This is as much for my benefit as anybody else. The war begins each day on the long drive into the desert, just past the Super Buffet and the Home Depot and the Petco, and the swath of look-alike houses that cling to the city's edge, along the forty miles of the strangest daily commute in America. Air Force Staff Sergeant Charles Anderson plucks his wristwatch from the cupholder and crosses into the war zone. He wears the watch only at work, and the ritual shifts his thoughts away from the everyday, which lately has been occupied by wedding plans and house hunting. He drives in silence, no music or news, past rocky scrubland that mirrors the Afghan mountains, valleys, and plains he'll spend his workday patrolling. First Lieutenant John Hamilton crosses over as he passes the High Desert State Prison, thirty miles outside Las Vegas, northwest on route 95. His cell-phone calls always drop off here, and over time he has come to think of the prison as the demarcation line between homelife and battlefield. A few more miles and Creech Air Force Base rises from the desert, a cluster of buildings at the foot of barren hills, cast gold by the early-morning sun. Captain Sam Nelson is the last to cross over. He steps into a plain brick building, home to the 42nd Attack Squadron, pulls his cell phone from his green flight suit, and leaves it on a counter with a pile of others. He passes through a doorway, from unclassified to secret, and the door shuts and locks behind him.
On this July morning, the three will crew a Reaper -- big brother to the Predator -- an unmanned aerial vehicle scanning the landscape from about twenty thousand feet, seventy-five hundred miles away. Nelson flies it, and Anderson runs the array of cameras and sensors that hang under the plane's nose and can see the hot barrel of a freshly fired weapon from miles off in the dark of night. Hamilton, the mission intelligence coordinator, feeds them reports from the battlefield and talks to the "customers," their name for the ground troops they'll be supporting in Afghanistan. He's twenty-four, still soft in the face, and studied public policy at Stanford; now in the morning paper he reads about policy he helps implement. He digs that. Never mind that his neighbors don't know how close to the war he really is every day. In the Reaper Operations Center, crowded with computers and flat-screen TVs, he settles in at his workstation, which has a bank of six computer screens, a laptop, two secure phone lines, and a radio headset. On the bottom center screen, he'll soon have nine message windows open, chatting with his bosses at Creech, commanders in Afghanistan, and troops on the battlefield.
The top middle screen shows the view from the Reaper -- in this case Afghanistan at rest. The sun has already set, but the infrared lens illuminates a darkened world in a palette of black and white. Down the hall, Nelson and Anderson step into the Ground Control Station, a windowless room ten feet wide and twenty feet deep, with beige walls and a drop-tile ceiling. At the far end, two men in flight suits and radio headsets sit in bulky tan faux-leather chairs before a cubicle cockpit of joysticks, throttles, and ten monitors. They stare at Afghanistan's roads and schools and markets and homes, as they have for the past several hours. Nelson and Anderson, their relief, slip into the seats as the Reaper flies on. Nelson checks his cargo, shown as neon-green silhouettes at the bottom of his center screen: four Hellfire missiles and two five-hundred-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs. Another shift of remote-control combat has begun.
At this very moment, at any given moment, three dozen armed, unmanned American airplanes are flying lazy loops over Afghanistan and Iraq. They linger there, all day and all night. When one lands to refuel or rearm, another replaces it. They guard soldiers on patrol, spy on Al Qaeda leaders, and send missiles shrieking down on insurgents massing in the night. Add to those the hundreds of smaller, unarmed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles being flown over the two countries by the Army, the Marines, and coalition countries, and a handful of missile-laden planes owned by the Central Intelligence Agency circling above Pakistan. Efficient and effective, the planes have fast become indispensable assets, transforming today's battlefields just as profoundly as the first airplanes transformed warfare during World War I.
The Reapers and Predators are flown by about 500 two-man teams like Nelson and Anderson, and the crews can't keep up with demand. Last year, armed UAVs circled Iraq and Afghanistan for 135,000 hours -- about fifteen years of nonstop flight time. This year, they will fly 190,000 hours, double that if you include all of the military's unmanned planes. Even as troops come home from Iraq and Afghanistan in coming years, the Air Force figures it will need more than one million UAV hours annually to be prepared for future wars. There are also drones flying antidrug missions in South America, keeping watch over ships in pirate-thick waters, and patrolling the U. S.-Mexican border. This year the Air Force will train more UAV pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined. And the proof that warfare will never be the same again can be found in the Pentagon budget: Next year, the United States will buy more unmanned aircraft than manned, as it expands to fifty combat air patrols over Iraq and Afghanistan, flown from Creech and bases in Texas, California, Arizona, North Dakota, and New York.
