Up in the Sky, An Unblinking Eye

The Predator is the UAV most civilians are familiar with, but only it and a newer craft called a Reaper—equipped with four Hellfires and two 500-pound bombs—are armed. The CIA and Air Force control these drones, using them to take out high-value targets—terrorist leaders—in remote corners of Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as in Iraq. The Air Force guides its Predators (as well as the high-flying Global Hawks, which can stay aloft for more than 20 hours watching a battlefield) from Air Force bases in Nevada and California—more than 8,000 miles from the killing zone. They use only qualified fighter or bomber pilots, who lead a somewhat surreal life. An Air Force pilot at Creech can wake up at his suburban house in the morning, drive his kids to school, go to work, kill a terrorist with a Predator, pick up his kids from soccer practice, and fall asleep in front of the tube … all in a day's work.

The vast majority of the roughly 1,500 drones flying in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, are much smaller craft, controlled by soldiers and Marines. Not long ago, a NEWSWEEK reporter watched as Sgt. Lenzy Schneider, 24, launched a Raven UAV from the roof of a building in a forward operating base near the town of Balad. Ravens are about the size of large model airplanes, with a wingspan of three feet. (The drone is sometimes mistaken for a bird when it is high in the sky.) Battery-powered, made of Kevlar and Styrofoam, they weigh less than five pounds and cost a mere $35,000—about one twentieth the price of a Predator. They're launched the same way a child might send a model plane skyward—with a flip of the wrist. "Anyone can fly it, even me," says Schneider, grinning. A two-week course is all a soldier needs to master the fundamentals of the Raven, although the Army has created a new classification—15W—for pilots who control larger drones.

Sgt. Chris Hermann, 24, flies his Shadow—one of those larger craft, launched by catapult and capable of staying airborne all day long—from a comfortable chair inside a trailer at a forward operating base outside Baghdad. He controls the bird with a large trackball, a hemispherical device built into his computer console. "Yeah, middle of the desert, aircon and a padded seat, there are worse jobs in Iraq," he says. The job is important but not all that challenging, he says. "We all joke about it," he told a NEWSWEEK reporter. "A monkey can do this job, this bird flies itself, it lands itself." When the weather is bad and the Shadow can't fly, Hermann and his buddies will get together and play Battlefield 2 or Call of Duty 4 or The Underground. Compared with those videogames, Hermann says, flying a Shadow is "kind of like old Atari, pretty basic, point and click."

Army soldiers don't do the shooting themselves; for that they call in Apaches or F-16s. But Sgt. Tim Bush, Schneider's partner, says Iraqi insurgents have learned to fear the drones. "They hear some sort of air noise and they don't know exactly what it is, but they know it's associated with 'my buddy getting killed'," says Bush. "Anything that makes them uneasy makes me happy." Unfortunately no airstrike is entirely precise, and drone-related hits have most likely killed dozens of civilians in both Iraq and Afghanistan. An Iraqi correspondent for NEWSWEEK was recently taken to sites in Sadr City where, it was claimed, women and children had been killed by errant UAV strikes. In the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, village mothers have been known to use the threat of a Predator attack to get their children to behave: "Obey or the 'buzz' will come after you."

That's a problem in fighting a counterinsurgency, where winning over the population is key. On the one hand, the coverage provided by UAVs allows ground troops to travel more freely and openly, to get out of their Humvees and interact with civilians. But the act of killing is becoming ever more remote—even robotic. Northrop-Grumman is even working on a $635 million contract to develop an unmanned bomber for the Navy. The X-47B will be the size of an F-14, but designed to fly from an aircraft carrier—with folding wings that would allow it to fit in carrier elevators. For now, this is just a "proof of concept" program, meant to demonstrate what is and isn't possible. But the first prototype is due next year.

As any military man can tell you, no war can be won from armchairs in Nevada. Soldiers will still have to confront the enemy (or, more precisely, try to figure out who is the real enemy) and partake in the endless trial of trying to win hearts and minds without winding up in a coffin. But with UAVs overhead, soldiers do not have to feel like they are sitting ducks for every ambusher or bombmaker. As they peer up at that … bird? … it's the insurgents who have to worry.

With Rod Nordland, Lennox Samuels and Hussam Ali in Baghdad, and Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai in Pakistan

© 2008