On Wednesday, the National Security Archive released 913 pages of Rumsfeld “snowflakes,” the cutesy nickname he gave for his regular missives. The collection, roughly 59,000 pages in total, is being released in monthly batches under the FOIA request (after some prompting with legal action). The archive is vast, and strange, and worth poking through in full for an insight into the tweet-length thoughts of the longest serving secretary of defense. For our purposes today, I’m going to talk about a subset of the Rumsfeld Snowflakes: his thoughts, in 2001, on drones.

The people around Rumsfeld appear to have been interested in drones, and in their military utility in both contested and uncontested skies, but nothing suggests that Rumsfeld paid any special attention to the most iconic aircraft of the War on Terror, at least not in 2001.

Drones first appear in a January 4th “Transition Agenda Thoughts” paper sent to Rumsfeld by Sean O’Keefe. O’Keefe, who would go on to work as deputy director of OMB for most of 2001 before heading NASA, wanted the military to explore new solutions for problems, and he suggested ruling existing answers out and finding new tools for tasks such as “precision deep strike, rapid deployment and battle space command & control missions.” He wanted tools that are different from the standard set of “cruise missiles/long range aircraft, forward deployment, and reconnaissance aircraft.” Instead, O’Keefe floats to Rumsfeld the “varied mission utility of B-2, mobile offshore bases, and UAVs.”

In other words: to transition away from precision deep strike, O’Keefe suggested a stealthy strategic bomber built for precision deep strike, and that instead of traditional reconnaissance aircraft, the Pentagon should look to drones. The transition agenda thoughts appear a second time in the released batch of memos, and there’s a check mark and a plus sign next to the section on drones, marks presumably made by Rumsfeld before he forwarded the list of thoughts along to his deputies.

On October 15th, 2001, Rumsfeld sent a memo to his deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz asking that he “get program decision memoranda drafted to instruct the Services to do what they should on UAVs.” There’s nothing in the memo about what Rumsfeld says the services should do, but it does reference having Pete Aldridge, then Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, take a look at the memos before sending them down so the services can get on board. Shortly thereafter, Rumsfeld sent Aldridge a memo on gunships, saying “We need more weapon systems that are like the AC-130, where the ordnance can be directed in a more precise way than can some of our other platforms and weapons.”

On November 8th, 2001, Aldridge responded, saying “the gunship’s advantage is that it couples target identification, man-in-the-loop decision making and organic firepower in a single platform.” To this end, Aldridge recommends that the Air Force upgrade gunships with “small UAVs and air-to-surface missiles”, as well as upgrades to their guns. Notably, Aldridge also suggests that the gunships be augmented with UCAVS, or unmanned combat aerial vehicles, a category of drone long in development but that does not yet exist outside the prototype or testing stages in 2018.

The only drone mentioned by name in the released memos is the Global Hawk, and even then, it’s not mentioned by Rumsfeld. It instead appears as a model technology in a sample column attached to a letter from Bill Roesing, suggesting that Rumsfeld write a weekly column on Leadership. (The column’s author, presumably Roesing, suggests that the Pentagon develop the Global Hawk first as a surveillance platform while exploring future iterations as “potential combat vehicles.”)

In April 2001, former Secretary of the Air Force Don Rice sent Rumsfeld a letter arguing for the restart of the B-2 program, complete with diagrams supposedly showcasing the cost savings of payload delivery by B-2 compared to an equivalent payload weight delivered by cruise missiles. In that letter, Rice suggests that “a long-range, dwell capability for electronic combat-manned or unmanned-would be valuable in many circumstances,” foreshadowing the long-endurance drones of the 2010s, and possibly even anticipating the optionally manned nature of the still-in-development B-21 bomber. Rice also suggested that the Air Force abandon the Joint Strike Fighter program and a proposed “stealthy F-111” program, and suggested instead that the Pentagon invest in “a technologically serious and fiscally prudent R&D program on a future unmanned long-range, stealthy attack aircraft you can pursue for the more distant future,” to fly alongside the B-2s from a restarted bomber program.

Perhaps the best reflection of Rumsfeld’s attitude on drones, at least as seen through these memos, is a short missive sent on February 214th, 2001: “Please add intelligence and unmanned UAVs to the list of things that we are going to get people to comment on.“

Kelsey Atherton blogs about military technology for C4ISRNET, Fifth Domain, Defense News, and Military Times. He previously wrote for Popular Science, and also created, solicited, and edited content for a group blog on political science fiction and international security.

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