Original subtitles

[tense music playing]

[helicopter blades whirring]

[narrator] Special Operation Forces are the elite commandos of the military.

They conduct ambushes, they conduct reconnaissance.

[narrator] They're also called upon to conduct espionage operations.

[man] Special ops people go in and do a raid

to get… piece of equipment or access to a program.

[indistinct radio chatter]

[narrator] To be successful, they rely on cutting edge technology.

The SEAL teams used every piece of spy craft available to them

in the hunt for bin Laden.

[narrator] While Special Operations Forces are found at the tip of the spear,

future technology seeks to separate the two.

Planes and drones will be trained to act and react.

[man] It's like the rise of the machines, like Terminator meets The Matrix.

[theme music playing]

[narrator] The world's superpowers

continue to modernize their military capability

for espionage with the development of advanced weaponry,

but one constant has been the use of special operations forces

to embed and gain intelligence on the enemy.

These specially selected units try to resolve the issues

that are difficult to address with conventional forces alone.

To do this, they often work in small units using unconventional tactics…

-[gunshot] -many first developed in the United States

by Major Robert Rogers back in 1756.

Robert's Rangers, in the French and Indian War,

were a classic example of special operations

taking indigenous troops, but fight them on their own terms.

[gunfire exploding]

You dressed in buckskins.

You wear a green uniform, you camouflage yourself.

You carried a musket, a pistol, and a tomahawk.

And you launched guerrilla warfare.

[Costa] In effect, it's about closing with and engaging with your enemy.

And that's what Rogers wrote about hundreds of years ago,

the idea of patrolling silently and ambushing your adversary.

Rangers today are trained in the same tactics

using some of the same principles.

[narrator] In fact, many Special Operations Forces

around the world use similar tactics for espionage operations

including sabotage.

[Melton] Sabotage is a very effective tool.

These days, it is often undertaken

by members of the special operations community,

sometimes working in conjunction with the CIA.

[narrator] One great example of sabotage was operation Gunnerside,

led by a team from the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE,

who trained Norwegian commandos during World War II.

The daring mission was designed to prevent the Nazis

from producing ingredients to create an atomic bomb.

[Fischer] The Germans built a heavy water plant at a place in Norway, Rjukan.

The idea was to… heavy water was to be used

in the German atomic bomb program.

Heavy water would have been used as a precursor for some kind of

atomic weapon capability that the Germans wanted.

[tense music playing]

[narrator] Deuterium was produced in a hydro plant called Vemork

at the bottom of a huge gorge in Norway.

A French commando unit attempted to seize it

but were attacked by Germans leaving only four survivors.

SOE Lieutenant Rønneberg and five Norwegian commandos

made another attempt to take it by joining the four fighters on the ground.

[Fischer] It was a small detachment.

Parachuted into Northern Norway

where they could land safely without being detected by the Germans.

[narrator] The nine-man unit made their way to Vemork unseen

and split into two groups,

one to destroy the facility, and the other to act as lookouts.

They had to break into the place,

which meant that they had to bypass the German guards,

get inside, and set explosives.

[narrator] The group's target was a battery of 18 cells,

the last stage in the production of heavy water.

Rønneberg set four explosive charges and blew the cells up.

He and the other commandos made their way to the mountainside three hours away

where they skied to safety.

Operation Gunnerside was one of the most successful sabotage missions

in the entire war.

The SOE also worked closely

with the United States Office of Strategic Services, OSS,

the predecessor of the CIA

and the US intelligence agency during World War II.

[gunfire popping]

Their alliance went far beyond the battlefield.

[gunfire popping]

There was very close cooperation with the British,

and we mobilized scientists, engineers, and technicians

just to work on special projects for the wartime.

Some were quite innovative, quite imaginative.

[narrator] One innovation was a device called The Liberator pistol

intended for distribution to resistance groups

in occupied countries.

The Liberator pistol was a tiny little single short 45.

It was designed to fit in the palm of your hand,

and designed to get in close to somebody,

execute him, and then take away his gun.

So we put a lot of those into the hands of French Resistance

to help them get guns from the Germans.

[gunfire pops]

[narrator] The Liberator pistol was intended for short-range use,

and although it held five extra rounds of ammo in the pistol grip,

it could only hold one round in the barrel.

And after firing you'd need to extract the spent cartridge using a rod

before replacing it with a fresh round.

[gunfire pops]

Another one was a little device called JA, Joan Allen, we called it.

And the Joan Allen was a very, very short-range radio

that was designed to make contact

with an aircraft flying directly over a field.

And it was designed… was to help the OSS drop supplies and people

to the resistance.

