by Eyal Press
Chris’s path to the drone program was unusual. He grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, in a home where red meat and violent video games were banned. His parents were former hippies who marched against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. But Chris revered his grandfather, a quiet, unflappable man who served in World War II. He also had a taste for exploration and for tests of physical fortitude: hiking and wandering through the woods in Maine, where his family vacationed every summer; wrestling, a sport whose demand for martial discipline captivated him. Chris attended the College of William & Mary in Virginia, where he majored in history. A gifted athlete, he cut a charismatic figure on campus, cultivating an air of independence and adventurousness. One summer, he traveled to Alaska alone to work as a deckhand on a fishing boat.
During his junior year, in 2001, Chris woke up one morning to a phone call from his father, who told him that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were on fire. Chris thought instantly of his grandfather, who had served for three years as a military police officer on the European front after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He wanted to do something similarly heroic. A year later, after spotting a pamphlet at the William & Mary career-services office for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a national-security agency that specializes in geographic and imagery analysis, he applied for a job there.
Chris began working as an imagery analyst at the NGA in 2005, studying satellite pictures of countries that had no link to the “war on terror.” Not long after he arrived, an email circulated about a Department of Defense task force that was being created to determine how drones could help defeat al-Qaeda. Chris answered the call for volunteers and was soon working at the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center. He found it exhilarating to participate directly in a war he saw as his generation’s defining challenge. His pride deepened as it became clear that the task force was having a significant impact and that the use of drones was increasing.
Chris spent a little over a year at the task force, including several months in Afghanistan, where he served as the point of contact between the drone center in Langley and Special Forces on the ground. After this, he worked for a private military contractor for a while. In 2010, an offer came from another contractor involved in the drone program to serve as an imagery-and-intelligence analyst. But as Chris mulled the terms, something strange happened: he began to fall apart physically. The distress began with headaches, night chills, joint pain, a litany of flu-like symptoms that, every few weeks, would recur. Soon, more debilitating symptoms emerged: waves of nausea, eruptions of skin welts, chronic digestive problems. Chris had always prided himself on his physical fitness. Now, suddenly, he felt frail and weak, to the point that working for the contractor was out of the question. “I could not sign the paperwork,” he said. Every time he sat down to try, “my hands stopped working—I was feverish, sick, nauseous.”
Chris went back to Lexington to live with his parents and try to recuperate. He was twenty-nine years old and in the throes of a breakdown. “I was very, very unwell,” he said. He consulted several doctors, none of whom could specify a diagnosis. In desperation, he experimented with fasting, yoga, Chinese herbal medicine. Eventually, his health improved, but his mood continued to spiral. Chris couldn’t muster any motivation. He spent his days enveloped in a fog of gloom. At night, he dreamed that he could see—up close, in real time—innocent people being maimed and killed, their bodies dismembered, their faces contorted in agony. In one recurring dream, he was forced to sit in a chair and watch the violence unfurl. If he tried to avert his gaze, his head would be jerked back in place so that he had to continue looking.
“It was as though my brain was telling me: Here are the details that you missed out on,” he said. “Now watch them when you’re dreaming.”
CONSEQUENCES
A few years before Christopher Aaron entered the drone program, a U.S. Army veteran named Eric Fair applied for a job to work as an interrogator in Iraq. Fair was assigned to Abu Ghraib, a prison on the outskirts of Baghdad where American occupation forces began housing detainees after the invasion of Iraq. In April 2004, a cache of photos leaked to the press revealed the sadistic abuse to which many of these detainees were subjected, showing naked prisoners stacked in pyramids, hung upside down, and dragged around on dog leashes as U.S. soldiers smiled and flashed the thumbs-up sign. The photos shocked many Americans and embarrassed President George W. Bush, who had insisted “we do not torture” even as the pictures contradicted this claim. They did not shock Fair, who was not assigned to work in the cellblock at Abu Ghraib where the worst abuses took place but who meted out plenty of harsh punishment of his own. During one interrogation, Fair slammed a prisoner into a wall. He put detainees into “stress positions” and witnessed the use of devices such as the Palestinian chair, onto which detainees were bound with their weight thrust forward and their hands behind their back. A Presbyterian, Fair later published a memoir, Consequence, in which he described the crisis of faith and recurrent nightmares that he experienced when he returned home. “I am a torturer,” he wrote. “I have not turned a corner or found my way back. I have not been redeemed. I do not believe that I ever will be.”
