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Comments: 419 +- Technology: Behind the Scenes With America's Drone Pilots on Wednesday October 14, @12:21PM
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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?"
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Submission: Behind the Trigger with America's Drone Pilots by Anonymous Coward
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Where do I sign up (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
I hate to say this... (Score:4, Insightful)
...given the serious topic, but this is IMHO another typical case of American fantasy: a war without casualties. I mean, without American casualties, of course. Wishful thinking, whatever technologies you throw at the problem.
Re:I hate to say this... (Score:5, Insightful)
...given the serious topic, but this is IMHO another typical case of American fantasy: a war without casualties.
I'm pretty sure that was the intent of all inventions developed for wartime use.
From the spear, the longbow, musket, and machine gun... The intent and purpose was to give your side the benefit of being able to put the enema at "arms length" (so to say) and put you on the side less likely to die.
I mean having people kamikaze their aircraft into targets might be more cost effective in the short term, but the point of making weapons was to kill the other side more effectively by putting your side at less risk.
Just a note...
Its really been the US doctrine since WWII whereas the Russians, Japanese, and Germans generals would still order suicidal attacks on targets for bravery where the US forces would just bomb the crap out of it, shell it with more artillery than needed, call in more air strikes, and then have the infantry move in forward with tanks in front of them. The tactics work.
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Re:I hate to say this... (Score:5, Funny)
FWIW, you don't need to put the enema a full arms' length up there. Just a couple inches past the sphincter will do fine. If you want to try for arms' length, go right ahead -- it's your bowels, after all... I just suggest using extra lube in that case.
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Re:I hate to say this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Russians carried most of the war and while they lost more soldiers
They lost almost two orders of magnitude more soldiers than the US did. As I understand it, the US conscripted about 18 million people while the USSR conscripted about twice as much. There's at least an order of magnitude more casualties per million in the USSR army than the US. Further, the USSR lost (as in were killed) about a third of its military. That's cutting it fine for a winning strategy. While it isn't particularly relevant, the US-associated fronts did capture more physical territory (including the gains in the Pacific, of course).
And the remark about the USSR opening a new front is silly. They could have opened it in 1935 as well as any time prior to 1945, if they so chose. At the time they opened the front, Japan had abandoned that front. So it was low effort for great gain as far as the Soviets were concerned.
I also think the strategic bombing had greater effect than popularly claimed. While factories might have not been particularly damaged, the bombing disrupted the logistics of the Nazi empire and forced the Germans to occupy territory that spread out their forces (for example, occupying Scandinavia, North Africa and the islands of the Mediterranean particularly Crete and Malta, the latter which was never successfully invaded).
Finally, it's worth noting that the USSR did as well as it did through the somewhat greater incompetence of Nazi strategy. Hitler's obsession with taking and occupying Russian cities, particularly Stalingrad and Leningrad, led to the greatest mistakes which doomed Nazi Germany.
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Re:I hate to say this... (Score:5, Insightful)
And lose. You can't *hold* ground with robots or avatars. You can't win hearts and minds. You can't accomplish significant political objectives.
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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?
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Re:I hate to say this... (Score:4, Interesting)
That's pretty much been the situation in Afghanistan since recorded history began. Under Taliban rule, the Taliban basically ruled Kabul, and outside the city limits, it was no man's land. The Taliban didn't give up bin Laden because they couldn't, he was 400 miles away in disputed territory and the Taliban didn't have the military to pull that off. There's a considerable difference between can't and won't. What the war did was create enough martyrs to put the Taliban in a stronger position than ever before.
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Look at the USAF... (Score:5, Interesting)
...Chief of Staff's reading list [militarypr...glists.com]. Short on fighter pilot stuff, long on strategy and counterinsurgency. They see the way things are going, no doubt about it.
why drones are so BAD (Score:5, Insightful)
They're bad because one of the reasons people, soldiers included, don't like war is due to the risk of being killed. If you remove that you also remove the only motivation to stop a war or just not start it. The geek in me loves the tech involved in drones development (minus the weaponry) but my human half is scaried as hell because they represent one more step towards an endless war scenario.
Not that bad (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Not that bad (Score:4, Insightful)
It'd never work because people and nations don't go to war over things they think are trivial. And if it's not trivial they are likely to fight tooth and nail for whatever their cause. This is already evident in that the terrorists have resorted to being terrorists because they do not have the resources to fight in a more traditional way on a field of battle. Even we, in the USA, did this during the Revolutionary War.
We didn't necessarily fall to the same level as the terrorists of today. But at the time shooting from any available cover, specifically targeting officers, and not forming up in ranks to exchange volleys was considered very dishonorable and unsavory by the British.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:why drones are so BAD (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, no matter what we do this will happen. Better us than them. They target civilians. We accidentally hit civilians.
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Air power never wins wars (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Air power never wins wars (Score:5, Insightful)
Air power never wins wars
That's the one lesson that nations can't seem to learn.
Without boots on the ground, you will not get proper intel. As such, there is a higher likelihood of collateral damage. When surprise attacks indiscriminately kill both combatants and civilians, you lose what little support you may have had.
This is the key. As long as we keep blowing up women and children, we're making more enemies than we kill.
The West (including Israel) have a blind spot, thinking "collateral casualties don't count". But to the people on the receiving end, their family is just as dead as if we had deliberately blown up their skyscrapers.
Whatever else our new strategy entails, "no civilian casualties" needs to be the cornerstone, or we're never going to win.
\rant
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd be tempted to say there's a good half of the west that doesn't have this luxurious blindspot America has. If anything big we to happen, they were on the frontline. Casualty previsions from the cold war in European countries basically ran in the high 80% range, and I'm pretty sure most major powers (India, China, Japan, the Soviets) in Eurasia had pretty similar things - sure, there's probably some of it in what are considered "side conflicts", but that blind spot is something you can't afford to have wh
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Saying airpower doesn't win wars is probably false. I would suggest that the thermonuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki played a war-winning role.
You have to qualify your statement to read "airpower ALONE doesn't win wars"--that statement has been generally true in the past. On the other hand, any person would be a moron to assume that the statement will continue to be true in the future. Generals usually start the next war off by fighting it just like the previous war. They are oftentimes no
Sex with sheep (Score:5, Funny)
From page 4:
Indeed, they see many things meant to be secret, like men having sex with sheep and goats in the deep of night. I first heard this from infantry soldiers and took it as rumor, but at Bagram I met a civilian contractor who works in UAV operations. "All the time," he said. "They just don't think we can see them."
Re:Sex with sheep (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't we just buy a television transmitter and have it broadcast this kind of video 24 hours a day? I dunno how well sheepfucking plays with the locals, but if there's any kind of personally identifiable info, maybe we can ridicule some of these guys to death. Uhm, if there're TVs. Otherwise we could distribute leaflets with choice video stills on them.
Or not. Mostly I just thought the title of "Afghanistan's Funniest Home Sheepfucking Videos" was really catchy.
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A U. S. monopoly? for how long? (Score:3)
Am I the only one reminded of H. G. Wells' "The Land Ironclads?"
"Their rifles... had the most remarkable sights imaginable, sights which threw a bright little camera-obscura picture into the light-tight box in which the rifleman sat below. This camera-obscura picture was marked with two crossed lines, and whatever wascovered by the intersection of these two lines, that the rifle hit... Changes in the clearness of the atmosphere, due to changes of moisture, were met by an ingenious use of that meteorologically sensitive substance, catgut, and when the land ironclad moved forward the sights got a compensatory deflection in the direction of its motion. The rifleman stood up in his pitch-dark chamber and watched the little picture before him. One hand held the dividers for judging distance, and the other grasped a big knob like a door-handle... When he saw a man he wanted to shoot he brought him up to the cross-lines, and then pressed a finger upon a little push like an electric bell-push, conveniently placed in the centre of the knob. Then the man was shot. If by any chance the rifleman missed his target he moved the knob a trifle, or readjusted his dividers, pressed the push, and got him the second time."
