Military drones began with tinkering in a garage
LAKE FOREST, Calif. — in 1980, Abraham Karem, an engineer whohad emigrated from Israel, retreated into his three-car garage inHacienda Heights outside Los Angeles and, to the bemusement of histolerant wife, began to build an aircraft.
The work eventually spilled into the guest room, and when Karemfinished more than a year later, he wheeled into his driveway anodd, cigar-shaped craft that was destined to change the way theUnited States wages war.
The Albatross, as it was called, was transported to the DugwayProving Ground in Utah, where it demonstrated the ability to stayaloft safely for up to 56 hours — a very, very long time in whatwas then the crash-prone world of drones.
Three iterations and more than a decade of development later,Karem’s modest-looking drone became the Predator, the lethal,remotely piloted machine that can circle above an enemy for nearlya day before controllers thousands of miles away in thesouthwestern United States launch Hellfire missiles toward targetsthey are watching on video screens.
The emergence of hunter-killer and surveillance drones asrevolutionary new weapons in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, andin counterterrorism operations in places such as Pakistan andYemen, has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry, much of itcentered in Southern California, once the engine of cold Warmilitary aviation.
Over the next 10 years, the Pentagon plans to purchase more than700 medium- and large-size drones at a cost of nearly $37 billion,according to a Congressional Budget Office study. Thousands moremini-drones will be fitted in the backpacks of soldiers so they canhand-launch them in minutes to look over the next hill or dive-bombopposing forces.
This booming sector has its roots in the often unsungpersistence of engineering dreamers who worked on the technology ofunmanned aviation when the military establishment and most majordefense contractors had little or no interest in it. Innovatorssuch as Karem were often sustained by grants from the DefenseAdvanced Research Projects Agency and a handful of early believers,including the CIA.
Karem said he imagined his drones involved in a “tacticalconflict with the Warsaw Pact, be it on the plains of Germany or aspart of our Navy and Marines.” he had to sell his company, and withit the prototype of the Predator, long before it became the icon ofa new kind of warfare.
“I did not envision the collapse of the Soviet Union and therise of warfare with non-state adversaries,” said Karem, anaeronautical engineer who served for nine years in the Israeli airforce before settling in the United States in 1977.
In the past decade, drones have become an integral part of U.S.military doctrine — so much so that it is difficult to recall howmarginal they once seemed. The military had less than 200 dronesthe day before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; today it has morethan 7,000, including mini-drones.
Before Sept. 11, drones weren’t “on the road map,” said TimConver, chairman and chief executive of AeroVironment, which buildsclose-in surveillance drones for the military. “It wasn’t somethingthat [the Defense Department] had said: ‘We need this. Let’s builda program around this.’ “
Before 2001, AeroVironment, through various small contracts,sold a drone called the Pointer in small numbers to the military.”Nobody ever really used them,” Conver said. since the invasion ofAfghanistan, the company has sold the military thousands of smalldrones.
The companies that design and manufacture drones haveexperienced massive growth that shows no sign of slowing, even withthe end of the war in Iraq and the planned drawdown in Afghanistan.The technology is significantly cheaper than traditional aircraft,and its potential uses increase as the craft become faster andstealthier.
Teal Group, a Fairfax, Va., market analysis firm, estimates thatnearly $100 billion will be spent globally on drones between nowand 2019.
“The needs for [unmanned aerial vehicles] are unsatisfied,” saidPhil Finnegan, Teal Group’s director of corporate analysis. “Themilitary wants a lot more. Worldwide you have very limited adoptionof UAVs, but foreign militaries have seen the success in Iraq andAfghanistan, and they want them.”
The rise of drones has been a small boon for SouthernCalifornia, where the aerospace industry has contracted painfullyin the past two decades. About 10,000 state residents are directlyemployed in the drone sector.
And for national security reasons, much of the supply chain iskept onshore, generating jobs among contractors andsubcontractors.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which makes the Predatorand the next-generation Reaper drone, is in Poway, north of SanDiego. AeroVironment, which makes an array of backpackablemini-drones, such as the Raven and the Wasp, is in Simi Valley.
Northrop Grumman is testing the X-47B, a carrier-based fighterdrone, for the Navy in Palmdale. The RQ-170, the stealth dronemanufactured by Lockheed Martin and used by the military and theCIA, is believed to have emerged from the company’s classifiedfacility, the Skunk Works, also in Palmdale, near Edwards Air ForceBase.
In the mid-1970s, Paul MacCready, an aeronautical engineer andthe first American to become a world gliding champion, needed cashfast to cover a bad loan he had guaranteed. MacCready, the founderof AeroVironment, and a team of engineers at the company decided tochase the Kremer Prize, the reward for besting a challenge that hadgone unmet for 20 years: a human-powered aircraft capable of flyinga figure eight around two markers half a mile apart. in 1977,MacCready’s Gossamer Condor, piloted by Bryan Allen, took theprize, then worth about $100,000. Two years, later Allen flewanother version of the bird across the English Channel.
AeroVironment, which consulted on air quality, began a sidelinein aviation firsts.
“You had these incredibly talented people attracted to somethingthis cool,” Conver said. “All the airplanes were extraordinarilylight. all were focused on things that hadn’t been donebefore.”
The group eventually flew a solar-powered craft from Paris toEngland, built a working model of Leonardo da Vinci’s flyingmachine and created a flying model of a pterodactyl.
In 1987, AeroVironment flew the first backpack-portable unmannedmilitary aircraft, a nine-pound plane with a camera in its nose. Itwas called the Pointer.
“They were bought for evaluation,” Conver said. “They wereprototypes.”
When the first Special Operations teams went into Afghanistan inOctober 2001, they brought with them two Pointer systems that theyused for low-altitude surveillance. soon, word was going up thechain that the troops wanted more Pointers for Afghanistan’sdifficult terrain. High above them, the Predator and Global Hawkwere also proving themselves.
“The Predator is my most capable sensor in hunting down andkilling al-Qaida and Taliban leadership and is proving absolutelycritical to our fight,” Gen. Tommy Franks wrote in a 2003 Air Forcebackground paper.
The drive for drones was on, and the effect on companies such asAeroVironment was profound. in 2001, the company had annual revenueof $29.4 million. in the decade that followed, that number swelledto nearly $300 million, nearly 85 percent of it from the sale ofdrones. The company, which employs 768 people, up from 163 in 2001,went public in 2007.
