The Last Fighter Pilot Has Already Been Born

LazerLordz SG

The last fighter pilot has already been born.

Flying bots rule the skies in combat zones around the globe. Now the battle is on between the joystick jockeys and the fighter jocks.

By Noah Shachtman

The F-16s had come and gone, dropping a pair of 500-pound satellite-guided bombs on an insurgent safe house in Iraq's Sunni Triangle. Now it was up to Major Shannon Rogers to see whether they had hit their target. With a tug of the throttle, he brought his plane to 10,000 feet for a closer look.

Typically, it takes hours, even days, to get an accurate idea of the damage bombs have caused in a war zone. GIs on the ground have to make their way to a target and report back. But Rogers can get the job done in minutes.

As his plane passed over the site of the safe house, dawn was breaking - a clear, sunny morning that had yet to give way to the August heat. But for Rogers, it was after sunset. He was operating his Predator unmanned aerial vehicle - a drone - from a secure terminal at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas.

Tracking the feed from the Predator's camera, Rogers could see rubble where the safe house had been. He and a sensor operator on his crew watched a crowd gather to ogle the destruction. Then a white Dodge pickup rolled up with a .50-caliber heavy machine gun in the back. Five men climbed out, ran into the house, and returned to move the truck to a secluded alley. They began loading ammunition and arc-welding the .50-cal's mount.

Back at Nellis, Rogers wasn't limited to just assessing battle damage. He could also inflict it; his Predator was equipped with two Hellfire laser-guided missiles. Rogers, who flew F-15s (call sign: Smack) before switching to drones, radioed for authorization to destroy the Dodge. He got it.

"We left their truck one big smoking hole," he remembers. "My heart was pumping as we were doing our business. It felt just as real to me, however many thousands of miles away, as if I was sitting right there in that cockpit."

Rogers' Predator is one of more than 1,200 UAVs in the US military arsenal; three years ago, there were fewer than 100 in the field. Today drones as small as a crow and as big as a Cessna are searching for roadside bombs, seeking out insurgents, and watching the backs of US troops. They're cheap, they can stay in the air longer than any manned aircraft, and they can see a battlefield better - all without risking a pilot.

Those capabilities tell only part of the story. UAVs give rank-and-file soldiers powers once reserved for generals. They push generals into the thick of battle. And they're blurring the lines between the fighter jocks and the grunts on the ground. Firmly entrenched hierachies don't change easily, but drones are reshaping military culture.

Private Joel Clark doesn't have any macho dogfight stories. He doesn't have a cool call sign or the swagger of a guy who has pulled 9 gs. In fact, Clark has never held a throttle. He did, however, flunk high school English. And that's how the milky-pale 19-year-old became one of America's newest pilots.

Clark had planned to join the Army as a Blackhawk helicopter mechanic. But that F kept him from graduating on time, forcing him to reapply. The second time around, his recruiter suggested he try instead to be a "96 Uniform" - Army-speak for a UAV operator. Clark had never considered becoming a pilot. But the idea of running a robot spy plane sounded pretty rad. Now he's one of 225 soldiers, reservists, and National Guardsmen training on a lonely airstrip at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, a 125-year-old outpost 10 miles from the Mexican border.

In a sense, Clark has been prepping for the job since he was a kid: He plays videogames. A lot of videogames. Back in the barracks he spends downtime with an Xbox and a PlayStation. When he first slid behind the controls of a Shadow UAV, the point and click operation turned out to work much the same way. "You watch the screen. You tell it to roll left, it rolls left. It's pretty simple," Clark says. But this is real life. "So you have to take it more seriously. If you crash one of these, you have to bleed and piss" - in other words, take a drug test.

Clark has no intention of nose-diving, however. Crashing a $550,000 Shadow isn't as catastrophic as riding a $4.5 million Predator into the ground (or a $55 million F-15, for that matter). But Clark has gamed away the past 11 months in Arizona, and today, finally, is his last "check ride." After this takeoff, he'll be certified to fly the Shadow 200. He'll spend a few months at Fort Hood, Texas, training with the 4th Infantry Division. Then he'll ship off to what his sergeant calls the Big Sandbox: Iraq.

"Striker 1-5, we have lights. Are we clear to launch?" Clark asks into his headset. The low buzz from the plane's engine shifts into a high-pitched, 105-decibel whine. "Departure approved," the control tower squawks back, barely audible over the din.

"Outstanding," Clark smiles, checking his instrument panel one more time. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Launch, launch, launch!" he says, as the plane jumps into the Arizona morning.