For fighter jocks like Colonel Pete "Gunz" Gersten, this is the start of a long twilight. Square-jawed, with the same muscled frame he had two decades ago when he played football and baseball at the Air Force Academy, he's been flying planes since before he could drive. He graduated from the Fighter Weapons School, the service's Top Gun, and has logged three thousand hours in an F-16, including three combat tours. He now commands the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Creech, which controls the Reapers and Predators over Iraq and Afghanistan. He's also learning to pilot the UAVs, which will put him one up on his father, who flew in SR-71's over cold-war battlefields in the 1970s. The sleek black spy planes cruised at nearly twenty-five hundred miles an hour, at eighty thousand feet. The crews recorded on wet film, and when they landed, technicians met the planes and raced off to develop the images. "He deployed all the time, four months at a time, in the days when people didn't deploy at all," he says. "I grew up like that, celebrating Christmas in March because he had been gone." Gersten's fleet of unmanned planes crawl like Piper Cubs but deliver real-time video from the battlefield without risking the lives of crew members, who can unwind afterward with a beer in their living rooms, or pick up dinner on the way home from soccer practice.
"We've been thinking about this for a long time," Gersten says, and he reads me a quote from V-J Day, 1945, spoken by General Henry Arnold, who was taught to fly by the Wright brothers and commanded the Army Air Forces during World War II: "We have just won a war with a lot of heroes flying around in planes. The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all." Maybe Arnold didn't figure on so many wars in between, but technology is catching up with his vision. In 2001, ninety years after an airplane first dropped a bomb, a Predator launched a Hellfire missile in Afghanistan for the first time. The next year, a Predator fired a Stinger missile at an Iraqi MiG-25. The missile's heat seeker was thrown off by the MiG's missile, which destroyed the Predator, but still: A drone had been in a dogfight. If the Air Force ever again has an ace, the pilot will likely be parked in a chair in a windowless room in the desert outside Las Vegas.
The Air Force now has 138 Predators and 36 Reapers. The military's overall UAV inventory has swollen to seven thousand, from hand-launched Ravens to jet-powered Global Hawks, which can fly twelve miles high and monitor a swath the size of Kentucky in a day. And the revolution has just begun. Within the next twenty years, the Air Force envisions unmanned planes launching tiny missiles in hypertargeted strikes, swarms of bug-sized UAVs, and squadrons of networked unmanned fighters, bombers, and tankers, many of which will fly autonomously. And the enemy will have unmanned planes, too. More than forty countries currently fly them. In February, an American F-16 shot down an Iranian drone flying over Iraq. And Hezbollah has used them to spy on Israel and attack a ship during fighting in 2006. They can be built cheaply, with off-the-shelf software and hardware, a natural progression for insurgents who have been building increasingly sophisticated bombs.
As we wait for our Skynet future, unmanned planes have carved out a vital role fighting low-tech insurgencies. Since the planes can simply watch a target for hours, or days, it is more likely that bombs released from them will land on the right people. This summer the new U. S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, further restricted air strikes and ordered troops to withdraw from a fight in which they were being fired on from civilian areas -- better to let enemy fighters slip away than risk alienating a village, or the whole country. This push to cut civilian casualties has only increased the military's reliance on UAVs. And next door in Pakistan, the U. S. has found few other effective tools for dealing with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. CIA Director Leon Panetta says UAVs are "the only game in town." It should be said that this kind of thinking substitutes a tactic, a piece of technology, for a strategy in Pakistan. But the remote missile strikes -- there have been dozens this year -- have killed many of the most-wanted Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders and scores of other fighters. They kill civilians, too, which riles the Pakistanis, but the American government has deemed that a bargain: It can methodically pick off people without risking American lives or the diplomatic headaches of a ground incursion or a captured pilot being paraded on the Internet.
Not many military operations show such lopsided results: big impact at low cost, with results disproportional to the sacrifice, which fuels the insatiable hunger for UAVs and makes waging war even more abstract for everyone at home. People care less about what their government does when they are not asked to contribute. In World War II, one in ten Americans served in the military, and the war dead totaled nearly half a million. Today, fewer than one in a hundred serve in the military, and as the machines take over and that flesh-and-blood burden shrinks even more, the citizenry will disengage more and more. But for commanders, the UAVs have been an unqualified good. Gersten had been on the job for a week when a Predator crashed while landing after a training flight at Creech. He stood on the runway and looked at the busted plane and felt relief. "I prepared my whole life to write a letter to someone's mom and dad or wife or kid about the loss of an aircraft," he says, "to tell them how sorry I was about the loss of a husband or father. And when the time came, I didn't have to do it."
