- 4 months ago
Tanner Yackley, a former drone sensor operator with the US Air Force, spent years flying remote combat missions, tracking targets, and executing high-stakes strikes — all from a windowless room thousands of miles away from the battlefield.
Yackley enlisted in the military at 18, drawn in by a recruiter who told him he'd be protecting convoys. He spent nearly 8 years in the service, sometimes working up to 12-hour shifts in a type of combat most Americans don't realize exists. Operating MQ-9 Reaper drones, Yackley made life-and-death decisions daily, striking targets based on limited intel, monitoring suspected terrorists, and witnessing acts of war unfold in real time.
Yackley opens up to Business Insider about the realities of drone warfare: the precision required to pull a trigger, the emotional cost of fighting a war you're not physically in, and what it's like to live with the memories of decisions made through a screen. He breaks down drone pilot training, the mental toll of shift work, and how it feels to be forgotten in the conversation about combat veterans.
Since leaving the service, Yackley has become a vocal advocate for mental health awareness among drone crews and continues to challenge public misconceptions about remote warfare.
For more:
https://remotewarrior.carrd.co/
https://rwsupport.carrd.co/
If you or someone you know is dealing with substance misuse or mental illness, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Helpline (1-800-662-4357) for 24/7, free, confidential treatment referral and information.
Yackley enlisted in the military at 18, drawn in by a recruiter who told him he'd be protecting convoys. He spent nearly 8 years in the service, sometimes working up to 12-hour shifts in a type of combat most Americans don't realize exists. Operating MQ-9 Reaper drones, Yackley made life-and-death decisions daily, striking targets based on limited intel, monitoring suspected terrorists, and witnessing acts of war unfold in real time.
Yackley opens up to Business Insider about the realities of drone warfare: the precision required to pull a trigger, the emotional cost of fighting a war you're not physically in, and what it's like to live with the memories of decisions made through a screen. He breaks down drone pilot training, the mental toll of shift work, and how it feels to be forgotten in the conversation about combat veterans.
Since leaving the service, Yackley has become a vocal advocate for mental health awareness among drone crews and continues to challenge public misconceptions about remote warfare.
For more:
https://remotewarrior.carrd.co/
https://rwsupport.carrd.co/
If you or someone you know is dealing with substance misuse or mental illness, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Helpline (1-800-662-4357) for 24/7, free, confidential treatment referral and information.
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TechTranscript
00:00My name is Tanner Yackley, also known as Blackjack.
00:03I served nearly 10 years in the US Air Force as an MQ-9 Reaper sensor operator.
00:07I logged over 3,000 combat hours.
00:09This is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:14Being physically separated, you know, 7,500 miles away from the target,
00:18you're having to take a life or watch things happen that you have no control over whatsoever.
00:24And then you have to go home and deal with dinner and deal with kids' birthdays
00:27and deal with anniversaries and you just watched absolutely horrendous things happen on the screen
00:32and there's no way to escape it.
00:40When we're surveilling the targets, usually there's many different things we could be looking for.
00:45Sometimes it was just, hey, does this person have a weapon?
00:48Is this person trying to plant an IED on the side of the road?
00:52Or is this person, you know, trying to pass a note?
00:55Or is it a certain individual that we're looking for?
00:58It was dependent on what type of target we were on for the day.
01:01But most of the time, you know, there was some type of trigger event.
01:04Either it could be someone, all right, if they're actively digging and, you know,
01:08we confirm that they have a weapon and an IED, then that's enough, you know,
01:14to check a box and say, yes, now we can take out that target.
01:17Or if all of a sudden they start actively shooting unfriendly forces,
01:20that was usually enough to go, yes, you know, we can employ on this target.
01:26Sometimes it could be that short of just someone says, hey, there's a person shooting a mortar at a base.
01:31And we get eyes on and within 30 seconds we're pulling the trigger.
01:34As you can see, mortar tubes light up like a 4th of July show in infrared.
01:39So it's really easy to find an active mortar tube.
01:43We don't have any other information. It's just that this is a bad guy.
01:46Everything's correlated here.
01:48There's other times that we would watch people for days, weeks, months.
01:53We had one target at our unit that I think we watched for six years
01:58before we finally had the opportunity to take them out.
02:03Usually when we're tracking patterns of life,
02:05it would be things like you'd watch somebody wake up for the day,
02:08go feed their goats, go play with their kids, hug their wife, drive their family somewhere, whatever.
