How US Drone Warfare Actually Works | Authorized Account | Insider

[00:00] nearly 10 years in the US Air Force  as an MQ-9 Reaper sensor operator. I   logged over 3,000 combat hours. This is  everything I'm authorized to tell you.

[00:14] Being physically separated, you know, 7500  miles away from the target, you're having to   take a life or watch things happen that you have  no control over whatsoever. And then you have to   go home and deal with dinner and deal with kids  birthdays and deal with anniversaries. and you  

[00:29] just watched absolutely horrendous things happen  on a screen and there's no way to escape it. When we're surveilling the targets, usually  there's many many different things we could  

[00:43] looking be looking for. Sometimes it was just,  hey, does this person have a weapon? Is this   person trying to plant an IED on the side  of the road? Or is this person, you know,   trying to pass a note? Or is it a certain  individual that we're looking for? It was  

[00:58] dependent on what type of target we were on for  the day, but most of the time, you know, there   was some type of trigger event. Either it could be  someone, all right, if they're actively digging,   um, and, you know, we confirm that they have a  weapon, uh, and an an IED, uh, then that's enough,  

[01:14] you know, to check a box and say, yes, now we can  take out that target. Where if all of a sudden   they start actively shooting unfriendly forces,  that was usually enough to go, yes, you know,   we can we can employ uh on this target. Sometimes  it could be that short of just someone says, "Hey,  

[01:28] there's a person shooting a mortar at a base", and  we get eyes on and within 30 seconds we're pulling   a trigger. As you can see, mortar tubes light up  like a Fourth of July show uh in infrared. So,  

[01:40] it's really easy to find an active mortar tube.  We don't have any other information. It's just   that this is a bad guy. Everything's correlated  uh here. There's other times that we would watch   people for days, weeks, months. Um, we had one  target at our unit that I think we watched for  

[01:57] six years uh before we finally happened had the  opportunity to take them out. Usually when we were   tracking patterns of life um it would be things  like you'd watch somebody wake up for the day,   go feed their goats, go play with their kids,  hug their wife, drive their family somewhere,  

[02:14] whatever. But then all of a sudden it turns  and they're starting to follow somebody or   walk or meet with somebody. Sometimes it was just  following somebody through a market building all   day, which made it very difficult just because  you're in very high density areas with a ton  

[02:29] of people, a ton of vehicles. So, you're really  trying to pull out details specifically of that   target and make sure that you don't lose them.  You had a electrooptical uh being the day TV   camera that you could see colors and that was  obviously very good for targeting and tracking  

[02:45] cuz you can pull a lot of detail from, you know,  a colored image than you can a black and white   image. I always tell people that, you know,  I could tell you what color a license plate   is. I can't tell you exactly what the license  plate says. And then the infrared was black  

[02:58] and white. You can gain your own information from  pulling out heat signatures and things like that.   Sometimes one wheel would run hotter than the  other four uh on a vehicle. And so then we knew,  

[03:10] all right, that's our vehicle. Um  because that back right wheel is hot. So a drone strike uh is carried out in multiple  ways. It's like a surgeon. You're preparing and  

[03:25] thing all as methodical as possible. The chain  of command is going to be you know you're based   off your intelligence whether that's what you're  collecting whether you're collecting like signals  

[03:39] intelligence things like that with it. So there's  many people that are within the chain that's that   you know pair everything together and say yes  because we watched this video of them from three   years ago and correlated it with what you're  seeing right now along with 10 other things  

[03:55] and we're we're 99% confident this is the same  person and or it could be as simple as this is   an active threat. We need to take him out now.  And then usually, you know, we would pass on  

[04:08] the information to, you know, our pilot that was  the lead for the day. Then they would run through   their own chain of command um with it and then  essentially come back with authorization saying,   "Yes, we authorize you to conduct that strike."  Uh sometimes that could take hours, sometimes that  

[04:24] could take seconds. Usually the decisions that  were being made were done uh you know outside of   our room. But that's the beauty of what we did is  you could send the real-time feed anywhere in the   world to put this information right in front of  people and allow them to make realtime calls. With  

[04:40] the aircraft, uh you've got, you know, everything,  every munition on it for the most part is laser   guided. The laser comes from the camera, shines  down, and there's a little reticle on the screen,  

[04:52] a little crosshairs that wherever I move, the  laser is in the middle of. If I drag it to the   right, well, then my missile is going to start  guiding to the right. Because of that, I had to be   extremely precise in that time. And most time of  flights of a missile is between 30 and 40 seconds.  

