Reaper Force - Inside Britain's Drone Wars. Peter Lee M.
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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 arguments they want to make. For example, the charity War on Want stated:
Drones are indiscriminate weapons of war that have been responsible for thousands of civilian deaths. Rather than expanding the UK’s arsenal, drones should be banned, just as landmines and cluster munitions were banned. Now is the time to stop the rise of drone warfare – before it is too late.7
This statement links ‘thousands of civilian deaths’ with the UK’s drones – the Reaper, in other words – despite evidence including the UN’s 2010 report on ‘extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions’ that does not even mention the UK or the RAF Reaper in its criticisms of drone use.
I have deliberately laboured these political and technical issues here because they provide the background to both my research and to the operations carried out by the RAF Reaper Force. They should also be borne in mind during the chapters to follow. From here on, however, my focus is on the pilots, SOs and MICs, past and present, who conduct the UK’s Reaper operations. They do not work in isolation, however, but are the most visible part of a vast and complex system. It takes an extensive array of people and skills, across several countries, to get a Reaper airborne and to enable it to function across continents: engineers of different types, communications specialists, computer programmers, operations support personnel, weapons technicians, armourers, intelligence gatherers, imagery analysts, air traffic controllers, aerospace battle managers, Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs), lawyers, logisticians, flying programme administrators and many more besides.
Crucial though, and often overlooked in conventional books about war or air power, are the spouses, partners, families and friends that send the Reaper crews off to war every day. They live with the pressures, the fatigue and the emotional overflow from the daily operations conducted by the crew members. Many also spend a large proportion of their time as, effectively, single parents. It is not possible to write about the members of the Reaper Force in isolation without showing how their work impinges on family life, and vice versa.
And now, the structure of the book, which seeks to immerse the reader in the lives of the Reaper operators, from the claustrophobic, fast-moving, life-and-death decisions in the GCS to the human cost, the moral dilemmas, and the triumphs and failures that they experience. There is no strict chronological sequence, as RAF Reaper operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are explored. Depending on who is speaking, and when, several names are used for the group who sought to establish a caliphate across Syria and Iraq: ‘ISIS’ (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), ‘ISIL’ (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), ‘Daesh’ and ‘IS’ (the self-proclaimed Islamic State). I use ‘IS’ for its brevity, while remembering its apocalyptic ambition and vision