The flat gray Shadow gets propelled skyward on a nitrogen-pressurized rail; when Clark is ready to land, a hand-sized antenna dish on the side of the runway will guide the plane to the ground by transmitting coordinates a lot like GPS. Sitting in a Humvee, Clark flies the Hunter by using a mouse to point and click pixelated dials and sliders modeled after the ones in a physical cockpit. Alternatively he can just click a route on a map, or program a destination and let the plane figure it out. Clark doesn't have a throttle, and he can't see out the front of the plane. In fact, there is a camera, but the soldier sitting to Clark's left is working the joystick to take the pictures that make the whole mission worthwhile. Clark is just driving the bus.

During the Cold War, US pilots were nobody's chauffeurs. They were aces, ready to mix it up with more agile Soviet MiGs. Today, few countries have fighters that can match US forces. The days of dogfights are over, unless the United States is planning to start a war with Israel or India. So if UAVs are getting simpler to operate, and if there are no more "duels in the sky," says retired Marine major general Tom Wilkerson - a quintessential fighter jock, a Top Gun graduate with more than 3,000 hours in the front seats of F-4s and F/A-18 Hornets - "maybe you don't need any fighter pilots at all."

Nearly six decades after World War I ace Carl Spaatz became its first chief of staff, the Air Force is still ruled by fighter pilots. They're the guys who can smile through barrel rolls that make lesser men lose their lunch, guys with the kind of toys that go Mach 2.

UAVs have been in that toy chest for decades. The Air Force sent a supersonic drone over China in the 1960s; in the Vietnam War its shark-shaped Lightning Bug flew 3,500 unmanned reconnaissance sorties. More experiments followed through the 1980s and 1990s.

Drones had their successes, but Air Force jocks never accepted them as a part of top gun culture. UAVs were considered so second class, the Air Force had to order pilots into drone duty. After all, airmen earned less money operating a Predator, and too much time as a drone pilot could lead to a loss of flight privileges for manned planes. They weren't much fun to fly, either. At a fraction of the weight of an F-15, they get pummeled by the wind on takeoff and landing; 25 have crashed since 2001. That means questions, accident reports, and a blot on your record. And let's just come out and say it: You're not exactly risking your life for your country flying a mission from behind a desk at Nellis.

All these attitudes began to change in 2001, when the CIA and the Air Force rigged a few Predators with Hellfire air-to-ground missiles. Suddenly, a UAV could do more than just float over a target for 20 hours at a time, watching and taking pictures, already a significant asset. It could also be a killer.

What a difference a missile makes. Nowadays, drone pilots get treated better. Predator flight time counts the same and pays the same as time in a fighter. When Major Rogers got the chance to command a squadron after four years at the Air Force Academy and a dozen years behind the stick of F-15s and other jets, he didn't care at all that his planes would be thousands of miles away, or that he wouldn't be able to feel turbulence or smell a burning engine. "Most of the time, I get to fight the war, and go home and see the wife and kids at night," he says.

The Pentagon brass like what drones can do, too. Thanks to UAV imaging and data-transmitting, generals back at HQ now have access to a lot of the same intelligence as their people in the field. "The higher echelons fight in the depths of the battle in real time," says retired Army general Wesley Clark, whose use of drones in Kosovo set the stage for today's UAV frenzy. Others talk about that change less glowingly. "It's like crack for generals," says Chuck Kamps, a professor of joint warfare at the Air Command and Staff College. "It gives them an unprecedented ability to meddle in mission commanders' jobs."

Either way, drones have become popular because they bring new speed to the battlefield. Ten days into the Iraq invasion, a Predator spotted what one analyst at US Central Command headquarters in Qatar thought was an Al Samoud surface-to-surface missile launcher. No way, another analyst said in a secure online chat room. That's a truck, and there's a building right next to it - a house, maybe - which could mean serious civilian casualties if the Predator fired.

While dozens of officers and analysts in on the chat debated what to do, a JAG officer - a military lawyer - came into the room. The building looked like a house to him, too. He suggested bringing a general in.

At the same time, officers at the Combined Air Operations Center in Al Udeid Air Base began preparations to scramble manned attack aircraft to the area. Military intelligence groups got ready to deploy signal-collection planes, to pick up cell phone chatter after the missile hit.

The general reviewed the situation and gave his OK to fire. The Predator launched a Hellfire, and the "truck" exploded so violently that the heat overloaded the drone's thermal sensors. It had been an Al Samoud after all.

The whole thing, from legal decision to command to execution, took five minutes. Tacticians call that time line - target acquisition, deployment of force, order to attack, destruction of target - the "sensor-to-shooter cycle" or "kill chain." It's a measure of any military's reflexes; in Gulf War I, the kill chain was often three days.

It can still take days for satellite pictures to be captured, scoured by imagery analysts, forwarded through the military hierarchy, and passed on to someone with a gun. But that's changing. With an armed UAV, the sensor is the shooter. The kill chain is only one link long.

