#Reviewing First Platoon

In the 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report, viewers peer into a future in which the government can anticipate crime before it happens and arrest those about to commit the act through the use of clairvoyant precognitive psychics. The film wrestles with who should have the authority to possess information and take action and the nature of justice in an environment of identity dominance. While such a scenario may seem far-fetched, Annie Jacobsen shows the reality of the concept of identity dominance over a population in First Platoon. She weaves together her main themes through four questions—what are the boundaries of a persistent surveillance state enabled by advances in biometrics; who should own and have access to biometric data of a population; how has the face of battle changed in an identity dominance environment; and what is justice in this new environment? Jacobsen provides a gripping and thought-provoking story built on rigorous research through Freedom of Information Act requests and numerous interviews. However, while Jacobsen provides a compelling narrative, the reader is perhaps left with more questions than answers at the end.

In the first chapter, "The Panopticon," Jacobsen draws a parallel between the original concept of a prison in which a single guard can see all inmates, but the inmates cannot tell when the guard is actually watching them, put forward by Jeremy Bentham—later extended to include the surveillance state by philosopher Michel Foucault—and the Pentagon's program to establish identity dominance through combat biometrics in the Global War on Terrorism.[1] Jacobsen bases her claim that the Department of Defense sought such a forward-looking program from a Defense Science Board Task Force report to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2004, which stated, "The [war] cannot be won without a 'Manhattan Project’-like tagging, tracking, and locating program for national security threats."[2]

Plan of the Panopticon by Jeremy Bentham, 1791. (Wikimedia)

Jacobsen worries that biometric and predictive programs such as these, created for battlefield expediency, will quickly poison our domestic law enforcement agencies and create a modern-day panopticon.

She further offers that three different Defense Science Board Task Forces helped develop the program: one that assessed personal risk of individuals based on several characteristics such as ethnic and religious tendencies; one that worked on tagging and tracking individuals over long durations of time and distance; and the last that worked on predictive behavior modeling based on a pattern of life analysis.[3] Jacobsen worries that biometric and predictive programs such as these, created for battlefield expediency, will quickly poison our domestic law enforcement agencies and create a modern-day panopticon.

One of the scariest scenarios discussed in the literature on Artificial Intelligence today is the misidentification of targets, whether in domestic surveillance or on the battlefield. Jacobsen chronicles such a near-miss scenario based on interviews with a Persistent Ground Surveillance System operator based at Combat Outpost Siah Choy in 2012. According to the rules of engagement at the time, if a Persistent Ground Surveillance System operator saw an individual complete three different interactions with the ground—presumably to emplace an improvised-explosive device—they could put together a 429 status packet, seeking approval to move the individual from civilian to insurgent status. 429 status allows U.S. forces to target the individual in the future lethally.[4]

The Persistent Ground Surveillance System operator recounted a day where the Palantir program identified for killing the “man in a purple hat”—a 429 individual he had watched for hundreds of hours—based on predictive analysis.

To aid the pattern of life analysis in Afghanistan, U.S. forces used a Palantir software program to catalog interactions and sightings, create linkages, and conduct predictive analysis. The Persistent Ground Surveillance System operator recounted a day where the Palantir program identified for killing the “man in a purple hat”—a 429 individual he had watched for hundreds of hours—based on predictive analysis. Another operator received the identification and had close air support on station to conduct a strike.

However, the operator looked at the camera and immediately understood it was not the same individual based on the intimate details of his face, gait, and mannerism. After averting the strike, the Persistent Ground Surveillance System operators concluded that the data fed into the program misidentified the man's hat as purple due to the morning lighting, leading to wrong identification.[5] The problems of misidentification in predictive analysis and biometric databases drive another question: who gets to own biometric data and makes the decision of friend or foe from it?

In the early parts of the book, Jacobsen chronicles the development of the use and cataloging of fingerprints and DNA by domestic law enforcement authorities in the United States. She points out that only those who have some run-in with authorities get placed into the FBI's criminal database within the Criminal Justice Information Services Division, making a case for dampening concerns about the federal government cataloging the entire population.[6]

In contrast to the selective cataloguing by domestic law enforcement, what the U.S. military did in Afghanistan amounted to cataloguing an entire population's biometrics.

