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Behind the Scenes With America's Drone Pilots
An anonymous reader writes "As President Obama meets with advisors on an Afghanistan strategy today (who are now leaning more toward Joe Biden's more-drones policy), and even as Al Qaeda claims it's not all that scared of drones, the new issue of Esquire takes the first real in-depth look at the American military's UAV build-up. Defense geek Brian Mockenhaupt spends some time on the ground in Afghanistan, as well as back at the Pentagon, where the pilots ('more like snipers than fighter pilots') are playing a kind of role-playing game, getting to know terrorists' daily ins and outs. Looks like these Reaper drones are the real wave of the future, eh?"
I've heard UAV pilots refered to more than once as the ChAir Force.
I wonder how long until the policies governing usage of these drones is no longer restricted to "war zones" ?
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U.S. government: Everything for killing, as little as possible for anything else. Killing and making the instruments of killing gives easy profits, partly because the contracts are largely secret.
The U.S. government is VERY corrupt, but U.S. citizens continue hiding from that fact.
As someone else said, the U.S. government's activities encourage other people to make drones. Soon that will be a common new threat. The rich people won't care, of course, since they will life in a radar-protected, drone-free area.
How long will we throw Ender at thier asses?
That is what I wanna know because the kids these days know violence and are in desperate need of an outlet.
To be a rigger?
...given the serious topic, but this is IMHO another typical case of American fantasy: a war without casualties. I mean, without American casualties, of course. Wishful thinking, whatever technologies you throw at the problem.
By its own definition, the US government is a terrorist regime. It utilizes violence to try to effect political change in other nations. According to Army Counterinsurgency Handbook (authored in part by Gen. Patraeus,) that is a defining characteristic of terrorist entities. The Taliban didn't attack us on 9/11... a bunch of Saudi Arabians, based in Florida and European nations, attacked us on 9/11. The Taliban offered to turn over Bin Ladin upon receipt of evidence that he was responsible for the attacks. The US Gov't refused. Today, EVERYONE responsible for 9/11 is DEAD or JAILED, and the US is waging ceaseless terrorist attacks on the Pashtun ethnic group of Pakistan and Afghanistan for NO APPARENT REASON. The usage of terrorist drone strikes, which have killed hundreds if not thousands of non-combatants this year, represents the kind of cowardice nominally associated with the BRAVE fighters of the so-called Taliban which resist the alien occupation of their country.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
After reading this I realize the not-so-obvious benefit of real planes flying around patrolling and bombing the enemy... The fear factor. As stated in the summary " Al Qaeda claims it's not all that scared of drones", which makes sense, a little spec in the sky orbiting quietly does not put the fear of God, oh sorry Allah, into the enemy. Get a couple of F35s, A10s or Apaches cruising about voila, fear is back. Intimidation is back factor in warfare. Never really thought about that aspect of an all-drone airforce...
... where having spent countless of hours fragging others in Descent will get you hired. Scary.
...Chief of Staff's reading list. Short on fighter pilot stuff, long on strategy and counterinsurgency. They see the way things are going, no doubt about it.
The Army reading list
is the past
Yours In Electrogorsk,
K. Trout
They're bad because one of the reasons people, soldiers included, don't like war is due to the risk of being killed. If you remove that you also remove the only motivation to stop a war or just not start it. The geek in me loves the tech involved in drones development (minus the weaponry) but my human half is scaried as hell because they represent one more step towards an endless war scenario.