Torturers like Fair dirtied their hands in ways that were visceral and tactile, which, in turn, made many Americans feel dirtied. The pilots and sensor operators in the drone program, by contrast, carried out “precision” strikes on video screens, an activity that seemed a lot cleaner. As the journalist Mark Mazzetti noted in his book, The Way of the Knife, remote-control killing seemed like “the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation.” The shift away from interrogation and torture was overseen by Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, who came into office determined to reduce America’s military footprint in other countries and to alter the moral tenor of the “war on terror,” an expansive phrase that he quickly disavowed. At the start of his first term, Obama signed an executive order banning the use of torture and calling for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, where detainees had been subjected to waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. During his tenure, Obama also dramatically increased targeted drone assassinations, authorizing roughly five hundred lethal strikes outside active conflict zones, ten times the number under Bush.
Early on, when it was first becoming clear that capturing and interrogating suspected terrorists was giving way to secret “kill lists” and targeted assassinations, even some hawkish observers questioned whether the United States knew whom it was killing and whether citizens understood the gravity of what was being done in their name. “Every drone strike is an execution,” Richard Blee, a former CIA officer who headed the unit responsible for hunting down Osama bin Laden, told Mazzetti. “If we are going to hand down death sentences, there ought to be some public accountability and some public discussion about the whole thing.” For more than two decades, the United States had barred targeted assassinations, a prohibition codified in an executive order that was signed in 1976, after the Church Committee exposed various “illegal, improper, or unethical” activities carried out by the CIA and other government agencies during the Cold War, including a slew of assassination attempts. The executive order established a norm against targeted killings that held sway until 2001, both because policy makers were aware of the order and because of legal and ethical concerns. But if, as Blee maintained, overturning this norm was a serious matter that merited discussion, you would never have known it from the level of public debate that took place. The escalation of the drone wars was met with strikingly little congressional or popular opposition, both under Obama and under his eventual replacement, Donald Trump. In 2016, Trump campaigned as a critic of expansive foreign interventions, which he promised to end. At the same time, Trump made it clear that under his watch the United States would feel even less constrained to carry out extrajudicial killings than under Obama, striking not only militants but also their families. In Trump’s first two years in office, more drone strikes were launched i
n Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan (three undeclared war zones) than during Obama’s entire presidency, and civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan surged. U.S. commanders were also given free rein to hit a wider array of targets, among them the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, a high-ranking state official who, on January 3, 2020, was killed by a missile fired from an MQ-9 Reaper drone. Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, described the strike as a violation of international law that could set an alarming precedent. “It is hard to imagine that a similar strike against a Western leader would not be considered as an act of war,” she said.
While human rights advocates like Callamard voiced concern, the public fell silent. Unlike the harsh interrogation methods that were adopted after 9/11, which sparked vigorous debate about the morality of torture and indefinite detention, drone warfare scarcely registered in public discourse. One explanation for this is that since the Vietnam era and the end of the draft, Americans had grown increasingly disengaged from the wars fought in their name. If something morally troubling happened on the distant battlefields where the conflicts raged, it was easy enough for the public to ignore. On the rare occasions when civilians did pay closer attention, as with the debate about torture during the Bush era, the outrage and opprobrium tended to be directed at individual perpetrators rather than at the system within which they operated. In the case of Abu Ghraib, for example, the blame fell on low-ranking reservists like Charles Graner, who was sentenced to ten years for his role in abusing Iraqi detainees, and Lynndie England, who was given a three-year sentence and dishonorably discharged. No senior officials were held accountable. As with the brutality in America’s prisons, which was often pinned on a handful of sadistic guards, the violence in America’s military campaigns could be attributed to a few “bad apples,” diverting attention from the system of war, which retained its moral legitimacy.
Another factor deterring robust debate about the drone program was that it was swathed in secrecy. According to U.S. officials, the laser-guided missiles fired from drones caused minimal collateral damage and were authorized for use only against high-level targets who posed an “imminent threat” to national security and could not be captured. Like so much else about the drone program, however, the identities of the dead were not shared with the public. As a 2017 report by the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic and the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies noted, the U.S. government officially acknowledged just 20 percent of more than seven hundred reported drone strikes since 2002 in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. It also failed to respond to nongovernmental organizations that had requested explanations about strikes in which “credible evidence of civilian casualties and potential unlawful killings” had surfaced.
The criteria used to approve drone strikes, the number of civilian deaths: all of this was kept hidden. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based organization that independently tracked America’s drone program, U.S. drone strikes killed between 8,858 and 16,901 people outside acknowledged war zones between the date it began collecting data and the end of 2020, including as many as 2,200 civilians. But because most of these strikes occurred in remote areas that were inaccessible to reporters, the public rarely heard about them. The sanitized language that public officials used to describe drone strikes (“pinpoint,” “surgical”) reinforced the perception that drones had turned war into a bloodless exercise.
