A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/drone-pilots-waiting-for-a-kill-shot-7000-miles-away.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

HANCOCK FIELD AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, N.Y. b From his computer console here
in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone
that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended
targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan.
Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks.

bI see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with
mothers, I see kids playing soccer,b Colonel Brenton said.

When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant b and only,
Colonel Brenton said, when the women and children are not around b the hair
on the back of his neck stands up, just as it did when he used to line up
targets in his F-16 fighter jet.

Afterward, just like the old days, he compartmentalizes. bI feel no emotional
attachment to the enemy,b he said. bI have a duty, and I execute the duty.b

Drones are not only revolutionizing American warfare but are also changing in
profound ways the lives of the people who fly them.

Colonel Brenton acknowledges the peculiar new disconnect of fighting a
telewar with a joystick and a throttle from his padded seat in American
suburbia.

When he was deployed in Iraq, byou land and therebs no more weapons on your
F-16, people have an idea of what you were just involved with.b Now he steps
out of a dark room of video screens, his adrenaline still surging after
squeezing the trigger, and commutes home past fast-food restaurants and
convenience stores to help with homework b but always alone with what he has
done.

bItbs a strange feeling,b he said. bNo one in my immediate environment is
aware of anything that occurred.b

Routinely thought of as robots that turn wars into sanitized video games, the
drones have powerful cameras that bring war straight into a pilotbs face.

Although pilots speak glowingly of the good days, when they can look at a
video feed and warn a ground patrol in Afghanistan about an ambush ahead, the
Air Force is also moving chaplains and medics just outside drone operation
centers to help pilots deal with the bad days b images of a child killed in
error or a close-up of a Marine shot in a raid gone wrong.

Among the toughest psychological tasks is the close surveillance for aerial
sniper missions, reminiscent of the East German Stasi officer absorbed by the
people he spies on in the movie bThe Lives of Others.b A drone pilot and his
partner, a sensor operator who manipulates the aircraftbs camera, observe the
habits of a militant as he plays with his children, talks to his wife and
visits his neighbors. They then try to time their strike when, for example,
his family is out at the market.

bThey watch this guy do bad things and then his regular old life things,b
said Col. Hernando Ortega, the chief of aerospace medicine for the Air
Education Training Command, who helped conduct a study last year on the
stresses on drone pilots. bAt some point, some of the stuff might remind you
of stuff you did yourself. You might gain a level of familiarity that makes
it a little difficult to pull the trigger.b

Of a dozen pilots, sensor operators and supporting intelligence analysts
recently interviewed from three American military bases, none acknowledged
the kind of personal feelings for Afghans that would keep them awake at night
after seeing the bloodshed left by missiles and bombs. But all spoke of a
certain intimacy with Afghan family life that traditional pilots never see
from 20,000 feet, and that even ground troops seldom experience.

bYou see them wake up in the morning, do their work, go to sleep at night,b
said Dave, an Air Force major who flew drones from 2007 to 2009 at Creech Air
Force Base in Nevada and now trains drone pilots at Holloman Air Force Base
in New Mexico. (The Air Force, citing what it says are credible threats,
forbids pilots to disclose their last names. Senior commanders who speak to
the news media and community groups about the basebs mission, like Colonel
Brenton in Syracuse, use their full names.)

Some pilots spoke of the roiling emotions after they fire a missile. (Only
pilots, all of them officers, employ weapons for strikes.)

bThere was good reason for killing the people that I did, and I go through it
in my head over and over and over,b said Will, an Air Force officer who was a
pilot at Creech and now trains others at Holloman. bBut you never forget
about it. It never just fades away, I donbt think b not for me.b

The complexities will only grow as the military struggles to keep up with a
near insatiable demand for drones. The Air Force now has more than 1,300
drone pilots, about 300 less than it needs, stationed at 13 or more bases
across the United States. They fly the unmanned aircraft mostly in
Afghanistan. (The numbers do not include the classified program of the
C.I.A., which conducts drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.)
Although the Afghan war is winding down, the military expects drones to help
compensate for fewer troops on the ground.

By 2015, the Pentagon projects that the Air Force will need more than 2,000
drone pilots for combat air patrols operating 24 hours a day worldwide. The
Air Force is already training more drone pilots b 350 last year b than
fighter and bomber pilots combined. Until this year, drone pilots went
through traditional flight training before learning how to operate Predators,
Reapers and unarmed Global Hawks. Now the pilots are on a fast track and
spend only 40 hours in a basic Cessna-type plane before starting their drone
training.

Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, said it was
bconceivableb that drone pilots in the Air Force would outnumber those in
cockpits in the foreseeable future, although he predicted that the Air Force
would have traditional pilots for at least 30 more years.

Many drone pilots once flew in the air themselves but switched to drones out
of a sense of the inevitable b or if they flew cargo planes, to feel closer
to the war. bYou definitely feel more connected to the guys, the battle,b
said Dave, the Air Force major, who flew C-130 transport planes in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

Now more and more Air National Guard bases are abandoning traditional
aircraft and switching to drones to meet demand, among them Hancock Field,
which retired its F-16s and switched to Reapers in 2010. Colonel Brenton, who
by then had logged more than 4,000 hours flying F-16s in 15 years of active
duty and a decade in Syracuse deploying to war zones with the Guard, said he
learned to fly drones to stay connected to combat. True, drones cannot engage
in air-to-air combat, but Colonel Brenton said that bthe amount of time Ibve
engaged the enemy in air-to-ground combat has been significantb in both
Reapers and F-16s.

bI feel like Ibm doing the same thing Ibve always done, I just donbt deploy
to do it,b he said. Now he works full time commanding a force of about 220
Reaper pilots, sensor operators and intelligence analysts at the base.

Pilots say the best days are when ground troops thank them for keeping them
safe. Ted, an Air Force major and an F-16 pilot who flew Reapers from Creech,
recalled how troops on an extended patrol away from their base in Afghanistan
were grateful when he flew a Reaper above them for five hours so they could
get some sleep one night. They told him, bWebre keeping one guy awake to talk
to you, but if you can, just watch over and make sure nobodybs sneaking up on
us,b he recalled.

All the operators dismiss the notion that they are playing a video game.
(They also reject the word bdroneb because they say it describes an aircraft
that flies on its own. They call their planes remotely piloted aircraft.)

bI donbt have any video games that ask me to sit in one seat for six hours
and look at the same target,b said Joshua, a sensor operator who worked at
Creech for a decade and is now a trainer at Holloman. bOne of the things we
try to beat into our crews is that this is a real aircraft with a real human
component, and whatever decisions you make, good or bad, therebs going to be
actual consequences.b

In his 10 years at Creech, he said without elaborating, bIbve seen some
pretty disturbing things.b

All of the pilots who once flew in cockpits say they do miss the sensation of
flight, which for Colonel Brenton extends to the F-16 flybys he did for the
Syracuse Memorial Day parade downtown. To make up for it, he sometimes heads
out on weekends in a small propeller plane, which he calls a bug smasher.

bItbs nice to be up in the air,b he said.