Chris Woods
February 24, 2015
Drone warfare: life on the new frontline
Just a three-hour drive from Washington DC on the scenic Virginia coast, Langley Air Force Base is home to one of the most crucial components of the US armed drone programme. Alongside a couple of squadrons of the F-22 stealth fighter, the inhabitants of a large, nondescript brick building deep within the base had been on a permanent war footing for more than a decade. Visitors without the necessary security clearance needed to be escorted front and rear by chaperones waving red glowsticks, a warning to any intelligence analysts who might walk by not to discuss classified operations within earshot. These men and women were part of Distributed Ground System One (DGS-1), a unit that traced its mission back to the 1990s and the earliest days of the Predator programme. A soundproofed viewing window revealed hundreds of intelligence experts working away in a cavernous darkened room, each small cluster of screens indicating an ongoing mission. Their job was to process vast quantities of data from the many aerial platforms (among them Predators and Reapers) now operating above conventional US battlefields. “When you come on shift you go up to your IMS, your imagery mission supervisor, and he will task you out to what bird you’re assigned to,” explained Airman Ray, a young enlisted geospatial analyst.
Some days Ray might pore over feeds from a U2 or an MC-12 Liberty, both manned surveillance aircraft. Other times, he could find himself assigned to a team analysing images from an armed drone. Like everyone else here, Ray was waging war – though in a few hours he would return home. “It’s not something a lot of folk necessarily understand, that our airmen that you’re seeing downtown really are doing a very important national security mission day to day. But they’re kind of incognito in terms of blending in,” said Colonel Lourdes Duvall, vice commander of the 480th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing – home to most of the conventional air force’s 3,500 analysts.
Historically, intelligence analysts had been emotionally distanced from the battlefield images they were seeing. Even in the late 1990s, it might take days for stills photographs from a U2 mission to be processed and analysed. “We were used to looking at photographs, listening in to enemy transmissions which, you know – abstractly lives are on the line and you never handle it cavalierly, but you didn’t get that intimate contact,” said one former senior air force commander.
Now, intelligence analysts were being remotely exposed to combat on the frontline all the time, and were expected to deliver real-time assistance. Airman Ray described a recent counter-narcotics mission in Afghanistan he had participated in, already in progress when he took over. As pro-government troops on the ground destroyed 1,500lb of drugs, Ray had spotted, while sitting at his desk in Virginia, a group of armed men approaching the location: “They set up and started firing – AK-47s, RPGs, the whole works. Watching this live on a feed is pretty hairy. Luckily none of our guys got injured or killed or anything.”
An airstrike was then called in on the attackers: “The threat to our forces on the ground was too great. So the airstrike was conducted, it was a success, the insurgents were eliminated, and we provided BDA [Battle Damage Assessment] to determine the success of the strike.” Ray’s team continued to watch over the mission in preparation for a helicopter extraction. But then disaster struck.
“We pan back to the helicopter that was supposed to land and we see it in pieces on the ground,” Ray recalled. “It had crashed. It’s one thing to go through training and looking at virtual scenarios of helicopter crashes. But seeing it live from thousands of miles away knowing those are our guys on the ground injured, it’s an indescribable feeling.”
Despite being remote from the scene, analysts at DGS-1 then helped guide in medevac teams to rescue injured personnel on the ground. Weeks after the event, Airman Ray was still clearly affected by what he had seen.
Langley was just one of more than a dozen hubs that made up the Distributed Common Ground System, or DCGS, the inelegant name for the US air force’s intelligence network which provided real-time remote support to drones and manned aircraft. Most hubs were in the US, with other key sites found in Germany and South Korea. From 2011, Britain, too, had shared battlefield intelligence, through its own Crossbow facility at RAF Marham. The CIA and Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) each ran independent, far smaller teams of intelligence analysts whose job was to assess data coming in from their own Predator and Reaper missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia – and if necessary to assist in a targeted killing.
Indeed, so important to the war effort had these analysis networks become, that they were now classed as weapon systems in their own right. When an armed drone destroyed a target on the battlefield, it was in effect two weapon systems working in harmony – the drone itself, and the intelligence “tail” which sought to make sense of what was being observed. For Predator pilots like Bruce Black, this ability of analysts to pore over frontline intelligence in real time was the true revolution behind remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), since it “slows the battle down so much and provides so much more situational awareness for the guys that have to make the decision”.
