Drones Are Here to Stay

Paul D. Shinkman

November 17, 2016

U.S. Drones Are Here to Stay

When the history of drone warfare is written, the otherwise unremarkable battle of Manbij that liberated a small city in northern Syria from the clutches of the Islamic State group this summer could end up with a chapter of its own.

Drones played an integral part of the fight for this key terrain roughly 20 miles from the Turkish border, representing a dramatic escalation of war planners’ reliance on the remote-controlled machines for intelligence gathering and killing.

Known in military circles as Remotely Piloted Aircraft or RPA, drones accounted for a third of the air missions during a month-long battle and conducted 663 airstrikes on ground targets, according to U.S. Central Command, the military headquarters that oversees conflicts in the Middle East. And some of their missions endured for 19 hours straight or more, with rotating shifts of pilots commanding the unmanned aircraft from the U.S. and elsewhere.

They remain hotly contested technology at the center of arguments by critics who say they make killing too easy. But their irrefutable contribution, rightly or wrongly, to defeating the Islamic State group serves as evidence for those who oversee them that there is no turning back on their use.

“All of those things make us uniquely capable in that kind of environment,” says Col. Case Cunningham, the commander of the Air Force’s 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, a drone unit based at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. “I feel really good about what our airmen are doing on the ground there because they’re saving lives from the folks that we’re in conflict with.”

The former F-16 and Air Force Thunderbirds pilot took over as commander of the unit in July 2015 and continues to fly drone missions himself from Creech on the MQ-9, more commonly known as the Reaper. His tenure comes at a time of unprecedented demand for the aircraft he commands – the percentage of missions in which Reapers fire their weapons has increased fivefold since 2011, he says. Now, roughly 15 percent of all the airstrikes in the war against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria are conducted by drones.

“That says a lot about what our commanders think,” Cunningham says.

These leaders, now in the midst of a political transition, are trying to find ways to get more drones into the skies, train more operators and prepare more analysts to process the information they produce.

“The RPA mission is instrumental to achieving decision advantage against our adversaries,” Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, head of the Air Force’s Air Combat Command, told a congressional panel earlier this year. “It is a powerful asset to our national decision-makers and our national security and is the backbone to the success of our current fights.”

In 2007, the Air Force was responsible for seven drone “combat air patrols,” or CAPs, what the military calls its flying missions. Now there are 65, Carlisle said.

“Our warfighters’ demand for persist attack and reconnaissance through the use of RPAs has skyrocketed,” he said.

Pentagon leaders considered Manbij one of the most critical and difficult liberation efforts in the lead-up to its current campaigns to free the terrorist network’s key havens of Raqqa and Mosul. It had been a transit hub for Islamic State group fighters and supplies flowing into Syria and Iraq until it was freed in August.

It posed particularly difficult problems for the airpower overhead supporting a coalition of local fighters on the ground, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. Its dense urban terrain, littered with Islamic State group fighting positions and tunnel networks, combined with a large civilian population forced to remain as human shields, made it particularly difficult for aircraft overhead to determine their targets and then strike them without incurring civilian casualties.

Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of the war against the Islamic State group, described Manbij after its liberation as “a very difficult fight, a very concentrated urban fight, where there were extensive use of [improvised explosive devices], there were use of tunnels, we were fighting inside buildings.”

Pilots for manned planes with experience over Iraq and Syria privately say this kind of dense, bloody, confusing urban warfare demonstrates an evolution in the kind of results the Air Force can now achieve. They’ve learned how to, for example, maneuver into a position from which they can strike insurgents flanked by civilians in narrow alleyways and with friendly forces nearby, all without colliding with the myriad other planes in the air or accidentally striking the wrong target.

They aren’t always completely successful. A review the Pentagon released last week of claims of civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria over the last year confirmed two instances in Manbij, one on July 31 and one on Aug. 20. On both occasions, a noncombatant entered the target area after the coalition aircraft had fired its weapon, the investigators say. They would not say what kind of aircraft conducted those strikes.

The true number may be much higher, as the Defense Department rarely releases details on specific strikes and who they were trying to target. British watchdog group AirWars.org estimates reports of civilian casualties at 23 for August alone.

Reports of civilian casualties have generally dogged the U.S. decision to use drones, particularly a broadly covered 2014 incident in which a U.S. drone over Yemen killed 12 people after targeting what turned out to be a wedding. The general criticism is compounded by the perception that the absence of risk to American pilots makes the decision to kill easier. 

Intelligence analysts and drone pilots reveal the intense pressures of conducting a war from the air. 

“I don’t for a second suggest that we don’t care about civilian casualties. We do. But our capacity to determine when there are is, I would say, pretty limited,” says Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Syria under Bill Clinton, to Pakistan and Iraq under George W. Bush and later Barack Obama, and until 2012 as the ambassador to Afghanistan – all central hubs of U.S. campaigns against extremist groups that rely heavily on drone use.

Crocker has observed firsthand the effect of war campaigns that focus on remotely targeting terrorist leaders, which in his estimation has done little to reduce the ability of al-Qaida or the Islamic State group to regenerate their operations.

“What we have done in the tribal areas [of Pakistan] and now in Syria is we have turned a weapons system – drones – into a strategy, or made it a way of moving forward in the absence of a strategy,” he says. “We’ll just go whack these guys and we don’t need to think about what strategic effect it is or isn’t. We can say we did it, we got one, and we look effective.

"It’s the hallmark of this administration. They really don’t want to have a strategy because that would mean more of a commitment than what they want to make.”

To Cunningham, drones have provided war planners with a degree of clarity and access that didn’t exist before.

He feels more “in combat” flying a drone than the previous two manned jets he piloted, in large part because in his current role he can remain hovering over the target for significantly longer durations than a manned alternative that must refuel more frequently, offering a greater familiarity with the battle-space below. Drone pilots also have more resources and access to information than their counterparts in manned planes, he says, because they aren’t constrained by the physical confines of a cockpit.

His aircraft have also carved out a unique niche in operations where multiple planes are involved. Last year, they conducted 500 “buddy lazes” – when one aircraft marks a target with a laser for another aircraft or ground unit to strike.

Cunningham uses the statistic to explain how his pilots are still contributing to these conflicts even though they aren’t at risk of being shot down themselves.

“We’re providing effects. It doesn’t matter where you’re sitting when you provide that effect. It matters the effect you’re providing,” he says, adding that drones can support operations in airspace that might be off limits to manned aircraft because a rescue team couldn’t respond in time if a pilot were shot down.

Increased reliance on remotely piloted aircraft has furthered their technology, bolstering their ability also to remain over a particular location for much longer than a manned aircraft. Analysts processing this intelligence can know more about a person, or a target, than they could before.

“It’s a complex battlespace,” Cunningham says. “It becomes incredibly challenging and incredibly difficult.”

“There is no one more capable of breaking out that complexity than the coalition that is currently fighting ISIS,” he adds. “We’re a big part of that.”