USAF Cuts Drone Flights As Stress Drives Off Operators 298
HughPickens.com writes: The NY Times reports that the U.S. is being forced to cut back on drone flights as America's drone operators are burning out. The Air Force is losing more drone pilots than they can train. "We're at an inflection point right now," says Col. James Cluff, the commander of the Air Force's 432nd Wing. Drone missions increased tenfold in the past 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 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. Colonel Cluff says many feel "undermanned and overworked," sapped by alternating day and night shifts with little chance for academic breaks or promotion.
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way 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 Walmart 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," says Cruff. The colonel says 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. "Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke," says Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, "that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors."
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way 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 Walmart 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," says Cruff. The colonel says 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. "Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke," says Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, "that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors."
maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:3, Interesting)
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Consider that unlike a video game, these guys are killing actual human beings on a daily basis.
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Consider that unlike a video game, these guys are killing actual human beings on a daily basis.
This, plus the fact that with any combat exercise mistakes can and will be made. That village you just bombed with your UAV turns out, after the fact, to be nothing. You just killed a bunch of men, women and children for nothing. You now have to live with that and can't even talk about it with your wife, gf, or whatever. Then you have to go back the next day and do it again knowing that you might be killing people that didn't do anything.
Tell me again how this is no big deal, no stress and you don't see the
Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:5, Funny)
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Not really daily, these days, but I'm sort of glad they're burning out. Battles should be fought by people, not avatars. When we remove the cost of war in human terms, then we've removed the fundamental disincentive against war, and that's a terrible thing for nation that claims to be peaceful. At least, that's what we used claim before 9/11. Since then it's been all war, all the time.
To be fair, I don't necessarily have a problem with drones as part of a larger strategy, but in the past few years, they
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An interesting philosophical point of view, but speaking as someone who wore a uniform? If there's a chance to prosecute a war without my being exposed to personal danger/gunfire, I'll take it. Pretty sure that all but an ate-up/tiny minority of the military think the same way.
That said, I do agree with your point: you don't own contested ground until there are a pair of your boots standing on it. It's simple, yet true.
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Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:5, Insightful)
PS: the whole secrecy thing can indeed wear on a relationship.
Years ago, when I did the "Cannot confirm or deny" thing, I spent 4 days a week working on Project Senior Trend [wikipedia.org], and 3 days in Nellis AFB in Vegas. I've lost count of the number of girlfriends I'd lost to the phenomenon of:
"So how was your week?"
"Oh, normal."
"Did you do anything fun or interesting?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary"
"C'mon, don't be so closed-up... how was your week?"
"Babe, you know I can't talk about it"
"Don't give me that shit - I saw those cuties you got on the plane with! You're fucking one of them, aren't you!?"
"No, no! It's not like that - I just can't talk about what I do up there is all!"
{heated argument ensues...}
I finally got past that by dating a chick who also worked up there as an SP (Security Police), which made things much more relaxed.
Even my wife (who I met *long* after I became a civilian) seriously asked me, point-blank, if I saw or worked with any aliens up there, and got mad when I refused to talk about it. I eventually defused it by joking about a dude named José, but it illustrates that such a job really tends to intrude on one's personal life.
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Well...
1) Denials can more often than not be just as revealing as confirmations.
2) It's a simpler thing for the typical grunt to keep in mind and perform than "confirm nothing, but deny only this stuff {gets handed a list-o-stuff}"
3) A flat non-committal "I can neither confirm or deny" routine (and variations thereof) tells absolutely nothing, which is how the folks running a top-secret project wants it.
4) Nope - I'm not going to lie -or- tell the truth about those days to the missus; Ft. Leavenworth is a l
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In my experience, most people actually talk to their SO's about what they do or did. It's not something they *never* do, but discretion is required. That said, the paranoid ones are untrustworthy anyway, so you were right to keep your mouth shut, and you are better off without them.
Re: maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:5, Insightful)
Since you don't actually kill people for a living, you shouldn't comment on the effects of it. It is not a video game and it isn't something you take lightly.
Bomber WSO.
Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:5, Informative)
Go sit a mission sometime. It's not what you think it is. Mostly it's monotonous, boring work. When there is an actual strike, it's a big deal. It's not like a video game at all, though. I promise you that.
I have sat these missions (not as a pilot) and I don't really understand the "stress" they are talking about. Other than the shift work, which can take a toll on family life, most of the folks I know doing these missions don't feel especially stressed about it.
I suspect this is a political push to change the AF standards of training required to do the job. The Army gives their UAS pilots ground training only. The AF, as far as I know, still requires full flight training. Big time and commitment difference. The AF also requires officers to do this while the Army allows enlisted, which means you get them younger, cheaper, and typically can hold onto them better because they don't have the same civilian opportunities by getting out.
Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know, maybe it might be a moral thing because they're executing people they don't know, for crimes they're not even aware of simply because they're given an order by a government that doesn't even follow its own rules and in answerable to no one?! Jesus man! They're killing people! They're killing A LOT of people, without trails. There are lots of innocents the die. Kids. Fathers. Mothers. Drone strikes aren't as precise as they have you believe.
That's why they're leaving. They're probably having nightmares at night about the people they killed who they never met; never even looked into their eyes.
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Maybe it's because NYT is a newspaper, which sells ads...
And there's a movie about a stressed out drone pilot [rottentomatoes.com] that released last month. There's always a tie-in to some sell....
====
Really, drone pilots are just that, extensions of a drone, hence are forced to act like drones during missions and need to basically fly the 'entire plane'. And that's stress by boredom--just look at airline pilots... same routine, same times, same crew, same daily grind, and usually ends with something that has to do with drugs
Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd have no compunction about blowing up bad guys on TV thousands of miles away.
Then you are not a normal person. There is no logical reason than distance should make any difference, and psychologically it makes no difference. The people in your crosshairs are just as real.
What's the problem?
There are plenty of problems. I served six years in the Marine Infantry. I never pulled trigger and directly killed someone. But I was involved in planning and coordinating actions that killed people. I never thought of the people on the other side as "bad guys". I thought of them as fellow grunts with whom I had a lot in common. They just happened to be born on the other side of a political boundary, raised in a different culture, and taught different values. That doesn't make them evil. There is also always a big level of uncertainty. Sure, the target may be carrying a rifle, but maybe he is hunting, or protecting his livestock, or part of an ad hoc village security team that we don't know about. It may be clear cut in a video game, but real life isn't like that.
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He is not. cayenne8 has mentioned several times that he is
a borderline alcoholic, has a definitive lack of empathy and is proud of both. Psychopaths aren't normal people, and that is a good thing.
Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a friend who was a drone operator. He suffers PTSD because of intense guilt. He says he knows for sure he was responsible for killing innocent civilians in Iraq, either because of bad luck, faulty intelligence or technical problems.
I'm not saying my friend should feel guilty. Civilian casualties are an unavoidable part of war. But it's easy for me to say that because I'm not the one who pulled the trigger.
I can't believe the posters who think that people can go around killing others, even if remotely, without it having psychological consequences.
Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't bet on it. I had a friend who was enlisted as a computer programmer in the AF. When the Army was having trouble finding enough people to fill all the deployment slots they had to fill they started sucking up Air Force people to fill those slots. So my friend who's computer programming job ostensibly fell under the Communications umbrella got sent to some outpost in Afghanistan to be a radio operator and because he was a Sergeant was expected to know how to run a Comms center supporting all kinds of patrols out in the field that were taking fire, as well as go on those patrols and act as their radio man. To me that demonstrated just the kind of idiocy that you can get when it isn't your own ass on the line. Some moron decided that Army communications troops and Air Force communications trooops were identical and was perfectly content to endanger a couple hundred folks by using them as such.
They also deploy lots of people to work outside of their trained fields of expertise doing everything from escorting third country nationals to driving trucks on convoys. You should absolutely not join any branch of the military, including the Coast Guard, if you don't want to be potentially sent to whatever hell hole the government decides we need to wage war in. You may not be forced to take up arms and shoot at people but once you are in they own you and will send you wherever they want regardless of logic or principle.
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Not being boots on the ground and such is leaving these guys with less sense of camaraderie than other soldiers. They don't feel compelled to re-up to fight alongside their brethren the way grunts and conventional pilots do.
The stress discussion is just a smokescreen for the fact that they
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I can't see what the stress is all about.
No, I've not been in the military
I have been in the military, though not as a pilot, and I can tell you that working in an environment where your job is to kill people is never stress free. Even if you're not in any personal danger, your body doesn't know that and will produce the exact same chemical responses. Additionally the mental stress both from being constantly alert and pulling the trigger is high. Flying an armed drone is not the same as playing Halo, no matter how superficially similar they seem.
Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:5, Insightful)
If killing another human being is "easy peasy" for you, and doesn't impart any stress into your life than you would be classified as a sociopath.
The sheer amount of ignorance in these replies is staggering. Surely you're able to understand that despite the fact that this person is viewing a screen they know the events are still real.
At this point I suppose it's wildly beyond your ability to understand why it might be a compounding factor to show up to work, kill a dozen people, and then go home to your kids every night.
Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:5, Insightful)
> into your life than you would be classified as a sociopath.
^^^^^ This.
I feel the same way, it's appalling that half the people replying are casually stating that they'd have "no problem" killing people. People who express those kinds of sentiments are the LAST people you'd want to have the power of life and death, ESPECIALLY if it's being done remotely.
I wish I could mod you up, but alas, I cannot.
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Did you miss the part about it's not always bad guys? Children being killed, and some of these pilots are parents themselves? Double-tap strikes killing first responders?
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Hate to be the wet blanket on your hypothesis here, but there is a vast difference between *saying* you'd have no problems with killing someone, and actually doing it.
If you want a civilian parallel, go hunting sometime. Something like 75-80% of first-time hunters freeze the hell up when it comes time to take the shot... and that's considered to be normal.
Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:4, Interesting)
The willingness of soldiers to fire on the enemy has been long debated. There is good evidence that most soldiers, even when they are in danger of being overrun by the enemy, don't fire their rifles (only about 30% fired against enemy in WWII). We are raised to value human life and it's really difficult to overcome that prohibition.
Interesting article here:
http://www.historynet.com/men-... [historynet.com]
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The willingness of soldiers to fire on the enemy has been long debated. There is good evidence that most soldiers, even when they are in danger of being overrun by the enemy, don't fire their rifles (only about 30% fired against enemy in WWII). We are raised to value human life and it's really difficult to overcome that prohibition. Interesting article here: http://www.historynet.com/men-... [historynet.com]
It's interesting thinking about that kind of statistic when applied to someone that's not in-danger themselves and is under the scrutiny of someone that expects on-the-job performance who's also not in-danger themselves but isn't obligated to push the button to kill. I expect it's actually easier to justify, in the stress of a firefight, not taking life as it can be blamed on the stressful situation, compared to being in an environment without that kind of external stress.
Maybe it would make sense to sh
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Part of the stress seems to be the long hours too; and it sounds like the cause is too much demand, not enough supply (of pilots).
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Here's a hint for you: IS operates in territory where they enjoy wide popular support. That means drones kill a lot of women and children in addition to "enemy combatants" which is a classification used to anyone killed who happens to have a pair of balls that already dropped. Especially children since due to high mortality and no social security, people are effectively forced to produce a lot of children to be able to survive their senior years in those regions.
And with drones having to stick around to see
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Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe it or not, people do understand that the targets of their "gameplay" are actual people, and not computer generated opponents.
Its hard to understand that because people who only play video games, we know that we're not killing real people, so we assume the feeling is similar. It's not. You know full well that those are real people, and you know from the news that some of them are quite possibly innocent. It may not be as visceral, but it still has an impact, especially when the technology lets you stay in action for long shifts while you loiter over an operational zone.
Re:maybe robots can fly the drones (Score:4, Insightful)
You sound like a psychopath.
Literally, I mean. You literally sound like a psychopath.
I wouldn't expect this to be a problem for long (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wouldn't expect this to be a problem for long (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why we're seeing an article on this in the news now. The military doesn't like to admit when it's having trouble recruiting. But this article is ammunition when someone goes to say "we need more money for more drone autonomy". And conveniently, the big drone manufacturers surely will have something expensive ready to sell them! What a coincidence!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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"I can't believe any other part of the military would push people in combat"
Exactly that. Others have said this is a pre to press for more drone autonomy when this is a basic military people management. The probably drinked the cool-aid and thought flying drones was indeed a good non-stressful 9-to-5 work. Well, there's no other problem but that they were wrong, just adjust and go ahead.
1) Stress going in and out "soldier mood"? Make the duty periods longer, just like even other non-militar professionals
Re:It's not a recruiting problem (Score:4, Interesting)
They knew about the effects of stress on soldiers who flew on combat missions into a combat zone and returned to a safe place after each mission. There's plenty of evidence for this if you look psychological assessments of the US Eight Air Force back in WW2. It looks like the lesson they drew from those experiences was that it was the exposure to combat that was the culprit and not necessarily stresses caused by participating in combat.