With the air force needing thousands more analysts, there were challenges here, too, in training and retaining enough personnel. “The stress, particularly on the air force and army intelligence communities from 2001 until really now has been horrific,” said General Jim Poss, who retired as director of air force intelligence at the end of 2012. “Our nations produce only so many people who’ll join the military and are of high enough capability to work in intelligence. And we’re constantly running out of those folks.”
The addition of so many Predator and Reaper combat air patrols (CAPs) on top of other intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms meant that at its 2011 peak, the US-led coalition flew more than 38,000 individual intelligence-gathering missions over Afghanistan alone, with thousands more ISR operations that year in Iraq and Libya. The introduction of increasingly sophisticated intelligence-gathering pods onto drones – and the huge increase in data this entailed – increased the burden yet further on already stretched analysts.
Like many of those operating armed drones above Iraq and Afghanistan, mission controller Janet Atkins had seen her share of disturbing sights, even at a distance of 7,000 miles. On one mission over the city of Mosul in Iraq, Atkins and her 3rd Special Operations Squadron “line” had spotted a suspect running from a building during a raid. The man had slowed to a walk in a nearby street, oblivious to the unseen Predator now directing a coalition helicopter to his location. The mission’s “customer” (the particular unit that had requested the drone operation) – most probably Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Balad, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad – had concluded that the fleeing man was the high-value target it was seeking. The helicopter was ordered to kill him.
“He was running, we were staying eyes on, able to tell them where the guy was at, and he hid underneath a van, from my memory,” Atkins recalled. “Anyway the helicopter comes in and starts shooting at him. This guy, you can tell he got shot in the leg or something, but he just kept running, trying to run, and we’re following him obviously. He jumped into peoples’ yards, it was just like an episode of Cops. We’re chasing him down, we’re watching him. Then before we knew it they were shooting him down, and I just remember me and the pilot going like, ‘Ohhh!’ because we weren’t expecting it.”
Why no attempt was made to capture the alleged insurgent on this occasion was unclear – certainly that was JSOC’s stated preference in Iraq. One issue may have been the possible risk to ground forces. Atkins remembered watching on another occasion, as a canine member of a special forces team died: “During a raid, one of the suspects went out the back door and we were told to follow them. All of a sudden we see one of the Blue Forces K9s [dogs] going after them, and the man had a suicide bomb on and blew up with one of the dogs on him.” For the first time on the job, Atkins cried that day. “Part of me was like, the dog was on our side, our team, and I just couldn’t believe it happened. That was the first time that I ever saw one of our own die. And I think, too, just because it was a dog, it’s not like he knew what was happening. I know that it’s their job but it hit me. I was like, ‘Oh my God that could have been one of our guys!’”
Although Atkins never left the drone bases of Nevada and New Mexico while fighting her “war on terror”, she remotely logged more than 2,100 drone combat hours above Iraq and Afghanistan. Physically remote as operators and analysts were, there was no doubting their frontline role – or their emotional connection to the fighting: “People have a real misconception about what happens in the Predator world. It’s not like video games where we just get to shoot people and chase them down. Most of the time it was so boring. And it takes a lot, a whole lot of coordination and a whole lot of approval for a Predator to shoot,” said Atkins, who left the air force in 2011 to raise a family. “We’re not killing people for the fun of it. It would be the same if we were the guys on the ground. You have to get to [the enemy] somehow or all of you will die.”
With so much emphasis on the surveillance conducted by armed drones and the data they acquired, pilots and sensor operators often described being relegated to monotonous secondary roles. One recalled an incident where a Predator had been circling a house in Iraq for hours, waiting for something to happen. Suddenly the suspect emerged, jumped into his car and began to move off. Sitting in their darkened Ground Control Station the remote crew should have known the drill: follow the vehicle. Yet nothing happened. From her desk in the Operations Cell, mission controller Janet Atkins knew something was wrong:
“I see the vehicle leave and I’m, ‘Why isn’t the tracker ball moving? Hello sensor? The vehicle is moving?’ I said it the second the vehicle moved,” she said. “The imagery analyst is texting, ‘The vehicle has left! The vehicle has left!’ The customer is like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And I got on my headset and I’m screaming, ‘Sensor!’ I turn around, I’m talking to my senior mission coordinator and senior pilot. ‘Someone needs to go and wake them up! We’re losing our vehicle!’ Then finally the sensor operator wakes up, zooms out [on the camera] and the vehicle has gone. There’s no way to even find it. We searched and we searched but we lost it. Oh my God, was there the biggest deal ever.”
