Never Mind, We’ll Do It Ourselves is a book about turning the Predator drone from a platform limited to line-of-sight navigation into one capable of flying hundreds of miles to a target area directed and controlled by satellite communications, feeding its live feed directly to intelligence analysts 8,000 miles away in real-time while hovering for hours. The book chronicles the crash, mad-science program kicked off in January 2000 for hunting down and taking out Osama bin Laden. Aside from its historical interest, the book lays out all the challenges many of us have seen in pulling together an ad hoc team, who, with a laser-focus on the goal, can accomplish miracles with duct tape and baling wire, while side-stepping as many bureaucratic landmines as possible. So many things that happened sounded eerily familiar to me from cheap, but clever tricks to, “Let’s just not tell them we’re doing this until after it’s done,” maneuvers.
The President had told the CIA, NSA, etc. to find Bin Laden and eliminate him by October 2000. Bin Laden’s network was already responsible for the destruction of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The deadline, if not the purpose, was based on politics rather than reality of course. It was for the various brain trusts of the intelligence agencies to figure out how to do it. The President’s job is to set the goals. The How it All Began chapter of the book starts with a scene directly out of The Hunt for Red October where Jack Ryan, as he’s ushered into an emergency meeting populated with all the top brass, asks his boss Admiral Greer, “Who’s giving the briefing?” to Greer’s, “You are,” rejoinder.
Alec Bierbauer, one of the authors finds himself in a brainstorming session with all the top minds and heavy hitters of the intelligence agencies, wondering to himself why is he there with this accumulation of brass and brainpower? He listens to them throw out ideas, ruling each of them out, and, as a listener, ticks off all the assumptions and limits that are articulated by all these smart people, tying the mission into an insoluble problem. Then, as he memorably writes:
Some moments in your life you hear the words being spoken, and you pray to God they didn’t just come from your own mouth.
“If we can’t send a pilot into harm’s way, can we just send the plane?”
The book chronicles how the authors assemble a team of mavericks and go-getters and accomplishes one crazy task after another until, in September 2000, they find themselves watching bin Laden emerge from a convoy into an Al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan, and relay the information to the command structure to send the cruise missiles from the subs parked in the Indian Ocean in anticipation of just such a moment, only to be asked after a long delay, “Can you guarantee he’ll still be there 2 hours from now?”
They had run into a hidden assumption that they hadn’t anticipated. They had accomplished the nearly impossible goal of putting eyes on the target, a single human being, from 8,000 miles away in real time, using an unpiloted aircraft but had no way of taking a shot that wouldn’t take at least 2 hours to get there.
From there the book chronicles how they set about squashing that hidden assumption by arming the drone itself in another odds-defying effort.
This book in not only a great work of historical documentation, but a great business book on how to get things done. It doesn’t sugar-coat the things they did that would have to be fixed to turn drone warfare into another tool in the armed forces, but it doesn’t focus on them. Those in the cybersecurity community will hold their heads in their hands at some of the things they did, and that part’s a great lesson too. Thrilling and entertaining and one of the best business books I’ve ever read to boot.
Musings of a Restless Mind 