By Nicola Abé
spiegel.de/international.de
A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He
succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of
the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people.
But then, one day, he realizes that he can't do it anymore.
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.
With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the
ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then
it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each
individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the
corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant's digital world collided
with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
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?
Invisible Warfare
When Bryant left the container that day, he stepped directly into
America: dry grasslands stretching to the horizon, fields and the smell
of liquid manure. Every few seconds, a light on the radar tower at the
Cannon Air Force Base flashed in the twilight. There was no war going on
there.
Modern warfare is as invisible as a thought, deprived of its meaning
by distance. It is no unfettered war, but one that is controlled from
small high-tech centers in various places in the world. The new (way of
conducting) war is supposed to be more precise than the old one, which
is why some call it "more humane." It's the war of an intellectual, a
war United States President Barack Obama has
promoted more than any of his predecessors.
In a corridor at the Pentagon where the planning for this war takes
place, the walls are covered with dark wood paneling. The men from the
Air Force have their offices here. A painting of a Predator, a drone on
canvas, hangs next to portraits of military leaders. From the military's
perspective, no other invention has been as successful in the "war on
terror" in recent years as the Predator.
The US military guides its drones from seven air bases in the United
States, as well as locations abroad, including one in the East African
nation of Djibouti. From its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the CIA
controls operations in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
'We Save Lives'
Colonel William Tart, a man with pale eyes and a clear image of the
enemy, calls the drone a "natural extension of the distance."
Until a few months ago, when he was promoted to head the US Air
Force's Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Task Force in Langley, Tart was a
commander at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, near Las Vegas, where
he headed drone operations. Whenever he flew drones himself, he kept a
photo of his wife and three daughters pasted into the checklist next to
the monitors.
He doesn't like the word drone, because he says it implies that the
vehicle has its own will or ego. He prefers to call them "remotely
piloted aircraft," and he points out that most flights are for gathering
information. He talks about the use of drones on humanitarian missions
after the earthquake in Haiti, and about the military successes in the
war in Libya: how his team fired on a truck that was pointing rockets at
Misrata, and how it chased the convoy in which former Libyan dictator
Moammar Gadhafi and his entourage were fleeing. He describes how the
soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan are constantly expressing their
gratitude for the assistance from the air. "We save lives," he says.
He doesn't say as much about the targeted killing. He claims that
during his two years as operations commander at Creech, he never saw any
noncombatants die, and that the drones only fire at buildings when
women and children are not in them. When asked about the chain of
command, Tart mentions a 275-page document called 3-09.3. Essentially,
it states that drone attacks must be approved, like any other attacks by
the Air Force. An officer in the country where the operations take
place has to approve them.
The use of the term "clinical war" makes him angry. It reminds him of
the Vietnam veterans who accuse him of never having waded through the
mud or smelled blood, and who say that he doesn't know what he's talking
about.
That isn't true, says Tart, noting that he often used the one-hour
drive from work back to Las Vegas to distance himself from his job. "We
watch people for months. We see them playing with their dogs or doing
their laundry. We know their patterns like we know our neighbors'
patterns. We even go to their funerals." It wasn't always easy, he says.
One of the paradoxes of drones is that, even as they increase the
distance to the target, they also create proximity. "War somehow becomes
personal," says Tart.
'I Saw Men, Women and Children Die'
A yellow house stands on the outskirts of the small city of Missoula,
Montana, against a background of mountains, forests and patches of fog.
The ground is coated with the first snow of the season. Bryant, now 27,
is sitting on the couch in his mother's living room. He has since left
the military and is now living back at home. He keeps his head shaved
and has a three-day beard. "I haven't been dreaming in infrared for four
months," he says with a smile, as if this were a minor victory for him.
Bryant completed 6,000 flight hours during his six years in the Air
Force. "I saw men, women and children die during that time," says
Bryant. "I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I
thought I couldn't kill anyone at all."
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