Joystick Warfare Hell The Suffering of an American Drone Operator

[xchrom]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pain-continues-after-war-for-american-drone-pilot-a-872726.html


Drone operators at Holloman Air Force Base in the southwestern state of New Mexico: Modern warfare is as invisible as a thought, deprived of its meaning by distance.


Former soldier Brandon Bryant, 27, takes a break near his home in Missoula, Montana. Bryant has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He flew drone missions in Iraq and Afghanistan during which he saw both American soldiers and Afghan civilians killed.

For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls.
Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.

"These moments are like in slow motion," he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay

[aandegoons]

1. It is terrorism plain and simple.

[Solly Mack]

2. k/r

[newfie11]

3. Horrible

War made clean and sanitary. No pain, blood, dismemberment seen by the killers.

It is as if playing video games. This is terrorism plain and simple. Keep in mind what goes around comes around. Others will have this technology someday and we will be screwed.

[green for victory]

4. "Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

"Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.

"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

[xchrom]

5. Kick

[xchrom]

6. 1 last kick. Nt

[Brickbat]

7. Important to know what we are asking people to do when this "sterile" technology that "protects our

troops" is used.

K&R

[undeterred]

8. Ick.

Like killing schoolchildren.