Pentagon Considers Awarding Drone Pilots Combat Medals

[sbr]

Siege is likley correct.

I can't imagine that had been posted here much before.

With the correct spelling either.

[Tonitrus]

Agree

You agree that the Bronze Star is only worth something with the V device?

I agree with drone pilots not getting anything higher than an ARCOM

Air Force Commendation Medal. 

[11B4V]

Agree

You agree that the Bronze Star is only worth something with the V device?

I agree with drone pilots not getting anything higher than an ARCOM

Air Force Wing Nut Commendation Medal. 

Fixed it for you.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Siege is likley correct.

I can't imagine that had been posted here much before.

With the correct spelling either.

You are likely correct.

[Siege]

Agree

You agree that the Bronze Star is only worth something with the V device?

I agree.
Do you realize SFC/E-7 and above get a Bronze Star (without V) for just deploying to a combat zone?
Come on man, if you stay long enough in the Army you get all kinds of stupid medals for just sitting on your ass.

Now the real ones, Bronze Star V and above, those ain't fun to get.

Lets put it this way. The SMA (Sergeant Major of the Army) have 4 times more medals than I do, but he doesn't have a single medal for valor. He is not infantry to begin with.

Notice below how he got 10 good conduct medals, I got 2. He got 8 ARCOMs. I got 3. And so on.
But no awards for valor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_F._Chandler

[CountDeMoney]

Agree

You agree that the Bronze Star is only worth something with the V device?

I agree.
Do you realize SFC/E-7 and above get a Bronze Star (without V) for just deploying to a combat zone?

Shame it's been watered down so much.  I've known Vietnam vets with just the standard BS that did a whole fuck lot more than just showing up.

Another example of why the United States Army has devolved itself into a fucking Special Olympics.  BERETS FOR EVERYBODY

[Razgovory]

I think the US army has always been pretty free with medals.

[MadImmortalMan]

Wow. Gramps got a bronzie for charging a machine gun nest at Anzio and saving his squad. Jumped up on top of the pillbox and tossed grenades in. I guess he'd get a MoH today.

[Valmy]

Really so long as the standards for the MoH are maintained I don't care what 'participant' medals the military feels moral demands they toss out.

[Valmy]

Wow. Gramps got a bronzie for charging a machine gun nest at Anzio and saving his squad. Jumped up on top of the pillbox and tossed grenades in. I guess he'd get a MoH today.

My Gramps helped procure those fine grenades from his desk in the Munitions department.  Today he might get a Bronze Star for that

[derspiess]

Do you realize SFC/E-7 and above get a Bronze Star (without V) for just deploying to a combat zone?
Come on man, if you stay long enough in the Army you get all kinds of stupid medals for just sitting on your ass.

In my ROTC days I came across a major who was said to have gotten his Bronze Star and unit combat patch (forget what unit it was) for spending what was essentially a 2 or 3 day layover in Saudi (or maybe it was Kuwait after liberation) during the latter part of Desert Storm.  IIRC he was just on his way to his officer advanced course and his flights got screwed up.

[viper37]

It's funny when a mentally retarded cripple is offended by stuff like this.

fucking moron.

[viper37]

Notice below how he got 10 good conduct medals, I got 2. He got 8 ARCOMs. I got 3. And so on.

amazing.  they gave YOU 2 medals for good conduct?  One could have been an accident, but two?  Man, this army is seriously fucked up!

[CountDeMoney]

A day job waiting for a kill shot a world away
From bases in the US, drone pilots watch for targets in Afghanistan
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
NEW YORK TIMES

HANCOCK FIELD AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, N.Y. — From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks.

"I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer," Colonel Brenton said.

When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant — and only, Colonel Brenton said, when the women and children are not around — the hair on the back of his neck stands up, just as it did when he used to line up targets in his F-16 fighter jet.

Afterward, just like the old days, he compartmentalizes. "I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy," he said. "I have a duty, and I execute the duty."

Drones are not only revolutionizing American warfare but are also changing in profound ways the lives of the people who fly them.

Colonel Brenton acknowledges the peculiar new disconnect of fighting a telewar with a joystick and a throttle from his padded seat in American suburbia.

