A New Form of War May Be Producing a New Form of Mental Disturbance
By Pratap Chatterjee
from TomDispatch.com March 5, 2015
The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East
and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or
the target list for that war or the right to wage it just about
anywhere on the planet are in question in Washington. Something far more
basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.
There are roughly 1,000 such drone pilots, known in the trade as
“18Xs,” working for the U.S. Air Force today. Another 180 pilots
graduate annually from a training program
that takes about a year to complete at Holloman and Randolph Air Force
bases in, respectively, New Mexico and Texas. As it happens, in those
same 12 months, about 240 trained pilots quit
and the Air Force is at a loss to explain the phenomenon. (The
better-known U.S. Central Intelligence Agency drone assassination
program is also flown by Air Force pilots loaned out for the covert missions.)
On January 4, 2015, the Daily Beast revealed an undated internal memo
to Air Force Chief of Staff General Mark Welsh from General Herbert
“Hawk” Carlisle stating that pilot “outflow increases will damage the
readiness and combat capability of the MQ-1/9 [Predator and Reaper]
enterprise for years to come” and added that he was “extremely
concerned.” Eleven days later, the issue got top billing at a special
high-level briefing on the state of the Air Force. Secretary of the Air
Force Deborah Lee James joined Welsh to address the matter. “This is a
force that is under significant stress -- significant stress from what
is an unrelenting pace of operations,” she told the media.
In theory, drone pilots have a cushy life. Unlike soldiers on duty in
“war zones,” they can continue to live with their families here in the
United States. No muddy foxholes or sandstorm-swept desert barracks
under threat of enemy attack for them. Instead, these new
techno-warriors commute to work
like any office employees and sit in front of computer screens wielding
joysticks, playing what most people would consider a glorified video
game.
They typically “fly” missions over Afghanistan and Iraq where they
are tasked with collecting photos and video feeds, as well as watching
over U.S. soldiers on the ground. A select few are deputized to fly CIA
assassination missions over Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen where they are
ordered to kill “high value targets” from the sky. In recent months,
some of these pilots have also taken part in the new war in the Syrian
and Iraqi borderlands, conducting deadly strikes on militants of ISIL.
Each of these combat air patrols
involves three to four drones, usually Hellfire-missile-armed Predators
and Reapers built by southern California’s General Atomics, and each
takes as many as 180 staff members
to fly them. In addition to pilots, there are camera operators,
intelligence and communications experts, and maintenance workers. (The
newer Global Hawk surveillance patrols need as many as 400 support
staff.)
The Air Force is currently under orders to staff 65 of these regular
“combat air patrols” around the clock as well as to support a Global
Response Force on call for emergency military and humanitarian missions.
For all of this, there should ideally be 1,700 trained pilots. Instead,
facing an accelerating dropout rate that recently drove this figure
below 1,000, the Air Force has had to press regular cargo and jet pilots
as well as reservists into becoming instant drone pilots in order to
keep up with the Pentagon’s enormous appetite for real-time video feeds
from around the world.
The Air Force explains the departure of these drone pilots in the
simplest of terms. They are leaving because they are overworked. The
pilots themselves say that it’s humiliating to be scorned by their Air
Force colleagues as second-class citizens. Some have also come forward
to claim that the horrors of war, seen up close on video screens, day
in, day out, are inducing an unprecedented, long-distance version of
post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).
But is it possible that a brand-new form of war -- by remote control
-- is also spawning a brand-new, as yet unlabeled, form of psychological
strain? Some have called drone war a “coward's war” (an opinion that, according to reports
from among the drone-traumatized in places like Yemen and Pakistan, is
seconded by its victims). Could it be that the feeling is even shared by
drone pilots themselves, that a sense of dishonor in fighting from
behind a screen thousands of miles from harm’s way is having an
unexpected impact of a kind psychologists have never before witnessed?
Killing Up Close and Personal From Afar
There can be no question that drone pilots resent
the way other Air Force pilots see them as second-class citizens. "It's
tough working night shifts watching your buddies do great things in the
field while you're turning circles in the sky," a drone instructor
named Ryan told Mother Jones magazine. His colleagues, he says, call themselves the “lost generation.”
“Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it
are a joke, that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo
warriors,” Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at
Nellis Air Force Base, told Democracy Now.
Certainly, there is nothing second-class about the work tempo of
drone life. Pilots log 900-1,800 hours a year compared to a maximum of
300 hours annually for regular Air Force pilots. And the pace is
unrelenting. “A typical person doing this mission over the last seven or
eight years has worked either six or seven days a week, twelve hours a
day,” General Welsh told
NPR recently. “And that one- or two-day break at the end of it is
really not enough time to take care of that family and the rest of your
life.”
The pilots wholeheartedly agree. "It's like when your engine
temperature gauge is running just below the red area on your car’s
dashboard, but instead of slowing down and relieving the stress on the
engine, you put the pedal to the floor," one drone pilot told Air Force Times. "You are sacrificing the engine to get a short burst of speed with no real consideration to the damage being caused."
The Air Force has come up with a pallid interim “solution.” It is
planning to offer experienced drone pilots a daily raise of about $50.
There's one problem, though: since so many pilots leave the service
early, only a handful have enough years of experience to qualify for
this bonus. Indeed, the Air Force concedes
that just 10 of them will be able to claim the extra bounty this year,
striking testimony to the startling levels of job turnover among such
pilots.
Most 18Xs say that their jobs are tougher and significantly more
upfront and personal than those of the far more glamorous jet pilots.
“[A] Predator operator is so much more involved in what is going on than
your average fast-moving jetfighter pilot, or your B-52, B-1, B-2
pilots, who will never even see their target,” Lieutenant Colonel Bruce
Black, a former Air Force drone pilot says. “A Predator pilot has been watching his target[s], knows them intimately, knows where they are, and knows what’s around them."
Some say that the drone war has driven them over the edge. "How many
women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? How
many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the
nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?" Heather
Linebaugh, a former drone imagery analyst, 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."
"It was horrifying to know how easy it was. I felt like a coward
because I was halfway across the world and the guy never even knew I was
there,” Bryant told
KNPR Radio in Nevada. "I felt like I was haunted by a legion of the
dead. My physical health was gone, my mental health was crumbled. I was
in so much pain I was ready to eat a bullet myself."
Many drone pilots, however, defend their role in targeted killings.
“We’re not killing people for the fun of it. It would be the same if we
were the guys on the ground,” mission controller Janet Atkins told Chris Woods, author of Sudden Justice. “You have to get to [the enemy] somehow or all of you will die.”
Others like Bruce Black are proud of their work. “I was shooting two
weeks after I got there and saved hundreds of people, including Iraqis
and Afghanis," he told
his hometown newspaper in New Mexico. "We'd go down to Buffalo Wild
Wings, drink beer and debrief. It was surreal. It didn't take long for
you to realize how important the work is. The value that the weapon
system brings to the fight is not apparent till you're there. People
have a hard time sometimes seeing that."
Measuring Pilot Stress
So whom does one believe? Janet Atkins and Bruce Black, who claim
that drone pilots are overworked heroes? Or Brandon Bryant and Heather
Linebaugh, who claim that remotely directed targeted killings caused
them mental health crises?
Military psychologists have been asked to investigate the phenomenon.
A team of psychologists at the School of Aerospace Medicine at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio has published a series of
studies on drone pilot stress. One 2011 study
concluded that nearly half of them had "high operational stress." A
number also exhibited "clinical distress" -- that is, anxiety,
depression, or stress severe enough to affect them in their personal
lives.
Wayne Chappelle, a lead author in a number of these studies,
nonetheless concludes that the problem is mostly a matter of overwork
caused by the chronic shortage of pilots. His studies appear to show
that post-traumatic stress levels are actually lower among drone pilots
than in the general population. Others, however, question
these numbers. Jean Otto and Bryant Webber of the Armed Forces Health
Surveillance Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health
Sciences, caution that the lack of stress reports may only “reflect
artificial underreporting of the concerns of pilots due to the
career-threatening effects of [mental health] diagnoses, [which] include
removal from flying status, loss of flight pay, and diminished
competitiveness for promotion.”
