Isegoria

During the 1970s, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the CIA’s aviation efforts concentrated largely on pilotless aircraft, or drones:

Hank Meierdierck, the man who wrote the manual for the U-2 at Area 51, was in charge of one such CIA drone project, which began in late 1969. Code-named Aquiline, the six-foot-long pilotless aircraft was disguised to look like an eagle or buzzard in flight. It carried a small television camera in its nose and photo equipment and air-sampling sensors under its wings. Some insiders say it had been designed to test for radiation in the air as well as to gather electronic intelligence, or ELINT. But Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer ever assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, offers a different version of events. “Spy satellites flying over the Caspian Sea delivered us images of an oddly shaped, giant, multi-engined watercraft moving around down there on the surface. No one had any idea what this thing was for, but you can be sure the Agency wanted to find out. That is what the original purpose of Aquiline was for,” Poteat reveals. “To take close-up pictures of the vehicle so we could discern what it was and what the Soviets might be thinking of using it for. Since we had no idea what it was, we made up a name for it. We called it the Caspian Sea Monster,” Poteat explains. Project Aquiline remains a classified project, but in September of 2008, BBC News magazine produced a story about a Cold War Soviet hydrofoil named Ekranoplan, which is exactly what the CIA’s Aquiline drone was designed to spy on.

At Area 51, Hank Meierdierck selected his former hunting partner Jim Freedman to assist him on the Aquiline drone program. “It flew low and was meant to follow along communication lines in foreign countries and intercept messages,” Freedman says. “I believe the plan was to launch it from a submarine while it was waiting in port.” The Aquiline team consisted of three pilots trained to remotely control the bird, with Freedman offering operational support. “Hank got the thing to fly,” Freedman recalls. Progress was slow and “it crash-landed a lot.” The program ended when the defense contractor, McDonnell Douglas, gave a bid for the job that Meierdierck felt was ninety-nine million dollars over budget. McDonnell Douglas would not budge on their bid so Hank recommended that the CIA cancel Project Aquiline, which he said they did. After the program was over, Hank Meierdierck managed to take a mock-up of the Aquiline drone home with him from the area. “He had it sitting on his bar at his house down in Las Vegas,” Freedman recalls.

[…]

Project Ornithopter involved a birdlike drone designed to blend in with nature by flapping its wings. And a third, even smaller drone was designed to look like a crow and land on windowsills in order to photograph what was going on inside CIA-targeted rooms. The tiniest drone program, orchestrated in the early 1970s, was Project Insectothopter, an insect-size aerial vehicle that looked like a dragonfly in flight. Insectothopter had an emerald green minifuselage and, like Ornithopter, flapped its wings, which were powered by a miniature engine that ran on a tiny amount of gas. Through its Office of Research and Development, or ORD, the CIA had also tried turning live birds and cats into spies. In one such program, CIA-trained pigeons flew around Washington, DC, with bird-size cameras strapped to their necks. The project failed after the extra weight tired out the pigeons and they hobbled back to headquarters on foot instead of in flight. Another CIA endeavor, Acoustic Kitty, involved putting electronic listening devices in house cats. But that project also backfired after too many cats strayed from their missions in search of food. One acoustic kitty got run over by a car.

[…]

During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, which began in 1977, CIA discretionary budgets were at an all-time low, and the CIA didn’t get very far with its drones — until late 1979, when the Agency learned about a lethal anthrax accident at a “probable biological warfare research, production and storage installation” in Sverdlovsk, Russia — the same location where Gary Powers had been taking spy photographs when his U-2 was shot down nineteen years before. As a result of the Sverdlovsk bioweapons accident, the CIA determined that as many as a hundred people had died from inhaling anthrax spores.