When he was deployed in Iraq, "you land and there's no more weapons on your F-16, people have an idea of what you were just involved with." Now he steps out of a dark room of video screens, his adrenaline still surging after squeezing the trigger, and commutes home past fast-food restaurants and convenience stores to help with homework — but always alone with what he has done.

"It's a strange feeling," he said. "No one in my immediate environment is aware of anything that occurred."

Routinely thought of as robots that turn wars into sanitized video games, the drones have powerful cameras that bring war straight into a pilot's face.

Although pilots speak glowingly of the good days, when they can look at a video feed and warn a ground patrol in Afghanistan about an ambush ahead, the Air Force is also moving chaplains and medics just outside drone operation centers to help pilots deal with the bad days — images of a child killed in error or a close-up of a Marine shot in a raid gone wrong.

Among the toughest psychological tasks is the close surveillance for aerial sniper missions, reminiscent of the East German Stasi officer absorbed by the people he spies on in the movie "The Lives of Others." A drone pilot and his partner, a sensor operator who manipulates the aircraft's camera, observe the habits of a militant as he plays with his children, talks to his wife and visits his neighbors. They then try to time their strike when, for example, his family is out at the market.

"They watch this guy do bad things and then his regular old life things," said Col. Hernando Ortega, the chief of aerospace medicine for the Air Education Training Command, who helped conduct a study last year on the stresses on drone pilots. "At some point, some of the stuff might remind you of stuff you did yourself. You might gain a level of familiarity that makes it a little difficult to pull the trigger."

Of a dozen pilots, sensor operators and supporting intelligence analysts recently interviewed from three American military bases, none acknowledged the kind of personal feelings for Afghans that would keep them awake at night after seeing the bloodshed left by missiles and bombs. But all spoke of a certain intimacy with Afghan family life that traditional pilots never see from 20,000 feet, and that even ground troops seldom experience.

"You see them wake up in the morning, do their work, go to sleep at night," said Dave, an Air Force major who flew drones from 2007 to 2009 at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and now trains drone pilots at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. (The Air Force, citing what it says are credible threats, forbids pilots to disclose their last names. Senior commanders who speak to the news media and community groups about the base's mission, like Colonel Brenton in Syracuse, use their full names.)

Some pilots spoke of the roiling emotions after they fire a missile. (Only pilots, all of them officers, employ weapons for strikes.)

"There was good reason for killing the people that I did, and I go through it in my head over and over and over," said Will, an Air Force officer who was a pilot at Creech and now trains others at Holloman. "But you never forget about it. It never just fades away, I don't think — not for me."

The complexities will only grow as the military struggles to keep up with a near insatiable demand for drones. The Air Force now has more than 1,300 drone pilots, about 300 less than it needs, stationed at 13 or more bases across the United States. They fly the unmanned aircraft mostly in Afghanistan. (The numbers do not include the classified program of the C.I.A., which conducts drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.) Although the Afghan war is winding down, the military expects drones to help compensate for fewer troops on the ground.

By 2015, the Pentagon projects that the Air Force will need more than 2,000 drone pilots for combat air patrols operating 24 hours a day worldwide. The Air Force is already training more drone pilots — 350 last year — than fighter and bomber pilots combined. Until this year, drone pilots went through traditional flight training before learning how to operate Predators, Reapers and unarmed Global Hawks. Now the pilots are on a fast track and spend only 40 hours in a basic Cessna-type plane before starting their drone training.

Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, said it was "conceivable" that drone pilots in the Air Force would outnumber those in cockpits in the foreseeable future, although he predicted that the Air Force would have traditional pilots for at least 30 more years.

Many drone pilots once flew in the air themselves but switched to drones out of a sense of the inevitable — or if they flew cargo planes, to feel closer to the war. "You definitely feel more connected to the guys, the battle," said Dave, the Air Force major, who flew C-130 transport planes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now more and more Air National Guard bases are abandoning traditional aircraft and switching to drones to meet demand, among them Hancock Field, which retired its F-16s and switched to Reapers in 2010. Colonel Brenton, who by then had logged more than 4,000 hours flying F-16s in 15 years of active duty and a decade in Syracuse deploying to war zones with the Guard, said he learned to fly drones to stay connected to combat. True, drones cannot engage in air-to-air combat, but Colonel Brenton said that "the amount of time I've engaged the enemy in air-to-ground combat has been significant" in both Reapers and F-16s.

