Air Force Says Robot Warriors Exhausted
AthertonKD
at 08:40 AM Jan 7 2015
Air Force Says Robot Warriors Exhausted
Reaper Over Joint Base Balad In Iraq
Kevin J. Gruenwald, U.S. Air Force, via Wikimedia Commons
Drones // 

A leaked internal memo says the Air Force's drone division is not only unmanned, but understaffed and overworked. Coming shortly before a major defense budget battle, the memo is a fascinating window into the strange bureaucratic politics of drones within the Air Force. Drones are largely how the Air Force fights insurgencies, but the high demand for drones and the limited advancement opportunities for drone pilots means there just aren't enough pilots to go around.

 

Contrary to the popular understanding of drones as killer robots, the Predators and Reapers primarily used by the Air Force are unmanned only in the sense that they lack an onboard pilot. Within the Air Force, the preferred term for such craft is “remotely piloted aircraft” (RPA), which emphasizes the humans involved in flying the plane, even if they're in Nevada while the drone is above Afghanistan. And while drones like the Predator and Reaper only require a few people to fly at a time, they can fly for up to 24 hours straight, meaning those crews need to switch out mid-flight.

 

Reaper Over Joint Base Balad In Iraq
Richard Lisum, U.S. Air Force, via Wikimedia Commons

As Dave Majumdar writes at the Daily Beast, piloting is hardly the only part of operating a drone that requires personnel.

In addition to the pilots who “fly” the MQ-1s and MQ-9s, there are sensor operators who work the cameras and other intelligence-gathering hardware onboard the unmanned aircraft. Further, there are maintenance crews who have to fix those drones. Perhaps most crucially, drones require hundreds of intelligence analysts who have to comb through thousands of hours of video surveillance footage to understand what the flight crews are watching.

“Some have looked at this as a problem with just RPA pilots and the number of them required for these CAPs, but that ignores the tail required for supporting RPA operations,” a senior Air Force official said. “This tail requires hundreds of man-hours to support every hour of flight in forward operations, maintenance, and most starkly in the processing, exploitation, and dissemination of the intelligence that RPAs create.”

The memo notes that the Air Force is currently flying with eight crew for every four-drone patrol, when ideally they'd have 10 members per patrol. High demand for drone patrols in the recent war against ISIS may be the catalyst for the memo, but the problems of supplying drone pilots in the Air Force go back years. In 2013, the Department of Defense floated the idea of a distinguished service medal for important roles removed from combat, such as piloting drones, but the DOD withdrew the medal after outcry over its place in the medal hierarchy. Lack of recognition may contribute to drone pilot attrition—drone pilots quit at three times the rate of manned aircraft pilots. And despite being physically far from combat, drone pilots get a close view of the death and destruction, which can lead to mental health challenges and cause post traumatic stress disorder.

[The Daily Beast]

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