Because the range of the radio was so short

and the beam was directed straight up at the airplane.

The Germans couldn't intercept it.

[narrator] The Cold War saw great advances in technology

that intelligence agencies and Special Operations Forces

could benefit from.

These advancements continue today with revolutionary devices

designed by both the military and commercial technology companies.

One example is the Prism 200 made by Cambridge Consultants in England.

This device fits in a backpack and uses ultra-wideband signals

to obtain a 3D view of an adversary behind a wall.

It can detect movement through wood, concrete, or bricks.

The user can monitor the room on the other side with a smart phone,

which can also be linked remotely to computers back at base.

Another innovative device is the TEC Torch developed by US Air Force

that can slice through metal like a piece of cake.

And smart and self-guided bullets

that can change their projected path during flight.

Advances in tracking, sensory detection, and weaponry

help support Special Operations Forces,

specifically when deployed to find, fix, and finish a specific target.

They developed the words find, fix, and finish.

We're going to find and identify the person who will become the target.

We're going to fix them in a specific location

that we know they'll be.

Once that's done, then it's passed over to the action element,

to capture, or, if necessary, kill the target.

[narrator] The elements of find, fix, and finish have been incorporated

into several high profile special operations missions in recent years,

including Operation Red Dawn, the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003

by task Force 121,

a multi-service force made up of elite operators

which included the US Army's Delta Force,

and the US Navy's SEAL Team Six.

Ultimately, catching Saddam Hussein proved to be more devilishly difficult

than was first envisioned.

And the belief was that he would stay

with his top-level advisors

and somehow maintain some Alamo-type of last defense.

And the US found that quite the opposite was true.

That essentially, the Iraqi military and intelligence services

just disappeared into the fabric.

They just laid down the arms, changed uniforms into civilian clothes,

and just disappeared.

Saddam was, at the end, he was traveling in a taxicab

with a bodyguard, a suitcase full of cash and weapons,

and going from prearranged location to prearranged location,

never staying in the same place more than one night.

[narrator] Tracking Saddam meant following his digital footprint.

Eventually, some very clever analysts

put together an early version of a social network.

And they'd begin to analyze the people that were closest to him,

and especially the bodyguards.

Then they'd look for a concentration of phone calls about the time,

in that area, that he would appear.

They wanted to see strange,

we see him here, and we get this cluster of calls.

We see him here now, we get a similar cluster of calls.

So they begin to try to identify clusters of calls

in advance to predict where he might be.

And by connecting the dots they were able to identify which calls

were predictive of his movements.

And finally were able to pin him down to a rat hole.

And a rat hole was a prepared underground tomb.

And what was successfully-- they found the site,

didn't see anything was there, stepped,

and found what was, in effect, the trap door.

And opened it, and shone a light.

And they contemplated tossing in a grenade.

And he… No, he shouts out, "Stop! I'm the president of Iraq.

I want to negotiate."

[helicopter whirs]

[narrator] Saddam Hussein was captured, stood trial,

and was executed on December 30th, 2006.

Another high profile case of Special Operations Force

mission to find, fix, and finish was the hunt for Osama bin Laden,

the founder and leader of terrorist organization Al-Qaeda,

who had orchestrated the attacks on 9-11.

[Melton] The CIA used every piece of spy craft available to them

in the multi-year hunt for bin Laden.

[narrator] Bin Laden had been on the run for almost ten years

before the CIA received positive intel on his possible whereabouts,

a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

[Melton] They were never 100% certain it was Osama bin Laden.

But from satellites they knew that there was a single man

living in a relatively large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

And each day he would pace inside a walled area.

And because they knew the precise location of where it was,

and they knew the time of day, and the angle of the sun,

from the satellite they could measure his shadow and then calculate his height.

And they knew that it came within a fraction of an inch

of being exactly his height.

They also noted that there were no cell phones within the target.

It's highly unusual to not have any cell phone communication

from a compound area.

[narrator] Over the next few months, the CIA used informants,

surveillance, and other intelligence gathering measures

including a fake vaccination program to try to find and collect samples

from bin Laden's compound in order to confirm his identity.

Based on intelligence, former president Barack Obama

authorized the CIA and US SEAL Team Six to plan for the raid.

[Melton] We've often referred to the SEAL teams as spies with flippers.

There's a close nexus between the special operations community

and the intelligence community

that was designed by Admiral McRaven, the legendary SEAL Team Six commander.

[narrator] In the early morning hours of May 2nd, 2011,

Joint Special Operations Command launched Operation Neptune Spear

to bring back bin Laden, dead or alive.

