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winter is that and there have none removed can you. hear me. welcome to sophie and sophie shevardnadze fears military is relying more and more on drone warfare look at this modern what's been be doing more harm than good brendan ryan to forward quote an operator in the u.s.

military is with me today to share his experience. modern warfare can be fought in mountain passes down near urban streets but aircraft firing missiles over afghanistan can be guided remotely from a base in nevada in a dark room lit by computer screens by a pilot in the skies what plays in the mind of a draw operator before he hits the button is it easier to fly to the enemy thousands of miles away instead of face to face those who engage in war distanced from its dangers and consequences. brendan bryant who served in the u.s. air force as a drone operator welcome to our show it's really great to have you with us brenda hi. thank you for having me right out both obama and trump haven't raced drone warfare with strikes in somalia and yemen tripling in trunks first year in office but this is ration in this country as a catalyst and a prime example never seems to improve can drones really change the course of

a contain. no drones definitely cannot change the course of anything especially if they're being misused as a tool and that's simply all that they are and if we take away our ability to interact as human beings with one another we're never going to solve this crisis. now during your time in the here us air force strongs were tested as a new form of warfare now even islamic state have been using them in iraq in syria to devastating effect to drones have the potential to be asked commonplace as war planes and helicopters and will everyone embrace them at some point. as this technology gets easier to manufacture you're going to see a lot more people utilizing it you can go to best buy in america and buy a quad copter drone for less than a thousand dollars and you can watch you tube videos of people putting stuff on

these drones to make them even deadlier so you know it really just takes a more moral and righteous and virtuous person to utilize this technology technology properly but obviously what we've been seeing is that none of these people who are using these things in warfare understand what virtues or morals actually are are we going to have like a drone on. combat from now on this is how we're going to look like in the future well if you look at what's happening with japan and china there are to utilize in this technology to fight over resources in the ocean so it's not unheard of that we're going to have cowards fighting cowards behind a computer screens now the biggest plus for using drones is that it's a as american lives know what is put in the firing line so how can the technology

be bad i mean your side suffers no losses. that's actually the thing about warfare that people need to understand is that there is a price to pay we going to war and if we take the human component out of it then there's no actual price and then we just continue to have. the cycle it's an endless endless cycle and there needs to be men and women who train with honor and integrity who are willing to go on to the battlefield and interact with humans because that's actually how battles are prevented usually we had people posturing one another back in world war two people didn't fire to kill one another only twenty percent people did today in today's conflict we have a ninety five percent fire and kill rate and we wonder why we have people with psychological the mental problems that are coming back from home or from war to home and killing themselves so this is just going to make it even worse now you

have described the use of drones as cowardly action i kept of you just in warfare arrests as honorable you can hardly describe homemade to i tax or children being recruited to carry them out on our wall right when she backed drones knowing your enemy what resorts to anything damage or kill your soldiers. just because our enemy does something dishonorable doesn't mean that we need to continue being dishonorable ourselves this is actually why codes of conduct and codes of honor were required for warriors back in ancient days it wasn't so our enemies could know what exactly what we were doing but so that we had a structure and boundaries in what we were going to do his wars aren't five against one another they're fought for the people and if you can set an example for the people as being the better and noble or and more honorable person people are going to side with you and then the enemy will lose their power and that's really what it comes down to you take away their ability to recruit give the people who are

suffering under these conflicts the ability to recover to feel safe that's the way to win this war say not career ended or weapons to kill one another yet but the point is there always been wars and there will be wars and there's nothing we can do about it really so as wening a war less important that's a dummy and that is a that is a poor poor excuse that is a poor poor whore excuse look at our look at the leadership that we have today trump is a idiot and every single person of his administration idiots and all they ever do is just sit there and posture and saying that we need to go to war and we need to go to war obama did the same. and we need people who are actual decent human beings saying anough is enough we have the ability to stop this we are conscious living human beings we're not animals we need to stop acting like animals and actually be

