A British Reaper drone taxis across a runway in southern Afghanistan. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is about the size of a light aircraft. Circling thousands of feet above the ground for hours at a time, armed with deadly hellfire missiles, it feeds live pictures to the soldiers below. But while those on the ground might have just started the evening shift in Kandahar, the drone's two-man pilot team will be watching dawn rise 7,000 miles to the west, in an air-conditioned room on Creech Air Force base in the middle of the Nevada desert.
Britain bought its first Reaper drones under an "urgent operational requirement" in October 2007, shipping the machines to Afghanistan, while dispatching a 50-strong RAF contingent of pilots and support staff to the US. But Britain's small UAV fleet is dwarfed by America's. The US now spends $0.5bn annually on drone development, and its fleet has grown from 300 to nearly 7,000 since 2002. In the last year the US military doubled the number of combat hour flown by its drone army.
In his book,Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution argues that this new generation of warrior—both human and machine—raises troubling legal and ethical questions about the nature of wars. But it is the human dimension that is most challenging.
Reliance on drones technology is creating an unusual new generation of soldier, such as Private Joel Clark, a teenager who flunked out of high school but became one of the best drone pilots in the US navy. In turn he became a senior drone instructor at the equivalent of the US air force "top gun" academy, made famous by the 1986 Tom Cruise film.
Both the British and US military have used drones since the mid-1960s, primarily for spying and intelligence gathering. But it was the addition of missiles to the now famous Predators that made unorthodox UAV pilots like Clark an even more important part of modern military strategy.
Since then drones have seen increasing action in Iraq and Afghanistan, lately attracting controversy for their role in hunting missions deep inside the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. Over two dozen such attacks since August 2008 (including four during the first month of the Obama presidency) have killed an estimated 300 people, among them women and children. The US military sees them as effective counterinsurgency tools; critics claim that civilian casualties play into the hands of local militias.
Beyond their ability to target militant Islamists, drones change the way war is fought in other ways. Each is equipped with advanced cameras capable of streaming live video back to an operations centre. To authorise a strike, British pilots in Nevada can speak, in real time, to senior commanders based at military headquarters in Northwood and military lawyers in London. During the first Iraq war the decision to attack a target could take hours, even days. But now what the military refer to as the "kill chain"—the decisions needed between finding a target and destroying it—has been radically shortened, sometimes to a matter of minutes.
Such fast-paced drama has not been lost on Hollywood. Ridley Scott's film Body of Lies (2008), for instance, shows a CIA chief ordering strikes from his mobile phone while taking his children to school. Such portrayals may exaggerate both the military capability and the drama of drone operations, but they do highlight an issue that increasingly worries military strategists.
Drone pilots, and the sensor operators who work alongside them, often operate thousands of miles away from the battlefront. Nonetheless, many show signs of psychological stress. The mental strain of operating in the killing zone one minute and driving home to be with their families or watch their children play football the next, requires them to make huge adjustments to their lives. A Reaper mission in which you have watched an enemy combatant die in a horrific explosion is certainly not a topic of conversation for the dinner table. It been reported that US air force commanders have had to call in chaplains, psychologists and psychiatrists to help ease the mental strain on these remote-control warriors.
Such strains are only likely to grow in the future. Singer claims that the number of pilots training to fly drones now outstrips those planning to get into a cockpit. For now, only experienced pilots can take control of drones mounted with weapons, although teenage soldiers are already trained on smaller models, such as the Desert Hawk III. But as more and more UAVs come into service it seems certain that younger, less experienced pilots will have to take the controls. And as drone technology becomes more complex, and more lethal, so the likelihood increases that they will be controlled by the hands of young soldiers, operating a joystick and keypad much like the PlayStation or Xbox they own at home.
At approximately £12m a piece, drones don't come cheap. But, in the end, the military's remote control revolution may be undermined more by the human cost on its new generation of young pilots.
