poor shape. The biggest defect was the radar; designed for air-to-air combat in the open sky, it could not deal with all the clutter at ground level. It was easily confused by things like waving trees, which it mistook for helicopters.

[…]

The modern Stinger looks a lot like the 1960s Redeye, and the Patriot missile looks like a smaller version of the old Nike. Rather than being bigger and more powerful, they are smarter and more agile. As with bombs, intelligence trumps brute force.

Modern missiles can spot targets faster and shrug off the clutter that confused Sergeant York. They are highly resistant to jamming and deception. They are harder to avoid in the dance of death known as the “terminal engagement phase,” when planes maneuver wildly in a desperate attempt to get away as the missile closes in.

Air defense has become a duel between radar operators and “defense suppression” aircraft equipped with electronic warfare pods, decoys, and missiles that home in on radar emissions. The attackers attempt to blind, confuse, or evade the defenses and get close enough to launch their missiles. A radar signal is like a searchlight on a dark night, advertising its position over a wide area. Radar operators respond by only turning their radar on at intervals, and by moving position when possible. It is a duel whose outcome is largely determined by who has the best technology.

The current refinement of the Patriot missile is state of the art. This is several generations on from the missile that was hailed (inaccurately) as the Scud-buster of the 1991 Gulf War. The fifteen hundred pound missile travels at almost a mile per second and can destroy an aircraft anywhere from treetop height to eighty thousand feet, at a range of a hundred miles away. Costing somewhere over a million dollars per shot, the Patriot is an effective weapon against a whole range of targets. A battery of Patriots can defend against attack helicopters like the Hind, strike aircraft, heavy bombers, and is now effective against Scuds and other ballistic missiles.

The recent focus has been on tweaking Patriot for missile defense because shooting down aircraft simply is not an issue. US air superiority in recent conflicts means that nobody has been in a position to bomb US forces. According to the USAF’s 2014 Posture Statement:

“Since April of 1953, roughly seven million American service members have deployed to combat and contingency operations all over the world. Thousands of them have died as they fought. Not a single one was killed by an enemy aircraft. We intend to keep it that way.”

[…]

The sharp end of a Patriot missile battery comprises four launch vehicles, each with four missiles ready to fire. In principle, a Patriot battery can take on sixteen aircraft at a time (of four times that number with new, miniature PAC-3 missiles). While two or more missiles may sometimes be launched on different trajectories at a difficult target, the battery might take out sixteen Reapers in a matter of seconds.

Whether Patriot could even hit small drones is another question entirely.

[…]

It is hard to image a three-quarter ton missile engaging a four-pound drone. And even if every missile worked perfectly, the seventeenth drone would get through — along with all those following.

Patriot missile batteries rely on radar, which is vulnerable; one hit could put the whole battery out of action. The drones might target the launch vehicles and personnel. Systems like the Patriot are not armored against attack, and the M983 trucks that transport the Patriot are as vulnerable as any other truck. Missiles are explosive targets full of flammable rocket fuel.

[…]

Nor can the problem be solved by issuing Stingers to every soldier; at over $38,000 a shot, they are too expensive to be bought in such volumes. Worse, missiles like the Stinger are heat-seekers that depend on the target having a hot engine. A small drone with an electric motor is invisible.

[…]

The USAF’s F-22A Raptor is arguably the best fighter in the world, but its six radar-guided AMRAAM missiles and two infrared Sidewinders will not dent a swarm, even if they were able to lock on. The Raptor’s 20mm cannon makes little difference. The rotary cannon has a high rate of fire to ensure a good chance of a hit, and the entire magazine is expended by six one-second bursts.

[…]

Against most opponents, air supremacy means destroying enemy air fields so their aircraft cannot take off or land. This was the answer to the kamikaze threat.

[…]

Small drones do not need a runway, air base, or hangars.

Laser dazzlers or “ocular interrupters”, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), are a good fit with drone capabilities:

They were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan as non-lethal weapons, especially for dealing with drivers. Shining the brilliant green light on a car windscreen signaled to a driver approaching a checkpoint that they need to stop; and when you cannot see, you cannot drive. It does not cause flash blindness, but produces enough glare inside the eye so that it is impossible to see far enough ahead to drive safely. The exact effect depends on conditions, but typically a driver would only be able to progress at 20 mph at best. The dazzling laser also prevents the target from effectively aiming a weapon at the source.

The GLARE MOUT made by B E Meyers has been used extensively by US forces in Iraq and elsewhere. It weighs under ten ounces and is normally clipped on the underside of a rifle; effective range is four hundred meters at night and perhaps half that in daytime, even though the output is barely one-eighth of a watt. Aiming it is as simple as pointing a flashlight, and it would be simple enough to link it to a drone’s camera.

[…]

Drones with laser dazzlers could close a road by dazzling drivers, or spread havoc by flying down a freeway and dazzling at random.

