Intro by Tom:
Since November 2002, when a CIA drone strike destroyed the
SUV of “al-Qaeda's chief operative in Yemen,” Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi (“
U.S. kills al-Qaeda suspects in Yemen”), it’s been almost 13 years of unending repeat headlines. Here are a few recent ones: “
U.S. drone strike kills a senior Islamic State militant in Syria,” “
Drone kills ISIL operative linked to Benghazi,” “
Drone kills four Qaeda suspects in Yemen,” “
U.S. drone strike kills Yemen al-Qaida leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi,” “
U.S. drone strikes target Islamic State fighters along Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”
Those last strikes in Eastern Afghanistan reportedly killed 49
“militants.” (Sometimes they are called “terror suspects.”) And
there’s no question that, from Somalia to Pakistan, Libya to Syria,
Yemen to Iraq, various al-Qaeda or Islamic State leaders and
“lieutenants” have bitten the dust along with significant numbers of
terror grunts and
hundreds of the
collaterally damaged, including women and children.
These repetitive headlines should signal the kind of victory that
Washington would celebrate for years to come. A muscular American
technology is knocking off the enemy in significant numbers without a
single casualty to us. Think of it as a real-life version of Arnold
Schwarzenegger's heroic machine in certain of the
Terminator
movies. If the programs that have launched hundreds of drone strikes in
the backlands of the planet over these years remain “covert,” they have
nonetheless been a point of pride for a White House that regularly
uses a "
kill list" to
send robot assassins into the field. From Washington's point of view, its drone wars remain, as a former CIA director once
bragged, “the only game in town” when it comes to al-Qaeda (and its affiliates, wannabes, and competitors).
As it happens, almost 13 years later, there are just one or two
little problems with this scenario of American techno-wizardry pummeling
terrorism into the dust of history. One is that, despite the many
individuals bumped off, the dust cloud of terrorism keeps on
growing. Across much of the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, the drone assassination program continues to act like a
recruitment poster
for a bevy of terror outfits. In every country (with the possible
exception of Somalia) where U.S. drone strikes have been repeatedly
employed, the situation is far worse today than in 2001. In the two
countries where it all began, Afghanistan and Yemen, it’s significantly
-- in the case of Yemen, infinitely -- worse.
Even the idea of war without casualties (for us, that is) hasn’t quite panned out as planned, not if, as
TomDispatch regular
Pratap Chatterjee reports today, you count the spread of post-traumatic
stress disorder among the drone operators. In fact, given how humdrum
headlines about the droning of terror leaders have become in our
world, and the visible
futility and failure
that goes with them, you might think that someone in Washington would
reconsider the efficacy of drones -- of, that is, an assassination
machine that has proven anything but a victory weapon. In any world but
ours, it might even seem logical to ground our terminators for a while
and reconsider their use. In Washington, there's not a chance in hell
of that, not unless, as Chatterjee suggests, both resistance and
casualties in the drone program grow to such a degree that a grounding
comes from the bottom, not the top. It turns out that -- remember your
Terminator films here -- if a future
John Connor is to stop Washington’s robotic killing operations, he or she is likely to be found within the drone program itself.
Tom
Killing by Committee in the Global Wild West
The Perpetrators Become the Victims of Drone Warfare
The myth of the lone drone warrior is now well
established and threatens to become as enduring as that of the lone
lawman with a white horse and a silver bullet who rode out into the
Wild West to find the bad guys. In a similar fashion, the unsung hero
of Washington’s modern War on Terror in the wild backlands of the
planet is sometimes
portrayed as a mysterious Central Intelligence Agency
officer.
Via modern technology, he prowls Central Asian or Middle Eastern skies
with his unmanned Predator drone, dispatching carefully placed
Hellfire missiles to kill top al-Qaeda terrorists in their remote
hideouts.
So much for the myth. In reality, there’s nothing “lone” about drone
warfare. Think of the structure for carrying out Washington’s drone
killing program as a multidimensional pyramid populated with hundreds of
personnel and so complex that just about no one involved really grasps
the full picture.
