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USAF Cuts Drone Flights As Stress Drives Off Operators
HughPickens.com writes: The NY Times reports that the U.S. is being forced to cut back on drone flights as America's drone operators are burning out. The Air Force is losing more drone pilots than they can train. "We're at an inflection point right now," says Col. James Cluff, the commander of the Air Force's 432nd Wing. Drone missions increased tenfold in the past decade, relentlessly pushing the operators in an effort to meet the insatiable demand for streaming video of insurgent activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones, including Somalia, Libya and now Syria. The biggest problem is that a significant number of the 1,200 pilots are completing their obligation to the Air Force and are opting to leave. Colonel Cluff says many feel "undermanned and overworked," sapped by alternating day and night shifts with little chance for academic breaks or promotion.
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed. "Having our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and thinking, 'All right, I've got my war face on, and I'm going to the fight,' and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Walmart to pick up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home — and the fact that you can't talk about most of what you do at home — all those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family, putting pressure on the airman," says Cruff. The colonel says the stress on the operators belied a complaint by some critics that flying drones was like playing a video game or that pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made it psychologically easier for them to kill. "Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke," says Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, "that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors."
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed. "Having our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and thinking, 'All right, I've got my war face on, and I'm going to the fight,' and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Walmart to pick up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home — and the fact that you can't talk about most of what you do at home — all those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family, putting pressure on the airman," says Cruff. The colonel says the stress on the operators belied a complaint by some critics that flying drones was like playing a video game or that pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made it psychologically easier for them to kill. "Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke," says Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, "that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors."
Soon we will have intelligent drones and just a few people monitoring them all as they go about their missions. Then we can wage "war" 24x7, 365 days a year -forever.
I'm amazed that drone piloting hasn't been outsourced to India already. You don't need to be a Real American Hero (TM) to fly an RC plane via satellite, so it's a waste of taxpayer's money to not get this job done in the cheapest way posible. I mean, it sounds like they've got a drone-piloting sweatshop going, in the USA, but if you want a sweatshop, the USA is not the place for it.
As the article you cite says, that was/is a practice of the CIA. The same is true for "Signature Strikes", or missling people that match your demographic target profile but haven't necessarily been observed doing insurgent things.
That said I'd wager that the stress of killing innocents, even if extremely rarely and by accident, weighs heavily on most of the USAF drone pilots. When you are actually in harms way it is a lot easier to justify your actions to yourself. But as a remote pilot thousands of miles from any threat I imagine that takes a toll.
It's a leadership problem, as shown by this:
I can't believe any other part of the military would push people in combat arms that hard with so little chance of academic breaks or promotion opportunities. Especially promotions. This is part of a general rot in the US Air Force that has been documented in various places, such as strategic forces being considered a loser's job and the antagonism to flying the A-10 warthog to provide close air support for ground units instead of sexy modern aircraft.
Being a pilot is one of those jobs where you have to really love what you do because the pay is too low to be in it just for the money. It's cheaper though that owning and flying your own plane all the time.
I don't blame anyone for not wanting to be in the US military right now. Anyone joining now has questionable moral character IMO.
Since you don't actually kill people for a living, you shouldn't comment on the effects of it. It is not a video game and it isn't something you take lightly.
Bomber WSO.
If killing another human being is "easy peasy" for you, and doesn't impart any stress into your life than you would be classified as a sociopath.
The sheer amount of ignorance in these replies is staggering. Surely you're able to understand that despite the fact that this person is viewing a screen they know the events are still real.
At this point I suppose it's wildly beyond your ability to understand why it might be a compounding factor to show up to work, kill a dozen people, and then go home to your kids every night.
PS: the whole secrecy thing can indeed wear on a relationship.
Years ago, when I did the "Cannot confirm or deny" thing, I spent 4 days a week working on Project Senior Trend, and 3 days in Nellis AFB in Vegas. I've lost count of the number of girlfriends I'd lost to the phenomenon of:
"So how was your week?"
"Oh, normal."
"Did you do anything fun or interesting?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary"
"C'mon, don't be so closed-up... how was your week?"
"Babe, you know I can't talk about it"
"Don't give me that shit - I saw those cuties you got on the plane with! You're fucking one of them, aren't you!?"
"No, no! It's not like that - I just can't talk about what I do up there is all!"
{heated argument ensues...}
I finally got past that by dating a chick who also worked up there as an SP (Security Police), which made things much more relaxed.
