Pilots Without a Cockpit

“Death, destruction, disease, horror. That’s what war is all about, Anon. That’s what makes it a thing to be avoided. You’ve made it neat and painless. So neat and painless, you’ve had no reason to stop it.”

—Star Trek

“On the drive out here, you get yourself ready to enter the compartment of your life that is flying combat,” retired Col. Chris Chambliss told the Los Angeles Times.¹⁵⁵ “And on the drive home, you get ready for that part of your life that’s going to be the soccer game.”

And in between you kill.

Many people can relate to the banal experience of commuting to and from work and the constant struggle with trying to separate one’s time in the office from time spent at home. But for an increasing number of Americans, the process of decompressing after a hard day’s work is about more than just trying to forget about expense reports and the petty tyranny of office politics: in many cases, it’s about trying to forget the lives you extinguished—and the lives of your comrades you couldn’t save.

In contrast to the traditional notion of the war fighter on an actual battlefield, Col. Chambliss, who was based out of Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base about forty minutes outside Las Vegas, could remotely order a Predator drone to fire a Hellfire missile at a group of suspected Taliban thousands of miles away in Afghanistan while, but a few hours later, making it home in time to catch a rerun of Friends. And there are thousands more just like him, soldiers and civilians alike, partaking in the US government’s expanded use of UAVs to assassinate perceived enemies on the other side of the globe.

Creech is a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, twenty miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a “ground control station” for remotely controlling drones located 8,000 miles away. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens.

In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield. The sensor operator controls the cameras that bring the battlefield into full view to gain intelligence and hunt down targets. This team doesn’t launch or land the plane—that is done by a similar team on the ground, closer to the battlefield. But once up in the air, the crew back in the US takes control.

Most US military drones are operated from Creech and another site just seven miles northeast of Las Vegas, Nellis Air Force Base. But weaponized drones have been remotely operated and/or monitored from dozens of military bases across the United States, including in Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, North and South Dakota, and Texas.¹⁵⁶ Even the US Air Force Base in the Pacific island territory of Guam has become a staging ground for drone flights over Asia.

At Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, soldiers monitor live feeds from drones flying over Afghanistan—what they call “Death TV.”¹⁵⁷ The New York Times reported that on a daily basis, the soldiers “review 1,000 hours of video, 1,000 high-altitude spy photos and hundreds of hours of ‘signals intelligence’—usually cellphone calls.” For up to twelve hours a day, they stare at ten overhead television screens, monitoring a constant stream of images being relayed to them from the battlefield while communicating on headsets with drone pilots at other bases and instant messaging with commanders on the ground. “I’ll have a phone in one ear, talking to a pilot on the headset in the other ear, typing in chat at the same time and watching screens,” a twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant told the New York Times. “It’s intense.”¹⁵⁸

At the nearby CIA headquarters, meanwhile, civilians working for the spy agency work closely with agents in the field, as well as private military contractors, everywhere from Somalia to Pakistan to target both high-profile terror suspects, such as US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as those who merely fit the “pattern of life” profile of a militant.¹⁵⁹

Along with the new breed of killing technology has also come a new breed of pilot, one schooled in the 21st century ways of gaming and multi-tasking. Former UN Rapporteur Philip Alston has warned that with drone operators based so far away from the battlefield and undertaking operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, “there is a risk of developing a ‘Playstation’ mentality to killing”—but that’s pretty much how this technology is designed.¹⁶⁰

Those deeply involved in the military’s UAV programs themselves say appealing to youth gaming culture was one of their explicit goals.¹⁶¹ “We modeled the controller after the PlayStation because that’s what these eighteen-, nineteen-year-old Marines have been playing with all of their lives,” a robotics expert working for the Marines told author P.W. Singer in his book Wired for War.¹⁶²

This can blur the line between the virtual and the real worlds. As a drone pilot in Qatar said, “It’s like a video game. It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s fucking cool.”¹⁶³

Not only have the controls on the military’s war-fighting machines changed, so has the nature of armed conflict—not for those on the receiving end of Hellfire missiles, of course, but for those pulling the trigger. As Singer noted, “For a new generation, ‘going to war’ doesn’t mean shipping off to some god-forsaken place to fight in a muddy foxhole but a daily commute in your Toyota Camry to sit behind a computer screen and drag a mouse.”