Afghanistan beds down. Traffic thins and an occasional truck pokes down a road, headlights carving a wedge in the night. Shepherds tend small cooking fires. The images race along an optic nerve from plane to satellite to fiber-optic cable, under the Atlantic, across the country, into the desert, and reconstitute themselves here in black and white. Nelson stares at this portal through space and works through a mental puzzle: What if I have to attack right now? He studies the terrain and plots an angle of attack that will ensure destruction of the target but avoid civilian casualties. He goes over the story problem again, aloud, with Anderson. The two fly together often, but the pairings rotate by the day. There's no Maverick and Goose joking and chiding, or hot-dogging, only a steady sense of reserve and focus. The workstations are devoid of anything personal. No family photos or stress balls or snacks. Just binders with radio codes and checklists.
They sit four feet apart but often speak to each other through the mouthpieces on their headsets, easier to hear over the hum of fans cooling the stack of computers. The speakers buried in the headsets' spongy rubber doughnuts also pipe in distant, disembodied voices from down the hall and around the world, some tinged with panic and supplication.
Nelson and Anderson answer those prayers. Hundreds of lives have been saved by UAV crews spotting roadside bombs, taking out snipers and mortar teams, and thwarting ambushes. Using laptop computers, ground units can see what waits for them beyond the next alleyway or bend in the road. This eye in the sky is so effective, so reassuring, that many commanders won't launch missions without it.
Nelson rests his left hand on the throttle and his right hand wraps around the joystick. Both are fixed to a narrow beige metal desktop, with a keyboard in between that he uses for instant-messaging. The matte plastic of the joystick and throttle has been worn shiny, squeezed and twisted for thousands of hours. Each push and pull causes the Reaper to rise or bank or descend. The stubby black button poking from the right end of the throttle and the trigger on the front of the joystick are not worn with use. Pressed in combination -- a rarity -- they send a message across twelve time zones, opening the jaws that clutch the bombs held tight under the wings. During those 135,000 flight hours last year, unmanned planes in Iraq and Afghanistan launched 187 missiles and bombs. Nelson has been flying Reapers since December and has never dropped. Anderson has dropped once. He centered the infrared targeting laser on a group of men that had just planted an IED, and the pilot squeezed the button and trigger, a slight movement of left thumb and right index finger. The missile raced along its invisible tether and half a minute later, the men were gone, erased in a cloud of black-and-white fire. A couple dozen people watched the strike, from operations centers in Afghanistan, Qatar, and the United States. Even a desk jockey at the Pentagon can monitor the feeds if he has the right clearance. So enticing are these voyeur views that a special term for them has arisen in military circles: Predator porn. Everybody likes to watch. But those idly watching aren't the guys squeezing the triggers and guiding the missiles. That would be Anderson. And on the drive home that night, he kept his watch on longer than usual, replaying the moment.
He joined the Air Force just after September 11 and worked as an F-15 crew chief until he discovered he was allergic to jet fuel. He switched to imagery analysis and deployed to Iraq once, poring over the sort of video he now gathers. Nelson, who wears an amused smile often enough to have creased his cheeks, had flown C-5 cargo jets for three years, ferrying troops and supplies to Iraq. Many pilots and some sensor operators were drawn into the program involuntarily, but both Nelson, thirty, and Anderson, twenty-eight, volunteered, and both want to stay. The hours are long and the downtime brief -- twelve hours a day, not including drive time, sometimes for six days straight -- but Nelson's sister and her kids live in Vegas, which means regular home-cooked meals, and his parents are nearby in Salt Lake City. He often golfs or plays basketball with guys from church, and he's starting an M.B.A. program. Anderson can rent a deck boat and cruise Lake Mead with friends on the odd day off, and when he moves into his house this fall, he'll start restoring and racing cars again, like the '54 Chevy pickup he souped up in Omaha.