human with one another i salute you on that statement and i wish you ran for president one day. i want to go back to how you become a drone operator i'm just interested in a whole process what's the process for becoming one what kind of people just us for all attract or are soldiers just told they're being transferred. well when i was in the service i was just transferred because of my aptitude scores. now adays there well let's just take a look at the people that i i worked with many of them were the lowest common denominator. when the u.s. military needed people to fill these positions they just asked a bunch of different careers to send us people and so the other careers sent us the kremlin mediocrity if you will the worst of the worst people who were rejected from other career fields because they couldn't function in leadership positions pilots

were moved into drones because they were medically unfit to fly their aircraft they either couldn't fail they couldn't be aircraft commanders or squadron leaders so they were shoved into the program there were very few people that actually volunteered to be in this program that were of any actual worth as human beings so this type of society i guess within the military culture is sick and degraded and. you know they're actually looked down upon by. aircraft people who actually fly aircraft because we're flying remotely they go to where flight suits it's a mess the whole thing's a mess. people in there to fill positions because they don't need qualified it's like three months now it's like. just hot just to cayle or are they supposed to be able to tell one to pull the trigger and one just a stealth. oh no ok so we're we're told we're told that you know we get the time to

look at our target to make the discernment of whether we get to kill him or not but the reality is that if you refuse to pull the trigger they're just going to take someone out of the seat and put someone in the seat that's going to pull it for them anyway and how the training works is you for flying over the never out of desert and we're looking at rocks and then they're saying hey we're going to pretend this rock over here is an enemy shining your laser at this enemy ok three two one rifle sixteen seconds time flight alright missile splashes enemy is killed you just won the war on terror let's pack up and go home it's just a bunch of imagination that doesn't actually accomplish anything other than to teach people basic toddler skills of hand eye coordination now i wear out that the operator schedules are pretty tough on that most of time like you just spend hours looking at nothing now what's the messed up sleep cycles and boredom how sharp are the operators when the time actually comes to make

a crucial decision. well this is kind of where the people that i used to work with are pissed off at me because they expose the mental difficulties that we were having you know we flew in my squadron eleven and a half hour days because we couldn't fly longer than the required crew rest according to air force regulations and in a sense many of us broke crew rest because we had to do office work or even some of us couldn't sleep i was one of those people that couldn't sleep so i really stopped sleeping and i did this thing called the easy man sleep schedule where you sleep every twenty minutes for four every four hours for twenty minutes and really screwed me up physically i was tired all the time i was exhausted we had people drinking and we had this one guy who got into a car accident and rolled his vehicle after drinking and he used the excuse that he was just tired from work and he got away with it it's just a mess like that people in this way. world are incredibly messed up and they refuse

to look at themselves in the problems that are going on with them and addressing them and then there is of course to million dollar question i mean you have firsthand experience of directing where hastur the desire to practice some of this are twelve strikes really that precise and surgical well if you're looking at accuracy of where the missile can hit in yes if you're looking at the intelligence behind it and how they discern what information that we're given and what targets are correct and no. in fact this is what we call secret compartmentalised information the three letter agencies that are working as the customer behind the scenes don't really give the people that work that swing the metaphorical sword the information all the information so they tell us where to swing the sword but when things go wrong in the wrong people are killed we're the ones that get blamed because they had all the intel and it's it's just

a big blame game prendre where does a drone operators in toll count from who is giving you the instruction as how console jersey shore the information is on point i mean does everybody ever questioned it. i know well people don't question it because that's why it's compartmentalize there's all sorts of different pieces of the puzzle and none of the pieces are actually talking to one another except for what's required knowledge is the modern currency and so like dragons they hoard this currency and only divvy it out whatever they think is necessary for them to complete their mission and get more of that currency it's it's like oh it's a weird kind of cycle. and it doesn't really get anywhere especially with agencies who have this rivalry with one another and they argue back and forth over who is the better person or who's the better agency or who's cooler and instead of actually getting the mission done and accomplishing it and finding a endgame for the whole thing whether i have

a show break right now and we'll go back with brandon bryant former trelane operator in the u.s. air force talking about they have a toll of drone warfare states will too. f

o c. z this is harlan kentucky. places people from st families.

