The Army, however, had a missile that Big Safari thought showed promise. The Air Force, they found, owned no weapons light enough for a Predator to carry and had only two experimental ones in the works, the Small Smart Bomb and a lightweight, air-launched cruise missile that was still just a concept. Grimes’ staff came up with three options. In early June 2000, Raggio told Kostelnik to stand down and directed Big Safari to figure out the smartest way to meet Jumper’s goal. Raggio, a three-star that both Grimes and Kostelnik answered to, sided with Grimes. He wanted to run Jumper’s project, but Bill Grimes, the director of the shadowy Air Force technology shop known as Big Safari, thought it belonged to his outfit, which after all was the Predator’s official System Program Office. Kostelnik, who saw it as an opportunity to advance his Small Smart Bomb. No one was more excited about Jumper’s decision than Air Force Major General Michael C. For some, it was more exciting to imagine the technical possibilities than the possible legal limits. The Predator’s success in Bosnia, however, was sparking new thinking about drones. In 1996, the INF Treaty between Washington and Moscow remained in force. Missiles launched from the sea or air were outside the pact, which defined a ground-launched cruise missile as “an unmanned, self-propelled vehicle that sustains flight through the use of aerodynamic lift over most of its flight path” and “a weapon-delivery vehicle.” The INF Treaty, as it is known, prompted Congress to give the Navy-run Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Joint Program Office authority solely over “nonlethal” drones. On December 8 of that year, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which required both nations to eliminate ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 300 to 3,300 miles. But after 1987 the very legality of arming drones became questionable, at least for the United States and the Soviet Union. Over the three decades since those experiments, the idea of weaponizing UAVs had been pursued by a number of people. The first Predator to launch a Hellfire (above) now hangs in the National Air and Space Museum. history the same year the armed Firebee was tested, retiring its QH-50 DASH drone helicopter, which carried torpedoes and even nuclear depth bombs that were never used in combat. The Navy, meanwhile, cancelled the most extensive armed UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) program in U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Air Force interest in drones evaporated. None was put into operation, though, and with the end of U.S. By firing a Maverick from a modified Firebee on December 14, 1971, at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the Air Force’s 6514th Test Squadron claimed a place in aviation history: the first launch of an air-to-ground missile from a remotely piloted aircraft. The closest brush with success came in the 1970s, when the Air Force and Teledyne Ryan put the TV-guided Maverick missile and later a TV-guided glide bomb on some Firebee target drones.
military had tried putting explosives or bombs or missiles on drones several times, but the results were never satisfactory. Since the Kettering Bug, World War I’s never-used “aerial torpedo,” the U.S. In 1999, Jumper had directed the Air Force to experiment with putting laser designators on the drone arming it was what he called “the next logical step.” For technical, legal, and cultural reasons, that step was a giant one. The Air Force owned only 16 Predators at the time, and was planning to buy a total of only 48 Predators by the end of 2003. Hardly anyone outside the military even knew what a Predator was, and many insiders were unimpressed by the fragile little reconnaissance drone, which in Bosnia had proved vulnerable to bad weather and relatively easy for the enemy to shoot down. On May 1, 2000, when Jumper, chief of Air Combat Command, announced his intent to arm the 27-foot-long reconnaissance drone, using the unarmed version to look for Osama bin Laden was still no more than an idea the National Security Council’s Richard Clarke and the CIA’s Charlie Allen were urging on their reluctant bosses. Nor was Jumper’s project secret, though defense industry trade publications were the only media paying attention. Contrary to later accounts, Air Force General John Jumper’s initiative to arm the Predator originally had nothing to do with the CIA’s covert operations against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
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