Soon he and Nelson will deploy to Afghanistan and spend four months launching and landing the planes. For the Predator's first combat deployment, to the Balkans in 1995, pilots flew from a trailer on the airfield using line-of-sight radar, good for about a hundred miles, depending on the terrain. But the distance from which they could fly the planes quickly grew. By bouncing the signal through a satellite, via a relay station at the airfield, pilots were able to fly them from the safety of another country. And in 2003, the military dropped a fiber-optic cable across the Atlantic, connecting America with an uplink station in Europe. Now commands zip back and forth at the speed of light. However, the satellite signals must be encrypted and decrypted, which takes about 1.7 seconds, too much time for a pilot trying to take off or land. By the time he corrects, it's too late, so the planes are still launched and landed by people nearby. When the two arrive in Afghanistan this fall, they'll finally be able to see and touch the planes they've been flying into combat all these months.
Much of the U.S. Air Force Predator and Reaper fleet for Afghanistan is maintained out of a small cluster of buildings and tents next to the runway at Kandahar Airfield. It is here that I saw the planes up close for the first time. Where fighter jets are at once sleek and muscled, these planes look emaciated. Rap a knuckle on a rib cage and hear the hollow reply. It's hard to see how this is the plane that's revolutionizing warfare. Perched on twiggy landing gear, it looks less like a piece of deadly, cutting-edge military hardware than an oversized version of the windup balsa-wood planes boys build from kits. Twenty-seven feet long, with a forty-nine-foot wingspan, the Predator weighs just twelve hundred pounds without fuel or missiles. A four-cycle snowmobile engine mounted in the rear propels it with a high-pitched whine. The Reaper, a third bigger than the Predator, seems far sturdier, and with a larger engine it flies at three hundred miles per hour, three times faster. The next generation will be jet-powered with a three-thousand-pound payload. Yet even the wispy Predator has a menacing quality. Glass-bubbled cockpits remind us that man controls the killing machine.
On a patch of concrete next to the runway, a dozen airmen tossed a football in the late afternoon and waited for word to roll out the Predators, parked nearby in giant arched tents called clamshells. An earlier dust storm had cleared, but the skies said rain, and rain can soak into the carbon-fiber skin, adding weight to a lean airframe already maxed out with six hundred pounds of fuel and two hundred-pound Hellfire missiles. "They're very temperamental aircraft. They like nice weather," Captain Andrew Dowd said as he ran his hand along a Predator's gray composite fuselage. "They're moody. They don't like hot. They don't like cold. It has to be perfect."
Dowd, who did maintenance on cargo planes as an enlisted airman, oversees a Predator ground crew of about fifty, with teams responsible for the weapons, electronics, radio and video gear, airframe, and engine. They run constant diagnostic tests on the planes, change the oil and spark plugs every 60 hours of flying, and rebuild the engine after 360 hours. Civilian contractors service the Reapers, stored in clamshells next to the Predators. Unlike manned aircraft, the drones don't have redundant systems, because there is no life to protect. This saves on both cost and weight but means small failures can be catastrophic. A third of the Air Force's Predator fleet has crashed, along with a couple of Reapers. The UAVs were pushed into use so quickly that they'd had a fraction of the testing a manned plane would have undergone, but their safety record, hour for hour, is about the same as that of the F-16, despite the fact that unmanned planes fly much more.
The losses are caused by part failures, pilot error, and interrupted signals, just as the Internet might cut out at home. During "lost link" episodes, when communication with the air crew is broken, the plane circles on a preset course and waits for direction. "We have to find it. It's like hide-and-seek," Dowd said. The week Gersten took command at Creech, a power surge hit the base and he lost contact with several Predators and Reapers over Afghanistan and Iraq. His crews told him this was nothing to worry about, and in fifteen minutes all the planes were back online. Two weeks later, another power surge hit Creech and he lost contact with more Predators and Reapers. Within a half hour, all were found. But systems so technology-dependent will be vulnerable to exploitation, whether through hacking or physical interruption of data -- shooting down a satellite, perhaps, along its round-the-world journey. And in increasingly wired war zones, everyone will be fighting for bandwidth.
The planes could easily be shot down flying over hostile countries with robust air-defense systems. The Serbs downed a Predator in 1995 with a ground-to-air missile, and more were lost over Kosovo and Iraq. New UAVs will fly much higher and be equipped with countermeasures to thwart missile attack. For now the Predators and Reapers have dominion over Iraq and Afghanistan, where their biggest threat is a sharp crosswind on the runway.