[05:07] That was usually um the correlation between the  two uh with the laser and the crosshairs was   wherever that got moved, that's where the missile  went. The difference between a drone pilot and a   drone sensor operator is the pilot uh you think of  as the person that is controlling the plane flying  

[05:23] it to where it needs to be in a point in space.  They are utilizing what we call stick and rudder   and the sensor operator is one that controls the  camera on the aircraft actively following targets,   manipulating it to pull out details, contrast,  brightness, gain level, things like that.  

[05:39] And then the pilot is the one that actively pulls  the trigger and employs a weapon, while the sensor   operator is the one that is actually lasing in  that weapon. Everything is a two-part process.   During any strike, my responsibility as a sensor  operator was to essentially back the pilot up on  

[05:57] the entire strike flow. So making sure that, you  know, if they were going to pull a trigger at a   certain range um from the target that they were at  that range uh and they were holding in the correct  

[06:09] place to do that. Once we were nosed to the target  and driving in, the pilot would pull the trigger,   the weapon would come off the rail, it would  cause a screen to go fuzzy. It's good to do with   the missile plume. And then once that cleared, if  it was a moving vehicle or something like that,  

[06:25] I would try to get a track on it. It was  again this trying to manipulate the picture,   manipulate the camera, um make sure the pilot's  doing what they're supposed to be doing,   hit the target. And then for the next 30 seconds,  it's all on me to make sure that wherever I move  

[06:44] my crosshairs, that missiles that missile's going.  So, I've got to be insanely steady uh with how I,   you know, move those crosshairs so that way I  don't miss my target. The reason that the pilot   and the sensor operator is a is a twoerson crew  um right is one just because at least right now  

[07:01] the technology while they've tried it just doesn't  work uh it's too it's way too technical especially   on the sensor operator side um and needing to  be able to make real-time decisions and changes   uh and things like that. I mean, they attempted  to even put technology in it 20 years ago to say,  

[07:17] "Hey, snap to these targets and look  here." But because of, you know,   magnetic fields and rotational drift and  things like that, um, with the Earth itself,   it doesn't work that way. You you can't get  something to fixate that precisely onto a target,  

[07:33] uh, when you have so many moving parts to it. Um,  so the technology just really isn't there yet.   you can't train a computer to do or you  can't train one person to do both jobs.

[07:48] This aircraft has a 66-foot wingspan. So, it's pretty big. It's not the little quadcopters that people see buzzing around   and everything else uh out there. This is a,  you know, full-size aircraft and it's controlled  

[08:03] uh either line of sight, so needing a direct  connection to the aircraft or via satellite   communication um by bouncing signals uh  into the sky off satellites around the   curvature of the earth and then getting into  um wherever it's operating. The MQ-9 usually  

[08:20] sounded like any really other like turborop  aircraft. We always joked about the the MQ-1,   the smaller one sounding like a lawn mower  because of the snowmobile engine it had on it,   but the MQ-9 was, you know, was a 900 shaft  horsepower engine on it was pretty big size.  

[08:35] And so you still had to worry about the sound  signature, but it it just sounded like, you know,   any other aircraft flying above your head. And  because we operate at like 20 to 30,000 ft,   you know, typical like airliner altitude,  unless you were in the right spot,  

[08:49] like being downwind from it, you could pick it  up. But most of the time we were so good with   our audio signature unless you were really low  on the ground. Um, you you never really heard it.

