POWAY, Calif. — The cars begin rolling through the security checkpoints before dawn. In a sprawling complex in the craggy rock outcroppings of north San Diego County, 3,300 workers are building a new generation of weapons central to the military’s vision for modern warfare.
This is where General Atomics Aeronautical Systems makes the Predator and Reaper drones, robotic planes that can thread the rugged mountains of Pakistan, capture video images of terrorist hide-outs and launch 500-pound Hellfire missiles to blast them apart.
The company’s 1.9 million square-foot facility is part of Southern California’s drone industry, which employs an estimated 10,000 people. The fast-growing business is fueled by Pentagon spending - at least $20 billion since 2001 - and billions more chipped in by the CIA and Congress.
Seeing an almost limitless market, dozens of defense contractors - Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. among them - are vying to get in on the action. They are building surveillance drones the size of insects that can fly through open windows, and others as big as jetliners that can skim the stratosphere.
Soon, experts say, the military and private companies alike will have fleets of robotic planes that can do just about everything piloted aircraft can do, such as carrying cargo and engaging in aerial combat.
“It is the most hotly sought-after weapon system in a generation,” said Loren Thompson, a military policy analyst for the Lexington Institute, a research center in Arlington, Va.
Among other things, the industry is the product of big money lobbying and pork barrel politics.
A little more than nine years ago, Thomas J. Cassidy Jr. stood on the windswept tarmac of Adelanto Airport in the Mojave Desert, pitching the wonders of the Predator drone to a dozen scientists and firefighting officials.
For Cassidy, this was the B list. The Pentagon was always seen as the primary customer for the Predator, but early trials during the conflict in Bosnia hadn’t gone well. The small aircraft, powered by a pusher propeller, was easily shot down by anti-aircraft fire. Fighter pilots mocked it as a pricey model plane.
Cassidy, a gruff former Navy rear admiral, was hired by General Atomics to persuade his former comrades in the military to buy the Predator. Now he was looking for any customers he could find. The Predator could be used to spot wildfires, he told his latest prospects. It could monitor global warming.
The audience listened politely - then scattered quickly when the demonstration ended. There were no takers.
It was Sept. 6, 2001 . Five days later, the world changed.
“That’s when the phone started ringing off the hook,” Cassidy said.
With the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the military suddenly wanted weapons that could search for and destroy al-Qaida’s mountain lairs.
It was a turning point for General Atomics, and the company was poised to take full advantage of the opportunity.
Through its political action committee, General Atomics had been making friends in Washington since the early 1990s, giving nearly $3 million since 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
By comparison, the political action committee for Northrop Grumman Corp. gave $8.2 million over the same period. But Northrop is a giant, with 120,000 employees and $33 billion in annual revenue. Analysts estimate that General Atomics, which is privately held, has 4,500 employees and annual revenue of about $600 million.
Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., whose district includes the Antelope Valley, a hub of aerospace activity, said drones make sense because they perform vital military functions without putting the lives of pilots at risk.
They also save money. Predators cost about $4 million. Each of the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters now in flight testing is expected to cost taxpayers about $100 million.
Critics, however, say the prospect of jobs and campaign money has blinded members of Congress to the shortcomings of robotic aircraft. On the battlefield, the pilotless drones have struggled with system failures, computer glitches and human error. Hundreds of unintentional civilian casualties have been blamed on strikes linked to drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“Everybody is gaga over this technology, but they haven’t seen how much time and money go into flying these things,” said Winslow Wheeler, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a Pentagon watchdog group. “They are not cheap, and they have limitations.”
The Pentagon is spending more than $4 billion this year buying and operating drones, more than 7,000 of which are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The CIA is also spending about $1 billion a year on drone technology, according to analysts, although the actual amount is not known because the agency’s budget is classified.
There is also a robust international market for U.S.-built drones, including Turkey, Italy and Britain. Last year, the Air Force released its Unmanned Aircraft System Flight Plan, which forecasts the possible drone development through 2047. In it, the Air Force lays out how drones would eventually replace nearly every manned plane - from fighters to tankers to bombers.
While General Atomics and Northrop reign as the two biggest drone builders, their rivals include:
Boeing, which has snapped up small drone manufacturers to catch up with the technology. One of the Chicago company’s key acquisitions was Frontier Systems Inc. of Irvine, Calif., which builds a drone helicopter that could be used for cargo and reconnaissance.
Among the drones that Boeing is developing are the fighter-size Phantom, which analysts said could be used for long-range bombing missions, and the Phantom Eye, an egg-shaped spy plane that can stay aloft for up to four days at 65,000 feet.
AeroVironment Inc., based in Monrovia, Calif., makes an array of small drones that have become a mainstay of the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan. One of them, the Raven, weighs about 4 pounds and is fitted with video cameras to give U.S. troops a bird’s-eye view of what could lie ahead or over a hill.
Like Boeing, AeroVironment is also building a long-endurance spy plane, dubbed the Global Observer, which is in test flight at Edwards Air Force Base near Mojave. The plane, with its 175-foot wingspan, is designed to hover at 65,000 feet for a week at a time.
Lockheed Martin Corp., the nation’s largest defense contractor, is making a radar-evading drone called the RQ-170 Sentinel or the Beast of Kandahar. Little is known about the stealthy plane, except that it is being developed at Lockheed’s famed Skunk Works in Palmdale, Calif.
The Bethesda, Md., company has also teamed with Kaman Aerospace Corp. on a robotic helicopter for transporting cargo.
Business, Pages 23 on 09/27/2010