02:15But then all of a sudden it turns and they're starting to follow somebody or walk or meet with somebody.
02:21Sometimes it was just following somebody through a market building all day,
02:24which made it very difficult just because you're in very high density areas with a ton of people, a ton of vehicles.
02:31So you're really trying to pull out details specifically of that target and make sure that you don't lose them.
02:36You had an electro-optical being the day TV camera that you could see colors.
02:42And that was obviously very good for targeting and tracking
02:45because you can pull a lot of detail from, you know, a colored image than you can a black and white image.
02:50I always tell people that, you know, I could tell you what color a license plate is.
02:54I can't tell you exactly what the license plate says.
02:57And then the infrared was black and white.
02:59You can gain your own information from pulling out heat signatures and things like that.
03:03Sometimes one wheel would run hotter than the other four on a vehicle.
03:08And so then we knew, all right, that's our vehicle because that back right wheel is hot.
03:19So a drone strike is carried out in multiple ways.
03:22It's like a surgeon.
03:23You're preparing and operating in a certain way,
03:26and you're following a checklist throughout the entire thing, all as methodical as possible.
03:31The chain of command is going to be, you know, based off your intelligence,
03:35whether that's what you're collecting, whether you're collecting like signals intelligence, things like that with it.
03:41So there's many people that are within the chain that, you know, pair everything together and say,
03:46yes, because we watched this video of them from three years ago and correlated it with what you're seeing right now,
03:53along with 10 other things, then we're 99% confident this is the same person.
03:59And or it could be as simple as this is an active threat.
04:02We need to take them out now.
04:04And then usually, you know, we would pass on the information to, you know, our pilot that was the lead for the day.
04:12Then they would run through their own chain of command with it and then essentially come back with authorization saying,
04:17yes, we authorize you to conduct that strike.
04:20Sometimes that could take hours.
04:24Sometimes that could take seconds.
04:25Usually the decisions that were being made were done, you know, outside of our room.
04:30But that's the beauty of what we did is you could send the real time feed anywhere in the world
04:35to put this information right in front of people and allow them to make real time calls.
04:40With the aircraft, you've got, you know, everything, every munition on it for the most part is laser guided.
04:46The laser comes from the camera, shines down, and there's a little reticle on the screen,
04:52a little crosshairs that wherever I move, the laser is in the middle of.
04:56If I drag it to the right, well, then my missile is going to start guiding to the right.
05:00Because of that, I had to be extremely precise in that time and most time of flights of a missile is between 30 and 40 seconds.
05:07That was usually the correlation between the two with the laser and the crosshairs,
05:12was wherever that got moved, that's where the missile went.
05:15The difference between a drone pilot and a drone sensor operator is the pilot you think of as the person that is controlling the plane,
05:23flying it to where it needs to be in a point in space.
05:26They are utilizing what we call stick and rudder, and the sensor operator is the one that controls the camera on the aircraft,
05:32actively following targets, manipulating it to pull out details, contrast, brightness, gain, level, things like that.
05:39And then the pilot is the one that actively pulls the trigger and employs a weapon,
05:43while the sensor operator is the one that is actually lazing in that weapon.
05:48Everything is a two-part process. During any strike, my responsibility as a sensor operator was to essentially back the pilot up on the entire strike flow.
05:58So making sure that, you know, if they were going to pull the trigger at a certain range from the target,
06:05that they were at that range and they were holding in the correct place to do that.
06:09Once we were nose to the target and driving in, the pilot would pull the trigger, the weapon would come off the rail,
06:16and it would cause a screen to go fuzzy. It's good to do with the missile plume.
06:20And then once that cleared, if it was a moving vehicle or something like that, I would try to get a track on it.
06:26It was, again, this trying to manipulate the picture, manipulate the camera, make sure the pilot's doing what they're supposed to be doing,
06:34and also making sure that I don't forget to turn a laser on, otherwise the missile's not going to hit the target.
06:39And then for the next 30 seconds, it's all on me to make sure that wherever I move my crosshairs, that missile's going.
06:46So I've got to be insanely steady with how I, you know, move those crosshairs so that way I don't miss my target.
06:53The reason that the pilot and the sensor operator is a two-person crew, right, is one, just because, at least right now,
07:00the technology, while they've tried, it just doesn't work.