[09:05] I had one strike that uh I was with a newer pilot  um that I don't think they had struck before. So   this was their first time. You know, I was fairly  seasoned at the time. We went got set up on the   target. We knew exactly what we were going to  do. was a vehicle next to a building out in the  

[09:21] open. The guy was just sitting outside his car,  pretty about as straightforward as it can come   for a target. And it was like, "Okay, let's go  ahead and turn in." Um, and right when we got our   clear to engage call, um, which is always the call  that we were waiting for. Uh, at that point once  

[09:37] it came across the radio, the expectation was the  trigger was pulled. Um, my laser is already on and   then I'm at that point guiding. I waited for that  individual to pull the trigger uh when we got the  

[09:49] clearance call and they didn't. And then instead  I heard, "Okay, is everybody ready?" And I went,   "What the heck?" You know, I looked over and  I'm like, "Pull the flipping trigger right   now." Because that was their responsibility.  That was what they were supposed to do in that  

[10:04] moment. Because any second we delayed, we let  any external factor potentially come into play,   right? Whether that's a person showing up or the  person just getting into the vehicle and leaving,   we didn't know what was going to happen.  And so anytime that we it was, you know,  

[10:17] a nice clear-cut situation like that, you wanted  to move as fast as possible to capitalize on it.   bus full of nuns is uh the what we always call the  proverbial bus full of nuns saying that any given   time when you're employing a weapon you know a  bus that is figuratively uh full of uh nuns on it  

[10:35] um could be driving into that you know target area  things like that so it's essentially comes down to   you you always have to plan for the unplanned so  needing to focus on on you know what could happen   um and while you hope nothing does you always  have to be prepared for it we had one time where  

[10:51] we had to an abort strike um as all of a sudden  the vehicle started moving um and they started   driving towards a gas station and we didn't want  to obviously have our weapons impact next to a  

[11:04] gas station. Uh so we aborted it and you know  usually with that is is the rule is you're going   90° off from wherever your target is and you're  utilizing maps that you have up to be able to  

[11:16] quickly make decisions within split seconds of  exactly where I'm going to shift that weapon.   hope to God nobody's standing there and hope that  you know it's a wide open field. Guess like I said   we try to control as much as we can but at the end  of the day there's only so much you can. So with  

[11:31] that one we shift we shifted uh the missile  off to a field and it impacted in the field   um you know 200 m away and everything was a-okay.  Um sure the person on the ground was like what in  

[11:44] the heck? Um but past that uh you know it all went  by the book. A lot of the parameters in aborting a   strike is set around how important the person is,  right? If it's somebody that's super high value,  

[11:57] you know, an immediate threat, it's going to take  a lot a lot more to abort that strike than there   would be if it's just somebody, you know, super  low level. There's so many decision makers when   an abort gets called. Sometimes that can be on  the crew. Some that can sometimes that can come  

[12:12] from way high up in the chain of command uh as  well that they hold the authority on the board.   One of the most important things when you're  striking a target is making sure is minimizing the   sonic boom of the missile because depending on how  far uh off of the nose of the aircraft you get,  

[12:29] the farther I get away from that, the loud  the longer the sonic boom is, which just gives   somebody the ability to hear, you know, the the  missile. So the aircraft is driven to a certain   point in space at that time and then a trigger  is pulled to make sure that this comes in at the  

[12:46] exact angle it needs to because I can't have a  weapon that comes into the roof of a building   and punches out the side uh of the room because I  didn't do my angles correctly. So we had a lot of  

[12:59] programs and things like that that would do the  math for us, but it was a lot of interpolation   uh of the data and making sure that what  we were planning for we actually executed.