It’s hours and days of boredom punctuated by a few moments of stark terror
Both the pilot and operator had fallen asleep on the job. A US air force recruitment video from 2010 portrayed an action-packed world for drone crews as their Reapers hurtled over the modern battlefield, gathering intelligence and dealing death. The mundane reality was, according to former pilot Bruce Black, “hours and days of boredom punctuated by a few moments of stark terror”. With Predators cruising at speeds no greater than 100mph, long periods were often spent just getting to and from a location. Afghanistan, with its sparse landscape, was particularly challenging. Once on-target and particularly during pure ISR missions, the aircraft might spend many more hours slowly circling a single location. If the drone had a special intelligence-gathering pod onboard, operators might not even be allowed to use their own instruments.
“I knew a controller said he once went four months without touching the control stick [of the camera]. That’s not an exaggeration because I did similar. I got paid for that,” said Michael Haas, a sensor operator with both special forces and the regular air force.
Coping with the crushing boredom became a job in itself. A nap by at least one remote crew member was sometimes an option with Predators locked on autopilot, admitted former sensor operator Brandon Bryant. “Sometimes the pilot would be like, ‘I was up with my family all day, I’m tired.’ I’d be like: ‘Hey, just go ahead, take an hour nap or something and I’ll wake you if something happens.’”
Other former operators also described taking turns to grab sleep when they could. With their job of liaising with the outside world mission controllers had it tougher, sharing an open-plan room with the shift commander. One former napper said: “They [mission controllers] couldn’t fall asleep and so would often be our check. ‘Hey guys wake up, shift commander is coming out to your GCS!’ By the time they got to us we’d look busy.” At least with unmanned aircraft, only the Predators or Reapers themselves were at risk. One Nato airman described an incident in which the crew of a combat helicopter in Afghanistan fell asleep towards the end of a lengthy, high-stress mission. They were only woken when proximity alarms began ringing as the aircraft strayed towards nearby Pakistan’s airspace.
For those remote operators unable or unwilling to sleep, there were other possibilities for distraction or stimulation. Some describe taking reading material into work: “I would always have a book with me, if I was in the bathroom I’d sit down maybe for five minutes and read a page,” said one former airman. “Only if nothing was going on … I would never read if there was something going on.” Others whiled away the hours talking to comrades. Haas (who also spent hours learning to draw caricatures of fellow operators) recalled getting into a text conversation with a British mission controller.
“He explained to me what the hell was actually going on in the game of cricket,” Haas said. “He was sending me these really long explanations of wickets and bowling. That’s how bored you are! As an American, when are you even going to see a game of cricket happening? I didn’t care – it was something other than that mission, so it was interesting. It killed three hours, I can’t complain.”
Not everyone would indulge. A former operator described one pilot who refused to be drawn into casual conversation: “He would not let you have any off-mission conversation, not even, “How is your day?” He’d pick up that DASH-1, the big information operating manual for the Predator in the GCS, and he would start asking trivia questions about the plane, about the sensor ball – and do that for eight hours! Oh God.”
Most controversially, some operators have described how simple digital games were sometimes smuggled onto the operating systems at work. The software for Predators and Reapers was supposed to run on closed military systems – but at some point, it was realised that games created using Microsoft Excel could be imported.
“One of my friends, he was brilliant when it came to breaking the rules. He created battleship games, chess games that you could play with another crew,” one former airman said. “You’d pull them up on your headset and you’d be playing against one member of the other crew while the other would typically be the referee.” Another recalls playing pinball and solitaire during flying missions. But the fun ended in 2011, when it was discovered that the games had probably enabled a minor virus to be imported into the operating systems of the armed drones.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back … We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know,” an air force source told Wired. At the time, the magazine reported that “military network security specialists are unsure whether the keylogging was intentionally introduced into the system or if it is, in fact, from an outside attacker”. The US air force later put out a statement insisting that: “The malware in question is a credential stealer, not a keylogger, found routinely on computer networks and is considered more of a nuisance than an operational threat.” The operators themselves were most likely responsible for the security breach following the loading of games onto the system. “That was probably how the virus got in,” a former airman told me. “That virus was essentially a result of absolute boredom.”
When Brandon Bryant left the 3rd Special Operations Squadron in April 2011, he was told that over the preceding two years alone, his actions had helped contribute to the deaths of 1,626 enemy combatants. The numbers were startling if misleading. According to an AFSOC spokeswoman, such data “does not distinguish between the crew that actually fired the missile and all of the crews that supported the objective over its lifetime. It also does not distinguish between ground force actions on the objective that may have resulted in enemy killed in action.” Indeed, the reality for most drone operators working with special forces units was that missions directly leading to a kill were a rarity – at least until 2011, when Barack Obama ordered AFSOC to begin using its drone fleet to carry out targeted killings in Yemen and Somalia.
