Behind the Scenes With America's Drone Pilots 419
An anonymous reader writes "As President Obama meets with advisors on an Afghanistan strategy today (who are now leaning more toward Joe Biden's more-drones policy), and even as Al Qaeda claims it's not all that scared of drones, the new issue of Esquire takes the first real in-depth look at the American military's UAV build-up. Defense geek Brian Mockenhaupt spends some time on the ground in Afghanistan, as well as back at the Pentagon, where the pilots ('more like snipers than fighter pilots') are playing a kind of role-playing game, getting to know terrorists' daily ins and outs. Looks like these Reaper drones are the real wave of the future, eh?"
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
What do you mean?
http://www.justnews.com/news/14708354/detail.html [justnews.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/business/worldbusiness/27iht-drone.4.11474996.html [nytimes.com]
http://gizmodo.com/5167853/the-draganflyer-x6-uav-police-edition [gizmodo.com]
Except for FAA approval, there isn't much stopping our police state to use them.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
Except for FAA approval, there isn't much stopping our police state to use them.
We already do use them to patrol the border.
Re:infernal machines (Score:3, Informative)
I would say that is a very common mindset and not just american. The whole "There's us.. and then there's them" thing is international. Many counties own citizens kill each other over religious disagreements (no provoking physical harm or damages). I'm not excusing the US for killing anyone, just saying it's a world mindset, not an american one.
Yes, you are right about the nukes. The US is still the only country to use nuclear weapons against another country during total war. I have no doubt that will change during the next round of total war (whenever that may be)
Re:infernal machines (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ChAir Force (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah... no. Suicide bombers aren't cowards, whatever else you want to call them. It seems people just think calling someone a "coward" is about the worst thing you can call them, so they just call all kinds of people cowards who by the meaning of the word _aren't_.
"wrestle with the thought..."? Seriously? What kind of meaningless tripe is that?
Website not coming up: Here's the text (Score:5, Informative)
The war begins each day on the long drive into the desert, just past the Super Buffet and the Home Depot and the Petco, and the swath of look-alike houses that cling to the city's edge, along the forty miles of the strangest daily commute in America. Air Force Staff Sergeant Charles Anderson plucks his wristwatch from the cupholder and crosses into the war zone. He wears the watch only at work, and the ritual shifts his thoughts away from the everyday, which lately has been occupied by wedding plans and house hunting. He drives in silence, no music or news, past rocky scrubland that mirrors the Afghan mountains, valleys, and plains he'll spend his workday patrolling. First Lieutenant John Hamilton crosses over as he passes the High Desert State Prison, thirty miles outside Las Vegas, northwest on route 95. His cell-phone calls always drop off here, and over time he has come to think of the prison as the demarcation line between homelife and battlefield. A few more miles and Creech Air Force Base rises from the desert, a cluster of buildings at the foot of barren hills, cast gold by the early-morning sun. Captain Sam Nelson is the last to cross over. He steps into a plain brick building, home to the 42nd Attack Squadron, pulls his cell phone from his green flight suit, and leaves it on a counter with a pile of others. He passes through a doorway, from unclassified to secret, and the door shuts and locks behind him.
On this July morning, the three will crew a Reaper -- big brother to the Predator -- an unmanned aerial vehicle scanning the landscape from about twenty thousand feet, seventy-five hundred miles away. Nelson flies it, and Anderson runs the array of cameras and sensors that hang under the plane's nose and can see the hot barrel of a freshly fired weapon from miles off in the dark of night. Hamilton, the mission intelligence coordinator, feeds them reports from the battlefield and talks to the "customers," their name for the ground troops they'll be supporting in Afghanistan. He's twenty-four, still soft in the face, and studied public policy at Stanford; now in the morning paper he reads about policy he helps implement. He digs that. Never mind that his neighbors don't know how close to the war he really is every day. In the Reaper Operations Center, crowded with computers and flat-screen TVs, he settles in at his workstation, which has a bank of six computer screens, a laptop, two secure phone lines, and a radio headset. On the bottom center screen, he'll soon have nine message windows open, chatting with his bosses at Creech, commanders in Afghanistan, and troops on the battlefield.
The top middle screen shows the view from the Reaper -- in this case Afghanistan at rest. The sun has already set, but the infrared lens illuminates a darkened world in a palette of black and white. Down the hall, Nelson and Anderson step into the Ground Control Station, a windowless room ten feet wide and twenty feet deep, with beige walls and a drop-tile ceiling. At the far end, two men in flight suits and radio headsets sit in bulky tan faux-leather chairs before a cubicle cockpit of joysticks, throttles, and ten monitors. They stare at Afghanistan's roads and schools and markets and homes, as they have for the past several hours. Nelson and Anderson, their relief, slip into the seats as the Reaper flies on. Nelson checks his cargo, shown as neon-green silhouettes at the bottom of his center screen: four Hellfire missiles and two five-hundred-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs. Another shift of remote-control combat has begun.
At this very moment, at any given moment, three dozen armed, unmanned American airplanes are flying lazy loops over Afghanistan and Iraq. They linger there, all day and all night. When one lands to refuel or rearm, another replaces it. They guard soldiers on patrol, spy on Al Qaeda leaders, and send missiles shrieking down on insurgents massing in the night. Add to those the hundreds of smaller, unarmed Unmanned Aer
Re:I hate to say this... (Score:4, Informative)
Stalin's millions of soldiers defeated the Germans, basically.
How would Stalin's millions of soldiers have done without the benefit of lend-lease? How would they have done if Germany had been able to pour the resources that went into building submarines into tanks and airplanes instead? How would they have done without the diversion of German troops to the African, Italian and (late in the war) Western fronts?
Re:ChAir Force (Score:2, Informative)
That's Adolf Galland - and Rudolf Neubrandt... :-)
Re:infernal machines (Score:3, Informative)
Tell me, what are the intentions of the people who those drones are targetting? How many innocents have those men killed this year? How many weddings, funerals, markets, and religious services have they bombed in service to their god of hate and blood? The patriotism of Americans is small potatoes compared to the fervor of these extremists. It's even smaller potatoes compared to =any= country's imperialism over 70 years ago.
We were the ones writing them checks in the 1980's simply because we didn't want a secular yet communist Afghanistan.
Oh... And we overthrew a legally elected socialist government in Iran in the 1950's only to have who we wanted in power replaced with a fanatical religious government and then we paid money and gave weapons to their enemy in Iraq who turned on us with those own weapons we sold them...
And we still prop up a non-democratic kingdom with money and weapons down there who represses any political dissent with prison and whippings! No wonder they hate us!
AND YOU SAY WE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE MIDDLE EAST! We've been mucking around down there for over 50 years!
Re:infernal machines (Score:3, Informative)
At Waco they used army equipment against people who had committed NO CRIMES.
Not even close. At Waco, the ATF attempted to execute a search warrant on the Branh Dividian compound. The Branch Dividians opened fire from a huge stockpile of automatic weapons killing 4 ATF agents.
After these murders, the FBI came in and *then* you started seeing millitary-like hardware.
Re:I hate to say this... (Score:3, Informative)
However, lend-lease was helpful but not critical as soon as all of the USSR industrial infrastructure was reorganized in Siberia.
I don't think you have any understanding of military logistics if you are making the claim that lend-lease wasn't "critical". The USSR built less then 100 locomotives during WW2. She received almost 2,000 from the United States. Two thirds of the truck strength on the Eastern Front came from the United States. That doesn't even take into account all of the high-quality aviation fuel that we sent them -- fuel that they lacked the capacity to produce on their own. How do you suppose Stalin would have kept the Red Army and his factories running without this support?
As for the African, Italian and even much of the French front, most of the actual fighting was done by the Britons, the Canadians, the Australians, the Poles, the Belgians, the Free French (including their African troops e.g. at Monte Cassino), and many others. Just compare the casualties.
What did I say that makes you think I was claiming that the United States was solely responsible for those fronts?
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Informative)
As someone who's actually part of one of the teams at the FAA working on the problem... Large-scale deployment of UASes in controlled airspace is a long long way off (5 years, minimum--10 more likely). The manufacturers just haven't quite grasped what all will be involved in making these things fit into the NAS...
Re:ChAir Force (Score:3, Informative)
Oh boy... A sailing friend of mine introduced me to one of these pilots - these guys have as much skill and training as the guys in the F-18 Hornets, and they are under similar stress. If they F-up they can kill some of their own, or lose a bird that costs millions to build.
The one advantage they have is that they can go home to their own bed at night (or day, or..), and if they do mess up, they can live after the fact.
This is the future of modern warfare, and having seen these things get assembled (I do some defense contracting) the technology is pretty dammed impressive.
If you think this is MS flight simulator, you are utterly clueless.
Re:infernal machines (Score:4, Informative)
Not even close. At Waco, the ATF attempted to execute a search warrant on the Branh Dividian compound. The Branch Dividians opened fire from a huge stockpile of automatic weapons killing 4 ATF agents.
After these murders, the FBI came in and *then* you started seeing millitary-like hardware.
Seeing as you don't seem to remember the incident very well, I'll remind you. The ATF attempted to stage a massive raid on the "compound". They lost the element of surprise because the ATF invited in the media to get lots of footage of their brave storming of this menacing redoubt. No action occurred that could be remotely called "an attempt to serve a warrant". What occurred was an unprovoked attack by a large force of ATF agents armed with automatic weapons, which was repelled and driven into ignominious flight by legally armed citizens firing in self defense from their dwelling.
Subsequent to this, the scene was taken over by a paramilitary FBI force which did its best over a period of weeks to work the situation up into a fever pitch that culminated in the mass murder of citizens guilty of no crime—including dozens of children.
In the future, such things will be taken care of quickly and quietly by drone jockeys in Nevada.
Re:I hate to say this... (Score:3, Informative)
They carried a smaller human toll between them than one night of firebombing of Tokyo.
Keep in mind that the terrifying thing about the Bomb wasn't that we used it to wreck a city, but that we could wreck a city with one bomber, rather than the old-fashioned way of sending 1000 bombers.
Note also that Dresden was far more thoroughly ruined without the Bomb....