What needs to be identified is whether the primary contributor to stress is being able to go home each day or simply being able to go to safety after the mission. If it's the latter, which I'd be more inclined to suspect, then restricting the guys to base isn't going to help the problem and in fact may make the problem worse since the comforts they were once provided are no longer available.
Re:I wouldn't expect this to be a problem for long (Score:5, Interesting)
Some artists have been helping people in areas being targeted by US drones to create large canvas images of some of the victims and lay them flat on the ground. That way as the drone flies over and targets the area the operator will see the face of a child who was previously murdered in a similar scenario. The idea came about because drone pilots describe their targets as "bug splats", and this is a way to hopefully connect them to their potential victims in the way soldiers deployed on the ground are forced to.
Maybe that and other efforts to make pilots aware of what they are doing and how it really isn't a game, that they are killing real people when they push those buttons, is having an effort. Of course they would never admit that, hence the excuse.
Re:I wouldn't expect this to be a problem for long (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are drones singled out as the big evil in this regard? How many faces do you think F-16 or B-1B pilots see before and after they drop their bombs on the designated target? Drones haven't changed that, they just move the pilot out of harms way.
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Why are drones singled out as the big evil in this regard?
Because they are another kind of force multiplier that increases the number of people that one person can kill effectively. Anything like that will be singled out for the same kind of criticism. Unless you think killing is something which should be promoted, this seems reasonable.
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I think engaging in a modern war when there is a legal basis for said war is something that is acceptable, and if that is acceptable, then whatever can be done to remove our sides people from harms way is also acceptable.
Therefore drones are a natural, acceptable progression from manned aircraft, whether they are conducting reconnaissance or dropping ordnance. A drone doesn't increase the number of people that one person can kill effectively, in-fact the current crop of drones are a reduction in offensive
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F-16 pilots don't see much of their ground strikes. Too fast.
B-1B pilots etc don;t see much of their targets. Too fast.
What was your point again?
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Drones put an extra layer of abstraction between the pilot and murdering they are doing, hence the term "bug splat". It's just an image on a screen, like you see on TV. The high number of civilian casualties attributed to drone strikes is thought to be partially due to this disconnect, where as a pilot sitting in the aircraft in the actual country and seeing live human beings with his own eyes (maybe at the AF base, if not from the air) seems to be more restrained.
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More correctly, there's a physicality to be
Re:I wouldn't expect this to be a problem for long (Score:5, Interesting)
Pilots are not removed from it though like drone pilots are. Pilots stay in the area and can see the aftermath, they feel the impact more.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
... many of them know the ground in some insurgent-run village in Iraq better than you know the ground a few blocks from where you live. And it's the drone operators and satellite imaging people who usually do the remote BDA, not traditional pilots. Traditional pilots don't "feel the impact" more, but it does cost a great deal more, and introduce a lot mroe risk, to operate an aircraft with them on board. You seem to prefer that, for some reason. Strange.
A bomber pilot may let loose with similar guided weapons from miles away, or from 30,000 feet. He may never fly over that spot again, and may have no need to hang around doing bomb damage assessment. The drone operator may spend a month flying over the same area, gathering intelligence on individual people, vehicles, buildings
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Traditional pilots don't "feel the impact" more, but it does cost a great deal more, and introduce a lot mroe risk, to operate an aircraft with them on board. You seem to prefer that, for some reason. Strange.
It's not that strange. More risk means there is a higher threshold for committing violence.
Re:I wouldn't expect this to be a problem for long (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wouldn't expect this to be a problem for long (Score:5, Informative)
Bomber pilots and F-16 pilots don't have high resolution video of every strike. (They do with some missile strikes but not all) and usually get "visual confirmation" from other sources. Drone pilots have video the whole time and watch every second of it during strikes. Other drone pilots have to "confirm" but the shooter does see every bit of detail. Just because they aren't flying in the airspace themselves doesn't mean they don't get the impact of their actions.
As someone who grew up with an AF pilot father who flew both fighters and bombers and who now works with drone pilots regularly, I guarantee you drone pilots see far more of the damage they cause "close up" than bomber and most fighter pilots ever will.