[…]

For twenty-five years, from 1974 to 1999, the CIA and the Air Force rarely worked together on drone projects at Area 51. This lack of cooperation was evident, and succinctly summed up in an interview Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave Time magazine in April of 2008. Gates said that when he was running the CIA, in 1992, he discovered that “the Air Force would not co-fund with CIA a vehicle without a pilot.” That changed in the winter of 2000, when the two organizations came together to work on a new drone project at Area 51, one that would forever change the face of warfare and take both agencies toward General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s Victory Over Japan Day prediction that one day in the future, wars would be fought by aircraft without pilots sitting inside. In the year 2000, that future was now.

The project involved retrofitting a CIA reconnaissance drone, called Predator, with antitank missiles called Hellfire missiles, supplied by the army. The target would be a shadowy and obscure terrorist the CIA was considering for assassination. He lived in Afghanistan, and his name was Osama bin Laden.

With 267 combat missions under his belt, 44 in Korea and 213 in Vietnam, Robert M. Bond was a highly decorated Air Force pilot and vice commander of Air Force Systems Command at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), which made him a VIP when he visited the F-117 program at Area 51 in March, 1984:

But in addition to being impressed by the F-117 Nighthawk, General Bond was equally fascinated by the MiG program, which was still going on at Area 51. In the fifteen years since the CIA had gotten its hands on Munir Redfa’s MiG-21, the Agency and the Air Force had acquired a fleet of Soviet-made aircraft including an MiG-15, an MiG-17, and, most recently, the supersonic MiG-23. Barnes says, “We called it the Flogger. It was a very fast plane, almost Mach 3. But it was squirrelly. Hard to fly. It could kill you if you weren’t well trained.”

On a visit to Area 51 the following month, General Bond requested to fly the MiG-23. “There was some debate about whether the general should be allowed to fly,” Barnes explains. “Every hour in a Soviet airplane was precious. We did not have spare parts. We could not afford unnecessary wear and tear. Usually a pilot would train for at least two weeks before flying a MiG. Instead, General Bond got a briefing while sitting inside the plane with an instructor pilot saying, ‘Do this, do that.’” In other words, instead of undergoing two weeks of training, General Bond pulled rank.

General Bond’s death opened the possible exposure of five secret programs and facilities, including the MiG program, the F-117 program, Area 51, Area 52, and the nuclear reactor explosions at Jackass Flats. Unlike the deaths of CIA pilots flying out of Area 51, which could be concealed as generic training accidents, the death of a general required detailed explanation. If the press asked too many questions, it could trigger a federal investigation. One program had to come out of the dark to keep the others hidden. The Pentagon made the decision to out the MiG. Quietly, Fred Hoffman, a military writer with the Associated Press, was “leaked” information that Bond had in fact died at the controls of a Soviet MiG-23. The emphasis was put on how the Pentagon was able to obtain Soviet-bloc aircraft and weaponry from allies in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “The government has always been reluctant to discuss such acquisitions for fear of embarrassing the friendly donors, but the spotlight was turned anew on the subject after a three-star Air Force general was killed April 26 in a Nevada plane crash that was quickly cloaked in secrecy,” Hoffman wrote, adding “sources who spoke on condition they remain anonymous have indicated the MiG-23, the most advanced Soviet warplane ever to fall permanently into U.S. hands, was supplied to this country by Egypt.”

[…]

It would be another four years before the public had any idea the F-117 Nighthawk existed. In November of 1988, a grainy image of the arrowhead-shaped, futuristic-looking craft was released to an awestruck public despite the fact that variations of the F-117 had been flying at Area 51 and Area 52 for eleven years.

Last month, Ukrainian makers Vyriy Drone performed an official handover of the first batch of 1,000 “all-Ukrainian” FPV drones:

It is important to note that some of the electronic chips in that make up devices may in fact come from China or other countries. But these are simple building blocks, commodity products which can be sourced from the U.S. and Japan. They are very different to specialist end products for drones like flight controllers.

[…]

“Initially, there was a generally accepted opinion that China could not be beaten on price,” Ukrainian analyst Serhii Flash wrote on his Telegram channel. “Never. But competition, time, volumes, optimization of business processes work wonders.”

