Drone syndrome

Book review of 'Drone Warrior'

Drone Warrior 

An Elite Soldier’s Inside Account of the Hunt for America’s Most Dangerous Enemies

Brett Velicovich and Christopher S Stewart

Dey Street (HarperCollins)

318 pages; Rs 499

This book comes with two caveats. First: Don’t judge it by its cover. The image of a tough young man, clean-cut features encased in wraparound glares and three-day stubble suggests that Drone Warrior is likely to be a variation of that discredited book Bravo Two Zero. Tough-talkin’ bravado is in evidence, of course, but this account is leavened by unexpected sensitivity.   

The author provides the second caution. The manuscript has been sanitised, so to speak, by the Pentagon/security establishment or, as he writes, it had “been vetted and reviewed by organizations within the government most people didn’t know exist”. The process, he grumbles, “took longer to complete than it took me to write the actual book”. Fortunately, this extreme vetting has not reduced to the book to a banality of heroic jingoism. 

Credit for that goes to Mr Velicovich. His objective for writing this book is not to puff off his heroism. “I am not a hero; I don’t deserve praise for doing my job, but this story needs to be told,” he writes in the author’s note. He sticks to that promise.  

Drone technology represents the most pivotal transformation in the art of war in general and the techniques of special/black ops in particular. It gained traction after 9/11, though as Mr Velicovich points out, they were a rarity then. “During the hunt for Saddam Hussein…most people were fighting over a single predator for the search. By the time I left the Army, nearly a decade later, my team alone was directing the movement of three Predator drones over individual targets, stacking them on top of each other in the airspace to watch out prey from multiple angles” (note the use of the word “prey” not “enemy”). 

Cheap and easily replicable, the US military came to believe that drones — rightly or wrongly — reduced collateral damage and saved lives. The drone doctrine endured from the Bush presidency through to the supposedly pacific Obama era and, since its two key exponents, Michael Flynn and James Mattis, became influential players in the Trump White House (the former only briefly), it is possible to assume that it will endure under a bellicose 45th presidency. 

Drone Warrior does not expend words on abstruse debates over the ethical implications of drone warfare (for that, watch the TV series, Homeland). Mr Velicovich is undeniably a fervent believer. His account, however, underlines the point that drone combat isn’t, as many of us assume, war at one remove. Sure, the drone warrior gets to circumvent the blood and gore of conventional warfare, but his pressures are as psychologically draining than those on the average GI. 

The quality of decision-making is the chief differentiator. In Iraq, for instance, Mr Velicovich’s is part of an elite task force whose responsibility was to draw up the kill lists — Al Qaeda targets “prioritized for capturing or taking out”. And this vital power to act as a virtual death squad — to “decide whether a man lived or died” — was his at the age of 25 years. 

The bulk of the book chronicles, in brusque staccato prose that has no doubt been honed by his Pulitzer-winning co-writer, Mr Velicovich’s evolution as a drone warrior. You suspect that the “major film” of the book that is in the making (or so the dust jacket says) will focus on the action-packed pages that follow, when Mr Velicovich and his team worked at Camp Taji (ironically nicknamed Camp Pizza Hut), the site of one of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons facilities, which the army had retrofitted into an operating station.

The more compelling parts of the book are Mr Velicovich’s description of the training, which included living the life of a jihadi (complete with prayers and indoctrination) to understand the terrorist mind set. Although he understood that the jihadists had a “perverted view of Islam”, he was programmed to develop a visceral hatred for Islamic terrorists.

The truly revelatory part of the book comes when Mr Velicovich returns from his tours of duty — to life outside this uniquely intensive form of warfare. Drone warriors, it turns out, are as prone to PTSD as their field combat counterparts. In Mr Velocovich’s case, it takes the form of an inability to feel, to mourn when he hears of death, form relationships and, most of all, to shake off a deeply ingrained compulsion to battle “evil”, which compels him back to the world’s most dangerous combat zones again and again. Clearly, drone warriors are subject to a brainwashing as intense as their jihadi enemies. 

Mr Velicovich’s finally manages to halt his spiral into self-destruction in Africa, when he turns his knowhow to a peaceful end — wildlife conservation — and, touchingly, has set part of the sale proceeds of his book to the cause. He is one of the lucky ones. Who knows how many psychologically damaged drone veterans are out there — in a country where gun ownership implacable remains a  constitutional right.