[13:14] My ground control station was the base outside  Las Vegas Cree Air Force Base. We operated there   while our plane was 7,500 miles around the world,  you know, in Afghanistan. This is about a 30x10   ft kind of shipping container-looking box, if  you will. It had nice padded carpeted walls and  

[13:30] a ton of, you know, servers and electronics.  So, usually they're pretty cool temperature-   wise just because you've got a ton of, you know,  electronics running throughout the room uh there   that you have to keep cold. And then usually you  had dim lighting throughout because any type of  

[13:44] bright lights would cause glare on the screen.  And then you had usually two different keyboards,   two different mice, eight different screens  that you were looking at at any given time.   We did shift work. So, you know, you were on  8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m. to midnight,  

[13:58] midnight to 8:00 a.m. uh rotation. A day in the  life was usually wake up, you know, 6:00 a.m.   throw the flight suit on. I'd get in, sit down in  a what we call mass brief, essentially briefing   the entire team that was flying that night. You  flew with the same people for the most part every  

[14:14] night. You'd get the briefing, you'd get the  things like the intelligence of what's going on,   right? Is there specific target factors that we  need to worry about? That could be, you know,   just basic target data on the person, how many  kids they have, you know, who their wife is,  

[14:29] what color vehicle they drive, what compound they  stay at. Um, and then the weather, needing to know   mission itself. And then you get farmed out on  who you were flying with for the night. Uh and  

[14:44] that could be anything which you know turned into  some some grueling nights and some long shifts and   things like that because you were having to sit  for six, seven, eight, sometimes 10 hours and some   some people did 12 uh pretty regularly. The shift  work itself was just grueling just because of how  

[15:01] quick we had to rotate. You know, you're trying to  fight your circadium rhythm at that point um which   just wasn't happening. Um, so then you get less  and less sleep and things like that that were um,   obviously impactful in doing such a high operation  tempo mission and trying to run on like two to  

[15:17] three hours of sleep. I was stationed at Creech  for 4 years. Never fell asleep in the seats or   fell asleep during a mission, but there was plenty  of people that did, you know, just because of the   the crazy operation tempo that we operated at. We  just white knuckled through it all. It was just  

[15:32] whatever. Grab another energy drink, grab another  cup of coffee or some popcorn with jalapenos in   it and hope that it does the trick. Flipping  the switch is used to talk about, you know,   going from work to home and home to work. I live  by myself for the most most of the time. Uh so,  

[15:49] you know, there's plenty of times where it was  simple things like, you know, I left the trash   can out and some HOA is mad at me or something uh  for it. But I got to bring that into work with me.   you know, I got to try to flip that switch off  and say, "Okay, I got to deal with that at,  

[16:03] you know, 10 hours from now because for the  next 10 hours, I need to worry about my job." I enlisted when I was 18 years old. I was fresh  out of high school. I didn't feel like college  

[16:19] thing to do when I got out of high school was to  do one of those two things, or the military. Uh,   so I picked the third option and and joined the  military. And I had a recruiter talk to me about  

[16:32] drones and, you know, said, "Hey, this is what  you're going to be doing. You're going be watching   convoys and things like that." And I thought that  sounded pretty cool. So, I said, "All right, let's   go ahead and do it." And jumped on. When I joined  the military, uh, there wasn't a lot of info on  

[16:46] what the job even was. It was just, "Hey, you're  on drones and you're controlling a camera." Uh,   that's really all anybody knew, especially back  in 2010. What I was expecting when I joined was   that I was going to be what we call overwatch  for convoys, things like that, and being able  

[17:02] to kind of provide that eye in the sky, if you  will. Didn't realize how what we call tip of   the spear it really was. One of the first times  that I realized that I was going to be actively  

[17:14] employing weapons uh on this aircraft was about  halfway through my training when somebody made a   comment just I think in a break room or something  like that. Looking back on it, I don't know if I   was necessarily too young, but definitely wasn't  set up for what the expectations were and how  

[17:32] grueling of a job it was going to be. Cuz a lot of  jobs are like that within the military. You know,   you set 18, 19 year olds to go out and do  things and nobody's preparing them for it.