Flash shares a graph showing how the prices of various locally made components including motors, frames and propellers have dropped an average of around 50% over the last two years.

Frames and propellers are relatively easy to make without a major investment in production machinery. Other components are more challenging. In 2024 we reported on how Ukrainian makers Wild Hornets were making their own flight controllers on a robotic assembly line, and later set up a similar process to make their own drone batteries.

Specialist companies have gone further. Thermal imagers are a particular challenge, and FPV makers have spent considerable time and effort finding Chinese suppliers who meet their requirements for cost and capability. In other countries, the defence sector makes it own high-end thermal imagers and price is not a factor. Drone makers are on a tighter budget. A $2,000 military imager is not a viable proposition for a $400 FPV,

In October 2024 Ukrainian start-up Odd Systems announced that they were producing locally-made thermal imagers. These are comparable to Chinese 256×192 pixel imagers, but about 20% cheaper at $250. Odd Systems say they when they can make their Kurbas-256 in volume the unit price will drop even further.

Importantly the Kurbas-256 is designed for FPVs rather than general industrial use. The developers talked to users about their combat experience with commercial Chinese thermal imaging cameras and modified their design accordingly. For example, some Chinese cameras suffer from condensation forming inside them, making them unusable, so Kurbas cameras come in a sealed unit sealed to prevent condensation.

“We studied the experience and considered the wishes of FPV operators. We have created a Ukrainian product with full control of hardware and low-level software,” the company told Militaryni.

For example, the operator can adjust the output of the Kurbas-256 in flight, changing contrast for a clearer image depending on conditions. Also, most thermal cameras have automatic calibration which sometimes freezes the image for several seconds. This is not an issue for most applications but disastrous on a drone, so Odd Systems’ cameras do not have this ‘feature’.

The F-117 Nighthawk, the nation’s first stealth bomber, would radically change the way America fought wars, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

As a Lockheed official explained at a banquet honoring the F-117 in April of 2008, “Before the advent of stealth, war planners had to determine how many sorties were necessary to take out a single target. After the invention of the F-117 stealth bomber, that changed. It became, How many targets can we take out on a single sortie?”

Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick worked on each rendition of the stealth bomber, which began in the early 1970s with Harvey, a prototype aircraft named after the Jimmy Stewart film about an invisible rabbit. Harvey’s stealth qualities were initially engineered using slide rules and calculators, the same way Lockheed had developed the A-12 Oxcart. Only with the emergence of the mainframe computer, in 1974, did those tools become obsolete. “Two Lockheed engineers, named Denys Overholser and Dick Scherrer, realized that it might be possible to design a stealth aircraft that would take advantage of some of the results of a computer’s calculations,” Lovick says. “In 1974 computers were relatively new and most of them were the size of a car. Our computer at Lockheed ran on punch cards and had less than 60 K worth of memory.” Still, the computer could do what humans could not do, and that was endless calculations.

[…]

“We designed flat, faceted panels and had them act like mirrors to scatter radar waves away from the plane,” Lovick says. “It was a radical idea and it worked.”

The next, on-paper incarnation of the F-117 Nighthawk began in 1974 and was called the Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled the Hope Diamond and because Lockheed engineers didn’t have much hope it would actually fly. After the Hopeless Diamond concept went through a series of redesigns it became a full-scale mock-up of an aircraft and was renamed Have Blue.

[…]

“It was a very weird, very crude-looking thing that actually looked a lot like the ship from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Our job was to look at it from every angle using radar to see how it showed up on radar.”

[…]

“Initially, it was as visible as a big old barn,” says Barnes. So the Have Blue mock-up was sent back to the Skunk Works for more fine-tuning. Several months later, a new version of the mock-up arrived at Area 51. “Lockheed had changed the shape of the aircraft and a lot of the angles of the panels. Once we put the new mock-up on the pole it appeared to us as something around the size of a crow.” There was a final round of redesigns, then the airplane came back to Area 51 again. “We put it up on the pole and all we saw was the pole.”