07:04It's way too technical, especially on the sensor operator side,
07:08and needing to be able to make real-time decisions and changes and things like that.
07:13I mean, they attempted to even put technology in it 20 years ago to say,
07:17hey, snap to these targets and look here.
07:20But because of, you know, magnetic fields and rotational drift and things like that with the Earth itself,
07:27it doesn't work that way, you know, you can't get something to fixate that precisely onto a target
07:33when you have so many moving parts to it.
07:36So the technology just really isn't there yet.
07:39You can't train a computer to do, or you can't train one person to do both jobs.
07:44So the MQ-9 Reaper, one of the most common ones out there that's flown today,
07:53this aircraft has a 66-foot wingspan, so it's pretty big.
07:56It's not the little quadcopters that people see buzzing around and everything else out there.
08:00This is a, you know, full-size aircraft, and it's controlled either line of sight,
08:04so needing a direct connection to the aircraft, or via satellite communication,
08:09by bouncing signals into the sky off satellites around the curvature of the Earth
08:15and then getting into wherever it's operating.
08:18The MQ-9 usually sounded like any really other, like, turboprop aircraft.
08:22We always joked about the MQ-1, the smaller one, sounding like a lawnmower
08:27because of the snowmobile engine it had on it.
08:29But the MQ-9 was, you know, it was a 900-shaft horsepower engine.
08:33It was a pretty big size, and so you still had to worry about the sound signature,
08:38but it just sounded like, you know, any other aircraft flying above your head.
08:42And because we operated at, like, 20,000 or 30,000 feet,
08:45you know, typical, like, airliner altitude, unless you were in the right spot,
08:49like, being downwind from it, you could pick it up.
08:52But most of the time, we were so good with our audio signature,
08:55unless you were really low on the ground, you never really heard it.
09:03I had one strike that I was with a newer pilot that I don't think they had struck before,
09:12so this was their first time.
09:13You know, I was fairly seasoned at the time.
09:15We got set up on the target.
09:17We knew exactly what we were going to do.
09:19It was a vehicle next to a building out in the open.
09:22The guy was just sitting outside his car,
09:24pretty about as straightforward as it can come for a target.
09:27And it was like, okay, let's go ahead and turn in.
09:30And right when we got our clear-to-engage call,
09:33which is always the call we were waiting for at that point,
09:37once I came across the radio, the expectation was the trigger was pulled,
09:41my laser's already on, and then I'm, at that point, guiding.
09:45I waited for that individual to pull the trigger when we got the clearance call,
09:50and they didn't.
09:52And then instead I heard, okay, is everybody ready?
09:55And I went, what the heck?
09:57You know, I looked over and I'm like, pull the flipping trigger right now,
10:01because that was their responsibility.
10:02That was what they were supposed to do in that moment,
10:04because any second we delayed,
10:06we let any external factor potentially come into play, right?
10:09Whether that's a person showing up or the person just getting into the vehicle and leaving,
10:13we didn't know what was going to happen.
10:15So any time that it was, you know, a nice clear-cut situation like that,
10:19you wanted to move as fast as possible to capitalize on it.
10:22Bus full of nuns is what we always call the proverbial bus full of nuns,
10:27saying that any given time when you're employing a weapon,
10:30you know, a bus that is figuratively full of nuns on it could be driving into that, you know, target area,
10:39things like that.
10:40It essentially comes down to you always have to plan for the unplanned.
10:43So needing to focus on, you know, what could happen.
10:47And while you hope nothing does, you always have to be prepared for it.
10:50We had one time where we had to do an abort and a strike as all of a sudden the vehicle started moving
10:57and they started driving towards a gas station.
11:00And we didn't want to, you know, obviously have our weapons impact next to a gas station.
11:05So we aborted it.
11:07And, you know, usually what that is is the rule is you're going 90 degrees off from wherever your target is.
11:13And you're utilizing maps that you have up to be able to quickly make decisions within split seconds of exactly where I'm going to shift that weapon.
11:20Hope to God nobody's standing there and hope that, you know, it's in wide open field.
11:25I guess, like I said, we try to control as much as we can, but at the end of the day, there's only so much you can.
11:30So with that one, we shifted the missile off to a field and it impacted in the field, you know, 200 meters away and everything was a-okay.
11:41I'm sure the person on the ground was like, what in the heck?
