Read Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins for Free Online Page A

Sihanoukeville, thus avoiding the Ho Chi Minh Trail altogether. A CIA analyst’s suggestion that people be recruited simply to watch comings and goings at the port was rejected in accordance with the officially accepted understanding that the enemy was entirely dependent on the trail.
    Ironically, although the project had proved less than effective in defeating the communist enemy, it came to serve as a global symbol of the soulless but deadly American war machine. The Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the war leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, contained a detailed account of the original Jason deliberations, including those cerebral ruminations on the relative lethal merits of cluster bombs and other munitions. Amid the general horrors of the war, the specter of an automated battlefield, in which targets were selected and struck by remote control, touched a sensitive public nerve, just as drone attacks unleashed by the Obama administration forty years later ignited similar debate. At scientific conferences in Europe, venerable Nobel Prize winners confronted by angry demonstrators had to be rescued by riot police. Other Jasons received death threats at home. An antiwar tract published by dissident scientists at Berkeley in 1972 cited the electronic battlefield as “an especially clear instance of Jason’s intervention contributing decisively to the prolongation of the Indochina war.” At a public meeting in Boston of the antiwar Winter Soldier movement, an embittered veteran, Eric Herter, testified eloquently and presciently about “the new forms of war that are to replace the unpopular struggle of infantry and patrol against guerrilla bands … This new war will not produce My Lais. It will be a war not of men at arms, but of computers and weapons systems against whole populations. Even the tortured bond of humanity between enemies at war will be eliminated. Under its auspices, the people of the villages have gone from being ‘gooks’ and ‘dinks’ to being grid-coordinates, blips on scan screens, dots of light on infrared film. They are never seen, never known, never even hated … It is hard to feel responsible for this type of war, even for those who were close to it. There is little personal involvement. The atrocity is the result of a chain of events in which no man plays a single decisive part.”
    Less emotional but more formidable opposition to Task Force Alpha was building up elsewhere. By 1972, a faction at the highest levels of the U.S. Air Force was becoming increasingly disenchanted at having to shell out a billion dollars a year for no appreciable return on a system that had not really been their idea in the first place. But even though the dissidents, including General Clay, were powerful four-star generals, there were also potent forces maneuvering to keep the system operating, even if peace broke out. These latter included John Foster’s directorate of defense research and engineering, along with other interested military and corporate parties, including IBM. Clearly the generals had to tread carefully in disposing of the unwanted project. Fortunately, they had someone on hand they were confident could accomplish the mission. “Someone very senior was fed up with the idiocy [of Task Force Alpha],” remembers Tom Christie, a former high-ranking Pentagon official. “They knew what they were doing when they sent John.”
    “John” was Colonel John Boyd, a legendary fighter pilot known as Forty-Second Boyd, thanks to his standing $40 bet that he could beat any pilot in a mock dogfight in forty seconds. He never lost. As fearless and skillful in bureaucratic combat as he was at the controls of a jet fighter, with no inhibitions about speaking truth to power (once, gesturing emphatically with his habitual cigar during an argument with a general, he burned a hole in the latter’s tie), Boyd could be counted on to cut through the technological pretensions of the electronic barrier. His