The History of Big Safari

Bill Grimes retired from the Air Force acquisition community with the kind of institutional memory most historians have to reconstruct from the outside, and in 2014 he published what remains the only substantial public account of the program office he spent much of his career inside. “The History of Big Safari” runs well past six hundred pages and documents, year by year and aircraft by aircraft, how a small, deliberately opaque corner of the Air Force became the Pentagon’s go-to shop for turning transport airframes into intelligence platforms, electronic-warfare aircraft, and eventually armed drones. Grimes writes as a program insider rather than an outside observer. He draws on internal records, unit histories, and interviews with the engineers and operators who did the work, and he structures the book as a tour through the office’s own files rather than as an argument aimed at the policy community. For a program that had surfaced in open sources only in fragments — mostly in aviation enthusiast publications and in Richard Whittle’s reporting on the Predator — the book filled a gap that had been obvious for decades.

The thesis is less an argument than a demonstration. Big Safari’s method, pulling a handful of airframes out of the normal acquisition stream and giving a small dedicated team the authority to modify them, has been responsible for a disproportionate share of American peacetime intelligence collection and wartime strike capability. Grimes shows that the large, slow Pentagon-wide acquisition process produces fighters and bombers; the rapid, quiet, program-office-level work produces the sensors, pods, antennas, and software that actually detect, geolocate, and often prosecute the enemy. The office was permitted to issue contracts in weeks, waive portions of normal testing, field one-of-a-kind aircraft, and work directly with operational commands rather than through the formal requirements process. Grimes catalogues the aircraft and lets the length of the list carry the point. By the time the reader reaches the chapters on the MQ-1 Predator, the pattern is unmistakable, and the question of whether the model works has already been answered by the previous five hundred pages.

The organization is strictly chronological, and that choice turns out to matter. Big Safari was established in March 1952 under the code name Pacer, acquired the name “Big Safari” in 1954, and has carried it ever since. Grimes opens on the Cold War reconnaissance crisis. The Soviet Union was closed, its radar order of battle unknown, its missile tests invisible, and the United States needed platforms that could listen to a continent whose borders could not be crossed. The office he describes was built to answer that need, and the early chapters are a sequence of C-97, C-130, and C-135 modifications carrying ever more capable signals-intelligence receivers, side-looking radars, and specialised telemetry collectors. He treats each airframe as a longitudinal story rather than a snapshot. The RC-135 family alone — Rivet Joint for signals intelligence, Combat Sent for electronic intelligence, Cobra Ball for missile telemetry — stretches across hundreds of pages, because the aircraft themselves stretched across decades of upgrades.

The specific cases are where the book earns its length. Grimes documents the EC-121 variants that provided airborne early warning before AWACS, the RB-57 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, and the specialised C-130 fleet that grew to include Commando Solo psychological-warfare broadcasters, Compass Call electronic-attack aircraft, and the Senior Scout roll-on signals-intelligence pallet. He traces the Combat Talon special-operations C-130s through the long project of adding terrain-following radar and air-refuelling probes, and he returns repeatedly to the question of how a program office kept a 1960s airframe tactically relevant into the 2010s. He writes about the Combat Sent missions that mapped Soviet emitters along the periphery of the air-defence belt and about the Cobra Ball flights that watched ballistic-missile tests from the Sea of Okhotsk and the Kamchatka ranges. He covers the one-off conversions carried out for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency during the Cold War, platforms that in some cases flew for a single operation and were then reconverted or retired without ever being described publicly. The MC-12 Liberty appears in the later chapters — a Beechcraft King Air turned into a manned intelligence platform in a matter of months during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, fielded to put full-motion video and signals intelligence over troops in contact, and filling a gap the formal acquisition system could not have closed in time.

For a reader coming to the book because of its relevance to current drone warfare, the chapters on unmanned systems are the destination. Grimes documents Big Safari’s role in the GNAT-750, the long-endurance reconnaissance drone from General Atomics that preceded the Predator, and follows the Predator itself from a CIA-funded prototype into a formal Air Force program. The crucial episode is the arming of the Predator with the AGM-114 Hellfire missile in 2000 and 2001. Big Safari ran the integration. The team added a laser designator and the Hellfire’s launch electronics onto a drone that had been built as a camera platform, worked through the pylon stress and launch-signature problems at China Lake, test-fired the weapon in February 2001, and had the system operationally ready weeks before the September 11 attacks. The first combat employment followed in October 2001 over Afghanistan. Grimes writes this material from the acquisition side rather than the operational side. The sensor-ball modifications, the ground-control-station changes, the launch-pylon redesign, the integration with the Rover downlink that let infantry on the ground see what the drone saw — these are his subjects, and his account complements the operational narrative Whittle and others have told elsewhere.