11:45But past that, you know, it all went by the book.
11:49A lot of the parameters in aborting a strike is set around how important the person is, right?
11:55If it's somebody that's super high value, you know, an immediate threat, it's going to take a lot more to abort that strike than there would be if it's just somebody, you know, super low level.
12:06There's so many decision makers when an abort gets called.
12:09Sometimes that can be on the crew.
12:11Sometimes that can come from way high up in the chain of command as well that they hold the authority on the abort.
12:17One of the most important things when you're striking a target is making sure is minimizing the sonic boom of the missile.
12:24Because depending on how far off of the nose of the aircraft you get, the farther I get away from that, the longer the sonic boom is, which just gives somebody the ability to hear, you know, the missile.
12:38So the aircraft is driven to a certain point in space at that time and then a trigger is pulled to make sure that this comes in at the exact angle it needs to because I can't have a weapon that comes into the roof of a building and punches out the side of the room because I didn't do my angles correctly.
12:58So we had a lot of programs and things like that that would do the math for us, but it was a lot of interpolation of the data and making sure that what we were planning for, we actually executed.
13:14My ground control station was the base outside Las Vegas, Creech Air Force Base.
13:18We operated there while our plane was 7,500 miles around the world, you know, in Afghanistan.
13:23This is about a 30 by 10 foot kind of shipping container looking box, if you will.
13:27It had nice padded carpeted walls and a ton of, you know, servers and electronics.
13:33So usually they're pretty cool temperature wise, just because you've got a ton of, you know, electronics running throughout the room there that you have to keep cold.
13:41And then usually you had dim lighting throughout because any type of bright lights would cause glare on the screen.
13:47And then you had usually two different keyboards, two different mice, eight different screens that you were looking at at any given time.
13:53We did shift work. So, you know, you were on 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
13:574 p.m. to midnight, midnight to 8 a.m.
13:59Rotation.
14:01Day in life was usually wake up, you know, 6 a.m., throw the flight suit on.
14:05I'd get in, sit down in what we call mass brief, essentially briefing the entire team that was flying that night.
14:11You flew with the same people for the most part every night.
14:14You'd get the briefing, you'd get the things like the intelligence of what's going on, right?
14:18Is there specific target factors that we need to worry about?
14:21And that could be, you know, just basic target data on the person, how many kids they have, you know, who their life is, what color vehicle they drive, what compound they stay at.
14:33And then the weather, needing to know things like what the winds are doing, things that are going to affect us overall for the mission itself.
14:40And then you'd get farmed out on who you were flying with for the night.
14:44And that could be anything, which, you know, turned into some grueling nights and some long shifts and things like that,
14:51because you were having to sit for 6, 7, 8, sometimes 10 hours, and some people did 12 pretty regularly.
14:59The shift work in itself was just grueling just because of how quick we had to rotate.
15:03You know, you're trying to fight your circadian rhythm at that point, which just wasn't happening.
15:08So then you get less and less sleep and things like that, that were obviously impactful in doing such a high operation tempo mission,
15:16and trying to run on like two to three hours of sleep.
15:19I was stationed at Creech for four years, never fell asleep in the seats or fell asleep during a mission.
15:24But there was plenty of people that did, you know, just because of the crazy operation tempo that we operated at.
15:30We just white knuckled through it all.
15:32It was just whatever, grab another energy drink, grab another cup of coffee, or some popcorn with jalapenos in it.
15:37And hope that it does the trick.
15:40Flipping the switch is used to talk about, you know, going from work to home and home to work.
15:45I live by myself for the most of the time.
15:48So, you know, there's plenty of times where it was simple things like, you know,
15:52I left the trash can out and some HOA is mad at me or something for it.
15:56But I got to bring that into work with me.
15:59You know, I got to try to flip that switch off and say, okay, I got to deal with that at, you know, 10 hours from now.
16:05Because for the next 10 hours, I need to worry about my job.
16:09I enlisted when I was 18 years old.
16:16I was fresh out of high school.
16:18I didn't feel like college was for me and I didn't really want to go and turn a wrench,
16:21which seemed like about the only thing to do when I got out of high school was to do one of those two things or the military.
16:26So I picked the third option and joined the military.
16:30And I had a recruiter talk to me about drones and, you know, said, hey, this is what you're going to be doing.
16:35You're going to be watching convoys and things like that.
