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.
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