Air power never wins wars, and that is what drones are. It is important to have boots on the ground, especially in a counterinsurgency campaign. For most insurgencies, the recruitment pool is the citizenry within the country who are unsatisfied and discontented. If a counterinsurgent force is relying primarily on impersonal methods such as drones or air power, the local populace will never see or interact with the foot soldiers of the counterinsurgency. The only way you can beat an insurgency is by interacting with the populace within the country, to galvanize support for the counterinsurgency campaign. If all you do is bomb people from the air you are going to get eh exact opposite effect. Without boots on the ground, you will not get proper intel. As such, there is a higher likelihood of collateral damage. When surprise attacks indiscriminately kill both combatants and civilians, you lose what little support you may have had. You have to go out there into the bush at the squad or platoon level and interact with local leaders, repair damage from both insurgent and counterinsurgent attacks, give little kids food/medical attention. You build up a rapport with people, and they will work with you. Otherwise, they are more likely to see you as the enemy instead of the insurgents. It may not be the newest, sexiest piece of technology, but it works. And you cant be afraid to have people out in harm's way. You have to have men getting in firefights, so the locals see you actually taking an interest in protecting their towns, their fields, their families. If this doesn't happen, you will lose.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
From page 4:
Indeed, they see many things meant to be secret, like men having sex with sheep and goats in the deep of night. I first heard this from infantry soldiers and took it as rumor, but at Bagram I met a civilian contractor who works in UAV operations. "All the time," he said. "They just don't think we can see them."
Better known as 318230.
"...given the serious topic, but this is IMHO another typical case of American fantasy: a war without casualties. I mean, without American casualties, of course. Wishful thinking, whatever technologies you throw at the problem"
This bares similarity to another war where they tried to fight it from the safely of helicopters, and similar to this one they will also lose it. But then again it isn't really about fighting some tribesmen in Afghanistan, but about extending the boundaries of the US empire and spending lots of money on the military budget. Especially since there is no longer some Soviet bogeyman around to save us all from. What's wrong with these Islamo-fascists that they don't want the sex-&-drugs-&-rock-&-roll and porn American life style.
davecb5620@gmail.com
On the other hand, if wars are made up of robots fighting robots, there'd be drastically lowered casualties on both sides... then, maybe, we could reduce wars to episodes of BatteBots and generate a large potential for advertising profit as the world tunes in to see the latest "war." In this way, it would be possible to turn the human craving for cyclical violence into a family friendly TV show. The advertising revenue would feed back into the "wars" much in the same manner as the current military-industrial complex uses profits from one war to develop the weapons for the next.
Drone planes....the most pussified, cowardice occupation ever conceived. I guess we know why their are so many RPG games available, complete with Network capability logging really "talented" gamers.
How indifferent will such a "pilot" be after a few months of "missions".
SMDH...Police in my neighborhood have been hanging Anti-Violence posters everywhere. Laughable considering our history.
it disturbs me.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I would not agree. However in this day and age where we handicap our side in every war you point is true.
bombing a population into submission works, it broke the back of the Germans and Japanese. It is far cheaper in manpower expenditure on our side to demoralize an enemy than befriend them. Yet we choose the later and put more people into direct risk.
I really think we would get seriously hurt in any real conflict as it would take a large population center being affected before we could fight like we had to. Perhaps that is the problem, in many cases today we don't really need to be in the fight in the first place. We had it right after 9/11 but lost it after countless "what ifs" and such by press and pundit. We lost it because don't have the patience for the long run nor did we feel the risk after so many years. Bush lost the effectiveness of 9/11 with the "mission accomplished" crap and really for many that removed the "pressing need".
Drones are great tools of assassins. I guess if the new face of war needs an association that is negative I would give it that. Now we will just hunt and peck at the enemy while he does the same to us and prolong things for dozens of years. The public now wants wars akin to Star Trek episodes, done in an hour with the nitty gritty done in the last ten minutes and everyone patting themselves on the back about how good they were.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Ender's Game
There are plenty of examples of wars won by air power. The Second World War, the Korean War, the Yom Kippur War, the Persian Gulf War, and the recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Sure there's no examples of air power winning wars all by itself, but that's not the point. Boots on the ground with a lot of air support beat boots on the ground.
Looks like these Reaper drones are the real wave of the future, eh?
At $10.9m, I'd rather see them going cheaper, and deploying more. Having seen the advances in home-built drones at Maker Faire and on RCGroups and having done a little myself, that price is absolutely ludicrous. You need $10.9m aircraft to reduce the risk that the components (or humans, if manned) will be lost in combat or fall into enemy hands. But if you use cheap commodity components, you don't need it to survive.