[17:49] My path for training was going through basic  military training at 8 weeks. Then I went to   a air crew fundamentals training past that. I  think that one was three to four weeks long. I   trained in New Mexico at Halman Air Force Base  for was about 6-month program what they call  

[18:05] initial qualification training. The first time  that you get hands-on with the aircraft sitting   in a ground control station because obviously  you're not physically, you know, inside the   aircraft. After you complete that 6 months, you  get moved on to your combat unit and go through  

[18:18] what's called mission qualification training.  can vary in length as far as how long that goes,   but it's specific to that unit because not every  unit does the same mission set. Our training   uh was a combination of academics um simulator  training and also live flight events. Every time  

[18:37] you were hitting a certain phase, you would go  through academic training uh on it. You know,   learn all there was to about it, the regulations,  the rules, um what you could do when. Then you'd   go through simulator training, uh, essentially  something that mimicked the ground control  

[18:52] station. You'd go in and you'd brief the event.  You'd have two instructors, one for the pilot, one   for the sensor. Two students then, one sensor, one  pilot, that would all get talked through really   what the mission was for the day. Very similar to  how a fighter pilot trains. The simulators were  

[19:09] can do things that are different and dangerous and  press that reset button where the live flight you   didn't have that option. You start out with just  the basics of this is what button means what. And  

[19:23] there's a lot of them. You know what the menus are  and how to navigate them and how to utilize those   buttons and menus to then get into these events  and pair it with a mission. The live flights   were done the exact same way. We trained on close  air support, strike coordination, reconnaissance,  

[19:39] air interdiction, combat search and rescue even.  There's only a handful that I saw that actually   washed out through the initial training of it.  But most of the time when people washed out,   it wasn't the traditional, you know, way that  you would in like SEALs training or something  

[19:55] like that. It was more so somebody just threw a  hand up and said, "I can't do this anymore." they   were ushered out quietly uh as much as possible  just because you didn't want to have it impact   everybody else around you. There was definitely a  learning curve on our on our side. The simulators  

[20:10] were notably and especially 15 years ago were  notably poor when it came down to the image   quality, different things like that. We called  them simisms. Ah, that's a simism. Like we can't   do anything about it. So, you just have to wait  until you get into the get into the into the jet,  

[20:26] uh, you know, to be able to see how it really  works. So, I was fresh out of the schoolhouse,   got to my first combat unit, had barely been there  a month, you know, seeing active combat missions   flown for the first time, you know, watching  all the feeds every day, and I was sitting  

[20:42] in a training event. And all of a sudden, in the  middle of the training event, we got a call over   the radio uh for that there's troops in contact.  Troops in contact is when anytime any friendly  

[20:54] forces are taking fire and they need our support  and usually needing something to do with flying or   potentially operating what we call danger close.  So it falls underneath the close air support   mission set. So that call came over the radio. Uh  it was a JTAC on the ground. Uh he was screaming  

[21:11] um saying you know and you know any player any  player uh we're taking fire. Uh you know you know   essentially we need help uh at that point. And so  then we jumped on and responded. Uh the pilot cued  

[21:24] the mic, said, you know, hey, we're we're, you  know, only a couple miles away. We'll be there in,   you know, 2 minutes and get eyes on. Uh at that  time, you know, I was still in in being trained,   so I wasn't qualified to be in this to stay in  the seat and execute a strike. So the instructor  

[21:41] that was behind me uh just leaned over, tapped me  on the shoulder, and said, "Swap." Then he turned   around and swapped me in. Uh, and then I stood  over and watched as they were frantically trying   to search for where those friendly forces are and  really where the enemies were uh at that point  

[21:56] because then you're trying to figure out who's  who uh within that because all you see is gunfire. My first strike was January 28th, 2013. Um,  at 6:49 in the morning, sitting on a target  

[22:17] watching some top of a mud hut. Uh, nothing going  on. And then all a sudden, we got a call over the   radio saying, "Hey, we need you to move this  other target area." So, we started heading that   way. I was pulling up graphics for it, looking  at the intel, figuring out, "All right, what's  

[22:30] this location? what's the issues around it as far  as bunch of trees or a bunch of buildings, things   like that. And it ended up being a um cave in  the middle of nowhere. And there was a handful of  