Along with not risking pilots' lives, the unmanned planes are ridiculously efficient. Because they are controlled from the United States, the Air Force needs only skeleton crews overseas, which trims the resources needed for food, shelter, and protection and shrinks the U. S. footprint. Of the more than twenty-six hundred Air Force personnel required to fly and maintain the Reapers and Predators and coordinate missions, only about four hundred are in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The planes are also much cheaper to buy and fly. A Predator costs about $4 million and a Reaper $11 million, half as much as an F-16, one of the Air Force's workhorses. In Iraq and Afghanistan, jets and UAVs are often called on for similar missions that support ground troops. The drones can't do strafing runs or intimidate with a low, fast, ear-splitting flyover, but they use a fraction of the resources, a moped instead of a monster truck. F-16's, which fly in pairs for safety, burn about a thousand gallons of fuel an hour. At that rate, they can stay over a target for about an hour before they must swap out with other planes or fill up at an aerial tanker. A Predator carries a hundred gallons of fuel with which it can stay aloft for twenty-four hours. As the Air Force likes to point out, a bomb from an F-16 killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but the final strike against the Iraqi insurgent leader came after Predators had gathered six hundred hours of surveillance footage in the hunt for him and his associates. Keeping two F-16's in the air that long would require about 120 tanker trucks' worth of fuel.
Dowd gave the command and his men brought out the planes. Even with full gas tanks, they're still light. Two men pushed on the landing gear, one steered the plane from behind, and two walked on each flank to ensure the delicate wingtips didn't clip anything. As the fifth plane rolled out, fat raindrops spattered the baked concrete. The ground crews pushed the planes back into the clamshells. The rain stopped. They brought them back out.
Behind the clamshells, in a ground-control station like those at Creech, a pilot and a sensor operator marched through a preflight checklist, just as they would in a jet. Much of this is done over the radio with the ground crew, since the pilot can't physically inspect the plane himself or peer through the canopy to watch a flap move. A computer screen shows the status of aircraft systems -- fuel, oil pressure, speed -- replacing a cockpit's myriad dials and gauges. The pilot pushed the throttle forward and the plane taxied onto the runway. "This is the hardest plane to fly," he said. Even here, right next to the planes, there is a slight dead space between command and execution. If the pilot isn't careful, he'll overcorrect and crash. He can't feel the subtleties of the plane's movements, and the craft's light weight exacerbates the effects of crosswinds and turbulence. Landing is even worse. Since the pilot can't feel the wheels touch down, he might land too hard, causing the plane to "porpoise" -- pop up and slam down again -- which can break the plane's slim landing gear. The Army's smaller UAVs, flown by enlisted soldiers, land themselves. Predators and Reapers could be outfitted for autonomous landings, but for now the Air Force wants humans in the loop to manage unexpected problems and prevent an overreliance on technology.
The pilot waited for an incoming cargo plane to land, then eased his Predator onto the runway and accelerated. On the screen, the pavement flashed past in a blur. The ground fell away and the plane climbed into the clouds and circled over the airport. The sensor operator zoomed in on a six-foot-square whiteboard with a black cross propped against a building just outside. He clicked on the infrared laser, a bright spot appeared on the board, and he centered it over the cross. This readjustment, done before every mission, ensures a missile will follow the laser for miles and land within feet of the glowing dot. The Predator climbed higher, through a wisp of clouds, over farm fields and villages. "Looks good and... they have control," the pilot said after a few minutes, meaning that the plane was now being flown from Nevada. The crew's mission was finished until they launched another plane or returned tomorrow to land this one.
The pilots at Kandahar say they prefer this work because the overseas deployments are short; most of their time is spent stateside. "For me it's just a job. A job's a job," the pilot said. "Imagine flying a 747 across the Pacific. There's nothing going on for hours on end. But at home I get to see my wife every night." Before we stepped from the air-conditioned cave into the daylight, I asked the men their names. They declined, a typical reaction within the UAV community. With only so many crews, the pilot said, even a first name could be dangerous. Social engineering, he said. A terrorist could weave together scraps of information, build a full identity, and target his family. "We're not fighting stupid people," the sensor operator added. "We might like to think they are stupid, but they're not."
For the UAV pilots, the mash-up of hometown and battlefield is a daily occurrence. And the insurgents and terrorists hate the drones; that is certainly true. U. S. soldiers drive around Iraq and Afghanistan always waiting, wondering if this will be the moment they blow up. So it is for insurgents. Missiles launched from UAVs are America's version of the roadside bomb, infecting insurgents with the same paranoia and fear. "He knows we're there. And when we're not there, he thinks we might be there," Colonel Theodore Osowski, who commanded the unit in Kandahar, told me. "It's kind of like having God overhead. And lightning comes down in the form of a Hellfire."