I do think there is a role for Reapers -- send them in for advanced missions and when you need to shoot. But for getting a look at the bad guys without putting anyone in harm's way? A $2k tricked out R/C airplane will get you there.
Nice side bonus: If you have a lot more planes, you can give more soldiers stick time. Not that war is fun, but if you're going to be in a war, it's nice to have a productive diversion.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The other half want a war with ONLY American casualties
"The real wave of the future" is complete and utter humiliation of the aggressors in this world and the Hereafter. Don't you forget that, all people with morality based on computer games.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Am I the only one reminded of H. G. Wells' "The Land Ironclads?"
"Their rifles... had the most remarkable sights imaginable, sights which threw a bright little camera-obscura picture into the light-tight box in which the rifleman sat below. This camera-obscura picture was marked with two crossed lines, and whatever wascovered by the intersection of these two lines, that the rifle hit... Changes in the clearness of the atmosphere, due to changes of moisture, were met by an ingenious use of that meteorologically sensitive substance, catgut, and when the land ironclad moved forward the sights got a compensatory deflection in the direction of its motion. The rifleman stood up in his pitch-dark chamber and watched the little picture before him. One hand held the dividers for judging distance, and the other grasped a big knob like a door-handle... When he saw a man he wanted to shoot he brought him up to the cross-lines, and then pressed a finger upon a little push like an electric bell-push, conveniently placed in the centre of the knob. Then the man was shot. If by any chance the rifleman missed his target he moved the knob a trifle, or readjusted his dividers, pressed the push, and got him the second time."
There is no law of physics guaranteeing the U. S. a monopoly on these things. Yet so much of the discussion implicitly assumes this is something "we" can do to "them."
The U. S. was certain that the Russians didn't have the technology capability to produce nuclear weapons, yet the U. S. had the monopoly on nuclear weapons for less than four years. (And the Russians then scared us by being the first to produce a fusion device that was capable of being a deliverable weapon--the U. S. had the first fusion explosion but it was a ground-based, building-sized device.
How difficult are these things to build? Are we sure you can't cobble a crude but effective one out of a video cell phone, an R/C model aircraft, and a couple of iPods? How long before we see these things over U. S. skies?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Now that the reign of the petrodollar is over, console yourself with the fact that America will no longer be able to fuel its multifarious instruments of death. I just hope that we withdraw all our soldiers from the Middle East while it's still an option.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
I'd just virtualize the controls, make it a MMO game, then offer cash prizes for the top "scores." I guarantee you, you'll have some 14 yr old with a D average who'll figure out how to bounce Hellfire missiles off walls to kill terrorists behind corners.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The war begins each day on the long drive into the desert, just past the Super Buffet and the Home Depot and the Petco, and the swath of look-alike houses that cling to the city's edge, along the forty miles of the strangest daily commute in America. Air Force Staff Sergeant Charles Anderson plucks his wristwatch from the cupholder and crosses into the war zone. He wears the watch only at work, and the ritual shifts his thoughts away from the everyday, which lately has been occupied by wedding plans and house hunting. He drives in silence, no music or news, past rocky scrubland that mirrors the Afghan mountains, valleys, and plains he'll spend his workday patrolling. First Lieutenant John Hamilton crosses over as he passes the High Desert State Prison, thirty miles outside Las Vegas, northwest on route 95. His cell-phone calls always drop off here, and over time he has come to think of the prison as the demarcation line between homelife and battlefield. A few more miles and Creech Air Force Base rises from the desert, a cluster of buildings at the foot of barren hills, cast gold by the early-morning sun. Captain Sam Nelson is the last to cross over. He steps into a plain brick building, home to the 42nd Attack Squadron, pulls his cell phone from his green flight suit, and leaves it on a counter with a pile of others. He passes through a doorway, from unclassified to secret, and the door shuts and locks behind him.