[22:43] people there that they wanted us to take out. We'd  go through that methodical checklist. My pilot and   I did things like planning for if we need another  weapon immediately afterwards because some person   runs or something like that. Well, then we have  to be prepared to, you know, take care of it. We  

[22:59] in turn would get all the weapons ready, be ready  for that reattack posture is what we called it and   then we went through and executed the strike at  that point and uh took out a handful of people at   this cave. Um, and then we had to then immediately  do a reattack and the person I was tasked to  

[23:15] reattack was sitting behind a rock and you know  we turned in and we had to change the angle we   were coming in from because it was like a hallway  almost with two rocks side by side and you've got   to worry about the missile coming in at a certain  trajectory um being able to be effective. Um it's  

[23:32] not the movies, right? It's not that oh a hellfire  missile comes down that levels the city block.   It's so much smaller of an explosion. Two and a  half years that I had trained up to that point,   all of it came to fruition in that moment. That  was the bar that was set was can you go through  

[23:50] and execute a strike effectively and can you work  under pressure? And when you know that strike   came off successful, you know, that told everyone  that I could do the job and I could be called on  

[24:02] to do it again. when we got onto that target  and we were actively coming from a different   target. Everything was going so fast uh at that  point. You know, we were setting up a camera,   I was calibrating my camera, um as we were rolling  into the target area, trying to pull out the best  

[24:16] picture I could uh at that point. So, everything I  was thinking, every thought that was going through   my mind was all about the technical aspects of the  the employment, you know, of shooting that weapon.   There wasn't much, you know, as far as being able  to stop and think of, wow, I'm about to take a  

[24:35] life. It was all about the just the technical  aspects of it all. Um, and being able to go in   and just and do your job. And that's that's all I  was thinking about was I better not screw this up.   in that moment, you know, back in 2013, I didn't  have a clue uh what it was doing or how it was  

[24:53] changing me or anything like that because all I  did was just look at it as, well, I'm doing my job   uh and this is what I'm trained to do. I can see  the entire strike um start to finish in my head  

[25:05] on everything from that first missile impacting to  the guy running uh to reattacking him um and his   lifeless body at the end of it. I've got thousands  of events like that that are burned into my brain.

[25:25] Being physically separated, you know, 7,500  miles away from the target after you're   watching a person for a long period of time and  then, you know, needing to take them out, it it   was usually what happened in the moment um with  it. You know, I had one strike that we watched  

[25:40] um I watched a person essentially get saw in  half with a missile uh and his wife drag half   that half of him across a field. And so that that  one will always be burned in my brain. Can't hear  

[25:56] anything obviously, right? But I can still  see the distraught on her face and and just,   you know, I mean she was screaming. you could  tell. And most of the time it wasn't the act of  

[26:10] employing. It was more so like watching people  literally tear each other apart. That was the   stuff that stuck with me and and that was harder  to deal with. One example of it is is two people  

[26:22] walking down an alleyway. One person all of a  sudden reaches out, pulls a pulls a handgun out   from underneath his throat that he's wearing uh  and turns and just shoots the guy next to him. Um,   and the guy dropped and then I just sat there and  watched him bleed out. And then eventually the  

[26:38] other guy just walked away and they went, "Okay,  follow that guy." And then you're sitting there   and just actively following this person. Um, and  you know, you have to process that you just watch  

[26:50] somebody die. Um, but again, you don't have time  to process it. Uh, not then. That was really the   piece to it that was most difficult. There was no  time that I disagreed with an order or anything  

[27:02] like that with what I was doing. You know, at the  end of the day, I was I'm proud of the work I did.   There were still targets at the end of the day.  They were still doing bad things and, you know,   we needed to take them out. There's plenty of  times you looked at it after the facts and went,  

[27:16] I don't really know what happened there. And a  lot of mission specifics, things like that you   can't talk about, right? Where we operated,  who, you know, who I was operating for,   things like that. Um, you just can't get into.  And unfortunately because of how much secrecy  

[27:30] was put into it and you know and rightfully  so, but now people feel like they can't talk   about just their basic emotions, it was just  strike the target, move on. Strike the target,   move on. And so that's that's what we did and  we're very good at it. I would say I definitely  