In addition to distancing soldiers from the consequences of their actions, the advent of remotely controlled drone warfare has changed the way the military trains its next generation of pilots, provoking what technology reporter Noah Schactman says is a “military culture clash between teenaged videogamers and veteran flight jocks for control of the drones.” Drone pilots, after all, don’t face any risk of dying in combat; thus, the disparaging label of “cubicle warriors” applied to them by those who do.

“There is no valor in flying a remotely piloted aircraft,” Col. Luther Turner, a former fighter pilot turned drone operator, conceded to the Washington Post.¹⁶⁴

But the future lies with the videogamers.

In 2004, the Air Force flew just five round-the-clock patrols with Predator and Reaper drones each day; by 2010, that number had reached forty.¹⁶⁵ By 2011 the Air Force was training more remote pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined. There were about 1,100 drone pilots and 750 sensor operators in the Air Force by the end of 2011.¹⁶⁶ The Air Force projected that it would need at least 2,110 pilots and about 1,500 sensor operators to staff its fleet by 2015.

“Our #1 manning problem in the Air Force is manning our unmanned platform,” Dr. Mark T. Maybury, Chief Scientist at the Air Force, declared in a September 27, 2011 presentation.¹⁶⁷

In order to meet that need, the Pentagon has hired an army of private contract employees.¹⁶⁸ At least a dozen defense contractors supply personnel to help the Air Force, special operations units, and the CIA. They work as technicians and mechanics, intelligence analysts and drone operators, sometimes even in the so-called kill chain when missiles are launched. This puts private contractors—people whose primary allegiance is to a corporation and who are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice—smack in the middle of some of America’s most sensitive military and intelligence operations.

The other measure the Pentagon has taken to meeting growing demand is to lower entry and training standards for those joining the military to operate drones. Air Force recruits, for example, do not have to meet the vision, physical or height requirements usually sought in a traditional pilot, nor do they have to go through the grueling courses for traditional pilots.

In 2009, the Air Force established two test programs at air bases in Nevada to train soldiers in the ways of drone warfare, one of them specifically geared to those who had never even flown a plane.¹⁶⁹ While traditional pilots usually train for two years before being deployed, this is a nine-month crash course, with six months dedicated to learning the basics of flying and the last few months to maneuvering a drone through a video-reproduction flight simulator.

In another program, drone pilots get 44 hours of cockpit training before they are sent to a squadron to be certified and allowed to command missions.¹⁷⁰ That compares with a minimum of 200 hours’ training for pilots flying traditional warplanes.

Cutting short the training required before a young soldier can pilot a killing machine in a combat zone has been controversial. “We are creating the equivalent of a puppy mill,” one fighter pilot told the Washington Post in 2010. According to Time magazine, former General Mike Moseley, like other heads of the Air Force before him, is also a critic of letting non-pilots operate drones in potentially deadly battlefield situations, believing “only a trained pilot [has] the mental and moral heft to deliver bombs and missiles.”¹⁷¹

It’s not just a question of whether drone pilots possess the proper training to effectively employ lethal force abroad, though. It’s also whether they can deal with the consequences of their actions. While those who operate drones are often located far from the battlefield, the high-resolution cameras on UAVs allow them to see, sometimes in gruesome detail, what happens when they decide to pull the trigger.

Fighter pilots “come in at 500–600 mph, drop a 500-pound bomb and then fly away. You don’t see what happens,” Col. Albert K. Aimar, commander of the 163rd Reconnaissance Wing based in Southern California, explained to the Associated Press.¹⁷² While the pilots who dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, they did not see the effects firsthand. By contrast, those who pilot Predator and Reaper drones see almost everything when they fire a missile. “[Y]ou watch it all the way to impact, and I mean it’s very vivid, it’s right there and personal,” said Aimar. “So it does stay in people’s minds for a long time.”

