High-Tech Army Team Turns From Killers to Airborne Spies

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, AFGHANISTAN — In 2006, the U.S. Army unleashed a lethal machine on Iraq’s insurgent bombers. Relying on a mixture of attack helicopters, unmanned drones, piloted planes and a massive amount of high-tech intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting gear, Task Force ODIN decimated the builders and planters of improvised explosive devices, helping take out hundreds of militants in a single year.

Today, ODIN is in Afghanistan. But it doesn’t do much killing anymore. Its armed drones have opened fire exactly three times since coming here in December, 2008. Its commanders shy away from ticking off body counts and measure success by how relevant their information is to ground commanders. It doesn’t even have helicopters these days, relying on partner units when the mission calls for using rotary-wing aircraft. Instead, the task force’s spy planes, drones and analysts quietly track the bombers’ networks instead of targeting individual insurgents. ODIN — short for Observe, Detect, Identify and Neutralize and recalling the All-Father of Norse mythology — takes a broader view of the battlefield now, its All-Seeing Eye trained on giving soldiers a real-time aerial view from above.

Consider ODIN-A, as the task force is known here, another example of the U.S. military’s gamble in Afghanistan: that it can wage a successful counterinsurgency while de-emphasizing the killing of insurgents. “’Kill’ isn’t the only answer here. This is a counterinsurgency fight,” Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Diermeier, a 42-year old Green Bay native who took command of ODIN-A on July 12, tells Danger Room. Adds Major Jason Periatt, his executive officer, “You can’t just say, ‘I captured this dude, I killed this dude, I’m making a difference.’ I go back to the 80s. We started rolling up drug dealers. That doesn’t mean you’re necessarily [succeeding], you’ve got to take the whole concept.”

But some people don’t like their classic myths revamped. For the first time, the heralded program faces angry congressional criticism. But Diermeier has a new, experimental program underway, known as Project Ursus, that brings the task force back to its IED-fighting roots.

It’s one thing to go after the guy who gets paid $50 to plant an IED in the path of a Humvee. There’s an obvious value in doing that, and it’s a component of the task force’s mission. But it’s too narrow a focus, according to Diermeier. “I want the guy who paid him $50,” he says.

Among the 750 soldiers, airmen and contractors working for Diermeier is Morris Lowery, the first sergeant of the Archers — Alpha Company, which flies the Warrior-A, the Army’s version of the Predator drone. The Warrior, like its CIA and Air Force counterparts, is armed with Hellfire missiles. But here, the full-motion video that it records and beams to ground troops’ laptops in real time is its most often-used weapon. The unit estimates that 80 percent of its daily intelligence output includes the footage. Lowery can see the difference clearly: like at least three other enlisted men and two warrant officers in Alpha Company, he served in Iraq in 2007, operating the same drones for ODIN.

In Iraq, Lowery recalls, he and his men were “very much counter-IED focused,” looking for bomb placers — or the weapons themselves. But now Alpha Company does “a lot more reconnaissance and target development,” helping ground troops understand the terrain around them.


To be clear: this is a matter of emphasis. ODIN shot full-motion video in Iraq. And when I showed up to check on Alpha Company, they were involved in a counter-IED mission. General Atomics contractor Steve Coombs and Specialist Michael Gransky sat in a tiny metal box called a ground control station, hands on joysticks. IRC-looking instant message windows competed for space on monitors that showed imagery from a Warrior they controlled. It was in the air over Wardak Province, looking for clues in the aftermath of an bomb attack.

But that emphasis, as the first sergeant judges, has clearly shifted from what it was in Iraq. “We’re about defeating the network here,” Lowery says. “It’s a different war, a different focus, a different terrain.”

That doesn’t sit well with members of Congress, for the understandable reason that right now it doesn’t look like the U.S. is winning the fight against either IEDs or their networks. Recently disclosed Pentagon data shows that successful IED attacks more than tripled from May 2009 to May 2010.

On July 1, sixteen U.S. Senators and Congressmen wrote to General David Petraeus, the incoming commander of the war, to complain about what they saw as a kinder, gentler ODIN at work in Afghanistan. The task force, they charged, was “only a fixed-wing management organization” — with none of the attack helicopters that provided so much of the original ODIN’s lethal power. The task force didn’t have enough planes, intel equipment and other gear, the added, and it didn’t sensibly use the assets it had. “Simply put, ‘Task Force ODIN’ currently in place in Afghanistan is not the Task Force ODIN that was extremely successful in Iraq,” they concluded.

It’s not hard to see why those legislators miss old-school ODIN. In Iraq, its combination of technology and lethality were striking. But in Afghanistan, units like Task Force Paladin are focused on stopping the IEDs and the $50-a-bomb emplacers. ODIN works with those units on a daily basis. To help Paladin counter those IEDs, Diermeier reveals a brand new effort under his command: Project Ursus, designed to track fertilizer bombs.

It’s one of an array of surveillance systems ODIN employs. A program called Constant Hawk provides what former commander Army Colonel A.T. Ball called “forensic backtracking” to locate the culprits of attacks, as well as provide long-term views of a given area. There’s a menu of communications tools that do everything from providing ground and other air elements access to remote databases containing ODIN’s still imagery and video products — some of which ODIN’s analysts cut on the spot for ground units — to spotting targets for soldiers and airmen to attack. The Army buys some of this technology especially for ODIN, but according to Ball’s essay, the team likes to use “commercial off-the-shelf avionics and radios” when possible, in order to work around the Army’s glacial process for buying gear.

ODIN-A can also listen in on insurgent chatter. One of its intelligence programs is called the Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System, or MARSS. Operated from a manned King Air plane, MARSS scoops up a variety of communications intelligence and produces full-motion video of its targets. But soon — possibly as early as late next year – MARSS will link into the Army’s Distributed Common Ground Station, the Army’s intelligence integration program for ground forces, transforming it into eMARSS. That’ll allow it to become what Diermeier calls “an airborne fusion center” for every type of intelligence the Army collects.

Upgrades like that might explain why, contrary to lawmakers’ assertion that ODIN-A is under-resourced, Diermeier and Periatt don’t have a long wish list. Even bandwidth — which vexed Ball in Iraq — isn’t an issue. Although they could always use more, “If we tell them we need more, they find it for us – Big Army, DoD, Centcom,” Diermeier’s biggest desire, he says, are “more folks that I could send directly and embed” with ground forces.

Similarly, even though ODIN-A rarely pulls its triggers, the procedure for launching its Hellfires is no longer as cumbersome and bureaucratic as Paul McLeary of Aviation Week found last November in the first in-depth piece on ODIN’s Afghanistan operations. According to Diermeier, it takes “ten minutes or less from positive identification” to fire a missile at the ground commander’s behest. Of course, ODIN-A hasn’t actually fired a missile since Diermeier’s rotation arrived last month.

So don’t expect Diermeier to promote the kinds of kill totals that ODIN boasted about in Iraq. In keeping with ODIN’s transition from countering IEDs to a broader intelligence mission, he and Periatt judge their performance by how frequently their intelligence products are demanded by soldiers and marines on the ground; and how they neutralize insurgent IED networks, judged by a decrease in attacks, rise in arrests, stopping the flow of money and material and so on.

That may not sit well with legislators, especially if IED attacks continue to rise. Diermeier isn’t focused on the criticism, though. “How we’re judged outside the organization,” he says, “isn’t relevant to me as a commander.”