[27:46] wasn't emotionally prepared uh to deal with any  of this uh you know coming out of it because it   wasn't like you know anybody openly at any time  said hey by the way you're going to struggle with  

[27:58] this. I have a best friend that a couple months  ago he had a doctor that looked him in the face   and said well you didn't deploy so how can you  have trauma? Do you have any idea how much of a   kick in the face that is for somebody that's  done thousands of hours th over, you know,  

[28:14] a thousand combat missions and just you're going  to turn around and say that to somebody, you know,   and and tell them that they can't have an issue.  It's not when people are in and they're doing it  

[28:29] that they recognize there's an issue. It's when  people get out and finally pick their head up and   go, "Oh, holy cow. I've got a lot that's impacting  me because of the work I did. No one's looking at   how is this affecting people when they walk  out of that box, take that flight suit off,  

[28:43] say, "I'm done serving and, you know, and then  go and work, you know, whatever job they're going   to." Nobody's looking at what's happening to that  group of individuals cuz I can promise you that's   the group that's struggling the most. Who do we  have here with us today? Up. Good boy. Up. Come  

[29:00] on. Come on. Come on. Do it. I know you can. There  you go. So, there you go. This is my service dog,   Hawk. Uh, or Lord Hawthorne. Uh, and I've been  with him for going on three years now. Uh, and  

[29:12] he is my PTSD-trained service dog. Off. Good boy.  Right here. Stay. Uh, he is for post-traumatic   stress. So, he does things like watch my back.  Will put pressure on my feet in certain moments  

[29:28] or alert if there's someone walking towards  me, anything like that that I don't see. always cuts everybody pretty deep just because of  um, you know, couldn't be farther from the truth.  

[29:47] You're making life or death calls every single  day. You could have multiple people operating   underneath one mission set. You may not have all  the intel. There's a lot of things that you're   trying to prepare for and a lot of preparation  that goes into it. Uh, and at the end of the day,  

[30:01] there's no reset button. There's no, hey, I  just got to turn it off and go home. You know,   that plane's still flying when I leave that  box. the whole, you know, gamers make great   uh drone operators is while there's some skills,  I'm sure, that transfer, there's not a single  

[30:17] game in the world that can prep you for the what  you're going to do and the decisions that you're   going to have to make and you know, and the  high caliber level that you're going to have to  

[30:30] operate at. I would say some of the technical  skills, right, is being able to multitask,   being able to be strategic, being able to make  quick decisions, right? decision- making needs to   be fast to the point because you're pivoting  so much uh throughout on any given mission  

[30:45] that you just don't know what you're going to be  setting yourself up for uh throughout the process. Drone operations today compared to 10 15 years  ago are I would say different in some aspects  

[31:02] but underlying not. the missions, the things like  that that they're doing are still going to fall   underate the same area, but it's not going to be  at such high operational costs that we did. You're   not flying as as insane amount of hours, but the  life or death decisions you're making are still  

[31:18] there and you still have to go home and, you know,  see your wife and kids or your fiance or whoever   um at the end of the day. So, the situation  in Ukraine is absolutely changing everything  

[31:30] that we look at with warfare. I mean, they've  essentially made their own air force with small,   you know, first-person view UAS. My concerns with  autonomy and AI within drone warfare would fall   under if they ever take the human completely  out of the loop. Letting software make life  

[31:44] or death decisions, I think, is is where we  have to draw the line. There's always going   to be a human behind that, you know, killchain,  behind that decision-m authority. The second we   go away from that is, you know, then where  where do you where do you draw the line?  

[32:00] AI was in charge in my past missions. Um, I  mean, the the impacts could have been horrible   uh throughout it with the, you know, the drone  strike in 21 that killed a bunch of civilians.  