There is no law of physics guaranteeing the U. S. a monopoly on these things. Yet so much of the discussion implicitly assumes this is something "we" can do to "them."
The U. S. was certain that the Russians didn't have the technology capability to produce nuclear weapons, yet the U. S. had the monopoly on nuclear weapons for less than four years. (And the Russians then scared us by being the first to produce a fusion device that was capable of being a deliverable weapon--the U. S. had the first fusion explosion but it was a ground-based, building-sized device.
How difficult are these things to build? Are we sure you can't cobble a crude but effective one out of a video cell phone, an R/C model aircraft, and a couple of iPods? How long before we see these things over U. S. skies?
Why hire remote pilots? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why hire remote pilots? (Score:5, Funny)
And no doubt his sister and brother will post such insightful stuff on the Internet that whole nations will turn over their reins of governance to them.
Of course you'll have to cover up the murders the kid unknowingly commits, just so you can keep him playing your computer games.
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Re:Why hire remote pilots? (Score:4, Insightful)
On the flip side, isn't buying "gold" from China what got our country into the debt fiasco we're in now with them? Fucking gold farmers.
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Great, yet we can't talk to Afghans (Score:4, Interesting)
I read the article and was amazed at the great use of technology, that we could beam video and aircraft commands across the world to do surveillance and attacks. But then I saw a special on PBS last night where our ground troops can't even talk with the Afghans. The interpreter didn't speak good english, and his face was blurred out -- no doubt due to fear for his life and his family's safety. So, I wondered, why can't we use the same UAV technology to facilitate better translation?
Simply, give ground troops a video camera, mic, and speaker. Video and audio would be relayed to a translator sitting anywhere in the world. The translator could translate from Afghan to english, speaking into the troops' earpiece. English to Afghan would be broadcast over the speaker the troop carries. It's not nearly as personal, but I'd bet we'd get better and more translators. They can work anywhere and don't have to fear being shot or their family being threatened.
Re:ChAir Force (Score:4, Funny)
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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
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Re:ChAir Force (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the Air Force as a whole not just the drone pilots.
What is laughable though is that the drone pilots get their time flying drones counted as flight hours which count toward their career gates. So for being at less risk than most anyone else and essentially playing flight sim games all day they get bonus pay.
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Re:ChAir Force (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:ChAir Force (Score:5, Insightful)
The man who straps a bomb to his chest and dies killing his enemies, or the man who kills from a lazy-boy with no risk to himself whatsoever.
They aren't cowards for strapping bombs to their chest. They are cowards because they tend to go after relatively undefended civilian targets. Driving a truck bomb into a barracks filled with Marines represents a legitimate act of war. Blowing up a pizzeria filled with civilians that had no military value is the coward's way out.
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Re:ChAir Force (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. They're evil for killing civilians, not cowards. Attacking the enemy where he is strong isn't bravery, it's fucking stupidity. Sometimes killing civilians is justified either as collateral damage or intentionally. e.g. had German families started settling in France during WWII occupation you can bet your ass they would have been fair targets.
In the case of blowing up some random people in a bazaar for some obscure religious difference then it's evil - but it's not cowardly. Giving your life for something intentionally is the very opposite of cowardly. But if you think dramatic terms like "coward's way out" make it sound worse, go for it.
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Re: (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?
Re:ChAir Force (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate use of the word "coward" in a military context. Two thousand people use guerrilla tactics against your army of forty thousand? Cowards. Many of your men are killed while sleeping in an ambush? Cowards. A gunman refuses to fight your sword-based army from melee range and keeps firing and running away? Coward. When you're doing it, it's good strategy. When the bad guys do it, it's cowardice.
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Re:ChAir Force (Score:5, Insightful)
>Muslims do not revere Muhammed. They simply believe he delivered the word of God.
However, large numbers of them will happily kill you for insulting him and vastly larger numbers will riot over same. You seem to be using a rather non-standard definition of "revere."
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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.
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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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
One's right to life, liberty, property, speech, press, freedom of worship and assembly may not be submitted to vote
You forgot one [wikipedia.org].....