Seeing Everything, Missing the Obvious
One thing is clear: the pilots are not just killing “bad guys” and
they know it because, as Black points out, they see everything that
happens before, during, and after a drone strike.
Indeed, the only detailed transcript
of an actual Air Force drone surveillance mission and targeted killing
to be publicly released illustrates this all too well. The logs recorded
idle chatter on February 21, 2010, between drone operators at Creech
Air Force base in Nevada coordinating with video analysts at Air Force
special operations headquarters in Okaloosa, Florida, and with Air Force
pilots in a rural part of Daikondi province in central Afghanistan. On
that day, three vehicles were seen traveling in a pre-dawn convoy
carrying about a dozen people each. Laboring under the mistaken belief
that the group were “insurgents” out to kill some nearby U.S. soldiers
on a mission, the drone team decided to attack.
Controller: “We believe we may have a high-level Taliban commander.”
Camera operator: “Yeah, they called a possible weapon on the military-age male mounted in the back of the truck.”
Intelligence coordinator: “Screener said at least one child near SUV.”
Controller: “Bullshit! Where? I don’t think they have kids out this hour. I know they’re shady, but come on!”
Camera operator “A sweet [expletive]! Geez! Lead vehicle on the run and bring the helos in!”
Moments later, Kiowa helicopter pilots descended and fired Hellfire missiles at the vehicle.
Controller: “Take a look at this one. It was hit pretty good. It’s a little toasty! That truck is so dead!”
Within 20 minutes, after the survivors of the attack had surrendered,
the transcript recorded the sinking feelings of the drone pilots as
they spotted women and children in the convoy and could not find any
visual evidence of weapons.
A subsequent on-the-ground investigation established that not one of
the people killed was anything other than an ordinary villager.
"Technology can occasionally give you a false sense of security that you
can see everything, that you can hear everything, that you know
everything," Air Force Major General James Poss, who oversaw an
investigation into the incident, later told the Los Angeles Times.
Of course, Obama administration officials claim that such incidents
are rare. In June 2011, when CIA Director John Brennan was still the
White House counterterrorism adviser, he addressed the issue of civilian
deaths in drone strikes and made this bold claim:
“Nearly for the past year, there hasn’t been a single collateral death,
because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities
that we’ve been able to develop.”
His claim and similar official ones like it are, politely put, hyperbolic. “You Never Die Twice,” a new report
by Jennifer Gibson of Reprieve, a British-based human rights
organization, settles the question quickly by showing that some men on
the White House “kill list” of terror suspects to be taken out have
“'died' as many as seven times."
Gibson adds, “We found 41 names of men who seemed to have achieved
the impossible. This raises a stark question. With each failed attempt
to assassinate a man on the kill list, who filled the body bag in his
place?” In fact, Reprieve discovered that, in going after those 41
“targets” numerous times, an estimated 1,147 people were killed in
Pakistan by drones. Typical was the present leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman
al-Zawahiri. In two strikes against “him” over the years, according to Reprieve, 76 children and 29 adults have died, but not al-Zawahiri.
Deserting the Cubicle
Back in the United States, a combination of lower-class status in the
military, overwork, and psychological trauma appears to be taking its
mental toll on drone pilots. During the Vietnam War, soldiers would
desert, flee to Canada, or even “frag”
-- kill -- their officers. But what do you do when you’ve had it with
your war, but your battle station is a cubicle in Nevada and your weapon
is a keyboard?
Is it possible that, like their victims in Pakistan and Yemen who say
that they are going mad from the constant buzz of drones overhead and
the fear of sudden death without warning, drone pilots, too, are fleeing
into the night as soon as they can? Since the Civil War in the U.S.,
war of every modern sort has produced mental disturbances that have been
given a variety of labels, including what we today call PTSD. In a way,
it would be surprising if a completely new form of warfare didn’t
produce a new form of disturbance.
We don’t yet know just what this might turn out to be, but it bodes
ill for the form of battle that the White House and Washington are most
proud of -- the well-advertised, sleek, new, robotic, no-casualty,
precision conflict that now dominates the war on terror. Indeed if the
pilots themselves are dropping out of desktop killing, can this new way
of war survive?
Pratap Chatterjee 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 and Iraq, Inc. 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 us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, 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