16:37And I thought that sounded pretty cool.
16:39So I said, all right, let's go ahead and do it and jumped on.
16:43When I joined the military, there wasn't a lot of info on what the job even was.
16:48It was just, hey, you're on drones and you're controlling a camera.
16:51That's really all anybody knew, especially back in 2010.
16:55What I was expecting when I joined was that I was going to be what we call overwatch for convoys, things like that,
17:02and being able to kind of provide that eye in the sky, if you will.
17:05I didn't realize how what we call tip of the spear it really was.
17:10One of the first times that I realized that I was going to be actively employing weapons on this aircraft was about halfway through my training.
17:19When somebody made a comment, just I think in a break room or something like that,
17:23looking back on it, I don't know if I was necessarily too young, but definitely wasn't set up for what the expectations were
17:31and how grueling of a job it was going to be.
17:34Because a lot of jobs are like that within the military.
17:37You know, you set 18, 19-year-olds to go out and do things and nobody's preparing them for it.
17:49My path for training was going through basic military training at eight weeks.
17:53Then I went to an air crew fundamentals training past that.
17:57I think that one was three to four weeks long.
17:59I trained in New Mexico at Holloman Air Force Base for about a six-month program for what they call initial qualification training.
18:07The first time that you get hands-on with the aircraft sitting in a ground control station,
18:11because obviously you're not physically inside the aircraft.
18:14After you complete that six months, you get moved on to your combat unit and go through what's called mission qualification training.
18:20It can vary in length as far as how long that goes, but it's specific to that unit, because not every unit does the same mission set.
18:27Our training was a combination of academics, simulator training, and also live flight events.
18:37Every time you were hitting a certain phase, you would go through academic training on it.
18:42You know, learn all there was about it, the regulations, the rules, what you could do when.
18:47Then you'd go through simulator training, essentially something that mimicked the ground control station.
18:52You'd go in and you'd brief the event.
18:54You'd have two instructors, one for the pilot, one for the sensor, two students then, one sensor, one pilot,
19:01that would all get talked through really what the mission was for the day.
19:05Very similar to how a fighter pilot trains.
19:08The simulators were done because that's where you can make mistakes.
19:11That's where you can screw up.
19:12That's where you can do things that are different and dangerous,
19:15and press that reset button where the live flight, you didn't have that option.
19:19You start out with just the basics of this is what button means what, and there's a lot of them.
19:24You know, what the menus are and how to navigate them and how to utilize those buttons and menus
19:29to then get into these events and pair it with a mission.
19:33The live flights were done the exact same way.
19:36We trained on close air support, strike coordination and reconnaissance, air interdiction, combat search and rescue even.
19:42There's only a handful that I saw that actually washed out through the initial training of it.
19:47But most of the time when people washed out, it wasn't the traditional, you know, way that you would in like SEALs training or something like that.
19:56It was more so somebody just threw a hand up and said, I can't do this anymore.
19:59They were ushered out quietly as much as possible just because you didn't want to have an impact everybody else around you.
20:06There was definitely a learning curve on our side.
20:09The simulators were notably, and especially 15 years ago, were notably poor when it came down to the image quality, different things like that.
20:17We call them simisms.
20:19Ah, that's a simism, like we can't do anything about it.
20:22So you just have to wait until you get into the, get into the, into the jet, you know, to be able to see how it really works.
20:30So I was fresh out of the schoolhouse, got to my first combat unit, had barely been there a month, you know,
20:36seeing active combat missions flown for the first time, you know, watching all the feeds every day.
20:41And I was sitting in a training event.
20:44And all of a sudden in the middle of the training event, we got a call over the radio for that there's troops in contact.
20:52Troops in contact is when anytime any friendly forces are taking fire and they need our support,
20:57and usually needing something to do with flying or potentially operating what we call danger close.
21:03So it falls underneath the close air support mission set.
21:06So that call came over the radio.
21:08It was a JTAC on the ground.
21:10He was screaming, saying, you know, and, you know, any player, any player, we're taking fire.
21:16You know, you know, essentially we need help at that point.
21:20And so then we jumped on and responded.
21:23The pilot cued the mic, said, you know, hey, we're, we're, you know, only a couple miles away.
21:28We'll be there in, you know, two minutes and get eyes on.
21:31At that time, you know, I was still in, in being trained.
