Slashdot Mirror
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 the Air Force referred to more than once as the Chair Force.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
To be a rigger?
What do you mean?
http://www.justnews.com/news/14708354/detail.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/business/worldbusiness/27iht-drone.4.11474996.html
http://gizmodo.com/5167853/the-draganflyer-x6-uav-police-edition
Except for FAA approval, there isn't much stopping our police state to use them.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Too late. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is testing them over Lake Erie and Ontario, and have been for several years over the Mexican border.
...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.
...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
Except for FAA approval, there isn't much stopping our police state to use them.
We already do use them to patrol the border.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
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.
That's the Air Force as a whole not just the drone pilots.
What is laughable though is that the drone pilots get their time flying drones counted as flight hours which count toward their career gates. So for being at less risk than most anyone else and essentially playing flight sim games all day they get bonus pay.
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...
I've been under an F-15 at an air show and it sounds like God just got home, especially when the afterburners light up. I can only imagine what it's like when there's no concern about popping the eardrums of those on the ground.
That being said, operationally they keep the aircraft above 20k feet specifically to avoid small arms fire. The level required to act as a psychological weapon makes them great for target practice.
Incidentally, if they're not intimidated by having antitank missiles and precision-guided bombs falling on their heads, I doubt flying any lower will do much to wilt their spirits.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
The fear factor isn't from noise. It's from never seeing what platform delivered the munition. You sit a drone up at 25-30k feet, the target wont ever hear it or see it. The survivors of an attack only know that the hand of God came down upon them without any warning, no sound, and their buddies got vaporized. THIS is where you get the fear factor. The knowledge that it could come at any time, and there is no way to know when. In fact, you almost have to assume that there is a drone over you at all times, and that all it would take is the push of a button to wipe you out.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It's a flight sim "game" with real death for someone at the end of the day, not "pretend death and go post my frag score on slashdot". They receive flight hours towards their career gates because the training and experience to perform this mission is specialized and expensive to generate, so that providing a solid incentive path to bring and keep high quality personnel in the career field is important.
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.
You're mistaken. The American people don't object to the killing or abuse of their OWN people either. It is well known that American prisons are full of non-violent druggies subjected to rape, torture, and all forms of sexual violence. Instead of a national outcry against this, it is treated as a subject for late-night humor. When blacks in Oakland protest against a black boy having been murdered, shot point blank in the back while restrained on the BART - most Americans were angry at the PROTESTORS and cheered when the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse them. Americans will only become angry when it is a friend, neighbor, or family member who is abused. Anyone else and it becomes ENTERTAINMENT. The show "Cops" exists as a voyeuristic corruption of the justice system which is obviously based on the court room in Idiocracy.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
True, but the bombs were aimed at averting the need to invade the japanese home islands. So several hundred thousand japanese civilians were killed by two bombs rather than the millions that would likely die in an invasion. That's not including the military casualties that were predicted. The Armed forces are still giving out medals that were originally produced in anticipation of that invasion. As ugly as using those bombs was the outcome isn't as bad as it could have been without them.
Tell me, what are the intentions of the people who those drones are targetting? How many innocents have those men killed this year? How many weddings, funerals, markets, and religious services have they bombed in service to their god of hate and blood? The patriotism of Americans is small potatoes compared to the fervor of these extremists. It's even smaller potatoes compared to =any= country's imperialism over 70 years ago.
The modern state of the US is easy for cowards to criticize. They don't realize that staying in Afghanistan and Iraq keeps the war in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and SURPRISE, Americans would prefer Iraqis, Pakistanis, and Afghanistanis to die to these insane fiends than American civilians -- but we're also risking American soldiers to die in the place of these people. If any other country, 150 years ago, had the power that America has now, the entire middle east would be a glass parking lot. It isn't, because America has far more compassion in its short history than those bloodthirsty, "progressive" European states ever had until their militaries were completely destroyed in the first half of the last century. So we have soldiers on the ground with rifles, and remote-controlled drones, because we can guide their missiles more accurately than just dropping a few million bombs on the unstable regions.
You probably can't figure that out, though, because you got some "America Sucks, GRRR! Every other country in the world has good intentions until America comes along and try to kill their leaders!" in your eye. You're ignoring 6,000 years of history and human nature to make your blind-eyed claims against one of the gentlest giants to ever sit on the Earth.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
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 man who straps a bomb to his chest and dies killing his enemies, or the man who kills from a lazy-boy with no risk to himself whatsoever.
They aren't cowards for strapping bombs to their chest. They are cowards because they tend to go after relatively undefended civilian targets. Driving a truck bomb into a barracks filled with Marines represents a legitimate act of war. Blowing up a pizzeria filled with civilians that had no military value is the coward's way out.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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
Simple answer: no one has any idea. The people targeted by the drones for extra-judicial assassinations are always and without exception "suspected" "militants" - i.e. people who might militantly oppose US interests, or interests of US sponsored warlords in some way or another. Some might be mass murderers, some merely opposed to their US-appointed "government" or simply enemies of some US informants. Or random bystanders. There is no way to tell.