On this July morning, the three will crew a Reaper -- big brother to the Predator -- an unmanned aerial vehicle scanning the landscape from about twenty thousand feet, seventy-five hundred miles away. Nelson flies it, and Anderson runs the array of cameras and sensors that hang under the plane's nose and can see the hot barrel of a freshly fired weapon from miles off in the dark of night. Hamilton, the mission intelligence coordinator, feeds them reports from the battlefield and talks to the "customers," their name for the ground troops they'll be supporting in Afghanistan. He's twenty-four, still soft in the face, and studied public policy at Stanford; now in the morning paper he reads about policy he helps implement. He digs that. Never mind that his neighbors don't know how close to the war he really is every day. In the Reaper Operations Center, crowded with computers and flat-screen TVs, he settles in at his workstation, which has a bank of six computer screens, a laptop, two secure phone lines, and a radio headset. On the bottom center screen, he'll soon have nine message windows open, chatting with his bosses at Creech, commanders in Afghanistan, and troops on the battlefield.
The top middle screen shows the view from the Reaper -- in this case Afghanistan at rest. The sun has already set, but the infrared lens illuminates a darkened world in a palette of black and white. Down the hall, Nelson and Anderson step into the Ground Control Station, a windowless room ten feet wide and twenty feet deep, with beige walls and a drop-tile ceiling. At the far end, two men in flight suits and radio headsets sit in bulky tan faux-leather chairs before a cubicle cockpit of joysticks, throttles, and ten monitors. They stare at Afghanistan's roads and schools and markets and homes, as they have for the past several hours. Nelson and Anderson, their relief, slip into the seats as the Reaper flies on. Nelson checks his cargo, shown as neon-green silhouettes at the bottom of his center screen: four Hellfire missiles and two five-hundred-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs. Another shift of remote-control combat has begun.
At this very moment, at any given moment, three dozen armed, unmanned American airplanes are flying lazy loops over Afghanistan and Iraq. They linger there, all day and all night. When one lands to refuel or rearm, another replaces it. They guard soldiers on patrol, spy on Al Qaeda leaders, and send missiles shrieking down on insurgents massing in the night. Add to those the hundreds of smaller, unarmed Unmanned Aer
www.joshferguson.org
Regardless of your air or naval power.....you'll always need a guy with a rifle and bayonet physically occupying a piece of real estate.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Obama is working towards lowering the number of ICBM/Warheads that we have. At the same time, China has ramped up their production line of missiles as well as Neutrons bombs while focusing on Offensive weapons designed to take out our sats. China has also has a massive Space Based weaponary. Combine the afore mentioned with Russia and China helping Iran, North Korea, Burma, and possibly Venezuela with nukes as well as Missile. What you have is ability for China to help these countries launch an attack on the entire west.
We are in VERY precarious times.
This is ABSOLUTELY not true in countries that do not have democracy; China, Iran (quasi-democracy), North Korea, Myanmar, etc.. The reason is that these countries have ZERO issues with losing their citizens lives if things are coached in the right way. With a democracy, then each life lost will slowly degrade support for war, esp. if we started it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I read the article and was amazed at the great use of technology, that we could beam video and aircraft commands across the world to do surveillance and attacks. But then I saw a special on PBS last night where our ground troops can't even talk with the Afghans. The interpreter didn't speak good english, and his face was blurred out -- no doubt due to fear for his life and his family's safety. So, I wondered, why can't we use the same UAV technology to facilitate better translation?
Simply, give ground troops a video camera, mic, and speaker. Video and audio would be relayed to a translator sitting anywhere in the world. The translator could translate from Afghan to english, speaking into the troops' earpiece. English to Afghan would be broadcast over the speaker the troop carries. It's not nearly as personal, but I'd bet we'd get better and more translators. They can work anywhere and don't have to fear being shot or their family being threatened.
Look; We dropped them on a nation that had attacked us. Simple as that. We had no knowledge of the long term consequences. If you really want to blame somebody, then blame the japanese emperior. Heck, even after we dropped the first one, they should have said enough was enough. But they did not.