Tasers are also a good fit:

Modern Taser-type weapons require very little power. Early Tasers used several AA batteries, but the latest versions only need a couple of lithium batteries to give repeated five-second shocks. A drone equipped with this type of weapon can disable a human target for as long as necessary, for example to keep them out of action while the rest of the swarm completes an attack.

A hand grenade will do little damage to a vehicle protected by an inch of steel plate, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), but high precision and intelligent targeting make an effective substitute for brute force:

In the 1991 Gulf War, laser-guided Mk 82 bombs weighing five hundred pounds were used for “tank plinking” attacks against individual Iraqi tanks. Unlike in previous wars when dozens of bombs were needed to guarantee a hit on such a small target, laser guidance meant that a pilot could score four kills with four bombs. The bombs were accurate enough, and a bomb of this size was overkill even against heavily-armored Russian-made T-72 battle tank.

In the 2003 war in Iraq, the Hellfire missile weighing a fifth as much proved just as efficient at destroying tanks. Laser guidance meant that every shot was likely to find its mark.

[…]

The T-72 has frontal armor more than eighteen inches thick, and the Hellfire can punch through it. But tank armor is not distributed evenly.

[…]

The AT4’s warhead weighs just under a pound, and it is capable of penetrating an impressive fifteen inches of armor compared to three inches for the original bazooka. This is still not enough to take a T-72 head on — tank armor is specifically intended to defeat this sort of threat — but it means the soldier can tackle anything else on the battlefield.

[…]

From above, the T-72 is a much easier prospect. The large, flat surface of the top of the tank has comparatively thin armor; if it was as thick as the front, the tank would be too heavy to move. The top armor on the T-72 is around two inches thick, and there are spots where it is even weaker.

While a small charge can breach the armor, the damage it does — the “behind armor effect” — is limited. One soldier compares it to firing a bullet through a car — alarming for the people inside but not likely to cause real damage. The high-speed jet of metal will injure anyone it hits and may set off fuel or explosives, but in a vehicle the size of the T-72, most shots will do little harm. That happens when the shot placement is more or less random, as it is likely to be in battle using an unguided weapon like the AT-4, often at long range against a target that may be moving. In practice it usually takes multiple hits from this sort of weapon to stop a tank.

[…]

Current guided weapons sense a target and tend to aim approximately at its center of mass. (A major exception is heat-seeking missiles, which home in on hot exhaust pipes). As we have seen, a small drone has enough computing power to do something much more sophisticated.

After Gary Powers’ U-2 got shot down, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the CIA and the Air Force were anxious to get its Mach-3 replacement flying:

At Lockheed, each Mach 3 aircraft was literally being hand forged, part by part, one airplane at a time. The production of the aircraft, according to Richard Bissell, “spawned its own industrial base. Special tools had to be developed, along with new paints, chemicals, wires, oils, engines, fuel, even special titanium screws. By the time Lockheed finished building the A-12, they themselves had developed and manufactured thirteen million different parts.” It was the titanium that first held everything up. Titanium was the only metal strong enough to handle the kind of heat the Mach 3 aircraft would have to endure: 500-to 600-degree temperatures on the fuselage’s skin and nearly 1,000 degrees in places close to the engines. This meant the titanium alloy had to be pure; nearly 95 percent of what Lockheed initially received had to be rejected. Titanium was also critically sensitive to the chemical chlorine, a fact Lockheed engineers did not realize at first. During the summer, when chlorine levels in the Burbank water system were elevated to fight algae, inside the Skunk Works, airplane pieces started to mysteriously corrode. Eventually, the problem was discovered, and the entire Skunk Works crew had to switch over to distilled water. Next it was discovered that titanium was also sensitive to cadmium, which was what most of Lockheed’s tools were plated with. Hundreds of toolboxes had to be reconfigured, thousands of tools tossed out. The next problem was power related. Wind-tunnel testing in Burbank was draining too much electricity off the local grid. If a reporter found out about the electricity drain, it could lead to unwanted questions. NASA offered Kelly Johnson an alternative wind-tunnel test facility up in Northern California, near the Mojave, which was where Lockheed engineers ended up—performing their tests late at night under cover of darkness. The complicated nature of all things Oxcart pushed the new spy plane further and further behind the schedule.

[…]

Russia was spending billions of rubles on surface-to-air missile technology and the CIA soon learned that the Oxcart’s new nemesis was a system called Tall King. Getting hard data on Tall King’s exact capabilities before the Oxcart went anywhere near it was now a top priority for the CIA.

[…]

In 1960, “there were many CIA officers who thought ELINT was a dirty word,” recalls Gene Poteat, the engineer in charge of Project Palladium, which originated with the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence.

[…]

“We needed to know the sensitivity of Soviet radar receivers and the proficiency of its operators,” Poteat explains. With Khrushchev using Cuba as a military base in the Western Hemisphere, the CIA saw an opportunity. “When the Soviets moved into Cuba with their missiles and associated radar, we were presented with a golden opportunity to measure the system sensitivity of the SA-2 aircraft missile radar,” says Poteat.