But one thing can be known for certain, the hordes of children killed by the drones were definitely not "targeting" anyone.
So the bottom line is this: when you choose to descend to the levels of the atrocities that you accuse your "evil" opponents of ... you yourself have become the very evil you claim to fight. Which is clearly the case with the US of A, and which all rational observer have pointed out a long time ago.
Truth hurts and US-ians want *absolutely nothing* to do with it.
It's funny that someone who says the truth hurts can't bring himself to use the accepted and proper noun for a citizen of the United States: American.
In fact, very much like Ancient Rome where the citizens were a different breed from the conquered and the "ungrateful" slaves outnumbered them 3:1
We are nothing like Ancient Rome. If we behaved like the Romans we would have killed every single male of military age in Afghanistan a long time ago. Say what you will about the Romans but they knew how to keep the enemies of civilization in line. We've long since forgotten how to do that. More's the pity.
everyone outside of the US should by now know quite well how they are used: to assassinate, remotely (with no regard for bystanders, due process or any of that "coddling" stuff)
I wasn't aware that enemies on the battlefield were entitled to due process before being killed. Could you point out this nugget of international law for me?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The Armed forces are still giving out medals that were originally produced in anticipation of that invasion.
For example, 500,000 Purple Hearts were made in preparation for the anticipated invasion of Japan. As it turned out, they were not needed then. This stockpile has been reduced by the Korean and Vietnam wars and all of the lesser actions (Iraq 1 & 2, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, and various "peacekeeping" missions), but about 100,000 still remain unused.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
>Muslims do not revere Muhammed. They simply believe he delivered the word of God.
However, large numbers of them will happily kill you for insulting him and vastly larger numbers will riot over same. You seem to be using a rather non-standard definition of "revere."
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Bullshit. They're evil for killing civilians, not cowards. Attacking the enemy where he is strong isn't bravery, it's fucking stupidity. Sometimes killing civilians is justified either as collateral damage or intentionally. e.g. had German families started settling in France during WWII occupation you can bet your ass they would have been fair targets.
In the case of blowing up some random people in a bazaar for some obscure religious difference then it's evil - but it's not cowardly. Giving your life for something intentionally is the very opposite of cowardly. But if you think dramatic terms like "coward's way out" make it sound worse, go for it.
I hate use of the word "coward" in a military context. Two thousand people use guerrilla tactics against your army of forty thousand? Cowards. Many of your men are killed while sleeping in an ambush? Cowards. A gunman refuses to fight your sword-based army from melee range and keeps firing and running away? Coward. When you're doing it, it's good strategy. When the bad guys do it, it's cowardice.
LMAO. Just LMAO. "Civilized world" as defined by who? People who think nothing of executing people after refusing appeals based on new evidence exonerating them? Or executing mentally defective people, and juveniles?
Or perhaps a civilized world where a country that has the largest percentage of its populace in the world incarcerated, and 1/4 to 1/3 of those incarcerated for crimes 65% of the population don't even believe should be a crime?
Or a civilized world where Supreme Court justices appointed by the administration of a political party rule that in the elections to determine the leader of that nation, that to recount votes to ensure accuracy would be to "undermine" the system?
Or a civilized world where following lobbying by unrelated interest groups, the President signs into law legislation to keep a person alive, despite their wishes, and that of the guardian they made an informed and aware decision to put in place to honor their wishes?
Or a civilized world where it is considered de jure for a medical insurance company to collect up to and over a thousand dollars a month for "health insurance", and then deny coverage for abdominal cancer in a patients 40s, on the grounds that they had failed to disclose they had their tonsils removed at age 9?
That civilized world, you mean?
Not even close. At Waco, the ATF attempted to execute a search warrant on the Branh Dividian compound. The Branch Dividians opened fire from a huge stockpile of automatic weapons killing 4 ATF agents.
After these murders, the FBI came in and *then* you started seeing millitary-like hardware.
Seeing as you don't seem to remember the incident very well, I'll remind you. The ATF attempted to stage a massive raid on the "compound". They lost the element of surprise because the ATF invited in the media to get lots of footage of their brave storming of this menacing redoubt. No action occurred that could be remotely called "an attempt to serve a warrant". What occurred was an unprovoked attack by a large force of ATF agents armed with automatic weapons, which was repelled and driven into ignominious flight by legally armed citizens firing in self defense from their dwelling.
Subsequent to this, the scene was taken over by a paramilitary FBI force which did its best over a period of weeks to work the situation up into a fever pitch that culminated in the mass murder of citizens guilty of no crime—including dozens of children.
In the future, such things will be taken care of quickly and quietly by drone jockeys in Nevada.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary