Game of Drones

It was the day before my 70th birthday in September 2018 when I stepped off the plane at Al Asad Air Base, Iraq to help fight ISIS, the Taliban and whoever else was fomenting trouble in the Middle East. This story relates how I got here and places I went after that. I flew my last combat sortie in an F-4 from Korat, Thailand to Cambodia on July 1st, 1973, attacking North Vietnamese supply lines to South Vietnam. Flying drones in Iraq was going to be a different experience. While the efficacy of drones is obvious to me, I had been a long-time critic of the Air Force integration of remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs) into the force structure in terms of selecting, assigning, and handling personnel involved with flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones. It seemed criminal to me to take a newly minted pilot straight out of pilot training and assign him or her to flying drones. Actually, it seemed mean to assign anybody to fly drones. I thought it would be better to let a person get some experience and maturity flying manned aircraft before sending them to fly drones. Another problem for people who got assigned to fly drones was the fact that, early on, they were producing drones faster than the Air Force could produce pilots and sensor operators so once assigned to fly drones it was hard to break out of that community and get back into manned aircraft. Fortunately for the Air Force, I had no conduit to voice my dissatisfaction with what I thought was poor management of resources. I also had no ability to influence anybody in this area. Those of us who flew combat missions in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam conflict also heard of drone crews suffering from the stress of flying drones. Us old heads had a hard time understanding how it could be stressful flying a drone from a control van that wasn’t going to suffer any injuries if the drone got shot down. The reasons for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for drone crews were explained to me by people who had been there and done that and they made sense. The oversight and scrutiny when flying drones were intense. Those of us who dropped bombs from F-4s and F-105s rarely saw the actual death and destruction we created. Drone crews saw it every day because they had to monitor their targets to get permission to strike those targets and then they watched them explode on their video displays. Supervisors and intelligence observers could easily identify collateral damage and assign blame. So, while there was no threat of being shot down, needing to try to escape and evade on the ground or the possibility of being captured as a prisoner of war, there were other mental challenges to deal with. Another drone pilot told me of the dichotomy of having breakfast with his wife and children before sending the kids to school and then driving to the base, getting in the control van and being interjected into the combat operations halfway around the world since the drones in Afghanistan and Iraq were remotely piloted from bases in Nevada, California and other stateside locations. Finally, media reports of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed inadequate for two reasons: the media’s basic aversion to the military and their ignorance of military operations which lead to their inability to accurately report the situation. I wanted to know what was really going on. I appreciated military speakers who briefed military affiliated organizations I belonged to, but it was still second-hand knowledge. I wanted a way to see for myself. My journey to Iraq started at a monthly luncheon with eight or ten fellow pilots at the Casa Machado restaurant at Montgomery Field in San Diego in October of 2017. At our monthly luncheons we solved many world problems amongst ourselves. The solutions we came up with went no farther than the table where we were sitting as our 6 degrees of influence didn’t reach national policy makers.