Even my wife (who I met *long* after I became a civilian) seriously asked me, point-blank, if I saw or worked with any aliens up there, and got mad when I refused to talk about it. I eventually defused it by joking about a dude named José, but it illustrates that such a job really tends to intrude on one's personal life.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Consider that unlike a video game, these guys are killing actual human beings on a daily basis.
This, plus the fact that with any combat exercise mistakes can and will be made. That village you just bombed with your UAV turns out, after the fact, to be nothing. You just killed a bunch of men, women and children for nothing. You now have to live with that and can't even talk about it with your wife, gf, or whatever. Then you have to go back the next day and do it again knowing that you might be killing people that didn't do anything.
Tell me again how this is no big deal, no stress and you don't see the problem. Granted, I *hope* that doesn't happen too much but it does happen or at least you worry that it *WILL* happen to you. I don't know if I could handle that kind of stress continuously day after day for years. You hope that command gets it right and doesn't put you in that position but it is ALWAYS in the back of your mind.
Personally I served in the Marines as Artillery. We kill people 10-20km away. We never see them at all. Are you going to tell me that there is no stress in that either? Let me clue you all in on something. Unless you are ground infantry/tank no one ever sees the enemy. It is all pictures on a computer screen if you even see that at all.
Sure, but that just restates the problem: drone operator is a low-status, dead-end job within the military. It's not that the huge, lucrative, civilian drone operator market is sucking the ranks dry, it's that the job offers career prospects and job satisfaction that aren't in line with the abilities it demands.
This in turn suggests there is something broken with the leadership of the Air Force -- which should come as no surprising given that we've heard exactly the same kind of stories of career burnout in officers who man nuclear missile launch sites. They're not paying attention to vital but non-glamorous missions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This should be no problem. They just need to hire more sociopaths and psychopaths. Corporate America is filled with such people, most of whom are middle managers. Other areas to mine are collection agencies, repo agencies, and Audi drivers. A lot of those people would be perfectly content to spend all day killing humans remotely, then going home to the wife and kids. The military just needs to lower their physical standards a bit.
Proverbs 21:19
I don't know, maybe it might be a moral thing because they're executing people they don't know, for crimes they're not even aware of simply because they're given an order by a government that doesn't even follow its own rules and in answerable to no one?! Jesus man! They're killing people! They're killing A LOT of people, without trails. There are lots of innocents the die. Kids. Fathers. Mothers. Drone strikes aren't as precise as they have you believe.
That's why they're leaving. They're probably having nightmares at night about the people they killed who they never met; never even looked into their eyes.
Did you miss the part about it's not always bad guys? Children being killed, and some of these pilots are parents themselves? Double-tap strikes killing first responders?
Believe it or not, people do understand that the targets of their "gameplay" are actual people, and not computer generated opponents.
Its hard to understand that because people who only play video games, we know that we're not killing real people, so we assume the feeling is similar. It's not. You know full well that those are real people, and you know from the news that some of them are quite possibly innocent. It may not be as visceral, but it still has an impact, especially when the technology lets you stay in action for long shifts while you loiter over an operational zone.
You sound like a psychopath.
Literally, I mean. You literally sound like a psychopath.
> If killing another human being is "easy peasy" for you, and doesn't impart any stress
> into your life than you would be classified as a sociopath.
^^^^^ This.
I feel the same way, it's appalling that half the people replying are casually stating that they'd have "no problem" killing people. People who express those kinds of sentiments are the LAST people you'd want to have the power of life and death, ESPECIALLY if it's being done remotely.
I wish I could mod you up, but alas, I cannot.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I wouldn't bet on it. I had a friend who was enlisted as a computer programmer in the AF. When the Army was having trouble finding enough people to fill all the deployment slots they had to fill they started sucking up Air Force people to fill those slots. So my friend who's computer programming job ostensibly fell under the Communications umbrella got sent to some outpost in Afghanistan to be a radio operator and because he was a Sergeant was expected to know how to run a Comms center supporting all kinds of patrols out in the field that were taking fire, as well as go on those patrols and act as their radio man. To me that demonstrated just the kind of idiocy that you can get when it isn't your own ass on the line. Some moron decided that Army communications troops and Air Force communications trooops were identical and was perfectly content to endanger a couple hundred folks by using them as such.
They also deploy lots of people to work outside of their trained fields of expertise doing everything from escorting third country nationals to driving trucks on convoys. You should absolutely not join any branch of the military, including the Coast Guard, if you don't want to be potentially sent to whatever hell hole the government decides we need to wage war in. You may not be forced to take up arms and shoot at people but once you are in they own you and will send you wherever they want regardless of logic or principle.