[32:16] That's thing that, you know, is horrible, right?  We hope that never happens. And at the same time,   you know, it's one of those that it's war, but you  absolutely, you know, you do everything you can to   prevent it from happening again. I think the moral  injury piece of it is never going to go away. What  

[32:33] are some things that work for you in terms of  like dealing with your PTSD? A lot of it is   just one communicating it. Um, you know, and being  able to talk to others about it. Um, and I found   that to be extremely therapeutic, if you will,  by recognizing and allowing, you know, people to  

[32:49] understand that they're not alone when it comes  to this, that this is a completely normal thing. I left the Air Force in September 3rd of  2018. Moved to North Dakota to work for  

[33:05] uh a contract company um doing essentially very  similar work to what I was doing in the military.   I left the Air Force just because I I had finished  my tenure at the schoolhouse where I was coming   up on it and the only option uh being a a younger  staff sergeant at the time was to go back to a you  

[33:23] know combat unit uh and go right back into shift  work and everything else. And I just knew after,   you know, I was at eight years at that point that  my body was just tapped um and that I couldn't do   that work anymore. I couldn't put myself back  into, you know, that shift work and everything  

[33:39] else. I was getting paid around $38,000 a year  uh to do that job. And with the, you know, moral   moral injury and mental stress that went with it,  uh it definitely wasn't nearly enough uh than what  

[33:52] I should have been should have been making. To be  19 years old and thrown into that role, you know,   and and have pulled my first trigger at 20 years  old. Arguably, it's a big reason that I got out,   too. uh you know, hard to hard to keep doing  that ops tempo and that and that type of job  

[34:07] when you're getting paid peanuts to do it. So,  I think the biggest thing that with PTSD and   mental health and and drone pilots especially  is 10 years ago it was laughed at, you know,   that that people could have it. So, we're still  fighting those stigmas, which is a huge problem  

[34:22] um for that community because I I think  it's rampant throughout the community.   Nobody wants to recognize it. And you know, the  veterans themselves are just shells of themselves,  

[34:34] you know, on any given day now. And it's hard  enough to put their feet on the ground. Um, let   alone go out and do a job and, you know, be, you  know, be a productive member of society. There's a  

[34:46] lot of things that, you know, that trauma evolves  and and manipulates my dayto-day, if you will.   It could be things like, you know, checking tree  lines. Um, because again, my anxiety is so high,  

[34:59] uh, that I'm constantly, you know, if something's  moving, things like that. My brain wants to know   what is that? What's that piece of information?  Uh, right? What's that sound? And then it's just   trying to constantly, you know, push out a lot  of negative thoughts, negative beliefs because  

[35:14] of the moral injury piece to this that make  it just difficult to operate on a day-to-day.   To be frank, being a drone operator, you know,  it's taken a toll on me in my life and my family,  

[35:27] my relationships, things like that. It's difficult  for me to maintain relationships. It's difficult   for me to maintain friend circles. It's diff  difficult for me to talk to family about it,   understand. Um, they can try to, um, but most of  the time it ends up doing more harm than good.  

[35:49] uh you know trying to relate to it instead of  just being supportive in the moment. Remote   Warrior uh is an organization that I started.  We're building so many different things to just   be able to put language to this. Put common, you  know, vernacular behind all of it and make it make  

[36:03] it make sense for people that are dealing with  this. We've got a guide out that's called the fog   of war guide that we put plain language into what  people may be feeling from things like, you know,   thoughts bouncing around in your brain so fast it  feels like a pingpong ball has been fired off. Um,  

[36:20] and that you can't focus on what you're saying.  So, it's being able to bring these tools and these   education, you know, materials to people, you  know, people that are struggling, but also the VA,  

[36:33] garden reserve units, uh, academia. I mean,  you name it. We have we have training plans,   lesson plans for all of it to bring in, you know,  discussions on identity crisis, moral injury,  

[36:45] all these pieces that come into play and that,  you know, these, you know, industry professionals   need to understand and need to start taking the  human into account um and not just the person on paper.

[36:58] Hi, I'm a producer on authorized account.  If you like this episode, then you should check   out our new podcast and comment below with the  names of people you'd love to hear us interview.