21:35So I wasn't qualified to be in this, to stay in the seat and execute a strike.
21:40So the instructor that was behind me, just leaned over, tapped me on the shoulder and said, swap.
21:46Then he turned around and swapped me in.
21:48And then I stood over and watched as they were frantically trying to search for where those friendly forces are
21:54and really where the enemies were at that point, because then you're trying to figure out who's who within that,
22:01because all you see is gunfire.
22:03My first strike was January 20th, 2013 at 6.49 in the morning, just sitting on a target, watching some top of a mud hut, nothing going on.
22:21And then all of a sudden we got a call over the radio saying, hey, we need you to move this other target area.
22:25So we started heading that way.
22:27I was pulling up graphics for it, looking at the intel, figuring out, all right, what's this location?
22:32What's the issues around it as far as a bunch of trees or a bunch of buildings, things like that?
22:37And it ended up being a cave in the middle of nowhere.
22:42And there was a handful of people there that they wanted us to take out.
22:45We'd go through that methodical checklist.
22:47My pilot and I did things like planning for if we need another weapon immediately afterwards,
22:53because some person runs or something like that.
22:56Well, then we have to be prepared to, you know, take care of it.
22:59We, in turn, would get all the weapons ready, be ready for that re-attack posture, is what we called it.
23:04And then we went through and executed the strike at that point and took out a handful of people at this cave.
23:10And then we had to then immediately do a re-attack.
23:14And the person I was tasked to re-attack was sitting behind a rock.
23:18And, you know, we turned in and we had to change the angle we were coming in from,
23:21because it was like a hallway almost with two rocks side by side.
23:25And you've got to worry about the missile coming in at a certain trajectory, being able to be effective.
23:31It's not the movies, right?
23:33It's not that, oh, a Hellfire missile comes down and that levels the city block.
23:37It's so much smaller than an explosion.
23:40Two and a half years that I had trained up to that point, all of it came to fruition in that moment.
23:46That was the bar that was set, was can you go through and execute a strike effectively?
23:52And can you work under pressure?
23:54And when, you know, that strike came out successful, you know, that told everyone that I could do the job and I could be called on to do it again.
24:02When we got onto that target and we were actively coming from a different target, everything was going so fast at that point.
24:08You know, we were setting up a camera.
24:10I was calibrating my camera as we were only into the target area, trying to pull out the best picture I could at that point.
24:18So everything I was thinking, every thought that was going through my mind was all about the technical aspects of the employment, you know, of shooting that weapon.
24:27There wasn't much, you know, as far as being able to stop and think of, wow, I'm about to take a life.
24:36It was all about just the technical aspects of it all and being able to go in and just do your job.
24:42And that's all I was thinking about was, I better not screw this up.
24:46In that moment, you know, back in 2013, I didn't have a clue what it was doing or how it was changing me or anything like that.
24:55Because all I did was just look at it as, well, I'm doing my job and this is what I'm trained to do.
25:01I can see the entire strike start to finish in my head on everything from that first missile impacting to the guy running to reattacking him and this lifeless body at the end of it.
25:15I've got thousands of events like that that are burned into my brain.
25:25Being physically separated, you know, 7,500 miles away from the target, after you're watching a person for a long period of time and then, you know, needing to take them out.
25:34It was usually what happened in the moment with it.
25:38You know, I had one strike that we watched.
25:41I watched a person essentially get sawn in half with a missile and his wife drag that half of him across the field.
25:51And so that, that one will always be burned in my brain.
25:56I can't hear anything obviously, right?
25:58But I can still see the distraught on her face and, and just, you know, I mean, she was screaming.
26:06You could tell.
26:07And most of the time it wasn't the act of employing.
26:11It was more so like watching people literally tear each other apart.
26:16That was the stuff that stuck with me and, and that was harder to deal with.
26:20One example of it is, is two people walking down an alleyway.
26:23One person all of a sudden reaches out, pulls a, pulls a handgun out from underneath his thobe that he's wearing,
26:30and turns and just shoots the guy next to him.
26:33And the guy dropped and then I just sat there and watched him bleed out.
26:36And then eventually the other guy just walked away and they went,
26:40okay, follow that guy.
26:42And then you're sitting there and just actively following this person.
26:46Um, and you know, you have to process that you just watched somebody die.
26:51Um, but again, you don't have time to process it.
26:53Uh, not then.