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Pilots are not removed from it though like drone pilots are. Pilots stay in the area and can see the aftermath, they feel the impact more.
This is completely backwards. Drones are quiet. They can loiter on station for hours while the controller watches and evaluates the target. They also stay and BDA the target. Piloted jets are loud. They move fast and release their bombs with a large horizontal velocity before they can even see the target, so the bombs arrive before their sonic signature. Then they are gone, usually even faster than they arrived. They generally have no idea what the target was, or even if they hit it. The BDA, includ
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Working how? Antagonising a whole new generation of potential terrorists who see people sat in comfort 7000 miles away killing their relatives at a wedding is working to what fucking objectives?
Just because Americans aren't dying doesn't mean it's working.
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That way as the drone flies over and targets the area the operator will see the face of a child who was previously murdered in a similar scenario.
If I were trying to cause regret in the drone pilots, it wouldn't matter whether any children were killed - only whether I could persuade the drone pilots that they were.
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Too bad you're an AC. This deserves mod points, which are wasted on AC posts.
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Mod points are for making good posts more visible and it is even more important and less of a waste to give them to a good AC post as they start at zero. They are not for rewarding people with karma. I often use most of my mod points making good AC posts more visible to people reading at +1 or higher.
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whether I could persuade the drone pilots that they were.
Or weren't...A La Ender's Game. Make the drone pilot believe he is playing a training video game.
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You didn't RTFA, did you?
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They think they are. They aren't.
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Re:I wouldn't expect this to be a problem for long (Score:4, Interesting)
There was an old (I think from the 1950ies) short story by the late Robert Sheckley, called "Watchbird" which describes exactly what you have written about.
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Re:I wouldn't expect this to be a problem for long (Score:5, Insightful)
"Then we can wage "war" 24x7, 365 days a year -forever."
As if we DON"T ALREADY DO THIS.
The USAF should do what the oil companies do (Score:5, Interesting)
in manning off-shore oil rigs: two weeks on, then two weeks off.
It might not be perfect, but it's better than the current situation.
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First they have to have enough bodies - which is actually a more complicated problem than you might think. First you have to have the manpower, which is both a recruiting problem and an allocation problem (Congress only authorizes the services to have so many personnel). You've also increased the load on your training and support facilities, the latter includes everything from barracks to the gym to the clerks over in Personnel (if the base is big enough, it may be able to absorb this load without undu
Double Taps... (Score:5, Informative)
I can imagine the "double taps" where they first attack a target and then hit it again when rescuers move in adds a certain level of stress to the soldiers...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/outrage-at-cias-deadly-double-tap-drone-attacks-8174771.html [independent.co.uk]
Re:Double Taps... (Score:5, Insightful)
As the article you cite says, that was/is a practice of the CIA. The same is true for "Signature Strikes", or missling people that match your demographic target profile but haven't necessarily been observed doing insurgent things.
That said I'd wager that the stress of killing innocents, even if extremely rarely and by accident, weighs heavily on most of the USAF drone pilots. When you are actually in harms way it is a lot easier to justify your actions to yourself. But as a remote pilot thousands of miles from any threat I imagine that takes a toll.
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It is about as awful of a job as I can imagine. There have been some awful stories of having a nice night vision view of resulting body parts, and not quite dead targets. Similarly there have been tails of "dogs" that look like a small humans coming into view just after firing, only to have you commander insist it was just a "dog". Try going home feeling proud and patriotic after being that guy.
Outsource! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm amazed that drone piloting hasn't been outsourced to India already. You don't need to be a Real American Hero (TM) to fly an RC plane via satellite, so it's a waste of taxpayer's money to not get this job done in the cheapest way posible. I mean, it sounds like they've got a drone-piloting sweatshop going, in the USA, but if you want a sweatshop, the USA is not the place for it.
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Except burning taxpayer money and getting as much budget as possible to do it is one of the hidden goals here. Cost cutting need not apply.
Not a moral conundrum (Score:5, Informative)
Buried several paragraphs into the link is the real reason for faltering numbers of UAV pilots:
Re:Not a moral conundrum (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know about that. People do change over time. I remember being a teenager and talking with my grandfather about the videos he brought back from Korea. He showed a bunch of videos of the camps and the guys hanging around.... so I asked "Did you take any footage of the fighting" "Yes I took some, I used to mount the camera on the gun sometimes" "Why don't you ever show those?"....
