In The Untold Casualties of the Drone War,Rolling Stone profiled four former members of the drone program whopubliclycriticized Americas use of unmanned aircraft strikesin an open letter to President Barack Obama. This administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilizations around the world, they wrote.With the release of Eye in the Sky starring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul and Alan Rickman where a moral debate on drone warfare roilsbetweenmilitary elites, we decided to revisitwhat these four vets toldus about the bizarre and sometimes horrifying nature of remote control warfare.
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When former drone sensor operators Brandon Bryant and Michael Haas first arrived at Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas, where much of Americas drone war is conducted, they were ushered into a large assembly hall along with dozens of other new officers. The lights went down and the first five power chords of Metallicas Creeping Death blasted out from the speakers. A large screen in front flickered to life with images of massive explosions. Cars, buildings and people were swallowed up in sweeping crosshairs, as whoops and cheers rose from the audience in the auditorium. Haas and Bryant looked at each other. A tall, heavyset officer with a large square jaw switched off the screen. Gentlemen! the officer boomed. Welcome to Creech. While here, it will be your job to blow shit up and kill people!
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Drone Operators conduct surveillance on more than combat
A day shift at Creech starts at 7:30 a.m. After a morning briefing and short safety quiz, pilots and sensor operators head off to their ground control station, which is little more than a shack with two seats and a bunch of screens. Most shifts are uneventful, spent watching a drone circle a featureless landscape. You knew you were in for a shitty shift when you saw the chairs already reclined, says Haas. That meant you were probably going to be spending the day watching nothing on the screen. Or if you came in when it was morning in Afghanistan you basically got to sit there and watch as guys went into their backyards to take a dump. I must have watched 400 guys take shits.
Numbers on drone strikes are largely unknown
According to the most recent numbers released by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), 245 strikes were launched in 2012. Between 2004 and 2016, the CIAs drone program claimed between 2,000 and 4,000 lives in Pakistan, as many as 965 of them thought to be civilians, according to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The U.S. has also killed several of its own citizens with drones, most notably American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, taken out in Yemen in 2011, along with his 16-year-old son, who died in a drone attack two weeks later. Last year, a CIA signature strike in Pakistan accidentally killed Warren Weinstein, an American aid worker held captive by Al Qaeda.
Terrorists say drone strikes support recruitment
During the trial of Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American found guilty of attempting to detonate a bomb in Times Square in 2010, the judge asked how he could be willing to kill so many innocent civilians. Shahzad replied, Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq they kill women, children, they kill everybody. In June of 2013 after Taliban gunmen killed nine visiting climbers and their guide in the mountains of northern Pakistan, a Taliban spokesman told a French reporter that the group had deployed a squadron to attack foreigners and convey a message to the world against drone strikes. According to Shahzad Akbar, a human rights lawyer in Pakistan, Taliban leaders have said that every drone strike gets them more suicide bombers As we speak, there is an operation taking place in North Waziristan where the Taliban are handing out free DVDs containing footage of drone strike victims.
Bernie Sanders is the only candidate critical ofthe drone program
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes targeted strikes as one of the nations most effective counter-terrorism strategies. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have expressed some concerns about killing U.S. citizens, but their larger issue is with losing an opportunity to interrogate suspected terrorists. Trump, stereotypically lacking on specifics, has only promised a heavy bombing campaign in Syria and elsewhere. Only Bernie Sanders has expressed doubts about the program. In an interview with ABC, he acknowledged that drone strikes have some strategic advantages, but added: There are times and places where they have been absolutely counter-effective and have caused more problems than they have solved. When you kill innocent people, what the end result is that people in the region become anti-American who otherwise would not have been.
Life on the drone base in Nevada sucks
One of the more bizarre aspects of manning a drone is that you are, in a way, in two places at once. While you spend the majority of your day flying 25,000 feet over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen or Syria, when you leave the base you are in a desert just outside Las Vegas. It is quite possible to go from killing people on the ground in Afghanistan to getting toilet paper at Costco. Bryant spent much of his downtime playingWorld of Warcraft. Haas drank so heavily that he got worried phone calls from his parents who saw his daily bar tabson his monthly credit card statements.The job wore you down, Haassays. There were limits as to how much you could fly in a week and in a month, but nobody got to keep within those limits. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourthof July, it didnt matter to us because we were technically in a theaterof war.
Drugs and alcohol fuel the drone program
Haas tells us that his means for coping became increasingly destructive. It was a pretty fucked up time, he says. He took to sniffing bath salts before, after and even during shifts. He also discovered that if he drank enough during his downtime he would be too intoxicated to be called into work. There was a lot of coke, speed and that sort of thing, he says. Everyone drank. We used to call alcohol drone fuel because it kept the program going. If the higher ups knew, then they didnt say anything, but Im pretty sure they must have known. It was everywhere.
Drone operators sometimes track a kill for weeks at a time
Over the course of amonth, one of the drone operator whistleblowers, Stephen Lewis, was tasked with conducting surveillance on a man whose son had been taken out in a CIA strike. I had no idea who he was, Lewis says. Only that he was fat, bald and walked with a waddle. The manspent most of his time at home with his wife and two daughters, or hanging nearby with neighbors. You could tell he was well liked, Lewis says. He was a real popular guy. The first Friday of every month, after midday prayers, the man rode his moped to pay respects to his son. During one visit to the gravesite, Lewis was asked by his commanders to confirm the targets identity. The missile struck as the man was ridinghome. His legs had caught fire, Lewis says. He turned around and at that moment the second missile caught him right in the face.
The Air Force is having a hard time keepingdrone operators
According to a memo from senior military officials acquired by the Daily Beast last year, outflow of personnel the number of drone operators leaving the Air Force is threatening the readiness of the program. Early last year, General Mark A. Welsh III, chief of staff of the Air Force, said the Air Force was loosing 240 operators per year, while only training 180. We were on a breaking point, says Benjamin Newel, a public affairs officer at Air Combat Command. The Air Force began offering drone operators six-figure salaries, but it doesnt seemto have stanched the outflow.The latest retention numbers Ive seen for 2015 were about the same as earlier, says Newell. Perhaps slightly worse.
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