It was launched from Pakistan.

The idea was ideally a 45 to 50-minute operation,

roughly a 50-man team.

[narrator] It's believed that along with other air support,

at least two MH-60 Blackhawk helicopters incorporating stealth technology

to avoid detection were used in the operation.

They were to assault the compound in multiple helicopters,

repel down onto the third story.

At the same time, another helicopter would land on the ground,

and they would assault from below.

The idea is overwhelm it and land at the same time.

The difficulty is that the first helicopter crash landed

in the very thin altitude in the compound.

So all of the team had to, in effect, assault the building from the bottom.

[narrator] Reportedly, predator drones and space-based satellites

conveyed vital information to the team on the ground

who wore helmet-mounted cameras

to transmit intel to commanders back at the base

and in the situation room in Washington DC.

This would also help the team quickly identify their targets,

pick up every threat, and take them down fast.

[Melton] They were able to get inside,

kill one terrorist in one of the buildings on the way in.

They killed his son, who was blocking the second floor.

They achieved access to the third level.

And of the SEALS that went up there,

one of them saw a man stick his head out of a door, they fired.

They went into the room; it was bin Laden.

They fired again and he was dead.

[tense music playing]

[Melton] He was there with one of his wives, and another woman.

Neither of them were hurt.

But the team then successfully begin to mine the place for data.

And they had a data exploitation team

that extracted every digital device that was there.

Every computer, every hard drive, all written records.

And that became a treasure trove that was referred to internally

as the Osama bin Laden library.

[narrator] From beginning to end of operation

it had taken less than 40 minutes.

SEAL Team Six was credited with carrying out the daring mission

and eliminating one of the world's most wanted terrorists.

The deployment of Special Operations Forces

has been a successful strategy for both intelligence and defense purposes.

But today, there are threats even special ops teams can't protect against.

One effective tactic of modern day sabotage is information warfare.

[dynamic music playing]

[Yousef] So this is basically using a computer

and artificial intelligence system to basically create a face

that doesn't exist.

Create a human being that was never there before,

giving it expression, and allowing it to talk and voice an opinion.

What's really scary is when you Google "deep fakes"

and "Obama" or "Putin" or "President Trump",

you actually see videos where the video's manipulated

for that individual to say something that's completely out of character,

but you saw it, you heard it, it's got to be real.

Information warfare is going to be a key area of concern

going into the 21st century.

We're in the opening stages of a second technology arms race.

Where the 20th century was about innovation in nuclear and space,

you're starting to see the 21st century be an arms race around key areas

like artificial intelligence and robotics.

These are things being driven by Russians, the Chinese,

by us, and some of our counterparts in Europe as well.

[narrator] One agency at the forefront

in the development of new defense technology in the United States

is The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

[Yousef] They really focus on creating over the horizon technologies.

I mean they're out there basically trying to create the impossible.

[narrator] Some over the horizon tech being tested

are High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense Systems, or HELLADS.

These ground based laser systems shoot powerful laser beams

at light speed through the air or space over distances of thousands of miles.

The heat produced by the beams burns through the surface of a target

and can disable warheads or ignite fuels or explosives.

DARPA also recently announced an initiative to focus research

on artificial intelligence and unmanned systems

that can operate autonomously.

[Yousef] Old tech, a human being with a gun

and radio going into a dark tunnel looking for the bad guy.

New tech, you've got seven or ten different robots crawling through a tunnel

or complex, or a warehouse district,

and communicating with each other in terms of what they see, what they hear,

and what the threat might look like. Massive savings in human life.

[robot whirs]

Artificial intelligence is a branch of machine learning, right?

Of the ability of the machine for itself to do--

instead of a human telling it what the relationship,

it learns relationships among data itself much faster than humans could teach it,

much deeper, broader, and draws relationships among data

that humans would never see before.

[narrator] One key driver for this advanced technology

has been a game changer, quantum computing.

Instead of bits, which conventional computers use,

a quantum computer uses quantum bits known as qubits.

These qubits can store an enormous amount of information, and uses less energy,

allowing us to create processors that are a million times faster

than the ones we use today.

Quantum is one area that, I think, every major superpower

and Western government is dedicating resources to.

One of the holy grails going to shape the 21st century.

[narrator] One of the biggest areas of advancement

has been in drone technology.

A fleet of drones operating together, right now that would tax what we have

in artificial intelligence systems, and computing power.

As you get breakthroughs in artificial intelligence

and quantum computing, that kind of processing,

that kind of type of coordination, or streamlining of the entanglement,

is something you can do at a greater scale,

thereby allowing you to operate a larger system of drones, robots,

or systems that are talking, coordinating with each other.

