CBS 60 Minutes on UAVs

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CBS
May 10, 2009

America’s New Air Force


60 Minutes (CBS), 7:00 PM

LARA LOGAN: Every so often in the history of war, a new weapon comes along that fundamentally rewrites the rules of battle. This is a story about a revolution in unmanned aviation that’s doing just that. Most people know them as drones. The Air Force calls them Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. And right now, there are dozens of them in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan, hunting down insurgents every minute of every day.

They’ve become one of the most important planes in the United States Air Force and yet the pilot is nowhere near the aircraft or the battlefield. They fly by remote control from thousands of miles away. Many of the details of this weapons program are classified, but our “60 Minutes” team was given secret clearance and unprecedented access to bring you this story.

This barren, mountainous landscape may look like Afghanistan, but in fact, it’s just 45 miles north of the Las Vegas Strip, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. This is Creech Air Force Base, home to the only wing in the Air Force where none of the pilots ever leave the ground.

COL. CHRIS CHAMBLISS [U.S. Air Force]: This is a new way to wage war.

LOGAN: Col. Chris Chambliss was one of the top F-16 fighter pilots in the Air Force, a member of the legendary Thunderbirds. Now, the unit he commands has no jets – just these pilotless planes known as the Reaper and the Predator. This is the first base in Air Force history that exclusively flies unmanned aircraft.

Right now, sitting here at Creech, we are about 7,500 miles away from the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. How close, though, is this base to the fight that’s going on there?

CHAMBLISS: I don’t think we’re 7,500 miles away at all. I think if you walk out the hangar and you go into one of the ground control stations, you’re in the fight.

LOGAN: The fight for the pilots is on a video screen. Here, a truck full of insurgents in Afghanistan is being tracked by the pilot. When the ground commander gives the order, he fires, hitting his target.

The trigger is pulled in Nevada, inside these cramped, single-wide trailers and small offices. Two hundred and fifty pilots work in shifts around the clock. Alongside each one of them is a crew member who operates the plane’s onboard camera, and a behind-the-scenes team of intelligence analysts.

The planes aren’t launched here at Creech. They take off from locations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and crews here take control by satellite once the aircraft is several thousand feet in the air.

All the screens that you see are secret. The Air Force declassified these pictures for our report. What you see here is the pilots’ real-time view of the battlefield from thousands of feet in the air, being beamed back live from cameras mounted on the unmanned planes. It’s what the soldiers on the ground call their “eyes in the sky.”

LT. COL. CHRIS GOUGH [U.S. Air Force]: I’m living the same fight as those guys – or at least I’m seeing the same fight.

LOGAN: Lt. Col. Chris Gough flew F-16 combat missions over Kosovo. Now he flies combat missions over Afghanistan – by remote control.

GOUGH: There are arguments that we aren’t as engaged in the war. I’ve heard those arguments. And I can tell you that – and I’m happy to tell you – that I’ve never been more engaged in a conflict in my life.

LOGAN: And he’s never been safer. Lt. Col. Gough sits half a world away from the war zone.

GOUGH: Physiologically, the stimulus and response, exactly the same. I’m not going 400 miles an hour, which means when I pull the stick, I don’t get 5 Gs on my body. I have much more ability to process and to comprehend what’s going on on the battlefield and the information just conveyed to me, and better relay that information to who needs it.

LOGAN: Is it stressful?

GOUGH: Terribly.

LOGAN: And terribly in demand – soldiers on the ground have come to depend on it.

I’ve heard the guys say, you know, they don’t want to step out the door without eyes in the sky.

GOUGH: Sure, I have a brother who’s in Army Special Forces. And honestly, I wouldn’t want him stepping out the door without this thing over the top of him either.

LOGAN: The Air Force now has 28 Reapers, each one costs about $11 million. It can fly as high as 50,000 feet, sit over a target for 15 hours straight, and is as dangerous as a fighter jet.

So this is the Reaper over here?

GOUGH: This is it.

LOGAN: It’s the Air Force’s newest and most lethal unmanned plane, and Lt. Col. Gough gave us a rare look.

This is a 500-pound bomb?

GOUGH: Correct. Five hundred, laser-guided bomb.

LOGAN: But the most important weapon is the aircraft’s million dollar camera.

GOUGH: I don’t want them to know that I’m watching their every move. And that – that unseen, unblinking eye is really the effect that I want to give the ground commander. The fact that they don’t know that I’m watching them – that’s really the magic.

LOGAN: The Air Force also has 116 Predators. It’s smaller than the Reaper, but it can stay up in the air even longer, 24 hours at a time. It can be miles away from its target, flying undetected through the clouds, while zooming in on an unsuspecting enemy.

We saw that ourselves when the Air Force flew a Predator over our heads, about two miles high in the sky.

This is how good the image is from a Predator at around 10,000. What you’re looking at is Creech Air Force Base and I’m on the ground. Even though I know there’s a Predator directly overhead, I still can’t hear a thing – pretty much like an insurgent on the ground in Afghanistan or Iraq. And if you look up to the exact spot where we’re being told the Predator is flying right now, there’s nothing but clouds and blue sky.

The Predator is still flying two miles above us, tracking our “60 Minutes” team as we leave the flight line. It’s this ability that makes it difficult for enemy fighters to escape.

Col. Chambliss showed us exactly how these aircraft do that. In this video declassified for “60 Minutes,” a group of insurgents in Iraq had just ambushed a U.S. convoy. They were trying to get away, but the Predator was watching.

CHAMBLISS: This is a hot gun.

LOGAN: And what do you mean by hot gun?

CHAMBLISS: Well, it’s literally, in this scene, white is hot – and that white spot that this guy is carrying is actually a hot gun. So it’s been fired and we already know that it’s been used. We’ve met positive identification criteria that these are bad guys, and so now we can go ahead and strikes these targets.

