Paul D. Shinkman
May 14, 2015
It’s easy to pick on drone pilots. The public narrative portrays them as washed-up flyboys who weren’t good enough to remain in fighter jets and instead had to settle for delivering death and destruction from a remote base safely ensconced in the U.S.
The stereotype figures prominently in “Good Kill,” a film scheduled for release this month that explores the moral and ethical questions the futuristic technology brings to the battlefield and the emotional toll it takes on these remote warriors. But beyond Hollywood screenwriting and other cliched portrayals that inevitably make war veterans cringe, some elements of pop culture accurately highlight a troubling trend toward stress and overwork within the U.S. military’s drone fleet.
New data the Air Force plans to release later this month show the results of its efforts to improve the mental health of drone pilots have stalled since 2012, the last time the service surveyed its drone teams. Those numbers had improved in 2012 from 2010, when the first survey of its kind showed high rates of drone pilots feeling overworked and expressing some concerns about the nature of the operations they conducted.
The ever increasing strain on these operators, and their families, represents a true concern among those who study the mental health of “virtual warriors.”
“I would hope we would have seen a little bit more of a downward trend,” says Wayne Chappelle, an adviser to the Air Force Office of the Surgeon General and clinical psychologist in the Neuropsychiatry Branch of the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. He conducted interviews with these airmen as a part of his research for the new data. “That is perhaps an unrealistic expectation.”
But the true sources of burnout don’t entirely align with the public’s perception.
Multiple current and former drone pilots who spoke with U.S. News say their concerns have comparably little to do with the ethics of dropping missiles on a Taliban operative in Afghanistan or an al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen at the direction of the CIA – all from the comfort of an air-conditioned unit in the U.S.
Fewer than 10 percent experienced any form of cynicism about their jobs, Chappelle says. This is one of the factors he studied, along with mental exhaustion and whether the airmen feel they have a low level of professional efficiency.
And that cynicism, down from as much as 17 percent in 2010, is focused more on the likelihood the Air Force will be able to train enough people to alleviate the grueling tempo of their work. The current demands have airmen saying that one or more days a week after finishing a shift they go home and don’t have enough mental reserves to address other issues in their lives, such as mortgage payments or their children’s weekend softball game.
“It’s not about the contribution of their work,” says Chappelle. “It was more about, ‘Are we going to see a relief in our manpower? Are we going to be able to achieve a state where we’re adequately resourced to be able to accomplish the tasks and mission that we have?’”
“Drone” has become a common part of the modern lexicon, representing both fears at home that the U.S. has become too comfortable with killing, as well as a touchstone of modern wars that saves American lives and provides unprecedented access to observing and attacking the nation’s enemies. Meanwhile, war planners have a growing need for the sophisticated access with minimal risk provided by “unmanned aerial vehicles,” or, more recently to quell public scrutiny, “remotely piloted aircraft.”
The film “Good Kill,” starring Ethan Hawke and January Jones, is set in 2010 and supposedly based on “true events.” It documents the unraveling of a former F-16 combat pilot who answered a call from his command to return home after three overseas tours and take up a job that allows him to spend time with his family – a common trajectory for drone pilots at the time. Now he sits in a box in the Nevada desert leading a team of young, idealistic up-and-comers that flies drones over faraway and hostile territory. They often strike enemy targets, occasionally off-record at the behest of a sinister voice on the other end of a conference phone line, who masks his identity by asking to be referred to only as “Langley.”
Each day, the central character must be jarred from 12-hour shifts virtually flying over a combat environment to return to his suburban American life outside Las Vegas with a wife and children.
“I blew away six Taliban earlier today, now I’m going home to barbecue,” Hawke’s character tells a stunned liquor store clerk, who will likely never again engage in idle chit-chat with the flight suit-clad patron who regularly buys fifths of Smirnoff.
“I feel like a coward, taking pot shots half a world away sitting in a box,” the pilot later laments to no one in particular. “The most dangerous thing I do is drive home on the freeway.”
Shortly after, he gets pulled over for drunk driving.
As plausibly dramatic as the movie makes the life of a modern drone pilot, ruefully deploying Hellfire missiles against foreign targets, the Air Force says the cause of the main character’s strain is misleading.
“Based upon all the interviews I’ve done … I have not seen that at all,” says Chappelle, who through his clinical capacity serves as the chief consultant to the heads of the Air Force’s major commands. “Actually what I have seen is when folks are able to provide support in a fashion like that, there’s a sense of protecting lives – being able to do what it takes to be able to ensure you’re advancing the protection of your own troops, or the safety of others.”
The service has attempted to make major improvements in the lives of drone operators in the last five years. Some are simple, such as new shift policies introduced in an attempt to give RPA crews more predictability on when they will be working. More significant was a recommendation implemented in 2011 to grant clearances to military psychologists and technical specialists, and embed them directly within the drone units. No longer do drone pilots have to determine they need help and travel to the psychiatric unit on base. In fact, any crews that employ weapons on a mission must meet with these professionals afterward.
