According to Pratap Chatterjee, an investigative journalist, the US Air Force needs at least 1,700 trained pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), however, facing increased outflow of employees, the Air Force is currently engaging regular cargo and jet pilots into becoming instant drone pilots "in order to keep up with the Pentagon's enormous appetite for real-time video feeds from around the world."
There are about 1,000 drone pilots in the US Air Force with 180 graduating annually from special training programs which would-be pilots complete at Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico and Randolph base in Texas. Alas, at the same time about 240 trained drone pilots quit each year, according to statistics.
The US Air Force officials fail to provide clear explanation of such a phenomenon. It is believed that drone pilots lead a cushy life: they live with their families in the United States, far away from zones of actual armed conflicts. Like office employees they are sitting in front of computer monitors, operating UAVs with joysticks and "playing what most people would consider a glorified video game," the journalist underscores. Some of them are carrying out "fly" missions over Afghanistan and Iraq, watching US troops on the ground, collecting data and video feeds, while a selected few are conducting "assassination missions" eliminating "high value targets" in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
"The Air Force explains the departure of these drone pilots in the simplest of terms. They are leaving because they are overworked," the journalist notes. However, pilots themselves complain that they feel humiliated when airplane pilots disdain them as second-class citizens. Others confess that they suffer from a sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) after watching horrors of war on their video screens day after day.
Military psychologists, who have been already asked to investigate the phenomenon, say that nearly half of drone pilots had "high operational stress," while a number was suffering from "clinical distress" – anxiety, depression or a severe stress. Indeed, notes the author, drone pilots are aware that they are killing not only "bad guys," but also peaceful civilians, including women and children, usually called by the Pentagon a "collateral damage."
Although the White House claims that civilian casualties in drone strikes are low, the figures prove the opposite: for instance, while chasing 41 "targets" in Pakistan, drones killed almost 1,147 people. Remarkably, none of 41 terrorists from the list was eliminated. Reports also say that in two strikes against the present leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, 76 children and 29 adults were killed, but not the notorious jihadist. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, the journalist emphasizes.
It looks like that the form of battle Washington is most proud of – "the well-advertised, sleek, new, robotic war on terror" – has proved exceptionally ineffective. "Indeed if the pilots themselves are dropping out of desktop killing, can this new way of war survive?" the investigative journalist concludes.