To embed with a UAV crew at Creech and see this hand of God at work, the Pentagon gave me a temporary secret clearance. When I walk through the doorway that separates secret from unclassified at the 42nd Attack Squadron, after handing over my phone and voice recorder, blue dome lights hanging from the ceiling flash, a reminder to the crews to mind their conversations, an outsider is among them.
In the ground-control station, Nelson nudges the joystick and sets his Reaper into a gentle bank. Hamilton sends an intelligence update through a chat room. Anderson zooms in on a walled compound, then works in quadrants around the house and the surrounding area. The plane cruises at eighteen thousand feet, five miles from the target area, but the picture looks as though we're looking down from a couple of stories up. At this distance, the crew can tell a man from a boy, a critical distinction. Nelson and Anderson have just taken control of another Reaper recently launched into the night sky over Kandahar. They're spying on a series of compounds a few miles outside the city where several high-value targets are believed to live. In preparation for raids or missile strikes, crews sometimes loiter over an area for weeks, building video dossiers.
"Anything special you'd like us to look for?" Nelson asks the customer, who sits in an operations center at Kandahar Airfield.
"Just pattern of life," the customer says.
Three people sleep on a rooftop, a reprieve from the summer heat. Cows stir inside a corral. A man rises, walks outside the compound, and stands beside the wall. "They get up, they go to the bathroom, they go back to bed," Anderson says. "That's normal." I wonder what the man would think about a half dozen people on the other side of the world watching him stretch in the dark, scratch his whiskers, and take a piss.
At the next compound, several men are moving around and light spills from the house. Anderson pauses his scan and watches, mildly suspicious.
"If they're bad, they know we're watching them," he says. "But then again, if they knew we were watching them all the time, they wouldn't do stupid stuff."
Although they have never set foot in Afghanistan, Nelson and Anderson make effective counterinsurgents. They have spent hours watching the same roads, the same villages, the same people. "You gradually gain a better understanding of who they are and how they live," Nelson says. He felt the same during his Mormon mission to the Dominican Republic, after his sophomore year at the Air Force Academy. For two years he walked or rode his bike on unpaved roads through villages and talked to people twelve hours a day. There he saw homes made of coffee cans and palm fronds. Now he gazes at houses made of mud bricks. To balance out the lack of human interaction, he has taken Afghanistan-familiarization courses offered by the Air Force. "You can picture them more as a people and a civilization," he says.
A fighter pilot deploys for a few months and learns little about the ground he flies over, save for terrain features. But Predator and Reaper crews pull three-year tours at Creech, flying combat missions most days of the week. They can more easily see changes in village activity, or traffic on a stretch of road. If they're tracking an individual, as they often will for days or weeks, they know when he goes to work, where he stops for tea, and whom he talks to along the way. Though civilians do die in some of the missile strikes, this ability to linger can do much to limit unintended deaths. If women and children or the unlucky neighbor is nearby, the plane can wait, and wait, without losing sight.
The unmanned planes are also used on the hearts-and-minds side of counterinsurgency, the building instead of the killing. Many areas of Afghanistan are so rugged and inaccessible that Americans find themselves in the strange position of spending millions on construction projects they will never see. Checking up on a micro-hydroelectric project in a remote valley requires transport helicopters, gunship escorts, and a dozen or more soldiers for on-the-ground security. So the Americans ask for photographs instead, which is fine if your partners aren't trying to screw you. "They lie to your face," a civil-affairs captain told me in Afghanistan. "They bring pictures that don't match up with the site. Then we get the grid coordinates, send a Predator over the area, and see there's no work being done."
Indeed, they see many things meant to be secret, like men having sex with sheep and goats in the deep of night. I first heard this from infantry soldiers and took it as rumor, but at Bagram I met a civilian contractor who works in UAV operations. "All the time," he said. "They just don't think we can see them." Which sums up a major allure of UAVs: Though they should know better by now, many insurgents still feel safe working in darkness or in the shelter of distant mountains and valleys, so they are exposed again and again. The unmanned planes have eroded their freedom of movement and simple early-warning systems, two of their few assets when outmatched in weapons, technology, and resources. Helicopters can be heard a mile or more away. Spotters watch vehicles leave bases and follow the slow advance of dismounted patrols. Surprise is a rarity for U. S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The insurgents almost always know they're coming, with at least several minutes' notice. So they toss weapons behind a rock and become, in an instant, civilians. But with a camera parked three miles overhead, last-minute subterfuge doesn't work.