"I feel like I'm doing the same thing I've always done, I just don't deploy to do it," he said. Now he works full time commanding a force of about 220 Reaper pilots, sensor operators and intelligence analysts at the base.

Pilots say the best days are when ground troops thank them for keeping them safe. Ted, an Air Force major and an F-16 pilot who flew Reapers from Creech, recalled how troops on an extended patrol away from their base in Afghanistan were grateful when he flew a Reaper above them for five hours so they could get some sleep one night. They told him, "We're keeping one guy awake to talk to you, but if you can, just watch over and make sure nobody's sneaking up on us," he recalled.

All the operators dismiss the notion that they are playing a video game. (They also reject the word "drone" because they say it describes an aircraft that flies on its own. They call their planes remotely piloted aircraft.)

"I don't have any video games that ask me to sit in one seat for six hours and look at the same target," said Joshua, a sensor operator who worked at Creech for a decade and is now a trainer at Holloman. "One of the things we try to beat into our crews is that this is a real aircraft with a real human component, and whatever decisions you make, good or bad, there's going to be actual consequences."

In his 10 years at Creech, he said without elaborating, "I've seen some pretty disturbing things."

All of the pilots who once flew in cockpits say they do miss the sensation of flight, which for Colonel Brenton extends to the F-16 flybys he did for the Syracuse Memorial Day parade downtown. To make up for it, he sometimes heads out on weekends in a small propeller plane, which he calls a bug smasher.

"It's nice to be up in the air," he said.

[Syt]

Taa-daa! Here we go:

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=119290

Panetta Announces Distinguished Warfare Medal

By Jim Garamone

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13, 2013 – Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has approved a new medal designed to recognize service members directly affecting combat operations who may not even be on the same continent as the action.

The Distinguished Warfare Medal recognizes the changing face of warfare. In the past, few, if any, service members not actually in a combat zone directly affected combat operations.

These new capabilities have given American service members the ability to engage the enemy and change the course of battle, even from afar, Panetta said at a Pentagon news conference today.

"I've always felt -- having seen the great work that they do, day in and day out -- that those who performed in an outstanding manner should be recognized. Unfortunately, medals that they otherwise might be eligible for simply did not recognize that kind of contribution."

Now, the Defense Department does.

" "The medal provides distinct, departmentwide recognition for the extraordinary achievements that directly impact on combat operations, but that do not involve acts of valor or physical risk that combat entails," Panetta said.

Technological advancements have dramatically changed how the American military conducts and supports warfighters. Unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, missile defense technology and cyber capabilities all affect combat operations while the operators may not be anywhere near the combat zone. The new medal recognizes the contributions of these service members.

It will not be awarded for acts of battlefield valor, officials said. It will be awarded in the name of the secretary of defense to members of the military whose extraordinary achievements directly impacted combat operations, and cannot be used as an end-of-tour award.

"This new medal recognizes the changing character of warfare and those who make extraordinary contributions to it," said Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "The criteria for this award will be highly selective and reflect high standards."

The most immediate example is the work of an unmanned aerial vehicle operator who could be operating a system over Afghanistan while based at Creech Air Force Base, Nev. The unmanned aerial vehicle would directly affect operations on the ground. Another example is that of a soldier at Fort Meade, Md., who detects and thwarts a cyberattack on a DOD computer system.

The medal could be used to recognize both these exceptional acts, officials said.

In the order of precedence, the Distinguished Warfare Medal will be below the Distinguished Flying Cross, and will be limited to achievements that are truly extraordinary. "The member's actions must have resulted in an accomplishment so exceptional and outstanding as to clearly set the individual apart from comrades or from other persons in similar situations," a DOD official said.

The military department secretary must approve each award, and it may not be presented for valorous actions. "This limitation was specifically included to keep the Distinguished Warfare Medal from detracting from existing valor decorations, such as the Medal of Honor, Service Crosses and Silver Star Medal," the official said.

Award criteria will be incorporated into the next revision of DOD Manual 1348.33-V3, Manual of Military Decorations and Awards, Volume 3.

I'm guessing it's going to look something like this. The four quarters will signal the level of the medal: