The Unseen Drone Victims
Deadly remote strikes take a toll, even on the best Air Force pilots.
REDWOOD VALLEY, California — After hiding all night in the mountains, Air Force Captain Kevin Larson crouched behind a boulder, waiting for the police he knew would come. It was January 19, 2020. He was clinging to an assault rifle with 30 rounds and a conviction that there was no way he was going to prison.
Captain Larson, 32, was a drone pilot — one of the best. He flew the heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper, and in 650 combat missions from 2013 to 2018, he had launched at least 188 airstrikes, earned 20 medals for achievement and killed a top man on the United States’ most-wanted-terrorist list.
He kept a handwritten thank-you note on his refrigerator from the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was proud of it but would not say what for. He had to keep the details of his work locked behind the high-security doors at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada.
Also locked behind those doors were the secrets he was not proud of. His family believes they eventually left him cornered in the mountains, gripping a rifle.
In the Air Force, drone pilots did not pick the targets. That was the job of “the customer.” The customer might be a ground force commander, the C.I.A. or a classified Special Operations strike cell. The customer got what the customer wanted.
Sometimes, it did not seem right. Some strikes were so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers. And classified rules of engagement allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy. Crews had to watch it in color and high definition.
Captain Larson tried to bury his doubts. At home in Las Vegas, he exuded confidence. He loved to go out dancing and was so handsome that he did side work as a model. He drove a Corvette convertible and a Jeep, and had a beautiful new wife, Bree.
“He never really talked about what he did — he couldn’t,” said his father, Darold Larson. “He said he was being forced to do things that went against his moral compass.”
Drones were billed as a better way to wage war, a tool that could kill with precision from thousands of kilometers away. The drone program started in 2001 as a small operation
hunting high-level terrorist targets. But during the past decade, as the battle against the Islamic State intensified and the Afghanistan war dragged on, the fleet grew larger, the targets more numerous.
A Vexing Moral Landscape
Over time, the rules meant to protect civilians broke down, recent investigations by The New York Times have shown, and the number of innocent people killed grew to be far larger than the U.S. Defense Department would publicly admit.
Captain Larson’s story, woven together with those of other drone crew members, reveals an unseen toll on the other end of those strikes. Because they were not deployed, they seldom got the same recovery periods or mental health screenings as other fighters. Instead they were treated as office workers, expected to show up for endless shifts in a forever war. Under unrelenting stress, several former crew members said, people broke down. Drinking and divorce became common. Some attempted suicide.
Despite hundreds of missions, Captain Larson’s personnel file, under the heading “COMBAT SERVICE,” offers only a single word: “none.” Drone crew members said in interviews that, while killing remotely is different from killing on the ground, it still carves deep scars.
In the wake of The Times’s investigations, the Defense Department
has vowed to strengthen controls on airstrikes and improve how it investigates claims of civilian deaths.
The Air Force is also providing more mental health services for drone crews to address past lapses.
“We are not physically in harm’s way, and yet at the same time we are observing a battlefield, and we are seeing some scenes or being part of them,” said Colonel Eric Schmidt, the commander of the 432nd Wing at Creech.
Captain Larson tried to cope by using psychedelic drugs. The Air Force found out. He was charged with using and distributing illegal drugs and stripped of his flight status. His marriage fell apart, and he was put on trial, facing a prison term of more than 20 years.
Captain Larson grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of police officers. He was an Eagle Scout who went to church nearly every Sunday.
At the University of Washington, where he was an honors student, he joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and the Civil Air Patrol, set on becoming a fighter pilot.
By the time he was commissioned in 2012, the Defense Department relied increasingly on drone strikes, and the Air Force was struggling to keep up. That year it turned out more drone pilots than traditional fighter pilots.
“He was sobbing when he got the news,” his mother, Laura Larson, said. “He wanted to fly. But once he started, he enjoyed it. He really felt like he was doing something important.”
Captain Larson was assigned to the 867th Attack Squadron at Creech — a unit that pilots say worked largely with the C.I.A. and Joint Special Operations Command. The drone crews operated out of a cluster of shipping containers in a remote patch of desert. Each crew had three members: a sensor operator to guide the surveillance camera and targeting laser, an intelligence analyst to interpret the video feeds, and a pilot to fly the Reaper and push the red button that launched its Hellfire missiles.