a co money city with no coal mines left. the jobs are gone all the coal miners have said that that was a lot of these people the survivors of disappearing before their eyes. i remember thinking when i was younger that if anything ever happened to the coal mines here that it would become a ghost town but i never thought in a million years i would see that and it's happening it's happened. i went back to have brandon bryant former pro an operator thank you us air for a socket about the implications of drone warfare no brainer if you're a save intel documenting terrorist but you look at the screen and saying they

aren't terrorists as most case in most cases what this actually be down to faulty intelligence or using drone operators are being deliberately misled that's kind of another part of the compartmentalize thing like they only give us the information that we need in order to give them the best picture possible and to swing the sword again the metaphorical sword so we while we can look at a person and they'll say follow this person or strike this person we don't get any more detail than that really we can but the details don't matter and we're not really sure the sources or anything. though we are being told that sources come from to put places either signals intelligence imagery intelligence or human intelligence we're not the ones that interact with that information how are this extra judicial killings justified legally is it ok to kill someone on suspicion

just because you're at war and can the war on terror be used in an instant or redefine your enemy to keep in those legal parameters. this is this is where we get into the grounds of legality versus morality you know the nazis everything that they did was legal to them slavery united states everything was legal the genocide of native americans in my country was legal right so where we have to come to the point is like where's the moral boundary that we want to to draw the line at and that something that shouldn't be left to the law the law is just a framework for us to play in not a black and white yes or no in every case is different i don't think that we should utilize any sort of technology or glorified any technology that to use lies to kill another human being we still need to see these people as humans not as demons

because there's a reason why these people are angry and they're hateful it's not because of anything other than we've created this monster ourselves and we've become the monster that they hate now of civilian deaths as a result of drone strikes hit us held responsible the drone operator or the commander who gives the order or the intelligence guys. really know when inside hold each other accountable if someone screws up then they just get a slap on the wrist and everything's ok and that's why you would see in the past when long strike happened someone like obama or brennan would blame the operators themselves for things that are gone wrong rather than the intelligence that was given because the cia and all these other agencies that are out there they don't want to take responsibility they just want to point fingers at other people and place the blame on others because they're perfect they don't make mistakes it's the operators that make mistakes and that's actually one of the reasons i started

speaking out was because the operators were just soldiers and while just following orders is is not a good excuse to do it we're not the ones that have ultimate responsibility in this though we do have responsibility in what we do to help more responsible and more traumatized over your experience than say soldiers who serve in their artillery and wives i mean they launch missiles into war zones they have feelings what's so different about being a drone operator. well here's where you get into close combat scenarios versus distant killing and if we really want to take a look at it violence and sex affect the same part of the human brain in the exact same way and hand to hand combat is as intimate as you could possibly get with someone but as you increase the distance from long range assault rifles or small arms fire and you get into artillery you cease actually seeing

a human target and you see actual like target locations or target buildings and you forget about the human being that's a part of it and if we look at something like world war two in the bombing of dresden a lot of those guys they just pushed bombs out of their aircraft and were just hitting targets but when they saw the devastation that they caused in the human beings that suffered many of them were institutionalized then and the instances of p.t.s.d. amongst those people were severe and where it comes from a difference between an artillery operator and a drone operator in we see our victims in fact when we fire a missile the missile sonic booms about one point two seconds after it comes off the rail and as the kinetic energy is lost through the missile that sonic boom hits the target first so we actually see the reaction of the target before missile strikes and i think that does something to a human being and i'm speaking from experience and reflection rather than any sort

of higher intelligence so. you know you can draw your own conclusions in this but really what it comes down to is seeing how people react in a very human way knowing that they're about to die and then killing them from with the finger of god from half a world away is it's a really disturbing feeling and i would say that. you know trauma is different across the board where soldiers on the ground they experience trauma like an earthquake or a volcano erupting well we experience trauma as a form of erosion of our self in a very definitive sense and even though it's a it might be a slower process it is very effective in degrading who we feel like we should be though here i have sad that you were on islamic states hit list as well as to hit lists of a right wing group in the united states what makes a drone operator

