been shot at and never fired a weapon in anger against an enemy. The closest I ever came was during a year in the Falkland Islands, where I got to walk old battlefields with veterans who fought in 1982 and who, in 2004 and 2005, were still wrestling with the mental legacy. My involvement in the 2003 Iraq War was as a chaplain at a British military hospital in Akrotiri, Cyprus, over a five-month period. There, on a daily basis, I witnessed the brutality of war in the broken, wounded and maimed bodies of (mainly) young soldiers and the occasional Iraqi civilian. Over time, those encounters took their own psychological and spiritual toll on me.
Until I started my research for this book I had never watched someone being killed. I mean actually killed, in real time, as opposed to seeing a YouTube video or some fictionalised Hollywood scene where the actors take off their make-up at the end of the day and go home. No, my experience of war has been routine, mundane and focused on the human cost – sometimes painfully so – not on the military or political aspects.
I was initially reluctant to pursue the project. I had spent several happy years away from the physical and mental traumas of war, teaching the ethical and political aspects of armed conflict and air power from the safety of a classroom. To delve into the professional and personal lives, and the experiences of the people who kill using remotely piloted Reaper aircraft – commonly referred to as ‘drones’ outside the RAF – in a new form of war from a distance, would be interesting. But it would also require me to return to an inner place I did not want to revisit. Then there was the practical difficulty of gaining the necessary level of access to one of the world’s most guarded and classified military communities.
My questions were endless. Would it even be possible? If I did manage to gain access would the Reaper operators be willing to talk to me? Why should they? Would their spouses and partners want to share their experiences of living with those who brought the mental images of distant killing home with them? It would be much easier by far to stay in the classroom, to stick with the theory rather than immerse myself in the world of the Reaper operations and those who carry them out.
Just as I was deciding to ignore the idea, fate intervened. I spent several hours with a Reaper pilot, John, and his wife, Kim, who spoke candidly about their experience of fighting wars on two fronts. He was fighting Islamic State (IS) jihadists at work and she was fighting cancer at home. As they described life in a strange in-between world that spanned killing and healing, I knew I had to try to write this book. Despite the apparent lack of physical danger John faced in piloting a Reaper over distant continents, this new form of war clearly carries different risks. The jeopardy is not from Taliban or IS bullets and bombs but is, instead, psychological and relational.
I started the process of trying to gain access to conduct the necessary research. My approach to the RAF Director of Defence Studies in early 2015 was simple and emerged from two historically linked questions: How much would people today – 100 years on – like to know more about the lives of the pioneering aircrew of the First World War? Will people today and in the future be similarly interested in the lives and experiences of the first generation of Reaper operators?
We are aware of what those First World War pilots and rear crew did in the air because of the flying log books and official records that survived them. Yet little is understood about how they felt about their experiences and day-to-day lives, partly because so few of them kept diaries, partly because the notion of publicly sharing personal feelings and sensitivities would have been culturally alien and partly because so few of them survived aerial combat to tell their stories. I wanted to make sure that such information about today’s Reaper crews was fully recorded. There is considerable public, academic and political interest in the first generation of Reaper operators, fuelled by the fact that their lives are even more secretive and less accessible than those of the First World War aircrews.
Within days of my approach, an informal, positive response came from the Air Staff, the senior officers who run the RAF, followed by several months of administrative action to bring the project idea to life. Eventually a letter of authority was granted but one final hurdle remained: the RAF, MoD and my university research ethics committees. In theory, ethics committees exist to promote quality research and protect participants. In practice, some of them can seem more like research prevention committees. Ultimately, however, with safeguards in place to ensure personnel and operational security, most notably through anonymity, the final research permissions were granted in June 2016.1 I was committed. All it needed was for the Reaper operators to be committed or all this would have been for nothing.
In July 2016, with my final clearances in hand, I travelled to 39 Squadron (RAF) at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, for a week. It was a step into the unknown. I had a couple of contacts on the squadron who would host me during my research visit and, hopefully, encourage others to take part and be interviewed. And take part they did. I ran out of time in Nevada to interview all the operators and their partners who volunteered during the course of my stay. The next month I found myself embedded for two weeks with XIII Squadron at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. Again, I eventually had to return to my lecturing without completing all the interviews I was offered: they would continue sporadically through 2017 and into 2018, with further visits to both XIII Squadron and 39 Squadron. Eventually, I would formally interview 90 members of the Reaper community: 45 currently serving personnel, 21 former Reaper crew members, and 24 spouses and partners.
This book is neither a systematic treatment of all aspects of the RAF Reaper Force, nor is it a proportionate representation of everything that it has done over the past ten years. Page after page describing many hundreds of similar attacks or countless hours of dull reconnaissance activities would be boring. I have therefore focused on a series of events and accounts that provide important snapshots in time, each of which says something unique and interesting about the people who fly the aircraft and the families that support them, and the development of the Reaper Force.
It is also not an official history, although it is historical all the same with accounts of real people and real events at particular times and places. At least two events that are covered in depth were the subject of major international press stories. Given the highly detailed and intimate approach I adopt throughout the book, I did not have room to include all the information I was given by the many contributors.
The book has been researched and written against the backdrop of ongoing terrorist threats against military personnel in general and Reaper personnel in particular.2 Consequently, the key requirement for my gaining access to the Reaper crew members and their families is that their identities and personal security should be protected. To that end, pseudonyms have been used throughout. I do not know the names of everyone, past and present, on the Reaper Force. If my chosen pseudonyms match the names of real people in the Reaper community I have not met, it is entirely coincidental.
The human memory is an imperfect tool, but even those imperfections have an authenticity of their own when they are caused by the intensity or trauma of war. To ensure accuracy of tone and content, and to meet my personal writing ethic of ‘honest, accurate and fair’, I have gone back and checked all the information with the contributors. Far from being asked to withhold details, I was delighted to receive countless snippets of additional detail and insight.
All credit for the success of this project goes to those who made it possible and those who have shared their most personal experiences. I can only share with you, the reader, what others have been willing to share with me. Any deficiencies or inaccuracies are my responsibility.
PETER LEE
1 ‘Royal Air Force Reaper: 21st Century Air Warfare from the Operators’ Perspective’, University of Portsmouth Research Ethics Committee Protocol E365, approved 21 October 2015; Ministry of Defence Research Ethics Committee Protocol 707/MODREC/15, approved 1 July 2016.