In contrast to the selective cataloguing by domestic law enforcement, what the U.S. military did in Afghanistan amounted to cataloguing an entire population's biometrics. Further, the United States, as a third party, held on to the massive catalog of biometric and genetic information of Afghans, Iraqis, and others worldwide that it had gathered in the separate Department of Defense classified Automated Biometric Identification System. Given the classified nature of the Automated Biometric Identification System, very few individuals have access to the data or understand precisely what is collected and stored. Further, stories of misidentification, such as that of Rod Nordland of the New York Times, give reason for further suspicion of the identification system’s integrity.

In 2011, Nordland traveled to Kabul to report on the biometrics collection by the Department of Defense and allowed the Army to take his biometric data with a Biometric Automated Toolset system. The biometric system identified him as Haji Daro Shar Mohammed, an Afghan on the terrorist watch list.[7] The false identification shows one of the many problems with the Automated Biometric Identification System and foreshadows the book's most important finding.

Jacobsen shines in bringing the absurdity of the tactical employment of such systems to life through the stories of the soldiers from First Platoon, Charlie Troop, 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment. Jacobsen's extensive interviews with members of First Platoon allowed her to reconstruct and retell many of the platoon's most significant actions, from the mundane to the tedious to the downright terrible moments of a modern-day deployment. Her ability to relate individual stories is similar to John Keegan's The Face of Battle. From the start of their deployment, the soldiers from First Platoon learned that most of their days in southern Afghanistan would include grueling foot patrols through grape fields, punctuated by stopping to take biometrics of those they encountered. Not only would members of the platoon take biometrics from Afghan civilians, but would take those of the Taliban they killed amid harassing small arms fire and even in the course of a firefight.[8]

In light of the recent rapid collapse of the Afghan government, the story arc of First Platoon makes the reader wonder if the sacrifice was worth it. One of the most memorable quotes from one of the soldiers exemplifies how most platoon members remembered their deployment: "The one school we built next to Ghariban ended up getting destroyed by us. We hit it with our own missile. We weren't supposed to say that's what happened, but it did. The Taliban took it over and were using it to plan IED [improvised explosive device] attacks. [It] sums up our deployment. Everything good we did ended up getting destroyed."[9]

The theme of everything good being destroyed brings the reader to the best and most explosive part of the book…

The theme of everything good being destroyed brings the reader to the best and most explosive part of the book—the order from platoon leader Clint Lorance to commit a war crime and his eventual pardon by President Donald Trump. Through thorough interviews, trial testimony, and interviews with Lorance's lawyer and biometrics expert, Jacobsen tells the story of the crime in detail and uncovers that the evidence used to champion Lorance's pardon rested on faulty biometric data.

On the morning of July 2, 2012, Lorance instructed his platoon to shoot at any two-wheeled motorcycles on sight, as he had intelligence that they were all Taliban.[10] While the platoon objected, they ultimately carried out his order later in the day, killing two Afghan men. In August 2013, a court-martial convicted Lorance of two counts of premeditated murder as a result.[11] Enter John Maher, a defense attorney who specializes in combat biometrics, who took up Lorance's appeal case, noting that the Army's charge sheet contained anomalies related to identity.[12] Maher, who worked in Afghanistan at the Rule of Law Center processing biometrics cases against Afghans, contacted a friend with access to the Automated Biometric Identification System, Bill Carney. Through means that remain unclear even today, Carney obtained the biometric data for the individuals killed by First Platoon and proved that at least one was a member of the Taliban who planted an improvised explosive device that killed a member of the platoon.

However, through Freedom of Information Act requests and persistent questioning of Maher and Carney, Jacobsen uncovered that the man who Maher and Carney had said was a member of the Taliban and killed by First Platoon in 2012 was reportedly arrested several times afterward, in 2014, twice in 2015, and 2017.[13] Additionally, the data Jacobsen received from the Department of Defense about the improvised explosive device event that killed a member of the platoon did not match up with recollections of the platoon members. When she plotted the grid on a map, the platoon members said it was in an entirely different district from where their fellow soldier died.