On the Al Jazeera show The Stream, former CentCom spokesman Josh Rushing described how an act so seemingly impersonal as remote-control killing can be just the opposite.¹⁷³ He said that sometimes drone pilots watch individuals and their families for days at a time, seeing them walk the dog and do their family chores. “Man has never experienced this before—watching someone from above for so long without them knowing it, almost in a God-like way,” said Rushing. “Then one day the decision comes down that you’ve got to take them out. You hit the button and kill them. But you knew these people in a way, so it can become quite personal.”

In his book The Predator, drone pilot Matt Martin expressed his anguish when he ended up killing civilians. In one case he described how he had carefully planned to blow up a group of supposed rebels who were standing around a truck. Suddenly, two kids on a bicycle appeared on the screen. There was an older boy, about ten, and a younger one balanced on the handlebars. They were laughing, talking—and riding alongside the truck.

Panicking, Martin wanted to stop the missile, but it was too late. The sensor operator had already released it. “Mesmerized by approaching calamity, we could only stare in abject horror as the silent missile bore down upon them out of the sky…. When the screens cleared, I saw the bicycle blown twenty feet away. One of the tires was still spinning. The bodies of the two little boys lay bent and broken among the bodies of the insurgents.”¹⁷⁴

Martin soothed his conscience by recalling the words of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that “you must sometimes do evil in order to do good.” (This is the same McNamara who bears much of the responsibility for the Vietnamese War [known in Vietnam as “the American War”] that killed over two million Vietnamese and some fifty thousand US soldiers.)

US Major Bryan Callahan said that drone pilots are taught “early and often” to compartmentalize their lives, to separate the time they spend firing missiles on battlefields from the time they spend—the same day—at home with their families.¹⁷⁵ When it comes to witnessing murder, “you need to tuck those things away and put them where they belong,” Callahan explains. “We’re pretty good at it.”

They’d better be. Because despite drones possessing the latest in imaging technology and despite all the much-vaunted checks that go into the decision to deploy lethal force, mistakes are all too common. And it’s hard to go home to one’s own family after wiping out someone else’s.

The Los Angeles Times detailed a lengthy investigation into a tragic incident in Afghanistan that left roughly two dozen civilians dead.¹⁷⁶ In the early morning hours of February 21, 2010, US Air Force pilots thought they had found the jackpot: a convoy of Taliban militants closing in on a group of American soldiers just a few miles away—a perfect, textbook case of the surveillance and precision power of drones in action. Every “i” was dotted, every “t” was crossed.

“We have eighteen pax [passengers] dismounted and spreading out at this time,” said a Predator drone pilot at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, one of US military’s most experienced who had spent more than one thousand hours training others to fly UAVs.

“They’re praying. They are praying,” said the drone’s camera operator. “This is definitely it, this is their force,” said the cameraman. “Praying? I mean, seriously, that’s what they do.”

“They’re gonna do something nefarious,” added the drone crew’s intelligence coordinator.

While they were sure they had a “sweet target,” in the words of the cameraman, the Americans did not fire. They still had more checks and balances to go through.

In addition to the pilot, cameraman and intelligence officer stationed at Creech Air Force Base, there was also a team of screeners at Eglin Air Force Base in Okaloosa, Florida, tasked with carefully monitoring the Predator’s video feeds and sending their observations to those piloting the drone. Meanwhile, an Army captain on the ground in Afghanistan leading US troops near the suspected Taliban had the final word on whether to fire.

Though the crew had their suspicions about the convoy, they could not fire until they had what they believed to be definitive proof they were dealing with armed insurgents. At one point, the Predator pilot in Nevada thought he spotted a weapon. But the camera operator could not confirm it. “I was hoping we could make a rifle out,” the pilot complained. “Never mind.”

Then a screener in Florida reported possibly seeing one or more children in the suspected Taliban convoy. “Bull[—]. Where!?” the camera operator replied. “I don’t think they have kids out at this hour.”

“Why didn’t he say ‘possible’ child?” the pilot said. “Why are they so quick to call kids but not to call a rifle?”

“I really doubt that children call,” the cameraman responded. “Man, I really… hate that,” he added, before qualifying: “Well, maybe a teenager.”

