I’ve never been a fan of Vegas. Masked by grand shows and stars, the artificial magnanimity of the strip coupled with the pick-your-guilty-pleasure from our round-the-clock menu of booze, gambling and prostitution, makes it seem like a one-stop-shop just waiting to buy your soul.
To me, it made sense that the remote-control toy-operators that have killed over 900 people on Pakistani soil since August 2008, were running their secret war right outside that very shop, from a base in Nevada.
Little did I know that, they are also locking-into and annihilating targets 30 minutes away from my home in Houston, Texas.
In the Sunday edition of the Houston Chronicle, Lindsay Wise features 36-year-old Major Stiles with the Texas Air National Guard who starts his day bright and early by feeding his one-year-old daughter waffles and sausage, then heads over to his job in a windowless room at Houston’s Ellington Airport, where he sits down “at the controls of a Predator drone as it cruises over insurgent hideouts and convoy routes in Afghanistan or Iraq.”
The article did not or could not mention Pakistan, because the 100 or so attacks since 2008 in the Waziristan region are after all only ‘suspected’ drone attacks, a part of what is largely believed to be a publicly rebuked but privately acquiesced deal between the Pakistani government and the US.
Most Houstonians probably assumed the Ellington Airport’s military ops were shut down in 2008 (the same year drone strikes really picked up in Pakistan), when the 147th Reconnaissance Wing lost its F-16 fleet. Until the article was published they had no way of knowing that some fighter pilots like Major Stiles stayed on to be re-trained as predator drone operators.
In the same piece Wise writes, “At any given time, the ground control station inside a top-security building at Ellington has two Predators in the skies over Afghanistan or Iraq. Each drone is controlled by a three-member crew. Crews rotate in shifts, so they’re always fresh.”
The crew consists of a pilot, a sensor operator and a military intelligence co-coordinator. By swapping F-16s for predators, the staff at Ellington has been reduced from hundreds to a handful. And these guys fly drones 24 hours-a-day, seven days-a-week.
Wise was not allowed to actually visit the top-security building at Houston’s Ellington Field, but the wing’s PR team was kind enough to give her a four-and-a-half minute long film of their operations. This is a must-see.