The Air Force is still in the process of placing psychologists and specialists within all drone units.
The transition so far has accounted for a drop in “chronic distress” from 21 percent in 2010 down to 9 percent in 2012. The rates of PTSD also dropped from 10 percent down to 5 percent in 2012, even though the criteria for diagnosis has expanded; “Persistent negative mood and cognition” has also been added to the list of symptoms that could lead to a specialist confirming an airman has PTSD, along with the previously listed side effects such as avoidance, “re-experiencing” symptoms like nightmares, and “hypervigilance” like increased arousal and startling responses.
These numbers, however, have all largely remained unchanged since 2012.
Leaders in the Air Force are worried they won’t have a good answer for drone operators who question whether they can sustain the stressors of their jobs. The service’s goals are to produce 300 RPA crewmen each year. Right now, they can only train and prepare 180. They’re too busy doing other things.
Since 2008 at least, demand for drone missions has always been higher than the Air Force’s staffing levels would normally allow. That means these airmen are overworked, veteran operators are too busy with active missions to train their replacements, few if any can break free for other military training or career development to prepare for their professional futures and, of course, they rarely have time to interact with their families.
“‘Health’ doesn’t just mean being able to fly the missions every day,” said Gen. Mark Welsh, the Air Force’s top officer, to a group of reporters in early April. “That’s the strain that’s been on this particular career field.”
The Air Force has never “caught the requirements rabbit,” he says.
The service tried to make up for shortfalls early on in the drone program by ordering Air Force fighter and bomber pilots to switch career fields and take up a virtual joystick and throttle instead. The “Transformational Aircrew Management Initiatives for the 21st Century,” or “TAMI-21,” mandated that pilots with fewer hours would be reassigned to help fill some of the empty slots for a force that today requires 1,200 active duty airmen.
“That kind of rubbed some folks the wrong way,” says Maj. Lewis Pine, who joined the Air Force in 2001 to fly B-1 bombers, before he was switched over to pilot MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, from 2006 to 2013. “The fighter pilots who signed up to join the Air Force, that was the first stark realization that this is a volunteer force you signed up for, but ultimately the needs of the Air Force are going to dictate what you do.”
Some pilots have embraced their new positions, he says. Others, perhaps “the Ethan Hawkes out there, have taken a different path with it.”
Another solution has been the Undergraduate RPA Training, or URT pipeline for prospective airmen to go straight into training to become a pilot for drones only. They undergo the same psychological screening as pilots for manned aircraft, and complete basic flight training in a small plane like a Cessna to get a feel for the elements, standards and regulations of flight. They forgo, however, the more advanced training their fighter and bomber colleagues must complete to actually operate over a combat zone.
The drone pilot cadre is now comprised of roughly 30 percent of URT applicants, and 70 percent of those who went through traditional pilot training and were reassigned. The Air Force ultimately hopes this ratio will shift to 90 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
Pilots like Pine have found great satisfaction in their work. He has greater access than fighter or bomber pilots to immediate intelligence, is speaking with friendly forces on the ground, and accessing peripheral computer systems that force him to develop an advanced picture of the battlefield, then operate within it. Unlike a fighter or a bomber, he and his team could loiter over a target, technically, indefinitely – drones get better gas mileage, and the same team is able to transition to a replacement drone while the first returns to base for more fuel or repairs.
“A lot of our folks are more involved in operations than some of the folks flying around in manned assets because we are in such high demand,” says Pine, now stationed at the Air Force’s Air Combat Command at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia.
His pilots equate success with being able to protect forces on the ground, and get instant gratification from what the military calls “going kinetic,” or launching missiles.
“That’s something that registers,” he says. “‘Hey, I just saved guys on the ground today because I was able to put one of my missiles into a group of bad guys that were shooting at them.’ There is definitely job satisfaction and reward with our guys knowing they saved some American lives today, some coalition lives.”
The demands on drone crews, however, remain incessant. Their normal schedules now require six days on, two days off, working at least a 12-hour day, many with an hour commute each way at remote bases like Creech, one of many drone operations’ hubs. The Air Force tries to keep pilots from having to fly more than six hours at a time, though that can be extended if the mission requires it.
On nine separate occasions over the last eight years, the military has had to adapt to the demands of conflict zones abroad and shift into a so-called surge posture, requiring drone pilots to operate seven days on, one day off.
“This has never stopped. Because we’ve been short,” said Welsh. “The deep breath has never come. The requirement just keeps going up.”
And it presents a harsh reality for the Air Force this summer, when many of the most senior RPA pilot officers who Welsh considers pioneers in the fledgling industry are reaching the end of their six-year commitments. Despite general enthusiasm for the work they’re doing, an inability to fix these problems could, as the general warns, “break the force.”
“It just really reinforces the notion that we’ve got more room to go,” says Chappelle. “We’ve got additional work ahead of us.“
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