Cian Westmoreland,
a U.S. Air Force veteran who helped set up the drone data
communications system over southeastern Afghanistan back in 2009, puts
the matter
bluntly:
“There are so many people in the chain of actions that it has become
increasingly difficult to understand the true impact of what we do. The
diffusion of responsibility distances people from the moral weight of
their decisions.”
In addition, it’s a program under pressure, killing continually, and
losing its own personnel at a startling and possibly
unsustainable rate
due to “wounds” that no one ever imagined as part of this war. There
are, in fact, two groups feeling the greatest impact from Washington’s
ongoing air campaigns: lowly drone intelligence “analysts,” often fresh
out of high school, and women and children living in poverty on the
other side of the world.
A Hyper-Manned Killing Machine
Here, then, as best it can be understood, is how the
Air Force version of unmanned aerial warfare really works -- and keep
in mind that the CIA’s drone war operations are deeply integrated into
this system.
The heart of drone war operations does indeed consist of a single
pilot and a sensor (camera) operator, typically seated next to each
other thousands of miles from the action at an Air Force base like
Creech in Nevada or
Cannon
in New Mexico. There, they operate Predator or Reaper drones over
countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, or Yemen.
Either of them might have control over the onboard Hellfire missiles,
but it would be wrong to assume that they are the modern day equivalent
of the Lone Ranger and his sidekick, Tonto.
In fact a typical “combat air patrol” may have as many as
186 individuals
working on it. To begin with, while the pilot and the sensor operator
make up the central “mission-control element,” they need a
“launch-and-recovery element” on the other side of the world to
physically deploy the drones and bring them back to bases in
Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. As with so much that the U.S.
military now does, this work is
contracted out to companies like Raytheon of Massachusetts.
And don’t forget another key group: the imagery and intelligence
analysts who watch the video footage the drones are beaming from their
potential target areas. They are typically at other bases in the U.S.
Each member of the flight crew has an Air Force designation that specifies his or her task. The pilots are known as
18Xs, the sensor operators are
1Us, and the imagery analysts are
1N1s. The launch and recovery personnel are often former drone pilots who have quit the Air Force because they can make
twice as much money working overseas for private contractors.
In charge of the flight operators are a flight operations supervisor
and a mission intelligence coordinator who report to a joint force air
and space component commander. In addition, there are
“safety” observers and
judge advocates
(military-speak for lawyers) who are supposed to ensure that any
decision to launch a missile is made in accordance with officially
issued “rules of engagement” and so results in a minimum number of
civilian deaths. They are often situated at the
Combined Air and Space Operations Center at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
But Predators and Reapers don’t fly solo. They typically roam in packs of four aircraft known as
“combat air patrols.” Three of them are expected to be in the air at any given time, leaving one on the ground for refueling and maintenance. A
fully staffed patrol
should have 59 individuals in the field doing launch and recovery, 45
doing mission control, and 82 working on the data gathered.
Bear in mind that the Air Force is currently staffing
65
such combat air patrols around the clock, and the Central Intelligence
Agency may well be operating quite a few more. (It is possible that the
two fly all missions jointly, but we have no way of knowing if this is
so.) In other words, toss away the idea of the lone drone pilot and try
to take in the vast size and complexity (as well as the pressures) of
drone warfare today.
This, by the way, is why Air Force officials hate the popular
industry term for drone aircraft: “unmanned aerial vehicle.” The
military notes correctly that drones are in every meaningful sense
manned. If anything, of course, they are
hyper-manned, when compared to, say, a traditional F-16 fighter jet. (In fact, the preferred military term is “
remotely piloted aircraft.”)
How PTSD Hits the Drone Program
In covering Washington’s drone wars, the media has tended to zero in on the top of the kill chain: President Obama, who every
Tuesday
reviews a “kill list” of individuals to be taken out by drone strikes;
the CIA general counsel who has to sign off on each decision (
John Rizzo did this, for example); and
Michael D’Andrea, the CIA staffer who oversaw the list of those to be killed until he was replaced by
Chris Wood last year.
In reality, these decision-makers at the top of the drone pyramid see
next to nothing of what happens on the ground. The people who
understand just how drone war actually works are the lowly 1N1 imagery
analysts. While the pilots are jockeying to keep their planes stable in
air currents that they cannot physically feel and sensor operators are
manipulating cameras to follow multiple individuals moving around on the
ground, the full picture is only obvious to the imagery and
intelligence analysts. They are steadily reviewing both real time and
past drone footage and comparing surveillance data to see if they can
spot potential terrorists.
