Reduced flights signal abrupt shift for Air Force.
CREECH AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. — After a decade of waging long-distance war through their video screens, America’s drone operators are burning out, and the Air Force
is being forced to cut back on the flights even as military and
intelligence officials are demanding more of them over intensifying
combat zones in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
The Air Force plans to trim the flights by the armed surveillance drones
to 60 a day by October from a recent peak of 65 as it deals with the
first serious exodus of the crew members who helped usher in the era of
war by remote control.
Air
Force officials said that this year they would lose more drone pilots,
who are worn down by the unique stresses of their work, than they can
train.
“We’re
at an inflection point right now,” said Col. James Cluff, the commander
of the Air Force’s 432nd Wing, which runs the drone operations from
this desert outpost about 45 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
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| Trevor Tasin, a retired Predator drone operator, with three of his sons, at home in New Braunfels, Texas, June 16, 2015. — Ilana Panich-Linsman, New York Times |
The
reduction could also create problems for the C.I.A., which has used Air
Force pilots to conduct drone missile attacks on terrorism suspects in
Pakistan and Yemen, government officials said. And the slowdown comes
just as military advances by the Islamic State have placed a new premium
on aerial surveillance and counterattacks.
Some
top Pentagon officials had hoped to continue increasing the number of
daily drone flights to more than 70. But Defense Secretary Ashton B.
Carter recently signed off on the cuts after it became apparent that the
system was at the breaking point, Air Force officials said.
The
biggest problem is that a significant number of the 1,200 pilots are
completing their obligation to the Air Force and are opting to leave. In
a recent interview, Colonel Cluff said that many feel “undermanned and
overworked,” sapped by alternating day and night shifts with little
chance for academic breaks or promotion.
At
the same time, a training program is producing only about half of the
new pilots that the service needs because the Air Force had to reassign
instructors to the flight line to expand the number of flights over the
past few years.
Colonel
Cluff said top Pentagon officials thought last year that the Air Force
could safely reduce the number of daily flights as military operations
in Afghanistan wound down. But, he said, “the world situation changed,”
with the rapid emergence of the Islamic State, and the demand for the
drones shot up again.
Officials
say that since August, Predator and Reaper drones have conducted 3,300
sorties and 875 missile and bomb strikes in Iraq against the Islamic
State.
What
had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews
could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living
safely in the United States with their families, has created new types
of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and
family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.
“Having
our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and
thinking, ‘All right, I’ve got my war face on, and I’m going to the
fight,’ and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Walmart to pick
up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home — and
the fact that you can’t talk about most of what you do at home — all
those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family,
putting pressure on the airman,” Colonel Cluff said.
While
most of the pilots and camera operators feel comfortable killing
insurgents who are threatening American troops, interviews with about
100 pilots and sensor operators for an internal study that has not yet
been released, he added, found that the fear of occasionally causing
civilian casualties was another major cause of stress, even more than
seeing the gory aftermath of the missile strikes in general.
A Defense Department study in 2013, the first of its kind, found that drone pilots had experienced mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Trevor
Tasin, a pilot who retired as a major in 2014 after flying Predator
drones and training new pilots, called the work “brutal, 24 hours a day,
365 days a year.”
The
exodus from the drone program might be caused in part by the lure of
the private sector, Mr. Tasin said, noting that military drone operators
can earn four times their salary working for private defense
contractors. In January, in an attempt to retain drone operators, the
Air Force doubled incentive pay to $18,000 per year.
Another former pilot, Bruce Black, was part of a team that watched Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, for 600 hours before he was killed by a bomb from a manned aircraft.
“After
something like that, you come home and have to make all the little
choices about the kids’ clothes or if I parked in the right place,” said
Mr. Black, who retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2013. “And after
making life and death decisions all day, it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to
care.”
Colonel
Cluff said the idea behind the reduction in flights was “to come back a
little bit off of 65 to allow some breathing room” to replenish the
pool of instructors and recruits.
The
Air Force also has tried to ease the stress by creating a human
performance team, led by a psychologist and including doctors and
chaplains who have been granted top-secret clearances so they can meet
with pilots and camera operators anywhere in the facility if they are
troubled.
Colonel
Cluff invited a number of reporters to the Creech base on Tuesday to
discuss some of these issues. It was the first time in several years
that the Air Force had allowed reporters onto the base, which has been
considered the heart of the drone operations since 2005.
The
colonel said the stress on the operators belied a complaint by some
critics that flying drones was like playing a video game or that
pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made
it psychologically easier for them to kill. He also said that the
retention difficulties underscore that while the planes themselves are
unmanned, they need hundreds of pilots, sensor operators, intelligence
analysts and launch and recovery specialists in foreign countries to
operate.
Some
of the crews still fly their missions in air-conditioned trailers here,
while other cockpit setups have been created in new mission center
buildings. Anti-drone protesters are periodically arrested as they try
to block pilots from entering the base, where signs using the drone
wing’s nickname say, “Home of the Hunters.”
Correction: June 16, 2015
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the pilot who retired as a major in 2014 after flying Predator drones and training pilots. He is Trevor Tasin, not Tazin.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the pilot who retired as a major in 2014 after flying Predator drones and training pilots. He is Trevor Tasin, not Tazin.
Christopher Drew reported
from Creech Air Force Base, and Dave Philipps from New York. Mark
Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