26:55That was really the piece to it that was most difficult.
26:59There was no time that I disagreed with an order or anything like that with what I was doing.
27:04You know, at the end of the day, I was, I'm proud of the work I did.
27:07There were still targets at the end of the day.
27:09They were still doing bad things and you know, we needed to take them out.
27:13There's plenty of times that you looked at it after the facts and went, I don't really know what happened there.
27:18I mean, a lot of mission specifics, things like that you can't talk about, right?
27:21Where we operated, who, you know, who I was operating for, things like that.
27:25Um, you just can't get into.
27:27And unfortunately, because of how much secrecy was put into it and, you know, and rightfully so, but now people feel like they can't talk about just their basic emotions.
27:38It was just strike the target, move on, strike the target, move on.
27:42And so that's, that's what we did and we're very good at it.
27:46I would say I definitely wasn't emotionally prepared, uh, to deal with any of this, uh, you know, coming out of it because it wasn't like, you know, anybody openly at any time said, hey, by the way, you're gonna struggle with this.
27:59I have a best friend that a couple months ago, he had a doctor that looked him in the face and said, well, you didn't deploy, so how can you have trauma?
28:06Do you have any idea how much of a kick in the face that is for somebody that's done thousands of hours, set over, you know, a thousand combat missions?
28:16And just, you're gonna turn around and say that to somebody, you know, and, and, and tell them that they can't have an issue?
28:26It's not when people are in and they're, and they're doing it that they recognize there's an issue.
28:30It's when people get out and finally pick their head up and go, oh, holy cow, I've got a lot that's impacting me because of the work I did.
28:37No one's looking at how is this affecting people when they walk out of that box, take that flight suit off, say I'm done serving and, you know, and then go and work, you know, whatever job they're going to.
28:49Nobody's looking at what's happening to that group of individuals, because I can promise you that's the group that's struggling the most.
28:55Who do we have here with us today?
28:58Up. Good boy. Up. Come on. Come on. Come on. Do it. I know you can. There you go.
29:04Oh, there you go. This is my service dog, Hawk, or Lord Hawthorne. And I've been with him for going on three years now.
29:12And he's my PTSD trained service dog.
29:15Off. Good boy. Right here. Stay.
29:19He is for post-traumatic stress. So he does things like watch my back and will put pressure on my feet in certain moments or alert if there's someone walking towards me, anything like that, that I don't see.
29:32Most people, that's the big stigma out there is everyone thinks it's a video game.
29:41That one always cuts everybody pretty deep just because of, you know, couldn't be farther from the truth.
29:47You're making life or death calls every single day. You could have multiple people operating underneath one mission set.
29:54You may not have all the intel. There's a lot of things that you're trying to prepare for and a lot of preparation that goes into it.
30:00And at the end of the day, there's no reset button. There's no, hey, just going to turn it off and go home.
30:06You know, that plane's still flying when I leave that box.
30:09The whole, you know, gamers make great drone operators as well.
30:14There's some skills, I'm sure, that transfer. There's not a single game in the world that can prep you for what you're going to do
30:23and the decisions that you're going to have to make and, you know, and the high caliber level that you're going to have to operate at.
30:31I would say some of the technical skills, right, is being able to multitask, being able to be strategic, being able to make quick decisions, right?
30:38Decision making needs to be fast to the point because you're pivoting so much throughout on any given mission that you just don't know what you're going to be setting yourself up for throughout the process.
30:50Drone operations today compared to 10, 15 years ago are, I would say, different in some aspects, but underlyingly not.
31:05The missions, the things like that they're doing are still going to fall under the same area, but it's not going to be at such high operational costs that we did.
31:13You're not flying this insane amount of hours, but the life or death decisions you're making are still there.
31:19And then you still have to go home and, you know, see your wife and kids or your fiance or whoever at the end of the day.
31:26So the situation in Ukraine is absolutely changing everything that we look at with warfare.
31:31I mean, they've essentially made their own air force with small, you know, first person view UAS.
31:36My concerns with autonomy and AI within drone warfare would fall under if they ever take the human completely out of the loop.
31:43Letting software make life or death decisions, I think is, is where we have to draw the line.
31:49And there's always going to be a human behind that, you know, kill chain behind that decision making authority.
31:54The second we go away from that is, you know, then where, where do you, where do you draw the line?