Many of them are in their teens or slightly older with perhaps a year
of formal military training. They are outranked by drone pilots,
officers with degrees and years of training at the Air Force Academy,
who will typically pull the trigger on a Hellfire missile.
Add to this picture one more fact: the Air Force is desperately short of people to do such work and
losing
them faster than it can train new recruits. As a result, Washington’s
drone wars are operating at perhaps two-thirds of what the Air Force
would consider ideal staffing levels. This means that drone personnel
are now expected to work double- and triple-duty shifts. As one drone
commander
explained
to an Air Force historian: “Your work schedule was 12-hour shifts, six
days a week. You were supposed to get three days off after that, but
people often got only one day off. You couldn’t even take your 30 days
of annual leave -- you were lucky to get 10. When you have mainly a
non-vol[unteer] community, what do you expect? It’s not going to be a
happy place.”
These overworked, under-trained, underpaid, very young drone
personnel are now starting to experience psychological trauma from
exposure to endless killing missions. They are the ones who see and have
to live with the grim scenes of what is so bloodlessly called
“collateral damage.”
“They are often involved in operations where they witness and make
decisions that lead to the destruction of enemy combatants and assets,”
Dr. Wayne Chappelle, an Air Force psychologist,
wrote in the August 2013 issue of
Military Medicine.
“They can still become attached to people they track, experience grief
from the loss of allied members on the ground, and experience
grief/remorse when missions create collateral damage or cause
fratricide. It is possible there are drone operators who perceive the
deployment of weapons and exposure to live video feed of combat as
highly stressful events.”
Chappelle’s studies have already shown an increased level of
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among these personnel. He is now
working on new studies aimed at focusing on exactly which of them are
most affected, at what point in the decision-making, and why. The Air
Force hopes that Chappelle can help them reduce the incidence of PTSD --
from which they are losing personnel -- by offering advice on just how
psychologists and chaplains working alongside drone operators might
counsel them on their ongoing traumatic experiences. Otherwise it faces
the problem of staffing its missions, fulfilling a growing demand for
ever more drone strikes in ever more countries, and a new phenomenon as
well: growing criticism and resistance to its killing machine from
within.
Cian Westmoreland, who was not even involved in active targeting
work, is nonetheless typical. He says that he is experiencing
nightmares about the 200 or so “kills” that he was credited as having
supported. As he
wrote
recently, “I started having dreams about bombs. I once dreamt I saw a
small girl crying over a body on the ground. I looked down and it was a
woman. I looked at the girl and told her I was sorry. I looked at my
hands and I was wearing my [battle dress uniform]. They were covered in
her mother’s blood."
Westmoreland's nightmares pushed him to speak out -- and he is just
one of a growing number of Air Force veterans who have chosen to do so.
An imagery analyst I recemtly interviewed told me that junior personnel
were deeply affected when they saw civilians, including women and
children, in the line of fire.
“If the pilot really wants to, they can ignore us and push the button
without us agreeing,” the analyst added. “We are often completely
helpless because airmen are terrified of officers. It is an unbalanced
chain of command.”
What’s striking is the whistleblowers coming forward are not pilots
and officers but the lowest ranked personnel in the drone teams.
PTSD in the Global Wild West
The trauma of desktop warfare comes mostly from the
voyeurism of watching death thousands of miles distant and can, in some
cases, be tuned out and eventually turned off. The same cannot be said
for the experiences of targeted communities.
Washington experts regularly claim that the surgical elimination of
top al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and Yemen has reduced terror in these
communities, but actual studies on the ground suggest that the very
opposite is true.
Last month, Alkarama (the name means “dignity”) -- a Geneva based
human rights organization that specializes in the Arab world --
published “
Traumatizing Skies,”
a special report on the impact of drones in Yemen. One hundred
participants were interviewed from the villages of Qawl and al-Sirin
between July and September last year and evaluated using the same
American Psychiatric Association standards for PTSD that Chappelle’s
team used on drone analysts.