Major Chad Bruton was a pilot with 3rd Special Operations Squadron who never directly killed anyone in more than two years of special forces Predator operations: “We were there to gather intelligence so that we could capture bad guys. We were always after high-value targets, almost never fired a missile. I never fired one,” he said. Yet even as indirect participants, operators could still be deeply affected. Bruton is still troubled, some years after helping set up the killing of alleged Taliban fighters in Afghanistan by other aircraft.
“Even though I didn’t drop the bomb and I wasn’t lasering it at the time, I found them and I saw them blown apart by a 2,000lb bomb,” he said. “If you weren’t told any different you would think it was just five to a dozen guys sitting around a camp fire. You have to take it on faith that these guys were tracked to this point, that they know these guys are Taliban.”
Not knowing their combat status for sure still concerns Bruton: “It’s grim, that’s one of those recurring things that comes back to me every now and then. I don’t know if you call that PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] or not, but I certainly remember from time to time, for no apparent reason, seeing these guys,” he told me. “Maybe on one of them I saw a weapon, but there are lots of reasons to have a weapon. I know how fallible humans are. So if there is a judgment after this life, hopefully I will be exonerated.”
Others wondered if their own actions were in some ways reminiscent of those they were fighting. “The major way of fighting the war for our enemy is for them to use asymmetrical guerrilla tactics. There is a strange juxtaposition between that and the way you operate an RPA mission,” said former intelligence analyst Daniel Hale, comparing drones to roadside bombs, a common insurgent weapon. “You are monitoring somebody for a long time and you’re waiting for them to be in just the right spot and then you blow them up. The technology couldn’t be any more night-and-day different, but when it comes down to it they’re the same thing.”
I know it’s on a screen and that people say it’s a video game, but there’s no damn reset button
Some found it challenging to understand where their own moral responsibility might lie with this new form of warfare. Haas recalls guiding in an A-10 attack aircraft in Iraq: “That was my first real experience and it opened my eyes: this was real. I know it’s on a screen and people say it’s a video game, but there’s no damn reset button. You gotta get it right, just that once, or you’ve failed. It stuck with me for a bit. Did I kill them technically? Was I the one who did it? Or was I just assisting? I never knew quite how much guilt to feel about that. So for the next few weeks I just blocked it out of my mind.”
Other incidents proved more traumatic for personnel, often made worse by operators having to passively observe: “This is a memory that is absolutely burned in my brain because that was the first time that I had ever seen somebody on our side get gunned down,” former pilot Chad Bruton says of a special forces raid he was supporting. “They opened a door and there was a guy with an AK-47 on the other side, waiting for them to come through … he just mowed them down and I was watching right behind them. I mean my view was just a slight offset from directly behind, so I saw every bit of it. I saw the muzzle flash, saw the splatter and them fall down and that was bad. I was told later on that they evac’d back and were still alive so hopefully they made it. But I have no idea. That’s one other thing, you never get closure on any of that kind of stuff.”
The US air force rushed to expand its armed drone fleet following huge battlefield demand. Yet there was little understanding at first of the strains this would place on thousands of personnel fighting from the home front. A significant challenge had been understanding how this novel form of warfare was affecting – and sometimes damaging – its men and women.
In 2010, special rapporteur Philip Alston warned the UN general assembly that “because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield, and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio feed, there is a risk of developing a PlayStation mentality to killing”. My conversations with many former and current air force drone operators and intelligence analysts indicated a very different picture. “This suggestion that people become gung ho or blase and port their Call of Duty experience into the real world is frankly not tenable,” as Wing Commander Richard Mason of the Royal Air Force put it. “You would not want people who would, dare I say it, reduce the act of killing to a blip on a screen.”
The US’s armed drone squadrons were nevertheless keen to encourage a war-fighting mentality. “We would walk into work and look at the pictures of [Osama] bin Laden and all these leaders. And it would be ‘Which one of these motherfuckers is gonna die today?’ It’s easy to get wrapped up in that attitude, because that approach was really pushed in to you,” says Haas.
Personnel serving in Afghanistan were offered similar motivation at the Bagram command centre from which numerous JSOC missions were controlled: “Immediately behind the entrance was an unexplained flat-screen TV displaying a repeating slideshow of pictures from the twin towers attack and George Bush looking sombre in front of an American flag,” says former intelligence analyst Daniel Hale. “It always seemed oddly placed to me, but I suppose it was just a halfhearted attempt to remind everyone why they were there.”
