Stress causes AF to reduce drone use
As demand for their missions increases, operators burning out.
CREECH AIR FORCE BASE, NEV. — After a decade of waging long-distance war through their video screens, America’s drone operators are burning out, and the Air Force is being forced to cut back on the flights even as military and intelligence officials are demanding more over intensifying combat zones in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
The Air Force plans to trim the flights by the armed surveillance drones to 60 a day by October from a recent peak of 65 as it deals with the first serious exodus of the crew members who helped usher in the era of war by remote control.
Air Force officials said that this year they would lose more drone pilots, who are worn down by the unique stresses of their work, than they can train.
“We’re at an inflection point right now,” said Col. James Cluff, the commander of the Air Force’s 432nd Wing, which runs the drone operations from this desert outpost about 45 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The cut in flights is an abrupt shift for the Air Force. Drone missions increased tenfold in the last decade, relentlessly pushing the operators in an effort to meet the insatiable demand for streaming video of insurgent activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones, including Somalia, Libya and now Syria.
The reduction could also create problems for the CIA, which has used Air Force pilots to conduct drone missile attacks on terrorism suspects in Pakistan and Yemen, government officials said. And the slowdown comes just as military advances by the Islamic State have placed a new premium on aerial surveillance and counterattacks.
Some top Pentagon officials had hoped to continue increasing the number of daily drone flights to more than 70. But Defense Secretary Ash Carter recently signed off on the cuts after it became apparent that the system was at the breaking point, Air Force officials said.
The biggest problem is that a significant number of the 1,200 pilots are completing their obligation to the Air Force and are opting to leave. In a recent interview, Cluff said that many feel “undermanned and overworked,” sapped by alternating day and night shifts with little chance for academic breaks or promotion.
At the same time, a training program is producing only about half of the new pilots that the service needs because the Air Force had to reassign instructors to the flight line to expand the number of flights over the last few years.
Cluff said top Pentagon officials thought last year that the Air Force could safely reduce the number of daily flights as military operations in Afghanistan wound down. But, he said, “the world situation changed,” with the rapid emergence of the Islamic State, and the demand for the drones shot up again.
Officials say that since August, Predator and Reaper drones have conducted 3,300 sorties and 875 missile and bomb strikes in Iraq against the Islamic State.
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.
“Having our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and thinking, ‘All right, I’ve got my war face on, and I’m going to the fight,’ and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Wal-Mart to pick up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home — and the fact that you can’t talk about most of what you do at home — all those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family, putting pressure on the airman,” Cluff said.
While most of the pilots and camera operators feel comfortable killing insurgents who are threatening U.S. troops, interviews with about 100 pilots and sensor operators for an internal study that has not yet been released, he added, found that the fear of occasionally causing civilian casualties was another major cause of stress, even more than seeing the gory aftermath of the missile strikes in general.
A Defense Department study in 2013, the first of its kind, found that drone pilots had experienced mental health problems such as depression, anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Trevor Tasin, a pilot who retired as a major in 2014 after flying Predator drones and training new pilots, called the work “brutal, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”
But Tasin said being a drone pilot was “not like being on the ground” during combat. “You are not getting blood all over yourself,” he said. “Your buddy is not getting killed.”
The exodus from the drone program might be caused in part by the lure of the private sector, Tasin said, noting that military drone operators can earn four times their salary working for private defense contractors. In January, in an attempt to retain drone operators, the Air Force doubled incentive pay to $18,000 per year.
Another former pilot, Bruce Black, was part of a team that watched Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, for 600 hours before he was killed by a bomb from a manned aircraft.
“After something like that, you come home and have to make all the little choices about the kids’ clothes or if I parked in the right place,” said Black, who retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2013. “And after making life-and-death decisions all day, it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to care.”
Cluff said the idea behind the reduction in flights was “to come back a little bit off of 65 to allow some breathing room” to replenish the pool of instructors and recruits.
The Air Force also has tried to ease the stress by creating a human performance team, led by a psychologist and including doctors and chaplains who have been granted top-secret clearances so they can meet with pilots and camera operators anywhere in the facility if they are troubled.
Cluff invited a number of reporters to the Creech base last week to discuss some of these issues. It was the first time in several years that the Air Force had allowed reporters onto the base, which has been considered the heart of drone operations since 2005.
The colonel said the stress on the operators belied a complaint by some critics that flying drones was like playing a video game or that pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made it psychologically easier for them to kill.
He also said that the retention difficulties underscore that while the planes themselves are unmanned, they need hundreds of pilots, sensor operators, intelligence analysts and launch and recovery specialists in foreign countries to operate.
Some of the crews still fly their missions inside sand-colored and air-conditioned trailers baking in the desert sun here, while other cockpit setups filled with map and data screens have been created inside new mission center buildings.