The look of absolute horror on his face when he asked "Why would you want to see that?" is something I have not forgotten.
The similarity is a bit striking in terms of technological overpowering, here is what he told me about the battles (never did seek out his footage), he was in a half track, relaying information from the radio.
"We would be at one side a hill. You would hear a bugle call come over the hillside and then, on the radio 'they are coming over the hill', and a few seconds later, there would be men coming over the hill right at our machine guns, and we would just mow them all down" That is really all he ever has to say about it.
People generally don't like war too much who actually have to see it. Viet Nam wasn't a shit storm domestically because it was particularly bad compared to other justifications for conflict. The Gulf of Tonkin lie is about par for the course on how wars get started. The real difference was the journalists actually showing people war directly.
Now all footage is carefully coreographed and any gore avoided like the plague because, the truth doesn't drum up support. However, you can't hide the truth from the people you ask to fight.
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The look of absolute horror on his face when he asked "Why would you want to see that?" is something I have not forgotten.
I've noticed veterans that have been in combat rarely talk about it. When they do, a common theme is how chaotic it was. And those who talk a lot about battles and firefights were never in one.
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video is slang, Im sure it was 8mm film. A lot of 8mm film has been converted to video.
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You are indeed correct, it was film. On reels, in fact, its still on reels. Hell, he didn't show any of them for years because the motor on his projector burned out and when he got a new one it was the wrong speed, and he and I had to figure out how to get it to play at the right speed.
I grew up in the 80s/90s man, its all video to me.
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> So, what was the Camera? Kodak? Bolex? Did Gramps get the film developed locally, or did he save
> the reels for Stateside? If there is a good collection, have you contacted the Library Of Congress?
> They love that sort of stuff.
Honestly, I have considered once or twice that I should find a better home for them than the lock box in the basement where he kept them. The camera was long gone (or put away, it might still be in the house stashed somewhere, I imagine if it is we will find it after my gr
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Meh...pretty much the same for any skilled technology position in the armed forces.
You don't join the armed forces to become rich. That's what Politics is for.
Re:Not a moral conundrum (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but that just restates the problem: drone operator is a low-status, dead-end job within the military. It's not that the huge, lucrative, civilian drone operator market is sucking the ranks dry, it's that the job offers career prospects and job satisfaction that aren't in line with the abilities it demands.
This in turn suggests there is something broken with the leadership of the Air Force -- which should come as no surprising given that we've heard exactly the same kind of stories of career burnout in officers who man nuclear missile launch sites. They're not paying attention to vital but non-glamorous missions.
This same kind of effect (Score:4, Interesting)
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>> came during the Vietnam war when soldiers would be fighting one day and a few days later, back home
It also happened during the first World War, when men would be regularly rotated from the static lines of trenches out back to civilization using a super-efficient system of trains and ships. See http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/... [iwm.org.uk] etc.
Does this mean Texas is safe? (Score:4, Funny)
No pilots for the drones means Obama's JADE HELM 15 invasion of Texas is postponed?
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He has to finish confiscating everyone's guns before the invasion can start.
The Drone Channel (Score:2)
I just realized, the drone streaming video is reality TV for the military and it's a hit!!
Imagine the commercial breaks!!
Take a lesson ... (Score:2)
USAF Drone Pilot Simulator 2015 (Score:2)
.
I don't blame them (Score:2, Insightful)
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Now? I don't see what's changed, aside from public opinion.
Of course, most join because they cannot afford education, or simply don't know what else to do at eighteen, and some have bought into the Terrorism Scare.
Hi, honey! Kill anyone today? (Score:3)
Day ain't over yet.
Seriously, though. I wonder why they don't to the drone equivalent of radiologists Nighthawk service. Set up a control base in Australia and run ops there for half the day.
What about drone squadron commanders? (Score:2)
Are the drone squadron commanding officers burning out too? It seems likely that they share the same high stress and poor prospects for promotion as their pilots. You have to wonder then, how far up the chain of command does this problem extend? And therefore, will we have to auotmate not only the pilots, but the next two higher levels of command as well, perhaps up to base commander?
Of course, if we do, the command to take each kill shot will have to be fully automated, since no colonel-level commander
You think THEY have it bad... (Score:2)
What do you think the guys manning the nuclear missiles are going though when they sit in the underground bunker for 24 hours straight waiting for the half functioning phone to ring so they can end the world?