32:00AI was in charge in my past missions. I mean, the, the impacts could have been horrible throughout it.
32:11With the, you know, the drone strike in 21 that killed a bunch of civilians, that's thing that, you know, is horrible, right?
32:18We hope that never happens. And at the same time, you know, it's one of those that it's war.
32:23But you absolutely, you know, you do everything you can to prevent it from happening again.
32:29I think the moral injury piece of it is never going to go away.
32:33What are some things that work for you in terms of like dealing with your PTSD?
32:37A lot of it is just one communicating it, you know, and being able to talk to others about it.
32:43And I found that to be extremely therapeutic, if you will, by recognizing and allowing, you know,
32:49people to understand that they're not alone when it comes to this, that this is a completely normal thing.
32:59I left the Air Force in September 3rd of 2018, moved to North Dakota to work for a contract company,
33:06doing essentially very similar work to what I was doing in the military.
33:10I left the Air Force just because I had finished my tenure at the schoolhouse or I was coming up on it.
33:15And the only option being a younger staff sergeant at the time was to go back to a, you know, combat unit
33:24and go right back into shift work and everything else.
33:27And I just knew after, you know, I was at eight years at that point that my body was just tapped
33:32and that I couldn't do that work anymore.
33:36I couldn't put myself back into, you know, that shift work and everything else.
33:40I was getting paid around $38,000 a year to do that job.
33:44And with the, you know, moral injury and mental stress that went with it,
33:49it definitely wasn't nearly enough than what I should have been making.
33:54To be 19 years old and thrown into that role, you know, and have pulled my first trigger at 20 years old,
33:59arguably that's a big reason that I got out too.
34:02You know, hard to keep doing that ops tempo and that type of job when you're getting paid peanuts to do it.
34:08And so I think the biggest thing that with PTSD and mental health and drone pilots especially is 10 years ago,
34:15it was laughed at, you know, that people could have it.
34:18So we're still fighting those stigmas, which is a huge problem for that community
34:23because I think it's rampant throughout the community.
34:26Nobody wants to recognize it.
34:28And, you know, the veterans themselves are just shells of themselves, you know, on any given day now,
34:36and it's hard enough to put their feet on the ground, let alone go out and do a job and, you know, be, you know,
34:43be a productive member of society.
34:45There's a lot of things that, you know, that trauma evolves and manipulates my day-to-day, if you will.
34:53It could be things like, you know, checking tree lines because, again, my anxiety is so high that I'm constantly,
35:00you know, if something's moving, things like that, my brain wants to know what is that?
35:04What's that piece of information, right?
35:06What's that sound?
35:07And then it's just trying to constantly, you know, push out a lot of negative thoughts, negative beliefs
35:14because of the moral injury piece to this that make it just difficult to operate on a day-to-day.
35:21To be frank, being a drone operator, you know, it's taken a toll on me in my life and my family, my relationships,
35:28things like that.
35:29It's difficult for me to maintain relationships.
35:32It's difficult for me to maintain friend circles.
35:34It's difficult for me to talk to family about it, you know,
35:38because unless somebody actually sat in that box and did the job, they don't understand.
35:42They can try to, but most of the time it ends up doing more harm than good, you know, trying to relate to it
35:50instead of just being supportive in the moment.
35:53Remote Warrior is an organization that I started.
35:55We're building so many different things to just be able to put language to this,
36:00put common, you know, vernacular behind all of it and make it make sense for people that are dealing with this.
36:06We've got a guide out that's called the Fog of War Guide that we put plain language into what people may be feeling.
36:13From things like, you know, thoughts bouncing around in your brain so fast it feels like a ping pong ball has been fired off
36:19and that you can't focus on what you're saying.
36:23So it's being able to bring these tools and these education, you know, materials to people, you know, people that are struggling,
36:30but also the VA, Guard and Reserve units, academia, I mean, you name it.
36:37We have training plans, lesson plans for all of it to bring in, you know, discussions on identity crisis, moral injury,
36:45all these pieces that come into play and that, you know, these industry professionals need to understand
36:52and need to start taking the human into account and not just the person on paper.
36:58Hi, I'm a producer on Authorized Account. If you like this episode, then you should check out our new podcast
37:03and comment below with the names of people you'd love to hear us interview.
37:06Aw, boy.
37:07The best.
37:08Aw.
37:09This is a big student at halftime, huh?
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