Finally, for all your carping about, you seem to ignore the fact that USSR, Germany, AND japan were all working on it as well. Germany transferred all their nuke knowledge to Japan via subs right before their fall. Either one of those 2 could have dropped them first (and the world would be a RADICALLY different place; all one nation). What would you be saying today had either of them dropped it? Praising that all the worlds jews were gone? That we were one happy nation?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not many military operations show such lopsided results: big impact at low cost, with results disproportional to the sacrifice, which fuels the insatiable hunger for UAVs and makes waging war even more abstract for everyone at home. People care less about what their government does when they are not asked to contribute. In World War II, one in ten Americans served in the military, and the war dead totaled nearly half a million. Today, fewer than one in a hundred serve in the military, and as the machines take over and that flesh-and-blood burden shrinks even more, the citizenry will disengage more and more.
This is why technology will never result in utopia. There is too much incentive for those in power to use it to increase their power, and too little cost to the populace to incite them to resist.
Your brain is not a computer.
It is vital to certain parties that war become intractable, perpetual and expanding.
"War brings business to Feinstein spouse: Blum's firms win multimillion-dollar defense contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan"
Afghanistan - the proxy war
"Implementing the McChrystal plan will perpetuate the longstanding fundamentals of US national security policy: maintaining a global military presence, configuring US forces for global power projection, and employing those forces to intervene on a global basis. The McChrystal plan modestly updates these fundamentals to account for the lessons of 9/11 and Iraq, cultural awareness and sensitivity nudging aside advanced technology as the signature of American military power, for example. Yet at its core, the McChrystal plan aims to avert change. Its purpose - despite 9/11 and despite the failures of Iraq - is to preserve the status quo. . . .
If the president assents to McChrystal's request, he will void his promise of change at least so far as national security policy is concerned. The Afghanistan war will continue until the end of his first term and probably beyond. It will consume hundreds of billions of dollars. It will result in hundreds or perhaps thousands more American combat deaths - costs that the hawks are loath to acknowledge.
As the fighting drags on from one year to the next, the engagement of US forces in armed nation-building projects in distant lands will become the new normalcy. Americans of all ages will come to accept war as a perpetual condition, as young Americans already do. That "keeping Americans safe" obliges the United States to seek, maintain, and exploit unambiguous military supremacy will become utterly uncontroversial."
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
NT
I just finished reading Skunk Works which has some very interesting history on spy planes, stealth aircraft and drones. It's really quite amazing how long the USA has been flying these things and what they can do.
Newsweek also had an article last week on the higher level and political implications of the change in the US Air Force's mission.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
By this definition, then the US Air Force of WWII was cowardly, especially the firebombing campaigns towards the end of the war in Germany and the nuclear bombs in Japan. When the crossbow was first widely introduced, the Pope tried to ban them because they were unchivalrous and cowardly. The people who attacked the Marines barracks in Beirut during the 80s and the American warship in Yemen were still branded as terrorists, despite attacking military targets. The attack on the Pentagon during 9/11 was also branded as a terrorist act. In Australia, a group of people were arrested as terrorists for planning to attack a military camp, also a valid military target. The truth is that, it is convenient for governments to label anyone they don't like as terrorists. I am not condoning attacks on civilians, whether by irregulars or by regular military. Regarding these drones, as they become more prevalent, countermeasures will be devised, you can bet on it. There already exist jammers that can interfere with the drones guidance systems. I predict that ECM measures will be devised to block/mislead the telecommunication linkage of the drones with its controllers. I also predict that "interceptor" drones will be invented that will loiter over the defended target and intercept incoming attack drones. Barrage balloons that interfere with sensors and radar might also make a comeback.
in international law.
The US is killing civilians by the busload in Pakistan. Or more accurately: at wedding and in houses where terrorists are thought to be hiding. Dunno why, but hitting weddings is almost routine.
Now come on... This is just plain plagiarism.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
"Yeah... no. Suicide bombers aren't cowards, whatever else you want to call them."