a target for extremes at home and abroad. see this is the strange thing is like i was told that i was on the isis hit list by the f.b.i. and off air force office of special investigations and i'm not sure how true that is because i hope that people who see what i'm doing i'm trying to bridge build a bridge between us so that we can come to an endgame solution and stop killing one another and this comes from a guy who did it who has like who has made very grievous mistakes and i think that the people back home who hate me you know they don't want to see anything other than the fear that they're being told so they're just a bunch of idiots who want to be idiots and even though i'm the guy with the experience and i'm the guy that has done the reflection and i've done the work in order to get this information out there they still think that i'm a traitor well i can also say that the left called me a monster so i'm not getting any praise from any group anywhere except for the

people who are actually you know doing the reflection of the jobs and trying to come up with a solution for this issue and i think that people who just want to be violent they're just going to want to be violent and they're just stupid you know and it can kill another idiot it takes a better person to stop hurting another person has that's where love and kindness come and that's where all these things are supposed to be utilized is that you give love to someone when they're unlovable you're a kind of someone when they're not kind to you it's easy to be kind and loving to someone who is kind and loving to you but it's really takes something special in a lot of effort to give that to people that are not you don't think are worthy of it now the boston marathon bomber. as well as five. attempts at a car bombing in times square back twenty ten justify their criminal actions with civilian casualties from american drone strikes in the middle east. the stroke

war has produced more terrorists than it has killed actually of course it's produced more terrorists than it has killed like what how how are like the a lot of these cultures over there warrior cultures they feel they face their opponents on the battlefield i grew up as a wrestler like and i know that in iran at least you know wrestling is a sacred sport it's fact it's the world's oldest sport so there is a sense of honor in accomplishment with being able to face your opponent on the battlefield and even if you're beaten there is still a sense of honor but when we're utilizing a technology that no one can fight back they're going to have to try to find a way to punish us punish us in the sense that they feel is necessary even though they're wrong i don't agree with anything that they're doing and it and but they're responding in a way that they don't feel like they can respond and that's the cycle of violence violence only begets violence you know right now

a trial is guided by operators and i don't i'm obviously but could the technology be fully automated i mean do you believe there will be robots that can kill humans . of course when i was in geneva actually. i was the only american that showed up to this conference of where they're determining the laws that they're going to create for autonomy it's warfare and one of the guys that was a proponent of a ton of this warfare says that you know robots can kill people better than people can because there's no emotion and i really thinking as someone who's done it do we really want thoughtless and emotional things that are able to just kill any human being's life indiscriminately and that's a question that is for the people and that is something that we need to be considered because no matter what technology that we use against someone else that technology can always be reversed and used against us and that is the balance of

things that's the cycle now i understand that you are not against drones as a tool but you say that there are use should be transparent how can this be possible when you are a war i mean keeping information classified may mean thousands of lives saved. and that's a that's a that's one of the things that people are confused about where we have this possibility of things but the reality of the situation is that lives are being ended when someone comes to mean be like well think about all the american lives that you say well that's that's that's an invisible number that's imaginary you know if we if people want concrete actual fact i can tell you i have killed thirteen people with missile strikes and there are one thousand six hundred and twenty six unnamed enemies that were killed in all the missions that i completed and i know that i know that for a fact and i know each of these persons was a human being they had a family they had friends they had lives and we ended them the possibilities are

endless when you come to the reality of things and i'm not going to rely on a possibility when the actual evident truth of these technologies being abused is sitting right in front of our goddamn faces. thanks for this amazing interview. truly amazing and show you i wish you all the best. were talking to brandon brian to use to fly drones for the u.s. air force discussing their rise and use of drones by the u.s. military and the dangers implications of long distance warfare and that's it for this edition of staff and the next time.

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