Drone War Vietnam

Introduction

On October 7, 2001, a US Air Force MQ-1 Predator drone flying over Afghanistan fired a missile at a building CIA analysts suspected of housing Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The Predator missed and instead struck a vehicle, killing several of the mullah’s bodyguards.

The botched Predator strike was hardly the first time US military and intelligence agencies had sent aerial robots into battle. As early as the Second World War, the military had tinkered with remote-controlled bombers.

Drones also played an important – and today largely unheralded – role in the bloody, two-decade US air war over Vietnam and surrounding countries in the 1960s and ’70s. Drone aircraft spotted targets for manned US bombers, jammed North Vietnamese radars and scattered propaganda leaflets, among other missions.

This book explores that obscure chapter of history. DRONE WAR VIETNAM is based on military records, official histories and published first-hand accounts from early drone operators, as well as on a close survey of existing scholarship on the topic.

The Ryan Aeronautical Model 147 Lightning Bug subsonic drone, a mainstay of the Vietnam air war, launched in mid-air from a DC-130 motherplane and, at the end of its mission, popped a parachute and floated toward the ground. A helicopter buzzed in to retrieve it.

The Model 147s were crude, unreliable and vulnerable to enemy air defenses and espionage. In 1967 the North Vietnamese began intercepting the drone operators’ radio signals and exploited the resulting intelligence to set aerial ambushes for drones and manned warplanes. Spiking losses forced the Air Force and the National Security Agency to equip the motherships with new radio encryption.

The Lightning Bug evolved. By the end of the war new Model 147s were more effective, more reliable and more survivable than early models, and they inspired totally new drone designs that further improved on the basic concept of unmanned aerial reconnaissance.

In perhaps the ultimate expression of robotic recce up to that point, the CIA deployed supersonic drones to spy on Vietnam’s neighbors. After many failures, the powerful D-21 drone – in essence a pilotless miniature of the Mach-3 SR-71 manned spy plane – photographed China’s Lop Nor nuclear test site between 1969 and 1971.

After Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces in 1975, the Pentagon quickly cooled on drones. The advent of more capable and more reliable satellites arguably rendered obsolete the drones that flew over Vietnam and its neighbors. For four decades, fast and dumb spy drones with their volatile engines, self-contained navigation systems and general lack of real-time data-link to their operators were … historical curiosities.

Then history began to loop back on itself. The high cost and inherent limitations of spy satellites in the 1990s spurred the development of a new generation of combat drone. The Predator that fired on Mullah Omar in October 2001 dramatically announced what appeared to many to be a whole new kind of warfare.

Yet it wasn’t new. In their fledgling efforts to send robots instead of human beings on the most dangerous aerial missions, US operators in South-East Asia in the 1960s and ’70s wrote the first chapter in the continuing tale of autonomous warfare.

Chapter One

The story of American drones over Vietnam doesn’t begin in Vietnam. Not in August 1964 when North Vietnamese torpedo boats allegedly attacked the US Navy destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, spurring President Lyndon Johnson to order retaliatory air strikes and the US Congress to authorize a wider war effort.

Nor even in May 1961 when President John F. Kennedy deployed US Army helicopters and Green Berets to South Vietnam for secret operations targeting Viet Cong guerrillas.

No, it begins much earlier in a much colder country, in the Soviet Union in 1950.

That year, Soviet military leaders realized they had a problem. The US Air Force at the time possessed around 1,000 bombers with the range and payload to drop the United States’ roughly 300 atomic bombs on cities across the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Air Force, by contrast, possessed a few hundred obsolete bombers as well as around five atomic bombs. The bomber gap favored the Americans by a huge margin and prevented deterrence by way of mutually-assured destruction (MAD).

The American threat wasn’t only nuclear. The devastation that US Air Force B-29s rained on North Korea starting in mid-1950 particularly alarmed Soviet premier Joseph Stalin.

The Soviets needed to fortify their cities against the apocalyptic threat of American atomic bombers. As many Cold War weapons-developers did when faced with a profound technological problem, they looked to Nazi Germany for solutions.

Near the end of the Second World War in 1945, German scientists, desperate to defend against hordes of Allied bombers, were on the cusp of developing radarguided surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). The Soviet Union scooped up some of that early SAM technology - and more than a few Nazi scientists - and launched the development of a copycat system.

The copycat system ultimately never entered service, but it did inspire a rival program to develop the Berkut SAM network. In August 1950, Stalin ordered the Kremlin to deploy the Berkut system around Moscow within one year. He wanted the system to be able to stop a 1,000-bomber raid like the kind the Allies occasionally mounted late in the Second World War.

In fact, it took eight years for workers to finish building Berkut. Stalin’s death in 1953 and the subsequent violent purge of many of his closest allies contributed to the delay, but the system’s sheer scale was the main reason it took so long to complete. Following the purge, Berkut became known as the S-25.

The S-25 was, in the words of historian Steven Zaloga, ‘an immense undertaking’. It consisted of a staggering fifty-six missile regiments in two concentric rings around Moscow. To support the missile sites, prison laborers built two ring roads around Moscow that, according to a US intelligence assessment, required as much concrete as the entire Soviet economy typically consumed in a year. The ring roads have become fixtures of Moscow’s modern transport system.

Beside the launchers, each S-25 site included 60 launch pads for V-300 missiles, a B-200 radar, a command bunker and crew housing and covered around 360 acres, usually in a forested area. It took almost 500 officers and men to staff a single site.