Convinced at last of drones' value, the Air Force is making a behind-the-scenes play to become the Pentagon's "executive agent" for UAVs, the hub and gatekeeper for robotic aviation. In other words, it's looking to run the whole unmanned show. Air Force planners aim to buy 144 more armed Predators, boosting the number of squadrons from 3 to 15. It's building an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Center for Excellence at Nellis to guide future drone development and has taken over from Darpa the development of next-generation bomb-carrying, highly autonomous UAVs.

The ironic thing about the Air Force's excitement is that drones aren't exactly airplanes. Sure, they have wings and fly, but they're more like guns (or cameras) with wings than planes with guns.

That's not how the Air Force sees it. Air Force rules say that only rated pilots, guys trained to pilot a B-52 or an F-15, are allowed to operate Predators. It costs $685,000 to train a pilot (not counting salary, bonuses, and equipment costs for refresher flights), which means a lot more money to staff all those planned Predator squadrons. But "you have to understand flight, know how to talk to a controller," says Colonel Tom Ehrhard, a former Air Force missile commander now working at the Pentagon. "It takes an aviator to do that."

The Army doesn't think so. It woke up to the potential of drones during 1996 war games at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. For the first time ever, Army units defeated the elite trainers of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, a tough, experienced unit on its home field. The winning side had Hunter UAVs, split-tailed drones with what look like a mushroom growing out of the fuselage - an antenna. The 11th couldn't make a move without getting spotted from above. The Pentagon had canceled the project earlier that year after building only 56 drones. But the upset win proved to strategists that drones finally had the onboard navigational intelligence and GPS locating capabilities to make them useful in the field.

Nine years later, grunts have a new favorite gadget. The most popular drone in the US military is the Army's Raven, a 3-foot-long unarmed flier that weighs half as much as a loaded M-16 and costs a bit more than a loaded Camry. "You throw the bird up when you want to throw it. You land it when you want to land," says Captain Matt Gill, a UAV company commander with the 82nd Airborne. Trained pilots need not apply - one of the most famous Raven operators is a cook from the 1st Cavalry. In 2002, the Army had 25 Ravens; today, it has more than 800 in combat or on the way. The Marines have about a hundred similar Dragon Eyes in the field. By 2010, the military will have nearly a thousand of the tiny, tactical drones.

Why the boom? Eyes in the sky keep soldiers from getting killed. "The way you used to get intel on the battlefield was you fought for it, sending your squad into a building, forcing your way in," says former Army captain Phillip Carter. Now company commanders can see around corners and over hills - a God's-eye perspective that once was the domain of generals, with their Predators, manned spy planes, and satellites.

Ravens transmit information locally, too narrow a view for a general, but the intel gets into the hands of the person who needs it most: a field commander. And he doesn't have to climb the chain of command to get it. "It flattens the org chart," says Kamps, the joint warfare professor.

Everyone's on board with drones - the question is who do you let fly them. The Air Force model considers them planes, which require expensive pilots who need to fly hundreds of hours in manned aircraft each year to keep their certification up. The Army model lumps them in with other tools, from cameras to guns, and puts them in the hands of anyone who can use them. Drones, meanwhile, are getting smaller, easier to operate, and even disposable. The technology, in other words, is trickling down, just like computers did a generation ago. Yet the Air Force still treats them like mainframes, to be operated by a highly trained elite. Are the flyboys on the wrong side of history?

Not necessarily. Different kinds of drones fly different kinds of missions. Tactical UAVs such as the grunt-flown, 1,000-foot-range Raven serve small groups in the field; endurance UAVs like the pilot-flown Predator send pictures back to generals and throw Hellfire missiles. The Air Force model suits the fighter-sized drones with full attack-plane features; the Army model fits the backpack-sized cameras with wings. But as drones continue to evolve, both models are morphing into something new.

At Huachuca, right next to where Private Clark is finishing his last takeoff, techs are prepping a Hunter. Beneath each wing is a 3-foot-long bright orange cylinder, a placeholder for a Viper Strike laser-guided bomb. These modified Hunters may never see combat. It doesn't matter. It's an experiment, a step closer to the Army's next-generation drone, the Extended Range/Multi-Purpose vehicle.

Like the Predator, the ERMP will be able to stay in the air 24 hours straight and communicate with its pilot via satellite. It'll have Viper Strike missiles, packing the sensor-to-shooter cycle into a single drone. Early prototypes have already destroyed tanks and buildings from 25,000 feet. But the critical advantage is in the ERMP's controls, which will be nearly identical to what Clark is now certified to use. The kill chain will be in the hands of a geeky teenager like Joel Clark, his fingers flying over a keyboard.