The U.S. Air Force on Thursday unveiled a $3 billion plan to vastly expand its drone program over the next five years to help meet increased demand and give overworked pilots a break, reported The Los Angeles Times.
"We've just been running 'em so hard. Every single mission those guys go in and fly today is a combat mission," said Gen. Herbert Hawk Carlisle, the officer in charge of Air Combat Command. "You know, the term we use in flying is, it's a 'death spiral.' If we just keep burning these folks out, and working them six days a week with little time off - and they're not allowed to go do any other jobs or any other things, and they're just doing constant combat missions - we'll lose them," he said, according to NPR.
The proposal, which must first be approved by Congress, would bring on 3,000 new drone pilots, doubling the force, and add 75 more Reaper drones to the current fleet of 175 Reapers and 150 of the smaller Predator drones.
The Air Force also plans to establish new drone operation centers, hopefully at Beale Air Force Base in California, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and at Britain's Lakenheath military base in Suffolk, England.
For the past 20 years, U.S. drones armed with missiles have constantly circled the skies of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Northern Africa and now Syria, conducting airstrikes, providing surveillance and sending live video back to operators in the states.
Nearly all of those drone missions are conducted from a single operational center in Creech Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas, Nev., and no housing exists there, so the 3,325 personnel must commute.
The new centers would cost some $1.5 billion to build and would each house 400 to 500 pilots and crew, costing an additional $1.5 billion, according to The LA Times.
Officials told the Times that the Air Force also plans to create a more traditional military command structure to help organize the drone program, which has grown exponentially over the past decade.
The Air Force's announcement comes less than a month after four former drone operators spoke out against "the devastating effects the drone program has overseas and at home," telling President Obama in a letter that the targeted killing program is a major driving force for the Islamic State group and worldwide destabilization, often creating more terrorists than killing, as HNGN previously reported.
A recent report from The Intercept revealed that nearly 90 percent of people killed in recent drone strikes in Afghanistan "were not the intended targets" of the attacks, which has the effect of radicalizing surviving family members.
"We came to the realization that the innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay. This administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world," the drone operators wrote in their letter to the president.
The strikes have increased by more than 800 percent under the Obama administration and, since 2002, have killed an estimated 1,200 innocent civilians, sometimes striking weddings, funerals and even rescue workers, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