[…]

Thornton “T.D.” Barnes was a CIA asset at an age when most men hadn’t graduated from college yet. Married at seventeen to his high-school sweetheart, Doris, Barnes became a self-taught electronics wizard, buying broken television sets, fixing them up, and reselling them for five times the amount. In doing so, he went from bitter poverty—raised on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no electricity or running water—to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old enough to vote. Barnes credited his mother for his becoming one of the CIA’s most important radar countermeasure experts. “My mom saw an article on radar in Life magazine when I was no more than nine or ten. She said I should write a school report on the subject and so I did. That’s when I got bit with the radar bug.”

At age seventeen, Barnes lied about his age to join the National Guard so he could go fight in Korea. He dreamed of one day being an Army officer. Two years later he was deployed to the 38th Parallel to defend the region alongside a British and a Turkish infantry company. It was in Korea that Barnes began his intelligence career at the bottom of the chain of command. “I was the guy who sat on the top of the hill and looked for enemy soldiers. If I saw ’em coming, it was my job to radio the information back to base,” Barnes recalls. He loved the Army. The things he learned there stayed with him all his life: “Never waste a moment. Shine your boots when you’re sitting on the pot. Always go to funerals. Look out for your men.” Once, in Korea, a wounded soldier was rushed onto the base. Barnes overheard that the man needed to be driven to the hospital, but because gas was scarce, all vehicles had to be signed out by a superior. With no superior around, Barnes worried the man might die if he didn’t get help fast, so he signed his superior’s name on the order. “I was willing to take the demerit,” Barnes explains. His actions caught the attention of the highest-ranking officer on the base, Major General Carl Jark, and later earned him a meritorious award. When the war was over General Jark pointed Barnes in the direction of radar and electronics. “He suggested I go to Fort Bliss and get myself an education there,” Barnes explains. So T.D. and Doris Barnes headed to Texas. There, Barnes’s whole world would change. And it didn’t take long for his exceptional talents to come to the attention of the CIA.

Barnes loved learning. At Fort Bliss, he attended classes for Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules missile school by day and classes at Texas Western University by night for the next fifty-four months. These were the missiles that had been developed a decade earlier by the Paperclip scientists, born originally of the German V-2 rocket. At Fort Bliss, Barnes read technical papers authored by former Nazi scientists. Sometimes the Paperclip scientists taught class. “No one really thought of them as former Nazis,” says Barnes. “They were the experts. They worked for us now and we learned from them.” By early 1960, Barnes was a bona fide missile expert. Sometimes, when a missile misfired over at the White Sands Missile Range, it was T.D. Barnes who was dispatched to disarm the missile sitting on the test stand. “I’d march up to the missile, take off the panel, and disconnect the wires from the igniter,” Barnes recalls. “When you are young, it doesn’t occur to you how dangerous something is.” Between the academics and the hands-on experience, Barnes developed an unusual aptitude in an esoteric field that the CIA was just getting involved in: ELINT. Which was how at the age of twenty-three, T. D. Barnes was recruited by the CIA to participate in a top secret game of chicken with the Russians that was part of Project Palladium. Although Barnes didn’t know it then, the work he was doing was for the electronic countermeasure systems that would later be installed on the A-12 Oxcart and on the ground at Area 51.

[…]

The plan was for the airplane to fly right up to the edge of Cuban airspace but not into it. Moments before the airplane crossed into Cuban airspace, the pilot would quickly turn around and head home. By then, the Russian radar experts working the Cuban radar sites would have turned on their systems to track the U.S. airplane. Russian MiG fighter jets would be sent aloft to respond. The job of Project Palladium was to gather the electronic intelligence being sent out by the radar stations and the MiGs.

[…]

“At the time, ECM [electronic countermeasure] and ECCM [electronic counter-countermeasure] technology were still new to both the plane and the missile. We’d transmit a Doppler signal from a radar simulator which told their MiG pilots that a missile had locked on them. When the Soviet pilots engaged their ECM against us, my job was to sit there and watch how our missile’s ECCM responded. If the Soviet signal jammed our missile and made it drift off target, I’d tweak my missile’s ECCM electronics to determine what would override a Soviet ECM signal.”

[…]

“Inside the airplane, we’d record the frequencies to be replayed back at Fort Bliss for training and design. Once we got what we wanted we hauled ass out of the area to avoid actual contact with Soviet planes.”

[…]

Back at Fort Bliss, Barnes and the others would interpret what NSA had captured from the Soviet/Cuban ECM transmissions that they had recorded during the flight. In listening to the decrypted Soviet responses to the antagonistic moves, the CIA learned what the Soviets could and could not see on their radars. This technology became a major component in further developing stealth technology and electronic countermeasures and was why Barnes was later placed by the CIA to work at Area 51.