Review of: Predator – The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A
Pilot’s Story
Author: Lt. Col. Matt J. Martin
with Charles W. Sasser
Publisher: Zenith Press
Source: Library
Grade: B
What’s it like to be a regular joe
guiding some of the deadliest aircraft in history while sitting in a chair half
a world away from the carnage? With a title like Predator – The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A
Pilot’s Story, I wondered what more Matt J. Martin could possibly have to
say. The answer is, a lot, including the emotional toll of seeing the after
effects of the missiles he unleashed, sometimes with unforeseeable effects.
A self-described Midwestern “farm
kid,” Martin grew up longing to fly airplanes like those that winged high over
his father’s hayfields, transporting his imagination far away. But chance after
chance to become a pilot slipped away. The first Iraqi war ended before he got
his second lieutenant’s commission in the Air Force, via his university’s ROTC
program, and flight training was closed to volunteers. Instead, he spent years
in charge of an underground nuclear missile silo in Wyoming.
“The irony – while my dreams
soared above the earth, my body was buried under the earth,” he writes.
Hoping at least to get in the air, he trained
as a navigator and acquired a civilian commercial pilot’s license, only to
learn his service obligation as a navigator would put him beyond the age of
eligibility for flight training. However, he managed stints doing airborne
reconnaissance over the southern “no fly” zone in Iraq, and over Afghanistan in
the early days of the U.S.’s post-9/11 war there. Even marriage to the woman
whose nickname, Ruby, would one day emblazon one of the world’s most advanced
aircraft, couldn’t keep him from feeling dissatisfied with his career. Until. .
.
“I was perusing an air force
assignments website when I came across a notation soliciting Predator pilots.
All I knew about Predator was that it was a remotely piloted aircraft…Not
exactly a fighter, although it was armed. It sounded almost like science
fiction…Little did I realize that the war for me was about to begin in a way I
could never have contemplated.”
Flying a Predator, he found, was
far different from flying manned aircraft. “Conventional airplanes were flown
with direct mechanical or hydraulic systems.…The same inertia and acceleration
that influenced the airplane also affected the pilot. He felt the gusts of
wind, turbulence, a change in the aircraft’s relative position to the
ground.…The Predator pilot had no such connections to his plane.”
One way or another, though, he was
flying war planes. Sometimes they were armed, sometimes they only provided a
set of eyes in the sky for ground forces. At times, Martin found himself
participating closer to the fighting as he participated in the delicate
operations of launching and landing the Predators.
Although the planes can be
controlled in the air by pilots half a world away, they must currently be
launched and landed from runways much closer to the territories they fly over.
An exasperated Martin (whose tongue sometimes got him in trouble) describes his
exasperation at fielding questions from visiting congressional members who
failed to understand the planes’ limitations.
Martin is enthusiastic about the
potential of Predator and its successor remotely piloted aircraft, and it seems
inherently better (or less bad) to conduct a precise strike than to destroy an
entire neighborhood when the object is to take out only small numbers of
suspects. And he insists that there are more than enough safeguards to keep the
pilots of such craft from excessive use of their deadly potential.
Still, he admits not being immune
to the psychological stress of seeing the human faces of his targets – and the
aftermath of strikes – in a way that pilots of conventional bombers never can.
And there’s a continued thread, never quite expressed, about the ability of
Predators and their like to win a war, given their precise targeting. Does
taking out one or even a dozen enemy fighters at a time do enough to deter more
from pouring in? In the long term, the role of craft such as Predators may lie more in support of ground troops than as lone rangers.
Even with the presumed wordcrafting
help from Martin’s co-writer, journalist/combat veteran Charles W. Sasser, the book’s language
is on the rough and ready side, alternating humor with horror in a way that
doesn’t quite gel. For the benefit of lay readers, the book also could have
used a glossary of military terms. Although Martin and Sasser are careful to
decode military acronyms on their first appearance, dozens of pages later I
would again find myself at least momentarily puzzled by abbreviations such as
GCS (ground control system), or multispectral targeting system (MTS).
Finally, though, the story Martin
tells is timely enough, and engaging enough to follow even for those of us who
can’t remember all the technical terms.