A Hidden Life
The specifics of Captain Larson’s missions are largely a mystery. He kept the classified details hidden from his parents and his former wife.
But several pilots, sensor operators and analysts who did the same work in other squadrons spoke with The Times about unclassified details and described their struggles with the same punishing workload and vexing moral landscape.
More than 2,300 service members are currently assigned to drone crews. Early in the program, they said, officials carefully chose their targets and took steps to minimize civilian deaths.
“We would watch a high-value target for months, gathering intelligence and waiting for the exact right time to strike,” said James Klein, a former Air Force captain who flew Reapers at Creech from 2014 to 2018.
But in December 2016, the Obama administration loosened the rules amid the escalating fight against the Islamic State, pushing the authority to approve airstrikes deep down into the ranks. The next year, the Trump administration secretly loosened them further. Before the rules changed, Mr. Klein said, his squadron launched about 16 airstrikes in two years. Afterward, it conducted them almost daily.
Over time, Mr. Klein grew angry and depressed. His marriage began to crumble. “I started to dread going in to work,” he said.
Eventually, he refused to fire any more missiles. The Air Force moved him to a noncombat role, and in 2020 he retired. “Very few people stayed in the field,” Mr. Klein said. “They just couldn’t take it.”
Talk Therapy
Talk In her job as a police officer, Captain Larson’s mother conducted stress debriefings after traumatic events. When officers shot someone, they were required to take time off and meet with a psychologist. Everyone was required to talk through what had happened. She was not aware of that happening with her son. “At one point I pulled him aside and told him, ‘If things start bothering you, you and your friends need to talk about it,’ ” Ms. Larson said. “He just smiled and said he was fine. But I think he was struggling.”
The Air Force has no requirement to give drone crews the mental health evaluations mandated for deployed troops, but it has surveyed the drone force for more than a decade and consistently found high levels of stress, cynicism and emotional exhaustion. The proportion of crew members reporting post-traumatic stress disorder and thoughts of suicide was higher than in traditional aircrews.
Starting in 2015, the Air Force began embedding human performance teams in some squadrons, staffed with chaplains, psychologists and operational physiologists offering a sympathetic ear.
But crew members said the teams were only modestly effective. A 2018 survey found that only 8 percent of drone operators used the teams. Instead, crew members said, they tend to work quietly, hoping to avoid a breakdown.
On the Run
During Captain Larson’s trial in Las Vegas, the civilian authorities were willing to forgive him, but the Air Force charged him with a litany of crimes — drug possession and distribution, making false statements to Air Force investigators and a charge unique to the armed forces: conduct unbecoming an officer. His squadron grounded him and told him not to talk to fellow pilots.
As the prosecution plodded on over two years, Captain Larson organized volunteer groups to do community service. His marriage was annulled. He read books on positive thinking and set up a meditation room in his house, said Becca Triano, his girlfriend at the time. She said he was “working hard to try to stay sane.”
The trial finally came in January 2020. His former wife and a pilot friend testified about his drug use. After deliberating for a few hours on January 17, the jury returned with guilty verdicts on nearly every count. Captain Larson was to be sentenced after a lunch break. His lawyer told him to be back in an hour. Instead he took off.
He loaded his Jeep with food and clothes and sped away, convinced that he was facing a long prison sentence, Ms. Triano said. The Air Force put a warrant out for his arrest.
By the afternoon of January 18, Captain Larson was driving north of San Francisco when the state police spotted his Jeep and pulled him over. He stopped and waited for an officer to walk up to his window. Then he gunned it — down the highway and onto a narrow dirt logging road. He pulled off into the trees and hid.
The next morning, officers spotted tire tracks; Air Force agents on foot spotted the Jeep but did not approach. Sheriff’s deputies had a better option: launching a drone.
Captain Larson was hiding behind a mossy boulder. There was no phone service. He could only record a video message for his family members. One by one, he told them that he loved them. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t go to prison, so I’m going to end this.”
As he spoke into the phone camera, he was interrupted by a buzzing. “I can hear the drones,” he said. “They’re looking for me.”
Had they found him alive, the pursuers would have told him this: The Air Force had decided not to sentence him to prison, only to dismissal.
But now, just as Captain Larson had done countless times, the officers could only study the drone footage and parse the evidence — slumped behind the boulder, shot with his own assault rifle — of another unintended death.