The History of Big Safari

Bill Grimes spent decades inside one of the US Air Force’s least-visible program offices, and in 2014 he published what remains the most detailed public account of it. “The History of Big Safari” runs more than six hundred pages and documents, year by year and aircraft by aircraft, how a small acquisition office became the Pentagon’s go-to shop for turning ordinary airframes into intelligence platforms, electronic-warfare aircraft, and — eventually — armed drones. Grimes writes as a program insider rather than an outside historian; he draws on official records, unit histories, and interviews with the engineers and operators who did the work. The book joined a thin shelf. Big Safari existed in open sources only in fragments before it appeared, mostly in enthusiast publications and in Richard Whittle’s reporting on the Predator. For a program that quietly shaped American air-breathing intelligence for more than sixty years, that absence was conspicuous, and Grimes closed it in a single volume written by someone who had been in the building while the decisions were made.

The book’s central argument is less a thesis than a demonstration. Big Safari’s method — pulling a handful of airframes out of the normal acquisition stream, giving a small, dedicated team authority to modify them, and fielding the result in months rather than decades — has been responsible for a disproportionate share of American peacetime intelligence collection and wartime strike capability. Grimes shows that the big, 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. He is not polemical about it. He simply catalogues the aircraft and lets the length of the list carry the point. By the time a reader reaches the chapters on the MQ-1 Predator, the pattern is unmistakable.

The organization of the book is strictly chronological, and that choice turns out to matter. Big Safari was established in March 1952 under the code name Pacer, became “Big Safari” in 1954, and has carried the name ever since. Grimes begins with the Cold War reconnaissance crisis — the Soviet Union was closed, and the United States needed to understand what was happening behind the air-defence belt — and tracks how a succession of C-97s, C-130s, and C-135s were quietly rebuilt into platforms carrying ever more capable signals-intelligence receivers, side-looking radars, and specialized telemetry collectors. He devotes chapters to specific programs rather than specific technologies, which lets him show how each airframe accumulated capability over successive modifications. The RC-135 family alone — Rivet Joint for signals intelligence, Combat Sent for electronic intelligence, Cobra Ball for missile telemetry — runs across hundreds of pages, because the aircraft themselves ran across decades.

The specific cases Grimes documents are the heart of the book. He covers the EC-121 variants that provided airborne early warning before AWACS; the RB-57 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft; the specialized 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 and the long work of adding terrain-following radar and refuelling probes. He writes about the Combat Sent RC-135U missions that mapped Soviet radars and the Cobra Ball flights that watched ballistic-missile tests from the Sea of Okhotsk. He covers the MC-12 Liberty, the manned turboprop that Big Safari fielded in a matter of months during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to put full-motion video and signals intelligence over troops in contact, 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 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 he 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 project. The team integrated a laser designator and the Hellfire’s launch electronics onto a drone that had been built as a camera platform, tested the shot at China Lake 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 engineering decisions, the launch-pylon problems, the sensor-ball modifications, the ground-control-station changes — and his account complements the operational narrative that Whittle and others have told elsewhere.

The MQ-9 Reaper chapter extends the story. The Reaper was a Big Safari product in the same sense the Predator was: a General Atomics airframe, pulled through a program office with authority to field it fast, modified continuously as new sensors, new weapons, and new data links became available. Grimes shows how the office handled each successive upgrade — multi-spectral targeting systems, synthetic-aperture radar, the move to broader-band data links, the addition of GBU-12 and GBU-38 precision bombs alongside Hellfire. 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 SIGINT aircraft turned out to be exactly the model the United States needed in the 2000s for armed drones.

Beyond the drones, the book is also a record of personalities. Grimes names program directors, engineers, pilots, and contractor leads. He is especially attentive to the enlisted maintenance crews and the civilian engineers at Greenville, Texas — the Big Safari depot run first by LTV, then by E-Systems, then by Raytheon, now by L3Harris — where most of the physical modification work has always happened. Readers interested in defence-industry history will find a detailed informal account of how a single depot and a small program office built decades-long working relationships with specific contractors, and how that continuity produced capability the normal procurement cycle could not match. The culture Grimes describes — small teams, concurrent engineering, waivers on normal testing, direct lines from users to engineers — 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 and it was not reviewed in the policy press. Within the community of defence journalists, drone historians, and acquisition specialists it is 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 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.

Where it sits in the field is clear. For a reader working through the literature on AI in warfare, “The History of Big Safari” is the industrial-base companion to the operational and ethical books that dominate the shelf. It pairs naturally with Whittle on the Predator and with Peter Singer’s work on robotic warfare, filling in the acquisition story those books gesture at. It is also 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. It is less useful for readers looking for argument, theory, ethics, or international-politics context; those are not what the book is for.

What is likely to age well is the body of specific detail. The programmes Grimes documents are now historical, and his book 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 US SIGINT platforms is otherwise fragmentary. The Predator and Reaper chapters have been overtaken in some operational specifics by later writing — the strike history has been covered more fully elsewhere — but Grimes’s 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 in 2014, before the proliferation of commercial-off-the-shelf drones, before the Ukrainian experience with small FPV strike aircraft, and before the current wave of software-defined and AI-enabled autonomy that is reshaping what rapid acquisition even means. The Big Safari model Grimes describes is physical modification of large, expensive airframes. The model that is now ascendant — rapid iteration on cheap, numerous, software-centric platforms — is in some ways its heir and in others its replacement. A reader coming to the book today will find the historical foundation of today’s drone warfare, told from the inside, and will have to look elsewhere for what is happening next.