In the summer of 2003, an Air Force pilot named Greg Harbin was doing desk duty at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
Day in and day out, Harbin sat in front of five computer screens, scanning photographs and video sent by unmanned planes flying 1,200 miles away, over Iraq and Afghanistan.
His job was to take that information, along with reports from ground troops, and identify fresh targets -- Taliban fighters or Iraqi insurgents.
But one thing puzzled him.
When regular units called for an attack by a Predator drone, the request went to Harbin, and then, if approved by a general, to "pilots" in Nevada, who fired the missile by remote control. The process often took as long as 45 minutes.
By contrast, special operations forces could call in attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft in less than a minute.
The difference, Harbin learned, was that a handful of special ops units were equipped with a device called the Rover, which gave them the same view as the pilots in Nevada. This greatly simplified communications.
Why don't all American fighting units have the Rover? he asked himself. Then he put the question to his boss, Lt. Gen. Walter E. Buchanan, commander of the Air Force in the Middle East. Buchanan's reply: Why indeed.
Buchanan dispatched Harbin to Texas to get a crash course in the Rover, a combination video receiver and laptop computer, and to bring back several of the kits with him. Seventy-two hours after he left Texas with four Rovers, Harbin was in Fallouja, Iraq, teaching members of the 82nd Airborne Division how to use it.
Harbin's days sitting in front of a computer were over. Over the next four years, Harbin would take a niche technology, spread it throughout the military -- and help change how the Air Force fights wars.
One day, it would save his life.
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The Rover, or the Remote Operations Video Enhanced Receiver, was born in 2002, shortly after the Afghanistan war began.
Christopher Manuel, an Army Special Forces chief warrant officer, had long wanted ground units to see, in real time, the video footage shot by Predators. After serving in Afghanistan, he traveled to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to make his case. Engineers quickly developed a prototype of the Rover system.
