On most weekday mornings, Crystal drops her daughter, Bianca, at school before driving through downtown Alamogordo, New Mexico, a town of 31,000 people in the Chihuahuan Desert, on her way to work. She and her husband, Luis, coordinate after-school care and pick-up, and by the time the sun sets over White Sands Missile Range, the sky aflame with ragged streaks of pink, they’re both home with Bianca for dinner and homework.
Recently Bianca, 7, has started asking more questions about her parents’ jobs.
“She knows when she sees the Reapers in the sky that that’s what we fly,” Crystal says. “She knows that we’re not pilots, that we control the camera. She knows that we’ve been in the war.”
Before, that was sufficient. But now Bianca wants to understand motive and logic. “’Why is the war going on? Why do you fly those?’ I try to answer at a level she understands,” says Crystal, a veteran sensor operator who now works as a civilian instructor, training airmen to operate the cameras on U.S. Air Force drones. “I figure she can form her own opinions as she gets older, and I just try to fill in the facts. I want her to be aware. I don’t want her to be scared.”
Crystal has reason to be cautious with her words. She and Luis, who is also a sensor instructor, spend their days helping to grow the Air Force’s drone program by teaching at Holloman Air Force Base, which adjoins Alamogordo. Drones—or remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), as they are known in the military—have quickly become one of the Pentagon’s tools of choice for precision surveillance and attack, and Holloman is responsible for training new pilots and sensor operators in order to meet swelling demand. This year the base will produce 818 RPA operators, more than double the number of projected F-16 trainees. All told, over 20,000 military and civilian personnel are currently assigned to the RPA program, representing nearly 5% of the Air Force’s total capability. While Americans may be queasy about the disembodied technology’s unintended consequences–civilian deaths overseas, stress on the home front–surveys have shown that we generally support the strikes themselves.
Base and squadron commanders say the RPA program is on track to become one of the Air Force’s largest divisions. In fact, for the first time ever, drones were responsible for more than half of the weapons dropped by the U.S. on Afghanistan last year. New recruits and pilots transferring to the drone program from other aircraft all pass through Holloman, sooner or later.
I first meet Crystal, petite and curvy, in the flickering, cave-like darkness of an RPA training room in one of Holloman’s many low-slung, nondescript buildings. Long brown hair frames her smiling eyes, button nose, and dusting of freckles. Airmen at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada used to call her “Mama Bear.”
