Drone warfare from the desk at the office

LA Times:

Strapped into the cockpit of an F-16 jet fighter, Air Force Col. Scott Brenton has dropped bombs over Bosnia, screamed over the desert in Iraq and strafed Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. But on a recent morning, Brenton flew his combat mission from a leather easy chair in a low-slung cinder block building on the edge of Syracuse. 

Brenton's unit, the 174th Fighter Wing of the New York Air National Guard, traded in its fleet of F-16s for unmanned Reaper drones two years ago. Since then, the reserve pilots have been flying nearly around-the-clock combat operations over Afghanistan from a base about five miles from this city's nearest Wal-Mart.

This is what the future of air power looks like.

The Air Force is pulling jet fighters from the flight lines by the hundreds and replacing them with Predators, Reapers and Global Hawks, all piloted from cockpits bolted firmly to the ground. As a result, more and more of war is being waged from home — thousands of miles from the snap of gunfire, shock waves and shrapnel.

"Ultimately, it is conceivable that the majority of aviators in our Air Force will be remotely piloted aircraft operators," Gen. Norton Schwartz, chief of staff of the Air Force, told reporters last week.

Critics say the shift blurs the boundaries of the battlefield and makes it too easy to decide to drop a bomb.

Brenton, the wing's full-time operations group commander, spent a recent morning here with his finger on the trigger of two 500-pound bombs and a rack of Hellfire missiles nearly 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan.

"I walked out of that building and put on my 'Syracuse hat' and just talked to my wife on the phone," said Brenton, 47, after his combat mission. "It's a different way of fighting a war." He would not say whether he had fired any weapons that day.

Because attack drones can be piloted from anywhere, the technology is beaming the war in Afghanistan into once-sleepy 9-to-5 airfields around the United States.

Air National Guard units based in New York, North Dakota, Texas, Arizona and California have traded some or all of their manned jets for drones, which are piloted here but take off and land on runways overseas.

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The transition to robots is creating a major cultural shift for the Air National Guard. Weekend training exercises that used to take pilots 30,000 feet above their hometowns at 1,000 mph have been replaced by combat shifts on an air-conditioned base. 

Last year, the Air Force trained more drone pilots than the total number of conventional bomber and fighter pilots combined. In the last decade, the Air Force has pulled more than 250 manned fighters off the flight line and plans to retire 123 more next year. During that time, the Air Force drone fleet has ballooned from 39 Predators, Reapers and Global Hawks to 280. When small drones in use by Army scouts and other services are included, the tally of unmanned aircraft in the military shoots to more than 7,000.
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While I am an advocate of drone warfare, we will still need manned aircraft against enemies who have the capacity to attack our planes with their own.  While the current generation of pilots are sometimes described as the Play Station team, we are still a long way from being able to engage in aerial combat with enemy fighters by using a joy stick at home.  We may eventually get there.

The Navy's X-47B is a much more powerful bomber drone than the Predator and Reaper versions in current use.  It gives commanders the ability to stand off even further with carriers making it more difficult for the enemy to attack the mother ship.  But it is still hard to imagine the X-47Bin a dogfight.  That is something the retired F-16s excelled at.