The lack of transparency prevented ordinary citizens from knowing even basic facts about who their country was bombing and why. On the other hand, one could argue that the opaqueness was convenient, sparing citizens from having to think too much about a campaign of endless war to which many were tacitly resigned. As Everett Hughes might have noted, remote-control killing had an “unconscious mandate” from the public, solving a problem in a nation that had grown disillusioned with the “war on terror” but didn’t necessarily want real constraints placed on America’s use of force. As exhausted by war as Americans had become, many were accustomed to the idea that the United States could exercise its military might on a geographically limitless scale and perhaps saw this as necessary, both to keep America safe and to project U.S. power.
Tuning out the drone campaign was all the easier because no U.S. soldiers risked dying in it. In contrast to messy ground wars like the invasion of Iraq, which cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, drones fostered the alluring prospect that terrorism could be eliminated at the press of a button. It was war without risk—without consequences, at least for our side, which made it easy for “good people” to keep the dirty business of targeted assassinations out of mind.
* * *
The “joystick warriors” pressing the buttons also experienced no consequences, some analysts suggested, owing to distance and technology, which sheared war of its moral gravity, turning killing into an activity as carefree as playing a video game. Serving as a drone operator was not, to borrow Erving Goffman’s terminology, “people work” that required daily interaction with “human materials,” as was the case for prison guards like Bill Curtis and for military interrogators like Eric Fair. It was detached, impersonal desk work, filtered through technology that desensitized the human beings involved to the consequences of their actions. In 2010, Philip Alston, the former UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary killings, warned that because drone operators “are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing.”
It was a logical theory, albeit one formulated without input from pilots who had actually participated in remote combat operations. When military psychologists began talking to imagery analysts and sensor operators about their experiences, a different picture emerged. In one survey, Wayne Chappelle and Lillian Prince, researchers for the School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, drew on interviews with 141 intelligence analysts and officers involved in remote combat operations to assess their emotional reactions to killing. Far from exhibiting a sense of carefree detachment, three-fourths of the subjects reported feeling negative emotions—grief, sadness, remorse—related to killing. Many experienced these “negative, disruptive emotions” for a long duration (defined as one month or more). Another study conducted by the U.S. Air Force found that drone analysts in the “kill chain” were exposed to more graphic violence—seeing “destroyed homes and villages,” witnessing bodies burned alive—than most Special Forces on the ground.
For the people staring at the screens, remote-control killing wasn’t so clean, the studies suggested. It was messy and disturbing, albeit in ways that differed from conventional warfare. Because they never set foot on the battlefield, drone operators were not exposed to roadside bombs, a common cause of brain injuries and PTSD among veterans of America’s recent wars. They did not experience haunting flashbacks of improvised explosive devices detonating on the streets they were patrolling and destroying their Humvees.
What, then, did they experience? One morning, I visited the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada to find out. Located forty miles north of Las Vegas, Creech is a constellation of windswept airstrips surrounded by sagebrush and cactus groves. The base is home to nine hundred drone pilots and sensor operators who fly missions with MQ-9 Reaper drones. It is also home to a group of embedded psychologists, chaplains, and physiologists called the Human Performance Team, which was established to address the rising levels of stress and burnout in the drone program.
All members of the Human Performance Team possess the security clearances required to enter the ground control stations where drone pilots do their work, in part so that they can get a glimpse of what they experience. A psychologist on the team named Richard (who, like most of the airmen I spoke to, asked to be identified only by his first name) told me that two weeks into the job he poked his head into a ground control st
ation just as the crew was “spinning up for a strike.” A veteran of the Marine Corps, he felt his adrenaline rise as he watched the screen flash. Then he put the incident out of mind. A few weeks later, he was at his son’s band concert; as the national anthem played and he peered up at the Stars and Stripes, the memory came back. “I’m looking up at the flag, but I could see a dead body,” he said. He was shaken, but he couldn’t say anything to his family, because the operation was classified.
Drone warriors shuttled back and forth across such boundaries every day. When their shifts ended, the airmen and airwomen drove to their subdivisions alone, like clerks in an office park. One minute they were at war; the next they were at church or picking up their kids from school. A retired pilot named Jeff Bright, who served at Creech for five years, described the bewildering nature of the transition. “I’d literally just walked out on dropping bombs on the enemy, and twenty minutes later I’d get a text: Can you pick up some milk on your way home?” he said. Bright enjoyed serving in the drone program and believed that he was making a difference. But other airmen in his unit struggled to cope with the stress, he told me; there were divorces, and some cases of suicide.