Peeling back all of the inconsistencies, Jacobsen finally pressed Maher and Carney about their data during a call in 2020, in which Carney admitted he did not pull the information for Lorance's defense from the Automated Biometric Identification System and only used name recognition to associate the individual to some files he kept from his time in Afghanistan. As Jacobsen puts it: "Lorance had ordered civilians killed. He was convicted of these murders and jailed for war crimes. He was pardoned and freed by President Trump after eight members of Congress and the defense team presented information that stated Lorance had killed terrorists. And now, Carney confirmed, information used to free him was false."[14] An individual with purported access to a classified system used information he thought was close enough to help release a war criminal.

Jacobsen provides a compelling argument for the dangers of institutionalized use of AI-enabled identification based on biometrics and predictive analysis.

Despite the strengths of Jacobsen's revelations, one of the most significant issues of the book is that it presumes too much in using the war on terror to forecast the future of U.S. domestic policing. Jacobsen rightly brings forward the concern that technologies created to aid and assist in the prosecution of a counterinsurgency should spark debate on how much and to what extent domestic law enforcement agencies get to use the same tools.

However, Jacobsen’s unstated assumption is that it is inevitable that tools such as Secure Electronic Enrollment Kits will end up on every corner of American streets. Jacobsen’s work would benefit from a better distinction between policing, warfare, and an explanation that in a counterinsurgency fight—as in any warfare—it is advantageous and necessary to identify friend from foe and use that information to target. Further, the author claims that the stated goals of biometric collection in Afghanistan served as a cover for the more nefarious goal of U.S. testing of the above-stated program—a claim for which she fails to provide adequate proof.[15] These issues aside, however, Jacobsen provides a compelling argument for the dangers of institutionalized use of AI-enabled identification based on biometrics and predictive analysis.

Jacobsen's gripping account of how a platoon's deployment revolved around biometrics and how it ultimately led to a grave betrayal of justice is a must-read. Jacobsen fails to substantiate her connection between counterinsurgency and domestic policing norms. Nonetheless, she makes a compelling case for why deliberate thought must go into how governments use biometrics in the future. She rightly points out that citizens of the U.S. must be wary of the creep of battlefield biometrics into everyday policing. Questions still exist as to who should own biometric data of populations, what rights individuals have over their biometric fingerprint, and who should have access to such databases, especially when a war is over. Perhaps a future Geneva Convention-like treatment of biometrics is the answer in our ever-connected world. Jacobsen's storyline of First Platoon reveals that while biometrics are a novel instrument in warfare it is not one that is free from the uncertainties that attend to every instrument in war.

Aaron Cross is a U.S. Army officer, currently serving as an Instructor of Military and Strategic Studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He served as a cavalry troop commander in Kandahar City from 2011-2012. The views expressed in this article are the author's alone and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: Forward Operating Base Salerno, Afghanistan 2013 (Specialist Robert Porter).

Notes:

[1] Annie Jacobsen, First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance (New York: Dutton, 2021), 12.

[2] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 46; Also, see John D. Woodward, Jr., “Using Biometrics to Achieve Identity Dominance in the Global War on Terrorism,” Military Review 85, no. 5 (September-October 2005): 30-34.

[3] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 48.

[4] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 126.

[5] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 139-40.

[6] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 56.

[7] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 58.

[8] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 104-7.

[9] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 229-30; Also, see Greg Jaffe, “The Cursed Platoon,” Washington Post, July 2, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/clint-lorance-platoon-afghanistan/.

[10] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 193.

[11] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 233.

[12] Jacobsen provides a picture of the charge sheet she obtained through FOIA requests which shows the initial names market out and ”a male of apparent Afghan descent,” written in. Jacobsen, First Platoon, Insert Plates.

[13] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 257.

[14] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 290.

[15] Jacobsen, First Platoon, 68.