An Air Force colonel who plans air operations in Iraq and Afghanistan showed me a video of an Iraqi insurgent launching several mortar rounds and then tossing the weapon in his car trunk and slowly driving off, under the gaze of a UAV. His car crawls down a canal road, then disappears in a whoosh of flame, smoke, and debris. A moment later, another car pulls alongside the destroyed car. Several men scramble out, retrieve the weapons from the smoking heap, and throw them into the canal, making the dead man a civilian casualty. In today's wars, every death -- combatant and civilian alike -- becomes a potential tool for both sides to promote the justness of one and the cruelty of the other. As UAVs saturate the airspace, more and more of the battlefield can be covered. Even when a UAV can't prevent or stop an attack, there will often be one close enough to capture the aftermath and track suspects.
But the cameras aren't just watching insurgents. The real-time videos allow commanders to see and direct movement at the lowest levels. On today's battlefields, when isolated actions can have enormous impact, there are times when you want higher-ups giving the go-ahead before a missile flattens a house. But the up-close image from a UAV can lead to a false sense of clarity, making a choice seem obvious when it's not. Someone watching an operation from miles away can't sense other critical factors, like the mood of locals or the difficulty of crossing rough terrain. "Sometimes it's more of a pain in the ass than anything," a captain in Afghanistan told me. He had tumbled off a mountain at night because of bad instructions from his boss back at camp, who couldn't resist giving orders while monitoring the Predator porn. Now, the captain says, he just turns down his radio. Some people in the military are also concerned that this footage could be used to question decisions made in chaotic moments, especially if it's being considered months later, from the safe remove of a hearing room. Osowski had posed this question in Kandahar. "What if in the heat of battle, you have a guy who hasn't slept in twenty-four hours, he's just killed a bad guy, and now he sees a civilian walking around the corner who also looks like a bad guy, and he kills him, too? If it's being recorded from above, what does it look like? Like he just murdered a civilian?" he said. "Do you have lawyers looking at that saying what he's doing is a violation of the law?"
Reaper crews train at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, but most Predator pilots and sensor operators train here, flying missions over the vast desert training area next to Creech, dotted with old tanks and fake insurgent villages. Crews follow men running between buildings, locate suspicious pickup trucks, and fire mock missiles at insurgent hideouts. Watch a UAV crew at work and you inevitably start to think: That might not be so hard. No 9g turns pushing you toward unconsciousness. No worries about ejecting at six hundred miles per hour if the plane malfunctions. No one incinerating you with a missile. Just a computer screen and a joystick. And so the crews have long heard the snickers and jokes, that they fly big toys, that anyone can do their jobs. In Afghanistan an Army colonel had shown me a spoof recruiting video that was making the rounds: "Join the team that keeps us flying: America's Air Force," a narrator announces, and the stock-trading baby from the E*Trade commercials pops up on a Webcam. "A lot of people are like 'Aren't you too young to be a pilot?' " the baby says. "And A, don't worry about it. You know, I just look young. I mean, you don't know how old I am. And B, I fly a Predator. So check it. Click." The screen cuts to an aerial shot of bombs exploding. "I just dropped a bomb. You just saw me drop a bomb. No big deal. If I can do it, you can do it."
All of the Air Force's current Predator and Reaper pilots started off in real cockpits flying fighters, bombers, tankers, and cargo planes. The Army and Marines, which fly hundreds of small unmanned planes in Iraq and Afghanistan, rely on enlisted personnel who have never flown traditional aircraft, but those planes are unarmed and used only for surveillance. Put missiles in the mix and concern grows. The Air Force has wanted UAV pilots who understand the mechanics and physics of flight as the new technology has developed. Many have already flown in combat over Iraq and Afghanistan. But fierce demand for UAVs is draining the pool of available pilots, and what's the sense in spending a couple million dollars training pilots in planes they might never fly?
Enter the Betas, the future armchair fighter jocks. The Air Force is now training a first-ever test group brought straight into the Predator program. After six months of screening and basic flight instruction, the Betas started a nine-week initial qualification course at Creech, the same taken by pilots, which includes forty hours in a simulator and nine or more actual flights. The eight Beta students were still in the academics phase when I visited Creech, but the nonpilots, who came from jobs like military police, civil engineering, and acquisitions, had so far performed as well as trained pilots, Gersten says. For this type of work, how they grew up might be more important than whether they've logged a thousand hours flying supersonic. "This generation, where were they when 9/11 started? They were in junior high and high school," Gersten says. "And they grew up with the very technology that we fly with here." Those who dreamed of being fighter pilots might never get the chance as the skies unman, but America's pool of gamers, texters, and TV watchers is certainly vast and deep. The Betas' progress is being closely tracked by the Pentagon, which can build plenty of planes if it has the people to fly them.