[…]

The director of science and engineering at Skunk Works, a man named Ed Martin, went to Lovick for some advice. “Ed Martin asked me how I thought the aircraft might appear on enemy radar. I explained that if the Oxcart showed up as being roughly equivalent to the size of a man, the Have Blue would appear to a radar like a seven-sixteenth-inch metal sphere — roughly the size of a ball bearing.” Ed Martin loved Lovick’s analogy. A ball bearing.

[…]

Before Martin left for Washington, DC, Lovick went to the Lockheed tool shop and borrowed a bag of ball bearings. He wanted Ed Martin to have a visual reference to share with the Air Force officials there. “Later, I learned the ball-bearing illustration was so effective that the customers began rolling the little silvery spheres across the conference table. The analogy has become legendary, often still used to make an important visual point about the stealthy F-117 Nighthawk with its high-frequency radar signature that is as tiny as a ball bearing.”

A top Space Force general said Tuesday that commercial systems have observed Chinese satellites rehearsing “dogfighting” maneuvers in low Earth orbit:

“With our commercial assets, we have observed five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchronicity and in control,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said during the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington. “That’s what we call dogfighting in space. They are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.”

A service spokesperson later elaborated on Guetlein’s comments, saying the operation occurred in 2024 and involved three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two other Chinese experimental spacecraft, the Shijian-605 A and B. The Shijian-6 systems are believed to have a signals intelligence mission.

The exercise showcased the country’s ability to perform complex maneuvers in orbit, referred to as rendezvous and proximity operations, which involve not only navigating around other objects but also inspecting them.

Guetlein listed the satellite dogfighting demonstration alongside several other concerning activities from “near-peer” U.S. adversaries. That includes Russia’s 2019 demonstration of a “nesting doll” capability, where one satellite released a smaller spacecraft that then performed several stalking maneuvers near a U.S. satellite.

[…]

“That capability gap used to be massive,” Guetlein said. “We’ve got to change the way we look at space or that capability gap may reverse and not be in our favor anymore.”

[…]

“The purpose of the Space Force is to guarantee space superiority for the joint force — not space for space’s sake. Space [operations] guarantee that, just like all the other domains, we can fight as a joint force and we can depend on those capabilities,” Guetlein said.

Recent upgrades to the Kometa system are allowing Russia to bring back glide bombs:

Most Russian glide bombs use a UMPK precision guidance kit, which relies on Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) signals from Russia’s GLONASS satellite system, the Russian constellation of satellites similar to GPS. The UMPK determines the glide bomb’s location and heading, adjusting its course with rear-mounted fins to stay on target. Although the GLONASS system is newer than GPS, it is more vulnerable to jamming, which the Ukrainians have exploited. The Ukrainian jammers emit fake PNT signals than are stronger than those from the GLONASS satellites, overpowering the actual signal and misguiding the glide bomb into thinking it is in a different location.

To counter this jamming, the UMPK includes the Kometa system, which uses multiple radio receivers to distinguish between genuine and spoofed PNT signals. Information about this system is somewhat limited given its sensitive nature. However, the Ukrainian Military Portal published an article in July 2023 with background information about the system. The initial Kometa design, introduced in 2012, consisted of three receivers capable of detecting the spatial separation between authentic PNT signals and the more powerful jamming signals. The system compares the strength and angle of arrival of the signals, allowing it to identify the real signal and filter out the signals coming from a jammer.

In April 2024, Armada International reported that the Russian military had started using an upgraded version of the Kometa system with an additional five receivers, bringing the total to eight. With more receivers, the upgraded Kometa could process a larger number of signals simultaneously, increasing its ability to identify and reject complex jamming patterns. Images posted on social media show Ukrainian forces capturing a device equipped with the 8-channel Kometa system. According to the post, the Ukrainians installed the system into one of their own devices and used it in an attack against Russia. Although not stated in the post, Ukrainian scientists likely studied the captured device to determine how to jam it. The Ukrainians were successful in jamming the upgraded Kometa system, forcing the Russians to stop using glide bombs.