“An overwhelming majority of adult respondents are seen to be
suffering from numerous drone-inflicted symptoms of PTSD, which are even
more prevalent amongst children,” writes Radidja Nemar, Alkarama's
regional legal officer for the Gulf countries. “The situation has
transcended the question about whether or not an individual has lost a
family member to a drone attack, simply because trauma has become
pervasive in a society living constantly under the fear of drones.”
Their situation differs from that of the pilots or analysts who can
and do quit their jobs when they begin to suffer. The victims have no
such options. They can’t escape the drones regularly buzzing overhead.
“The common denominator in most of the cases is the feeling that life
has no value and that death could happen at any moment and without
apparent reason,” wrote one of the Yemeni survey researchers. “This
shared feeling hinders most everyday activities in the villages and
results in constant anxiety and fear. The deterioration of the living
conditions in general, as added to the lack of healthcare services and
the mental suffering of the populations, are aggravating their general
feeling of hopelessness, frustration, and anxiety.”
The most distressed respondents were women, partly because they felt
the drones violated their modesty. Girls reported the highest percentage
of sleeplessness and nightmares. Not least was the impact on women’s
daily lives, already far more restricted than those of men. Atiqa, a
55-year-old mother of three, for instance, explained that her blood
pressure problems had become more severe, forcing her to stay in bed for
several days at a time. Fatima, a 40-year-old mother of five, reported
that women like her were unable to enjoy the few opportunities where
they could meet other women, like
weddings, for fear that such gatherings would act like drone magnets.
Similar reports have emerged from Pakistan, says Dr. Mukhtar-ul-Haq,
the head of the psychiatry department at Peshawar’s Lady Reading
Hospital. He has studied the impact of the drone war on Waziristan, a
tribal borderland near Afghanistan. “The vast majority of people report
being perpetually scared of drone attacks day and night,” Dr. Haq
said
in a video conference call held by Alkarama to mark the release of its
Yemen report. “The constant noise makes them experience bouts of
emotional trauma and symptoms of anxiety. They often manifest themselves
in the form of physical illness, heart attacks, and even suicide.”
Joining the Alkarama conference call was Brandon Bryant, a former Air
Force sensor operator, who has experienced PTSD, thanks to his work
with drones. He has become one of the most outspoken critics of
Washington’s killing program. “The leadership only looks at this program
as a numbers-based thing… how many people were killed,”
says
Bryant whose unit took part in 2,300 kills. He estimates that he
personally killed 13 people with Hellfire missiles. “They don’t care
about the human beings doing the job or the human beings affected by the
job.”
Although they never served together, Bryant and Westmoreland recently discovered each other’s work at a screening of the film
Drone
by Norwegian filmmaker Tonje Schei. The two Air Force veterans have now
joined forces to seek justice for affected communities. They have set
up an online organization of national security whistleblowers and their
supporters, giving it the symbolically bloody name of
Project Red Hand. Through it they are calling for others from the drone program to join them in speaking out.
“Many of us are people who looked down one day to see our hands painted red,” they write in the organization’s
mission
statement. “To those [to] whom we direct our words, we are not your
adversaries. We are only a mirror. Through our crimson hands we only
seek to show you your reflection. We believe that truth deserves its own
narrative. We hope that people like you will also stand up and join us
in our efforts. We are also living proof that there is life after this,
and if you trust us, we will show you a better world.”
In bucking the military system and Washington’s cherished drone war
program, perhaps Bryant and Westmoreland are themselves the ones who are
taking on the classic Wild West roles of the Lone Ranger and Tonto.
They have ridden into the badlands of the national security state to
challenge the injustice of an outlaw system of killing that extends
across significant parts of the planet. In the face of such an
implacable program, one can only hope that they will find their silver
bullets.
Pratap Chatterjee, a TomDispatch regular, is executive director of CorpWatch. He is the author of Halliburton's Army: How A Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War.
His next book, Verax,
a graphic novel about whistleblowers and mass surveillance co-authored
by Khalil Bendib, will be published by Metropolitan Books in 2016.
Follow
TomDispatch on Twitter and join him on
Facebook.
Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s
Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book,
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Pratap Chatterjee
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