LOGAN: Do you believe that Predators and Reapers are changing the face of war?

CHAMBLISS: When we can take 34 airplanes, and we can have them airborne all the time, and they can look at whatever we need them to look at, that’s a huge capability and so because of that, the enemy has to do things differently now. They have to hide more. They don’t know when we’re looking at them. They don’t know where we are.

LOGAN: The pilots’ aerial view of the battlefield often allows them to see the enemy before the soldiers on the ground can. Lt. Col. Gough gave us an example of how he once used this advantage to expose a suspected sniper.

GOUGH: We called down to the convoy and said, hey, how about if you start your engines and just move ten meters for me.

LOGAN: And what happened?

GOUGH: And as soon as they did that this individual reached down and pulled a rifle out.

LOGAN: So you knew?

GOUGH: We were in short order able to engage that individual successfully, alleviate –

LOGAN: With what?

GOUGH: – with the Hellfire strike.

LOGAN: What if you get it wrong?

GOUGH: We don’t.

LOGAN: Ever?

GOUGH: That’s a tough question. Yeah. We have the resources to make sure we’re right. In battle, in combat, in the fog and friction of war, there are always going to be times that your judgment isn’t. With hindsight, you could see things with more clarity.

LOGAN: But you’re not there in the fog and friction of war, you’re sitting here in your cockpit in Nevada.

GOUGH: And that’s what makes us more powerful and have that clarity, because I’m able to distance myself from the fight and use resources that are otherwise unattainable to the combatants.

LOGAN: In spite of that clarity, unmanned planes and Air Force jets are criticized in Afghanistan for killing innocent civilians, including an incident just this week that’s under military investigation.

Across the border in Pakistan, where the CIA operates, they’re blamed for even more deaths. The CIA wouldn’t talk to us about their operations. But the Air Force argues that the ability of these planes to sit over a target for extended periods makes them more precise than piloted planes.

We got a sense of that when the Air Force let us sit with Predator pilots in Nevada while they kept a close watch on U.S. soldiers along the Afghan-Pakistan border. What you’re looking at is the image from the Predator’s infrared camera as the pilots watch a Chinook helicopter offloading troops.

This is happening in the dead of night, so on the ground it’s pitch-black. The Predator crew in Nevada was tasked to watch over the soldiers as they got some rest, pulling guard duty from half a world away.

AIRMAN [Predator Crew Member]: It looks like they’re all in sleeping bags.

LOGAN: Those large white spots they’re looking at are the soldiers’ sleeping bags. The infrared image is so sensitive that once the soldiers are inside the bags, the image can distinguish between the cool sleeping bag and the soldier’s warm heads – those black circles that you can see poking out at the top of the bags.

The crews spent hours studying suspected insurgents. They’ve just seen these men ambush U.S. troops. The pilot can take them out and still make it home in time for dinner.

We joined Lt. Col. Gough one morning as he headed to work to ask him what that’s like.

GOUGH: To go and work and do bad things to bad people is – and then when I go home and I go to church and try to be a productive member of society – those don’t necessarily mesh well.

LOGAN: Does it feel strange compared to being deployed?

GOUGH: Yeah, when you drive past Las Vegas and you look down to the Strip, and turn the corner and head north to the base, you know, you’re leaving one world and you’re going to the other. You know, we go from being parents and spouses to being warriors.

LOGAN: Col. Chambliss and his wife, Linda, have been juggling that lifestyle for two years.

It’s sort of like being in a movie that you can, you know, you’ll wake up at home and have breakfast with the wife – (laughs) – and head to war.

LINDA CHAMBLISS [Col. Chambliss’ Wife]: Mm-hmm.

CHAMBLISS: It is a bit. Once you pull the cockpit out of the airplane, then whether you are 50 miles away from the airplane or 5,000 miles away, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

LOGAN: Do you think that distance makes it – it’s kind of like a video game and not like real life?

CHAMBLISS: No, no, not at all, because you know that there’s no reset button. When you let a missile go and it’s flying over the head of friendly forces and it’s flying toward the enemy to kill somebody or to break something, you know that that’s real life – and there’s no take back there.

GEN. NORTON SCHWARTZ [Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force]: It has become central to the way we operate.

LOGAN: Gen. Norton Schwartz is the chief of staff of the Air Force, its top military officer.

As a system, do you see anything that has done more damage to al Qaeda?

SCHWARTZ: This is probably at the head of the line.

LOGAN: In 2006, the Predator played a crucial role in hunting down the most wanted al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

SCHWARTZ: Here’s the way it goes. You had 600 hours of Predator time over a lengthy period –

LOGAN: Following Zarqawi?

SCHWARTZ: – following Zarqawi. And then you had maybe six minutes of F-16 time to finish the target. So it reflects, again, the power of the unmanned systems to produce the kind of intelligence that leads you to a guy like Zarqawi, who was very good at maintaining his anonymity.

LOGAN: Col. Chambliss told us he thinks the power of these unmanned planes is just beginning to be tapped.

CHAMBLISS: Next year is going to be a watershed year. We’ll actually buy more unmanned aircraft than we buy manned aircraft for the first time in the Air Force’s history.

LOGAN: The Air Force has had to call on their National Guard and Reserve crews to meet the growing demand for these planes. And they’re looking for a new generation of pilots who are willing to give up flying at the speed of sound.

CHAMBLISS: Once you get over the fact that you’re not climbing up the ladder and getting into a cockpit, this is so much more satisfying because, you know, every time you fly, every single day, you’re having an impact on the ground.

LOGAN: So you wouldn’t go back to flying fighter jets?

CHAMBLISS: I’ll be honest with you, I wouldn’t.