The pilot told the troops on the ground of the screeners’ observations, saying they had spotted “a possible rifle and two possible children near the SUV.” As if it was a game of telephone, the original message about identifying children had become “possible children.” And the “possible rifle” became proof positive that the convoy possessed weapons. Ultimately, the Army captain decided it was time to fire, pointing to a “positive identification” he had made based on “the weapons we’ve identified and the demographics of the individuals”—demographics, not identities—as well as intercepted phone conversations picked up from somewhere in the region.

The consequences were grave. “Dead and wounded were everywhere,” the Times reports. In the aftermath of the strike, the Predator crew noticed three survivors trying to surrender.

“What are those?” said the cameraman.

“Women and children,” the intelligence coordinator replied.

“That lady is carrying a kid, huh?” said the pilot.

“The baby, I think, on the right. Yeah,” the intelligence coordinator said.

Having just massacred a group of civilians, the crew tried to tell themselves that they did nothing wrong—that they were just doing their jobs.

“No way to tell, man,” the safety observer said.

“No way to tell from here,” said the cameraman.

For all the military’s vaunted checks and balances, for all of its screeners and intelligence coordinators and safety observers, the Predator drone crew had just killed innocent men, women, and children. According to the US government, fifteen people were killed and twelve wounded, including three kids. According to Afghans, twenty-three people were killed, including two young children aged three and four.

For many soldiers, the forty-minute commute home is not enough time to decompress and forget horrors like that—even when the ones they’ve killed are militants, not civilians. As Col. Chris Chambliss put it: “To go to work, and to do bad things to bad people, and then when I go home and go to church and try to be a productive member of society, those don’t necessarily mesh well.”

When pilots go home, they don’t talk about the bad people—or innocent civilians—they’ve killed. Instead, they bottle it up inside. A pilot identified only as “Captain Dan” told producers for a documentary on drones that his family knows he flies UAVs, but “I don’t go home and tell them what mission I flew or something like that. That’s a challenge in the job that you have to do day in and day out.”¹⁷⁷

While they may quietly suffer from combat related stress, many soldiers relish the idea of engaging in combat missions while remaining at home, pointing to the burden and worry it takes off their families and the opportunity it provides them to spend more time with their kids.¹⁷⁸ The family of a drone pilot doesn’t have to deal with the stress of wondering if their loved one will make it back alive.

Drone pilots sit safely, thousands of miles away from the physical danger of the war they are fighting. The only danger they face is mental. But that is still a very real danger—one that, in extreme cases, can boil out into home life in the form of abuse and the breakup of families.

For drone pilots and other drone crewmembers, viewing the real time video feed is often the biggest stressor related to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Soldiers on the ground engage in brutal and deadly combat—and drone operators watch. That exacts a toll.

A December 2011 government-commissioned report of Air Force drone pilots found that nearly half reported “high operational stress,” in contrast to thirty-six percent of a control group of six hundred Air Force members in logistics or support jobs.¹⁷⁹ Nearly a third of the US Air Force’s 1,100 drone operators suffered “burnout,” with seventeen percent thought to be “clinically distressed,” though much of that distress may have come as the result of earlier deployments.

Pilots operating drones that are supporting US troops in war zones like Afghanistan have an easier time because they have a sense of accomplishment from protecting troops on the ground. Soldiers and Marines who get pinned down in insurgent fire in Afghanistan often call in the drones for help, and directly communicate with drone operators to get precise targets. “These guys are up above firing at the enemy,” said Colonel McDonald, coauthor of the study.¹⁸⁰ “They love that, they feel like they’re protecting our people. They build this virtual relationship with the guys on the ground.”

“Physically, we may be in Vegas,” Air Force Major Shannon Rogers told Time magazine in 2005, “but mentally, we are flying over Iraq. It feels real.”¹⁸¹

“A lot of people downplay it, saying ‘You’re eight thousand miles away. What’s the big deal?’ But it’s not really eight thousand miles away, it’s eighteen inches away,” Col. Pete Gersten, commander of the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Creech, told Stars and Stripes in 2009.¹⁸² “We’re closer in a majority of ways than we’ve ever been as a service.”