Standing 39ft tall with a warhead weighing up to 700lb, the V-300 - or SA-1, as NATO referred to it - was a monster of a missile, but it was inaccurate. It was standard practice for crews to fire three missiles at a time on the assumption that two would widely miss their target. Anticipating huge defensive barrages during wartime, by 1958 the Kremlin bought no fewer than 32,000 V-300 missiles.

The S-25 system had another fatal flaw. It worked best when engaging targets flying below 59,000ft. However, the new U-2 spy plane that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and US Air Force began operating in 1956 could fly higher than 70,000ft.

Soviet air defense planners had little faith in the S-25, and not only because the V-300 missile lacked performance. ‘The system layout was ill-conceived, being spaced equally around the periphery of Moscow,’ Zaloga explained. ‘This meant that at the most likely points of bomber attack, the north and west, the thin layer of defenses could be overwhelmed during an attack, or the defenses breached by preliminary attacks prior to the main bomber waves.’

The S-25 lingered in service through the early 1980s, but neither country that deployed the system - the Soviet Union and North Korea - ever fired a V-300 missile in anger. For front-line use in actual shooting wars, the Soviets developed a much better air defense system, one that would shape a generation of American reconnaissance technology.

This was the S-75, NATO code-name SA-2. Soviet planners rushed development of the S-75, starting in 1954. While it borrowed some components from the S-25 system, the S-75 was simpler and easier to transport. Its SNR-75 radar took advantage of recent technological advancements. The two-stage V-750 missile, 35ft from tip to tail, was more powerful and more accurate than the V-300. It could hit targets 28 miles away. Perhaps most importantly, it worked at altitudes higher than 70,000ft.

In July 1956, the S-25 system around Moscow detected, for the first time, one of the CIA’s U-2s flying with impunity over Moscow. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, duly enraged, ordered the Kremlin to speed up the S-75’s development. Shoot down the U-2s, Khrushchev demanded. Meanwhile, Soviet diplomats filed a formal complaint to the US embassy in Moscow about the U-2 overflights.

US president Dwight Eisenhower was upset. Richard Bissell, Jr, the CIA official who oversaw Lockheed’s work on the U-2, had assured Eisenhower that Soviet radars wouldn’t detect the U-2.

When that rosy prediction proved false, Eisenhower suspended the CIA’s authority to approve U-2 flights over the Soviet Union. Moving forward, the president would approve, on an individual basis, each U-2 mission over Soviet territory. Eisenhower rejected more proposed U-2 sorties than he approved.

There was just one U-2 mission over the Soviet Union in 1958 and two in 1959. In early 1960 Eisenhower promised Khrushchev that there would be no U-2 flights over the Soviet Union during the remaining months of his administration ending in January 1961.

The first V-750 missiles entered service in 1957. Soon S-75 systems were in place around Moscow, Leningrad and Baku. As thousands of V-750s poured from Soviet factories, the Kremlin’s developers were hard at work improving the missile and its associated radars. In 1958 the Soviet Union exported to China five batteries of S-75s and deployed technicians to help operate the systems. A year later, everything changed.

As part of a proxy spying effort targeting the Communist Bloc, the United States had equipped the Taiwanese military with high-altitude spy planes including RB- 57s and U-2s. On October 7, 1959, a salvo of three V-750s destroyed a Taiwanese RB-57 flying over China at an altitude of 65,600ft. It was the first-ever hostile shoot-down of an aircraft by a surface-to-air missile.

A little over a month later on November 16, 1959, a Soviet S-75 battery shot down an American WS-416L reconnaissance balloon, Zaloga claimed. ‘This incident remains unverified,’ he noted.

In mid-1960 Eisenhower made a fateful decision. Under pressure to better understand Soviet ballistic missile developments and frustrated with delays in the Corona spy-satellite program, the president approved a U-2 mission over the Soviet Union, this despite his pledge to the Soviet premier. On May 1, 1960, CIA pilot Gary Francis Powers took off from a base in Pakistan and winged toward the Ukraine, a center of Soviet weapons production.

Soviet radars tracked the U-2 the whole way. A dozen Soviet fighters climbed to intercept but couldn’t reach the high-flying U-2. Powers’ luck ran out near Sverdlovsk. A nearby factory produced the latest 13D version of the V-750 missile. Local S-75 batteries were among the first to receive the new, more powerful 13D.

Two S-75 batteries launched missiles at the U-2. One 13D exploded behind the spy plane at an altitude of 67,000ft. The damaged U-2 spiraled out of control. Powers bailed out right before a second V-750 struck his plane.

Powers’ shoot-down sparked a diplomatic crisis, one that the Pentagon and the White House had anticipated. ‘Someone had better be giving some thought to the problem we’re going to have if and when a U-2 pilot comes down in unfriendly territory,’ Colonel Harold Wood, the Air Force’s head of reconnaissance, said at a meeting with his deputy Lieutenant Colonel Lloyd Ryan in the Pentagon basement in September 1959.

That someone turned out to be Ray Ballweg, vice president of Pasadena-based Hycon Manufacturing, which produced the U-2’s powerful cameras.

A few weeks after Wood uttered his ominous warning, Ballweg met the colonel and his deputy at the Pentagon. Ryan echoed Wood’s concern about the seeming inevitability of a U-2 pilot winding up in enemy hands.

‘Hell, Lloyd, why don’t you have us install a camera in a jet target drone?’ Ballweg said. ‘No reason it can’t be programmed to do the recon job for you and bring back pictures.’ No pilot, no risk of a pilot getting captured. However, Wood and Ryan knew