But of course they are.
Look, there are no consequences to themselves personally for being suicide bombers. One, they physically die. That means no possibility of being captured, tried, imprisoned, etc.
Two, they think they're going to paradise for what they're doing.
In their own minds, there are zero consequences for what they're doing, only reward. And so while there's some cowardice involved on the part of the bombers themselves, the greater cowardice is actually on the part of those that send them.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Let's hope we outgrow this childish behavior soon.
The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear fission bombs. Thermonuclear bombs are fusion bombs. The first fusion bomb wasn't exploded until several years after WWII had ended.
That being said, you'll find Max Hastings book, Retribution, to provide an interesting and well researched take on the factors that led to Japan's surrender. Hastings' position is that the fire raids, mining operations and submarine blockade of Japan were the major factors that led to the surrender. He notes that, at that time and for some time after the war, the Japanese did not consider there to be any significant difference between the atomic raids and the conventional fire raids that were destroying their cities on a regular basis. Finally, he discounts the influence of the Soviet declaration of war and invasion on Manchuria except to the extent that a few, non-military Japanese in the power structure still hoped that the Soviets would help them achieve a negotiated settlement.
Bottom line is that air power and sea power were able to force the Japanese to surrender without "boots on the ground".
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Terrorism is NOT the same as guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare targets militarily significant targets in an attempt to make it difficult for an enemy to mobilize force. Assuming a "just cause" targeting enemy combatants, generals, leaders, and support staff are all potentially legitimate ways to impact an adversaries ability to fight. Because of this, I wouldn't call the attack on the Pentagon a "terrorist" attack. It was a military strike which killed some civilians as collateral damage. The attacks on US forces around the world are similarly not "terrorist" in nature. They may be for an illegitimate cause (which I firmly believe), but they are not terrorist.
The attacks on civilians in hotels are terrorist attacks. Intentionally bombing schools, public transit, and marketplaces is terrorist. The intent of a terrorist attack is NOT to reduce the enemies ability to fight, but to reduce their will to fight by attacking those who are not directly involved in the conflict. The attack on the trade center was a terrorist attack. Arguably the atom bombs dropped on Japan were terrorist, the main question being whether the "primary" target was military complexes or civilian populations. We can discuss further whether "terrorism" is a valid approach, but it is definitely a significantly different act than the kind of guerrilla warfare practiced during the US war for independence.
Atanamis
Care to provide any evidence that this is true? Because I can provide several instances that show that staying in Afghanistan and Iraq didn't do much of anything to contain terrorism. In fact, it seems a lot more likely that remaining in those places is at best, a waste of our troops lives and a lot of money, and at worst, is actually encouraging world-wide terrorism.
Oh, and here's another hint for you: "people who don't agree with you" != "cowards".
Not a very good argument. The war was essentially over by this point anyway - we could very likely have just stood by for a month or two and waited for the Japanese government to collapse. But this:
Right on, brother. If we ever figure out why we're there, we might make some progress in A-stan. Until then, we're just spinning our wheels. This was the same thing that made Iraq drag on for so long - the objectives kept changing. In fact, I think that much like it was in Iraq, the solution is to simply declare victory and go home.
Here are two videos showing a US Customs Predator B UAV landing at the big Air Show in Oshkosh Wisconsin this past summer. The first video shows the aircraft landing and close-up. The second video shows the inside of the portable control trailer and the view from the UAV cameras during the approach and landing. http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid626910413?bclid=9230910001&bctid=30185778001 http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid626910413?bclid=9230910001&bctid=30711327001 Enjoy!
From TFA:
On his third combat mission after the training, he dropped a Hellfire at the feet of a man who had just planted an IED in Iraq.
Oh, good going, dude... now this slimy terrorist gets to laze around all day in Paradise with his 72 virgins, and I'm stuck down here with my hand wrapped around my, uh, "joy" stick...
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
I live in New Zealand, you insensitive clod!
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Now come on... This is just plain plagiarism.