The MQ-9 Reaper chapter extends the story without starting it over. The Reaper was a Big Safari product in the same sense the Predator was: a General Atomics airframe pulled through a program office that had the authority to field it fast and the standing relationships to modify it continuously as new sensors, new weapons, and new data links became available. Grimes documents each successive upgrade — the multi-spectral targeting system, the synthetic-aperture radar, the move to broader-band data links, the addition of GBU-12 and GBU-38 precision bombs alongside Hellfire, the expansion from reconnaissance orbits to hunter-killer missions. The point he does not spell out but which runs under the whole section is that an acquisition model designed in the 1950s for secret signals-intelligence aircraft turned out to be exactly the model the United States needed in the 2000s for armed drones. Nothing about Big Safari was redesigned to accommodate the Predator; the Predator was absorbed into a method that had been waiting for it.

Beyond the airframes, the book is a record of institutions and personalities. Grimes names program directors, engineers, pilots, and contractor leads, and he is especially attentive to the enlisted maintenance crews and the civilian engineers at the Greenville, Texas, depot where most of the physical modification work has always happened. The depot passed from Temco to Ling-Temco-Vought to E-Systems to Raytheon and, after the book’s close, to L3Harris, and the continuity of the workforce across those corporate transitions is one of the themes Grimes keeps returning to. Readers interested in defence-industry history will find a detailed informal account of how a single depot and a small program office built working relationships with specific contractors that lasted longer than most careers, and how that continuity produced capability the normal procurement cycle could not match. The culture he describes — small teams, concurrent engineering, waivers on normal testing, direct lines from users to engineers, a willingness to accept non-standard aircraft that no formal program would ever approve — is the culture that today’s defence-tech advocates argue the Pentagon needs to recover.

The book’s reception reflects its character. It is not an academic study, it was not reviewed in the major policy press, and it was published by a service that normally places books of this kind. Within the community of defence journalists, drone historians, and acquisition specialists it has become a standard reference. Whittle’s “Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution” treats Grimes as a primary source for the Big Safari side of that story. Air Force Magazine and specialist aviation outlets have drawn on it for retrospective pieces on individual aircraft programs. There is no major policy counterpoint to argue with, because Grimes is not making a policy argument. He is documenting a program. The implicit case that rapid acquisition works is one that advocates of defence-innovation reform cite approvingly and that defenders of the formal acquisition process regard warily; neither side writes against the book itself. Reviewers from outside the acquisition community have noted the prose assumes a reader who already knows what a Rivet Joint is, that the organisation is sometimes repetitive, and that the book is better used as a reference than read straight through. None of those observations are wrong.

Where the book sits in the field is reasonably clear. For someone working through the literature on AI in warfare, “The History of Big Safari” is the industrial-base companion to the operational and ethical volumes that dominate the shelf. It pairs naturally with Whittle on the Predator and with Peter Singer’s “Wired for War” on the robotic turn in military affairs, filling in the acquisition story those books gesture at. It is a useful counterweight to accounts that treat the drone revolution as a sudden break: Grimes shows the continuity — the same office, the same depot, the same methods — from a 1950s C-97 collecting Soviet radar signatures to a 2010s Reaper launching Hellfires in the Hindu Kush. The institutions that put the first weapon on a Predator were the same institutions that had been putting antennas on transport aircraft for half a century, and the lesson about speed of acquisition is older than the technology that made it famous. The book is less useful for readers looking for argument, theory, ethics, or international-politics context; those are not what it is for, and Grimes does not pretend otherwise.

What is likely to age well is the body of specific detail. The programmes documented are now historical, and this volume is the one place where many of them are described at length in the open literature. The chapters on signals-intelligence aircraft, in particular, are difficult to replace, because the open-source literature on American airborne signals intelligence is otherwise fragmentary and scattered across specialist journals. The Predator and Reaper chapters have been overtaken in some operational specifics by later writing — the strike history has been covered more fully elsewhere, and the ethical conversation has moved past where it stood in 2014 — but the acquisition-side account remains the clearest explanation of how those aircraft actually came to exist as armed systems. What has dated is the forward-looking material. The book closes before the proliferation of commercial-off-the-shelf drones that has reshaped the Ukrainian battlefield, before the current wave of small, cheap, software-defined platforms, and before the ascent of AI-enabled autonomy as a distinct category of weapon rather than a feature grafted onto an existing one. The Big Safari model Grimes describes is physical modification of large, expensive airframes by a small team of specialists. The model that is now ascendant — rapid iteration on cheap, numerous, software-centric platforms often built outside the primes — is in some ways its heir and in others its replacement. A reader coming to the book today will find the historical foundation of contemporary drone warfare told from the inside, and will have to look elsewhere for what is happening next.