All drone operators were asked early on in their training whether they would be willing and able to take a life. At least one captain who refused to kill on conscientious grounds was placed in a “paper-pushing office job” for the rest of his air force career, say former colleagues. Haas, who also carried out operational training of drone pilots, was disturbed by the attitude of some students: “They all wanted to shoot. “I wanna shoot, I wanna kill these guys!” I would say [to them] it’s more important to spare the innocent than to kill the guilty,” he said. “I would really try to push that home, I think I got through to one or two of them.” Bryant encountered similar views among some operators: “There was a lot of hoorahing, a lot of tough, ‘We’re badasses!’ I never once, never ever once thought any of us were badasses.”
Still Bryant, who never physically left the US until after he quit the air force, still found himself learning plenty about Iraqi life: “I remember watching a wedding and these people are all in a circle and they’re doing like the cancan: they’re kicking back and forth and they’re moving in one direction, and switch directions, and then they move further in the other direction. And I was fascinated because these were people enjoying themselves. Someone in that wedding was a bad person. But at that moment they probably weren’t thinking about someone they wanted to kill.”
Bryant likened some of his actions to those of a voyeur. “We’re the ultimate peeping toms,” he said. “No one’s gonna catch us. No one’s going to hear or see a Predator drone flying at the distance and height that we flew at.” Operators might later feel emotionally challenged if required to kill people they had spent time observing, but US air force clinical psychologist Wayne Chappelle describes this as a normal response: “I would think that’s a very healthy and normal reaction and a reaction that would indicate a well-adjusted person. If somebody doesn’t have that experience, if somebody doesn’t feel to some degree some level of discomfort, then what does that mean?”
For many remote operators and analysts there was a personal cost to their work – though it took the air force some time to understand this. “It was essentially taking on a task and trying to achieve certain objectives, but not having adequate manpower strength to achieve those objectives,” says Chappelle. “As a result, folks have to work longer hours and more rapid shifts. You can carry on something like that for a short period of time, but if you have to carry it on for several weeks to several months, eventually it’s going to wear you down. Because you’re not geographically separated from family or other sorts of social connections, there’s also often the expectation that you would continue to function and meet those demands and obligations in your personal life. And I think that then creates a bit of a double whammy.”
Of increasing concern to psychologists was whether traditional markers for measuring combat stress were the most reliable way to gauge wellbeing among remote operators and analysts. Research confirmed that many of the stresses experienced by personnel were being amplified by poor working environments – even more so perhaps than by remote combat itself. Personnel were given advice on how to manage their home lives, and even on the risk of over-caffeinating. Perhaps the biggest challenge was in ensuring operators and analysts had somebody to talk to.
Bryant, who was ultimately diagnosed with PTSD when he left the air force, says there were few options available to him as his stress levels mounted: “If you wanted to go talk to a therapist about it, [people] would say, ‘Well if you do, your security clearance is gonna be taken away.’ And that scared a lot of people, because security clearance is sacred. We could go see a chaplain but we can’t tell the chaplain anything that we’ve been doing. We can just tell him how we feel about things, like I feel bad about my job. The general response that we would get was, ‘It’s part of God’s plan.’ And then no one decided to ever go see the chaplain again, especially me.”
Similar levels of stress and PTSD indicators were found among intelligence analysts. “I may not have been on the ground in Afghanistan, but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end. I know the feeling you experience when you see someone die. Horrifying barely covers it,” former DGS-1 analyst Heather Linebaugh wrote in the Guardian. “When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience.”
Linebaugh also described how two friends and former colleagues committed suicide within a year of leaving the service. However, the Royal Air Force reported that its own medical personnel “have not detected any adverse psychological and physical trends for RAF pilots of RPAS”. Any variance might perhaps have been related to the all-volunteer nature of the British crews, or to an enhanced sense of camaraderie due to their posting abroad. However, the British Ministry of Defence has been unable to identify any primary research that supports its claim of lower stressors for UK crews.
By 2013, the US air force’s ISR Agency was trialling the full-time presence of psychologists on its operations floor: “The chaplain and the psychologist in this unit try to do preventative programmes,” a senior intelligence commander at one US base told me. “They’re very much into education, prevention and proactive outreach, so that they can minimise the chance of problems developing.” Airman Ray, the young enlisted analyst, confirmed that he and others did have access to a mental-health team if needed: “They are fully cleared so you can speak if you have anything mission-related that affects you, you can go up and speak freely.”
This is an edited extract from Sudden Justice by Chris Woods, published in April by C Hurst Publishers in the UK and Oxford University Press, NY, in North America.
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