Being in the USAF is a lousy job for a lot of people. Flying drones has got to be one of the worst I can think of. Yea you are a pilot, but you literally fly a desk in a shipping container chained to the apron at some military base in the USA. All the "action" takes place at odd hours compared to you
They just need to hire more sociopaths (Score:2, Insightful)
This should be no problem. They just need to hire more sociopaths and psychopaths. Corporate America is filled with such people, most of whom are middle managers. Other areas to mine are collection agencies, repo agencies, and Audi drivers. A lot of those people would be perfectly content to spend all day killing humans remotely, then going home to the wife and kids. The military just needs to lower their physical standards a bit.
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What sort of mission do these drones fly where even a 2000msec latency would matter?
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What sort of mission do these drones fly where even a 2000msec latency would matter?
Seems like 2 seconds would be a significant delay if you're firing guns or shooting missiles. I'm guessing that computers probably help to compensate for the difference as long as you tagged your targets in advance.
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so I have a sneaking suspicion the military has also worked this one out.
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Seems like 2 seconds would be a significant delay if you're firing guns or shooting missiles.
The drones don't have guns. The missles/bombs are GPS guided. You set the coordinates to those of the target. The latency doesn't matter much.
It is far less expensive to station a serviceman in Nevada than in Khandahar.
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It definitely counts as logged flight hours. When this whole thing started all of those pilots were officers, and trust me an officer pilot would never let a flight hour go uncounted because it directly affects their pay.
Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation. That said I don't know if it is still an issue but I knew a man who was a commercial airline pilot and it didn't really seem like that great of a gig. He was making so
Re:How does "drone time" look like on your logbook (Score:4, Informative)
I think it's only the pilots of big planes at major carriers that make the giant salaries. I knew a guy flying for one of the turboprop "puddlejumper" affiliates of a major carrier who was making like $19k a year.
It seems kind of ironic to me that pilots who arguably have to do more hands-on aviation in smaller planes (and often flying into smaller airports) get paid less than pilots who fly highly automated planes into major airports, even if the larger planes carry more people.
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I think it's only the pilots of big planes at major carriers that make the giant salaries. I knew a guy flying for one of the turboprop "puddlejumper" affiliates of a major carrier who was making like $19k a year.
$19k? Recently? I'm pretty sure that's below the poverty line. And $35k isn't much above it. That's not very much for all the responsibility and training required.
Re:How does "drone time" look like on your logbook (Score:5, Informative)
The aviation industry is kind of a Ponzi scheme. New pilots become instructors as soon as they can for barely minimum wage just so they can rack up flight hours on someone else's dime. Similarly they will have to pay to get multi-engine trained, then will turn around and work for nothing just to rack up enough multi-engine hours at some backwater commuter service as soon as they are able. Soon you see the "opportunity" to fly for a regional and get to rack up hours on a real plane. Making it big at a real airline is the light at the end of the tunnel, but countless others drop out due to overwhelming debt and impoverishment.
It takes thousands and thousands of flight hours to even be considered as a pilot for any airline you have actually heard of, and those hours would cost hundreds or even thousand per hour if you bought them yourself. So you offer up your labor for almost free just to get the flight hours on each successive rung of the ladder.
A lot of this hit the fan about 10 years ago when a crash was partially blamed on the pilot working two jobs, being overtired and overstressed, and then crashing with a load of passengers. People were shocked at an airline pilot would have trouble feeding himself on just one job. I don't think much has changed since then.
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Being a pilot is one of those jobs where you have to really love what you do because the pay is too low to be in it just for the money. It's cheaper though that owning and flying your own plane all the time.
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an officer pilot would never let a flight hour go uncounted because it directly affects their pay
I mean in the civilian sector. You can't log simulator hours (except maybe the absolute top-tier type 7 ones) into your logbook as full value flight hours, so how would this crap count?
Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation.
Which is in no way different to your standard IR, which all airline pilots are required to have anyway. Moreover, first thing they teach you in IR training is "don't trust your sense of motion". If anything, these static control stations are even worse, because they don't teach you to ignore conflicting motion sensations.
I knew a man who was a commercial airline pilot and it didn't really seem like that great of a gig
That
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You are right, they just need a longer commute to be able to de-stress from the day a bit more before getting home to the wife and kiddies..