Satellite-guided glide bombs were “miracle weapons” for the Russians, traveling 25 miles or farther under pop-out wings, facing practically no countermeasures.

That has changed. Now the Ukrainians not only have countermeasures — some of these countermeasures appear to be extremely effective.

“Previously, the enemy used glide bombs with high accuracy to attack objects in the territory of regional centers such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia,” Narek Kazarian, whose 10-person Night Watch team in Ukraine develops electronic warfare systems, told Forbes.

Night Watch’s new Lima jammer is partly responsible for the recent degradation of Russian glide bombing, Kazarian claimed.

Lima isn’t a traditional jammer that simply blasts radio noise toward the enemy. “We use digital interference,” Kazarian explained. It’s “a combination of jamming, spoofing and information cyber attack on the navigation receiver.”

[…]

“All high-value targets are guaranteed to be covered by [electronic warfare],” Fighterbomber claimed. It might take eight or even 16 glide bombs to reliably hit one target, the channel added. And while the glide bombs are inexpensive for a precision munition — each costing around $25,000 — the Sukhoi jets that lob them two or four at a time aren’t cheap.

Launching four jets to maybe hit one target is risky and inefficient for an air force that has just a thousand or so modern jets, and has already lost 120 of them in action in Ukraine.

The intensive Ukrainian jamming has also grounded many of Russia’s drones. Night Watch’s earliest efforts focused on forcing down Shahed attack drones that routinely strike Ukrainian cities.

Radio jamming has effectively accomplished what the Ukrainian air force largely failed to accomplish with its expensive, vulnerable S-300, Patriot and SAMP/T surface-to-air missile batteries, which can hit Russian jets from scores of miles away but were always too few in number to fully protect the front line and safeguard Ukrainian cities

The Pentagon has announced a new contract to acquire Precision Strike Indoor & Outdoor (PSIO) small Unmanned Aerial Systems from drone-maker XTEND:

The contract is with the Pentagon’s Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate, an obscure outfit which develops capabilities for the military (“and Interagency customers”) to carry out operations typically involving clandestine, asymmetric strikes against the highest value targets. In the past this might have meant a Reaper drone taking out an insurgent leader on a balcony with a six-bladed Hellfire R9X ‘Ninja’ missile without damaging the building. The new weapon takes precision strike to places which were previously out of reach.

Flying drones indoors is a major challenge, in a complex and cluttered three-dimensional space with obstacles in every direction. XTEND’s CEO Aviv Shapira previously told Forbes how the company’s XOS operating system took over the difficult work of piloting, so that even a beginner could fly like a pro, going through windows and other narrow openings with ease.

All the operator needs to do is indicate where the drone needs to go and the XOS software does the rest, plotting the optimal route and automatically avoiding obstacles while also flagging objects of interest like people or weapons seen by the drone’s camera. It also makes a map of the space as it goes so it can find its way back.

[…]

Rotor guards mean that the drone will not be damaged by collisions with walls or other solid objects, and it is described as a being used for ‘indoor precision operations’. The Scorpio carries a one-pound payload with multiple different warhead options.

[…]

The Scorpio’s navigation system does not rely on GPS or other satellite signals, which may be jammed or unavailable inside buildings. Its range is quoted as greater than 3 miles, with a maximum speed of 25 mph.

Apart from its smart software though, perhaps the most striking feature of Scorpio are its communications. Mesh networking allows three drones to work together, controlled by a single operator. Typically two would be positioned to guard exits while the third explores a building interior.

The specifications include an option for a fiber optic data link. This makes the drone impossible to jam , and allows it to go into spaces where no radio signal can reach, such as underground tunnels.