Amid Kansas bean fields military analysts watch live video of far-off suspects’ lives … and mark them for death. The killings, and accompanying civilian casualties, take an emotional toll
In a dimly lit room at McConnell air force base in south central Kansas, analysts from a national guard intelligence reconnaissance surveillance group watch live drone surveillance video coming from war zones in the Middle East.
During combat, the analysts become part of a “kill chain” – analyzing live drone video, then communicating what they see – in instant-message chat with jet fighter pilots, operators of armed Predator and Reaper drones, and ground troops.
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| A drone’s eye view of a target in the desert. The ‘kill chain’ links
video analysts, jet fighter pilots and operators of armed drones.
Photograph: Main_sail/Getty Images/iStockphoto |
They carry out drone warfare while sitting thousands of miles from battlefields. They don’t fly the drones and don’t fire the missiles. They video-stalk enemy combatants, and tell warfighters what they see. The work, they say, helps kill terrorists, including from Isis.
The group does this work in the middle of America, at an air base surrounded by flat cow pastures and soybean fields. The 184th Intelligence Wing of the Kansas air national guard, started this work about 2002. Until last year, most people in Kansas knew nothing about their role in drone warfare.
The work is top secret. They say that they see things in those drone images that no one wants to see. Sometimes, it’s terrorists beheading civilians. Sometimes it’s civilians dying accidentally in missions that the Kansans help coordinate.
They agonize over those deaths. The most frequently heard phrase in drone combat, one airman says, is: “Don’t push the button.”
“You see [enemy combatants] kiss their kids goodbye, and kiss their wives goodbye, and then they walk down the street,” said a squadron chief master sergeant. “As soon as they get over that hill, the missile is released.”
The Americans wait to fire, he says, “because we don’t want the family to see it”.
‘Worst year for civilians’
Drone war critics describe it as depersonalized killing, done with collateral costs unknown. Those critics, including those studying civilian deaths on the ground in the Middle East, say that actual deaths exceed by thousands the total number admitted to by the US and its coalition allies. In a statement on their website, Airwars.org said: “By any measure, 2017 has been the worst year for civilians in the fight against Isis, as battles moved deep into Iraqi and Syrian cities.” Despite the coalition’s insistence that it was waging “the most precise war in history”, Airwars estimates that at least 3,875 non-combatants were killed by coalition actions during 2017 to November.In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, nearly 10,000 people are estimated to have died in 4,413 US strikes since about 2002, according to the watchdog Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The bureau estimates that as many as 1,488 were civilians, including up to 331 children.
Reporters for the New York Times Magazine, in a November story called The Uncounted, wrote that they had spent 18 months personally visiting 150 coalition strike sites in Iraq. They concluded that one in five strikes kills civilians – a toll they say is 31 times higher than military estimates.
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