“I’ve seen troops die before,” sensor operator Jesse Grace told the military paper. In one incident, Grace watched as an IED killed five of his comrades. All he could do was watch. “I felt like I was helpless,” Grace said. “It was a traumatic experience. It shocked me. I had just turned nineteen. It happened on Memorial Day. I remember that.” Many drone pilots have witnessed similar events and are just as affected by “survivor’s guilt” as if they were like any other soldier who was party to a firefight.

“If I screw up or miss something, if I screw up a shot, I wish it was me down there, not them. Sometimes I feel like I left them behind,” said US Major Bryan Callahan.¹⁸³

The Air Force study found that the biggest source of stress for drone operators was long hours and frequent shift changes because of staff shortages. Drone crews work ten to twelve hour shifts. Alternating between day, evening and overnight shifts every three weeks prevents them from fully integrating into civilian life.¹⁸⁴

As a result, drone crews are generally “tired, disgruntled and disillusioned,” said a former fighter pilot who teaches at the Air Force Academy. “It’s insane,” he said. “You can’t run an Air Force like this without burning your people out.”

Drone pilot Matt Martin recalled how, after months and months of long days staring at monitors, he became bored, cynical and suspicious of everyone he was watching. And, as military are wont to do, he found himself hoping that the targets he was following would prove themselves to be insurgents so he could “get some action.”

One day, he spotted a group of men at a park in Iraq’s Sadr City, and wondered if it was a terrorist cell meeting or just a bunch of men smoking and dancing. He watched them for hours.

“One of the men eventually got up off the ground and walked over to a nearby shack. I thought I finally had them. He was going for weapons,” Martin wrote. Alas, the man returned with folding chairs. Martin was disappointed. “I kept hoping somebody would pull out a rocket launcher,” he admitted. “At least it would mean I was making good use of the Predator’s time and resources. Beside, blowing up things was much more interesting than watching men sit around in the dark smoking cigarettes, dancing and holding hands.”¹⁸⁵

Another major problem drone personnel deal with is information overload. Tasked with sifting through unprecedented amounts of raw data to help the military determine what targets to hit and what to avoid, drone-based sensors find themselves drowning in a sea of endless data. And they are not alone. “There is information overload at every level of the military—from the general to the soldier on the ground,” said neuroscientist Art Kramer, a researcher contracted by the military to help soldiers cope with digital overload that has led not only to stress, but to tragic mistakes.¹⁸⁶

The military seems to be aware of the insanity. “It’s clear that we’ve pushed our units not to the breaking point, but close,” said Col. Eric Mathewson, commander of the Air Force’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Task Force. But it doesn’t seem the military is doing much about it.

An interview request issued to the Veterans Affairs National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (NCPTSD) for this book was denied, with a spokesperson declaring that NCPTSD “does not have a subject matter expert to deal with your request.” Even though there are numerous interviews and books written on the topic of drone pilots experiencing symptoms related to PTSD, there is no official governmental expert who can speak about it.

It seems that the military has another solution in mind—replace the pilots with automated, autonomous killing machines.¹⁸⁷

Already, the human role in drone warfare is rapidly becoming that of “a supervisor who serves in a fail-safe capacity in the event of a system malfunction,” notes retired Army Colonel Thomas Adams.¹⁸⁸ Even then, Adams thinks that the speed, confusion, and information overload of modern-day war will soon move the whole process outside “human space.” Future weapons “will be too fast, too small, too numerous, and will create an environment too complex for humans to direct,” he says, and new technologies “are rapidly taking us to a place where we may not want to go, but probably are unable to avoid.”

The trend toward greater autonomy will only increase as the military moves from one pilot remotely flying one drone to one pilot remotely managing several drones at once. “Lethal autonomy is inevitable,” said Ronald C. Arkin, who authored a study on the subject for the Army Research Office.¹⁸⁹

Arkin believes autonomous drones could be programmed to abide by international law. Others vehemently disagree and question the ethics of robots making life and death decisions.

But one thing is certain: autonomous weapons won’t suffer from PTSD. And that’s why—ethical or not—the military will most likely be expanding its dependency on machines that do not possess the troublesome emotions and consciences of its human pilots.