The school's director of operations, Lieutenant Colonel Geoff Barnes, flew KC-135 aerial tankers for ten years and taught air-power doctrine for a few years before coming to the UAV program at Creech. On his third combat mission after the training, he dropped a Hellfire at the feet of a man who had just planted an IED in Iraq. He held up his hand and watched tremors race through it, and then he finished the last two hours of his shift. As a tanker pilot, he had no combat experience, while many of his fighter-pilot colleagues had flown close-air-support missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Barnes is an avid gamer and was comfortable following action on multiple screens while instant-messaging and talking to several people at once. "I'm not saying that if you can play games, you can do this, or that this is just a game. What we do here is a very serious business," he says. "But when you're looking at a skill set for what it takes to be able to work in a two-dimensional area, gaming helped me to make the transition."
Despite that remove, the UAV crews' work is quite personal. They often operate more like snipers than fighter pilots, observing targets for days, even weeks. They follow their lives. They see them with friends and family. They know them.
The crews can also struggle with feelings of impotence, watching events unfold below, hearing firefights over the radio and breathless calls for help, when sometimes there's nothing to be done. One day in May 2007, at the Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar, Osowski watched real-time UAV footage on a giant flat-screen TV as soldiers pushed into the Al Qaeda stronghold of Baqubah. Two Stryker armored vehicles crawled up a road. Osowski saw a dark spot in the road, where perhaps the dirt had been disturbed. The first Stryker drove around it. Smart move, he thought. The second drove over it and an enormous explosion bloomed on the screen. Live on TV, he had just witnessed seven deaths. "We had guys going to see the chaplain after that one," Osowski said.
But the biggest problem for UAV pilots is not combat trauma but workload. As shift workers, they flop between days, nights, and swing shifts, their internal clocks in limbo. In a 2008 Naval Postgraduate School study, many Predator pilots reported being very sleepy at work because of the long hours and regular schedule changes, and emotionally and mentally exhausted by the lack of free time. With the program growing so fast, many pilots see no end in sight.
There will be no drops today, only quiet homes and sleepy farmers. Anderson switches from the infrared sensor to the camera in the plane's nose and the voyeur's view is replaced with a swath of dark serenity. The earth is still black, the sky deep blue, with a sliver of pink across the middle, the first hint of sunrise. This could be the view from the red-eye, cruising into New York from Los Angeles. Dreamy stillness here. But in the void below, the war is wide awake, the night shift busy. Thousands of marines push deep into Helmand province, special-operations teams scour eastern provinces for a captured American soldier, and the insurgents, hard workers, too, shuttle weapons, launch rockets, and bury bombs.
Anderson switches back to infrared and refocuses on the center compound. A dozen chickens scurry through the courtyard. A cow rises in the corral as a man approaches. More light spills from the homes. Afghanistan wakes up. And at 4:50 in the afternoon in Las Vegas, Nelson hands over control to the next pilot. He starts work at 5:00 A.M. tomorrow, so he must be out of the building in the next ten minutes to comply with the mandatory twelve hours off. Anderson follows a moment later, a day of combat finished.
I step into the daylight, where a 100 degree breeze swirls, and after just a couple hours watching missions, I feel as though I'm in Afghanistan, so strong was the mental shift. There is little out here to give any sense of where I am. On the desolate road south, Anderson runs through the day's missions. In a few more miles he'll slip off his watch, and his war will end until morning. Hamilton and Nelson have returned to the world, too. Twenty miles on, America comes into focus again, like a Polaroid gaining garish detail, as I roll into Las Vegas.
Back at the hotel, I see a Pai Gow dealer I'd spoken to the night before. Like just about everybody else in Las Vegas, he has no idea how close he is to the front. He sits at a fifty-dollar-minimum-bet table, which is empty. He's waiting for the guy who comes every Wednesday, and last year lost $125,000 to the casino playing this one game. All around us, the clack of chips and jangle and beeps of video poker machines mark time. It's a 24/7 mission here, too. When I left the hotel at five this morning, the overnight shift was putting in hours at their own ground-control stations, cocktails in one hand, cigarettes clamped in the other, free fingers wrapped around the throttles of slot machines. Now the faces are new but the same. Above us, black orbs dot the ceiling, the all-seeing eyes. In a hidden room not far away, someone sits before a bank of computer screens and watches life on the gaming floor, searching for the troublemakers.