[narrator] Drones don't only operate in the sky.

In 2019 the US Navy contracted Boeing

to develop four enormous undersea drones

to wage war beneath the surface of the ocean.

They're called the Orca.

These attack submarines are part of a fast-evolving

Navy unmanned autonomy program.

They're currently being used to gather data,

but they're working on ways for them to communicate in real time,

carry out reconnaissance missions,

hunt, deploy mines, and fire torpedoes.

[Yousef] Both the US, the Russians,

and Chinese are working on different platforms

that will allow for autonomous vehicles to be deployed out in the battlefield,

and these are two, three, four, five,

ten vehicles talking and coordinating in terms of movements and locations.

We get to the point where you'll have machine on machine warfare,

where you'll have a swarm of drones or devices meant to act offensively.

[drones whir]

So a lot of the stuff that you saw in the turn of the century,

in terms of autonomous systems, and robotics, Skynet and The Terminator,

all that stuff seemed far-fetched,

but here we are 20 years after the turn of the century,

and a lot of the technologies that we saw that were science fiction,

we're starting to see come to fruition.

[narrator] Hypersonics is another area

nation states are dedicating a lot of resources

to see who can get to the point of dominance and breakthrough first.

[Melton] China is actively developing systems

that they believe cannot be defeated by existing US counter-missile technology.

And the idea is that if you can

launch a weapon

and have it then go at hypersonic speed as it approaches a target

that it can't be intercepted.

[Yousef] The area of hypersonics is garnering a lot of attention,

both on the Chinese side, and obviously on the US side.

If you look at hypersonics, what really that means is,

when one side fires a rocket or a device,

the space, or the pace that the device travels,

allows it to flow and go so fast that it basically avoids detection,

meaning by the time one side launches the device,

and by the time it reaches its target,

the other side has just detected it. So there's no capable defense for it.

[booming]

[narrator] China recently successfully tested the XINGKONG, or Starry Sky,

which it publicly described as a hypersonic waverider vehicle,

a reference to the missile that can travel close to the water

to avoid detection and missile defense.

We are also seeing a breakthrough in innovation

with remote sensing technology.

Everyone talks about building a concrete wall on the Southern border.

That's not what's happening. If you look at the different technologies

being tested and deployed on the Southern wall,

you're looking at remote sensors, at computer vision,

at unmanned drones.

It's basically a sensor ray or a virtual wall

that's meant to detect and identify and protect equities.

It's the Southern border to the country,

but that same technology would apply to a facility, a base,

or an outpost out in the middle of a war zone.

The benefit of these technologies is they enhance, and in some cases,

take the place of what was done by a regular infantryman.

For example, at the start of the Gulf War,

what we saw was infantry men donning special suits and equipment

to go on the front line and defuse a bomb,

and this was putting them at tremendous risk.

What you saw towards the end of the Gulf War,

and what you're seeing today, is that job has been replaced by a robot,

by a drone,

something that's taken the operator out of that direct line of harm.

There's a definite enhancement and benefit to our servicemen

when you have a robot that's on the tip of the spear versus being an operator.

So as drones become more and more capable,

human elements will gradually disappear from this equation.

And they have all of the ability to intercommunicate

and establish tactics on their own.

[Yousef] It's like rise of the machines, and Terminator meets The Matrix.

A bunch of devices, drones and systems working together

without a lot of human oversight.

For us to be able to navigate this future,

We need to have cultural, societal norms that drive what is right and what's not

in terms of entrusting so much of our future on autonomous systems.

What's scary is if a government decides to launch a fleet of these devices

without any human oversight,

i.e., making the algorithm or the brain inside that machine

make very grave and critical decisions to include whether to fire or not fire,

if it does have an ordinance on that platform.

[narrator] Many believe it's too late for containment

as more and more products used in the household

as well as on the battlefield

are able to communicate not only with us but with each other.

Genie's out, but we want to make sure we contain it best we can.

I have faith in the people that are working to keep us safe.

I don't lose any sleep over that.

I lose much more sleep over what happens

if we don't use the tools that are available to us

to stop madmen in North Korea,

or getting the Iranian government to get a nuclear bomb.

Those are things that worry me, not the abuses here in this country.

[Yousef] If we can get to the point of proper coordination

and cooperation between private sector and public sector,

we can unlock these technologies that will enhance the way we live,

also enhance how we keep ourselves safe from adversaries,

both domestic and abroad.

Those breakthroughs in technologies

are going to have a greater implication and application

in terms of how the 21st century plays out.

[atmospheric music playing]