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Another Benefit of Traditional Planes (Score:5, Insightful)
After reading this I realize the not-so-obvious benefit of real planes flying around patrolling and bombing the enemy... The fear factor. As stated in the summary " Al Qaeda claims it's not all that scared of drones", which makes sense, a little spec in the sky orbiting quietly does not put the fear of God, oh sorry Allah, into the enemy. Get a couple of F35s, A10s or Apaches cruising about voila, fear is back. Intimidation is back factor in warfare. Never really thought about that aspect of an all-drone airforce...
I've been under an F-15 at an air show and it sounds like God just got home, especially when the afterburners light up. I can only imagine what it's like when there's no concern about popping the eardrums of those on the ground.
That being said, operationally they keep the aircraft above 20k feet specifically to avoid small arms fire. The level required to act as a psychological weapon makes them great for target practice.
Incidentally, if they're not intimidated by having antitank missiles and precision-guided bombs falling on their heads, I doubt flying any lower will do much to wilt their spirits.
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Re:Another Benefit of Traditional Planes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The modern state of the US is easy for cowards to criticize. They don't reali
Re:infernal machines (Score:4, Insightful)
Simple answer: no one has any idea. The people targeted by the drones for extra-judicial assassinations are always and without exception "suspected" "militants" - i.e. people who might militantly oppose US interests, or interests of US sponsored warlords in some way or another. Some might be mass murderers, some merely opposed to their US-appointed "government" or simply enemies of some US informants. Or random bystanders. There is no way to tell.
But one thing can be known for certain, the hordes of children killed by the drones were definitely not "targeting" anyone.
So the bottom line is this: when you choose to descend to the levels of the atrocities that you accuse your "evil" opponents of ... you yourself have become the very evil you claim to fight. Which is clearly the case with the US of A, and which all rational observer have pointed out a long time ago.
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Re:infernal machines (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (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
Re:infernal machines (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:infernal machines (Score:5, Interesting)
The Armed forces are still giving out medals that were originally produced in anticipation of that invasion.
For example, 500,000 Purple Hearts were made in preparation for the anticipated invasion of Japan. As it turned out, they were not needed then. This stockpile has been reduced by the Korean and Vietnam wars and all of the lesser actions (Iraq 1 & 2, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, and various "peacekeeping" missions), but about 100,000 still remain unused.
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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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Truth hurts and US-ians want *absolutely nothing* to do with it.
It's funny that someone who says the truth hurts can't bring himself to use the accepted and proper noun for a citizen of the United States: American.
In fact, very much like Ancient Rome where the citizens were a different breed from the conquered and the "ungrateful" slaves outnumbered them 3:1
We are nothing like Ancient Rome. If we behaved like the Romans we would have killed every single male of military age in Afghanistan a long time ago. Say what you will about the Romans but they knew how to keep the enemies of civilization in line. We've long since forgotten how to do that. More's the pity.
everyone outside of the US should by now know quite well how they are used: to assassinate, remotely (with no regard for bystanders, due process or any of that "coddling" stuff)
I wasn't aware that enemies on the battlefield w
Re:infernal machines (Score:5, Insightful)
LMAO. Just LMAO. "Civilized world" as defined by who? People who think nothing of executing people after refusing appeals based on new evidence exonerating them? Or executing mentally defective people, and juveniles?
Or perhaps a civilized world where a country that has the largest percentage of its populace in the world incarcerated, and 1/4 to 1/3 of those incarcerated for crimes 65% of the population don't even believe should be a crime?
Or a civilized world where Supreme Court justices appointed by the administration of a political party rule that in the elections to determine the leader of that nation, that to recount votes to ensure accuracy would be to "undermine" the system?
Or a civilized world where following lobbying by unrelated interest groups, the President signs into law legislation to keep a person alive, despite their wishes, and that of the guardian they made an informed and aware decision to put in place to honor their wishes?
Or a civilized world where it is considered de jure for a medical insurance company to collect up to and over a thousand dollars a month for "health insurance", and then deny coverage for abdominal cancer in a patients 40s, on the grounds that they had failed to disclose they had their tonsils removed at age 9?
That civilized world, you mean?
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