The Times, 1 May 2016, ‘Isis hackers publish hitlist of drone pilots’, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/isis-hackers-publish-hitlist-of-drone-pilots-xz59sq5bb, accessed 15 February 2018.
‘I DROPPED MY SON AT SCHOOL IN THE MORNING, CONTINUED ON TO WORK AND, WITHIN A COUPLE OF HOURS, KILLED TWO MEN. I WENT HOME LATER THAT DAY TO BE GREETED BY MY SON WITH A CHEERY, “HOW WAS YOUR DAY?” DO YOU LIE TO PROTECT HIM OR DO YOU TELL THE TRUTH?’
JAY, REAPER PILOT
This is a book about the unknown community of the RAF Reaper Force. It is a group that embodies a series of contradictions: aircrew who never leave the ground, who are unseen but regularly in the news and who operate at the cutting edge of technology yet rely on the basic roles of air power – surveillance and attack – that have existed for more than a century.
The biggest contradictions, however, surround the aircraft they fly, remotely via satellite links, from distant continents: the MQ-9 Reaper. For many, perhaps most, people outside of the military, the Reaper is a drone. The word ‘drone’ implies that they are autonomous, self-thinking, emotionless robots but this overlooks the vast technical infrastructure and hundreds of people needed to operate the Reaper squadrons, and ignores the three crew members that fly each aircraft from a Ground Control Station (GCS): the pilot, SO and MIC. Furthermore, ‘drone’ becomes almost meaningless because it puts the Reaper in the same category as small hobby quadcopters. These hobby drones typically weigh less than 20lbs, measure 30–60 centimetres in diameter and typically stay airborne for less than an hour. They must be flown ‘line of sight’ (that is, you have to be able to see them with the naked eye), and fly no higher than 400 feet.
In contrast, the Reaper is a fully functioning aircraft with a 60-foot wing span that is piloted remotely from a GCS far away. It can carry four 100lb Hellfire missiles and two 500lb laser-guided bombs, operates at 20,000 feet, and can stay airborne for between 12 and 20 hours depending on its weapon load. To fly a Reaper the pilot has to pass aviation exams and (s)he must follow the aviation rules and laws that pilots of manned military aircraft must follow. Practically and legally, the International Civil Aviation Organisation recognises the Reaper as a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA). When combined with all the elements that make it work, like satellite communication, computer links, crew and infrastructure, it is formally known as a remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS).3 Similarly, RAF personnel and RAF air power doctrine refer to Reaper, aircraft, RPA or RPAS. Therefore, for the sake of accuracy and authenticity, unless the context calls for the use of the term ‘drone’, such as my entry into the Reaper world in Chapter 1, the remainder of the book will also refer to Reaper, aircraft, RPA or RPAS as I take the reader inside what is more widely referred to as Britain’s drone wars.
What became known as the ‘drone wars’ started with the USA’s use of the MQ-1 Predator immediately after 9/11. By 2006 the Predator had been joined by the MQ-9 Reaper, which brought improved endurance, weapon load and sensing equipment to America’s ongoing War on Terror. The Predator and the Reaper would become mainstays of conventional USAF military operations and unconventional CIA operations. Amongst the best books to capture the technological and military developments in the US at that time is Chris Woods’s Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars.
By the time the RAF acquired the Reaper from the US in 2007, a new vocabulary of war had already emerged. Outside the military, the term ‘drone’ was used almost everywhere to describe these RPA, while the crews who operated them were stereotyped as ‘Playstation killers’4: detached, disengaged, remote and emotionally disconnected from their targets. The chapters to follow will challenge these stereotypes and assumptions, as the extent of the visual, emotional and psychological immersion of the crews in the operations they conduct becomes apparent.
I had my first conversations with a few British Reaper pilots and SOs in late 2011 and 2012. I had been out of the RAF for several years by then and approached them with a negative attitude towards their work, which reflected the general tone of media comment at the time. But, once I got talking to them, I found an intense mental and emotional engagement with what they did and with the people they targeted. The quote at the start of this chapter was merely the starting point for deeper and more insightful conversations in subsequent years.
A major source of frustration for the British Reaper personnel has been, and still remains, that the actions of the RAF’s two Reaper squadrons have been conflated by the media and anti-drone lobby with the CIA’s use of the Reaper and the Predator. (I have spoken informally to several USAF Reaper and Predator pilots who did not like being linked with the actions of the CIA. Specifically, they did not want to be associated with the large numbers of civilian deaths attributed to the CIA.5) So, I found it difficult to reconcile the experiences of the RAF Reaper personnel that I was beginning to encounter with some of the more extreme claims that were being made about ‘drone’ operators. For example:
He is a drone ‘pilot’. He and his kind have redefined the words ‘coward’, ‘terrorist’ and ‘sociopath’. He is the new face of American warfare. He is a government trained and equipped serial killer. But unlike Ted Bundy or John Gacy, he does not have to worry about getting caught. It is his job… A CIA strike on a madrassa or religious school in 2006 killed up to 69 children, among 80 civilians.6
There was something akin to an obsession with zero CIVCAS (civilian casualties) among the British crews I spoke to and later observed in action. The attitude was influenced by RAF civilian casualties from an incident in 2011 (see Chapter 5). I was a King’s College London lecturer specialising in the ethics of war and air power in 2011 and 2012. At the time, the same weapon system – the Reaper – was reported as producing high numbers of civilian casualties by the CIA, while the RAF was reporting one incident. My academic background in the ethics of war, and years of lecturing on military air power, told me that the difference in casualty numbers had to come down to the contrasting policies of different governments and the Rules of Engagement (RoE) that they imposed on their respective Reaper Forces.
A scalpel in the hands of a skilled surgeon is used with precision and purpose, but still damages healthy tissue; a scalpel used without skill, or used by a torturer, can disfigure faces and bodies. The Reaper with its 100lb Hellfire missiles can be unbelievably accurate in, say, hitting a moving vehicle or a single individual. However, I do not want to draw too strong a comparison between the relative accuracy of a scalpel and a Hellfire missile. A ‘surgical’ missile strike can be very accurate compared to the use of a ‘dumb’, unguided bomb, but it is obviously not the same degree of precision as a surgeon achieves in a hospital. A small missile is still a missile: fire it into a dense crowd of civilians and many of them will be killed and wounded. A 500lb bomb will make a proportionately bigger explosion with the potential to kill more people, combatants or non-combatants.
The key question is this. How many civilian deaths will a government allow its armed forces to inflict in the pursuit of the government’s aims? Bluntly, the US considers itself to be at war and has been since 9/11, while the UK has chosen to participate in several military operations during that same period. These political differences have dictated the degree of force that successive US and UK governments have been willing to allow their Reaper Forces to use. Many individuals and organisations either do not know or understand these subtle differences, or they have ignored them for the purposes of the
