Solomon2
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Locked in on a mission, they often forget they're in Nevada. Capt. Mark Ferstl, a former B-52 pilot, said drone pilots typically feel more intimately involved in combat than they did when they sat in actual cockpits.
"When I flew the B-52, it was at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, and you don't even see the bombs falling," Ferstl said. "Here, you're a lot closer to the actual fight, or that's the way it seems."..
"From a personal reward standpoint, it's way more fun to climb up the ladder, throw the white scarf around your neck, and get into an F-16 cockpit," said Chambliss, a former fighter pilot who volunteered to fly drones. "But from a combat effectiveness standpoint, it's not even close.
"You can look at guys walking down a road and tell whether any of them are armed," he said. "You can zoom in from an ultra-wide to a road intersection" to look for bombs.
Though more than 95% of their missions involve gathering intelligence or watching over troops, pilots sometimes must decide whether to open fire. They operate under the same rules as pilots of fighter jets or attack helicopters. Only after going through a long checklist of safeguards are they cleared to push a black button on the throttle and squeeze a gray trigger on the joystick to release a bomb or missile.
The pilots call out "Three, two, one, rifle!" as the weapon launches and "Splash!" when it hits its target.
The job also involves confirming deaths, by drone or manned aircraft. Then crew members focus on corpses and ruined buildings.
"You see a lot of detail," Chambliss said. "We feel it, maybe not to the same degree as if we were actually there, but it affects us. Part of the job is to try to identify body parts."
or the viewpoint of the Brits:
...'It’s irrelevant where you are physically sitting,’ Oz says. 'You’re attached to the airframe, you’re attached to the view that you see, and you’re attached to the laws of armed conflict.’
He reacts with cool anger to suggestions that this mode of war reduces victims to the status of players in a video game. 'It’s a bugbear of mine because I’ve had the accusation levelled that it’s a Star Wars game. It’s anything but. If we act like it’s Star Wars, there are people in the command centre watching us and listening to what we do. The taking of human life is not something to be considered lightly. OK, they are bad guys we are killing, but they are still human beings.’
He also bridles at the suggestion that UAVs leave moral judgments to machines. 'The plane cannot start, cannot fly and cannot release a weapon without us doing it. Human beings are in the cockpit – exactly the same as when I was flying a Tornado. We just happen to be 8,000 miles away from the plane.’ -
The Reaper pilots insist their high-resolution cameras, as well as the long periods that they can stay airborne, give them more time to weigh decisions before weapons are fired.
'On a fast-jet, because of the speed you’re coming in at, you don’t have the fuel and the time to hang around. But we can sit on top of this thing for hours at a time,’ Oz says. 'We have the luxury to pick up the phone and say, look – something just doesn’t look right here.’
This recently happened when the RAF Reaper pilots saw what they thought were Taliban insurgents preparing to fire. 'But something didn’t make sense...
The mantra that the Reaper pilots repeat is 'zero expectations of civilian casualties’. They are forbidden to attack buildings if there are women and children in the area and they avoid targeting property. In Afghanistan village life, Taliban fighters are never far away from women and children.
In internal reporting the RAF has dropped the term 'compound’ because it obscures the simple truth that these are houses. As one senior commander told me, 'We’re trying to get it into the guys’ heads that this is not compound no 28, it’s 34 Acacia Drive – so you don’t hit it.’
According to Oz, 'We’ll spend hours watching some guy. There have been plenty of times when I’ve had a clearly identified enemy combatant under my crosshairs and I haven’t been able to fire at him because he’s in a village and there are civilians around. If there’s any doubt, we won’t fire. Apart from the tragedy of wounding or killing an innocent civilian, it plays straight into the hands of the enemy for propaganda – it’s a double whammy. You have to wait for your opportunity.’
It is curious that civilian casualties from drone strikes receive so much attention, while those caused by conventional attack aircraft, whose pilots are also miles away from their targets, are overlooked. But this is because anti-drone campaigners doubt the MoD’s estimates of civilian casualties...
