Senior coalition commanders  say the enemy’s commanders already have fled the ISIS-controlled city of Mosul in northern Iraq in the wake of sustained airstrikes.

“You don’t see as many black [ISIS] flags any more,” Frampton said.

Tipping Point:

An impending Iraqi ground campaign to liberate Mosul could be a tipping point in the war, coalition personnel say.

Mosul has become a symbolic objective for the Iraqi National Army, which is looking to reassert its legitimacy after being routed during the ISIS blitz across Iraq to the gates of Baghdad in 2014.

The liberation of Mosul, only 40 miles from the Kurdistan Regional Government’s capital in Erbil, also will be a key fight for the Kurdish peshmerga to demonstrate their battlefield élan compared with the Iraqi National Army.

“Mosul will be the next part of this phase of defeating Daesh,” Lukes said. “When we’re ready to launch a combined air and ground assault on Mosul, we will. We’re not done yet.”

Despite coalition air support, however, the battle for Mosul could be a bloody one.

Approximately 7,000 ISIS fighters are entrenched in the city of more than 1 million, according to U.S. military personnel and news reports.

Mosul, the most populous city controlled by ISIS, is barricaded behind successive layers of improvised explosive device (IED) defenses and booby traps, creating a perilous approach for attacking Iraqi and Kurdish forces.

Military and news reports say ISIS fighters have bedded down within the civilian population. The use of human shields will limit the freedom of coalition air power to support ground forces.

The tight urban battlefield within a dense civilian population will require the kind of sustained “eyes on the target” capability that drones like the Reaper can provide.

“Mosul is going to be a big fight,” Frampton said. “And there’s a lot we can do to shape the fight.”

‘Compartmentalize’

The use of drones to deliberately target British citizens fighting for terrorist organizations has sparked debates about due process and the legal limits of government to assassinate its own citizens—controversial issues with which the United States also has grappled.

RAF Reaper pilots steer clear of discussing politics or thorny legal issues, but they do push back against what they say are misperceptions about drones.

Drones are not automated “deathbots,” as one pilot said. A human pilot is remotely in control of everything a drone does—takeoff, landing, surveillance, firing weapons.

Human pilots remain essential to drone operations. And if communication with the drone is somehow lost, the aircraft is programmed to fly back automatically to its base of origin.  

Another misperception is that drone pilots are immune from the psychological consequences of their actions.

Killing the enemy while staring at a computer screen is still killing, even with technological barriers supposedly sterilizing the act.

Drone pilots face a unique kind of combat stress. When combat pilots typically go to war, they are quarantined from everyday life by distance and the simple routines of being deployed.

But drone pilots have to balance the daily burden of making life or death decisions on faraway battlefields with the mundane chores of “normal” life.

“You look at bad guys for six hours and then you have to come home and fix the washing machine,” one RAF flight lieutenant said.

The deployed RAF Reaper pilots all previously piloted the drone on combat missions. They explained the need to find ways to “compartmentalize” the unique psychological stress of drone warfare.

While RAF manned aircraft pilots usually deploy for about four months, Reaper pilots remotely conducting combat missions from the U.S. and the U.K. can be involved in combat operations day in and day out for up to three years.

“We go through the same adjustment process as deployed pilots, but on a much more frequent time scale,” a RAF flight lieutenant told The Daily Signal.  “It’s tough. But there are coping strategies.”

Each pilot reacts to the stresses differently, and many have developed personal routines to ease the daily transition from war to peace. Some use the car ride home as time to decompress after missions; others listen to music.

“I’ll spend an hour so in the gym or go on a run,” a RAF squadron leader said. “I create a buffer zone in my mind to separate my civilian life from my work life.”

Frampton, the RAF group captain, said:

Everybody deals with the stress in a different way. We have the support mechanisms in place. And we look for the effects. There’s a lot of research going into the cumulative effects of non stop combat operations.

The workload for drone pilots isn’t likely to diminish anytime soon.Recognizing the long-term military value of remotely piloted aircraft, the Royal Air Force has plans to double its drone fleet in the next decade.

Just Cause

Many of the Reaper pilots say they have few qualms about killing ISIS fighters.

They’ve seen the beheading videos. They’ve seen the videos of prisoners burned alive and of gays hurled from rooftops. They read news reports about the crucifixions, the rapes, the sex slaves, and the mass murder of Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

The Islamic State’s ruthlessness adds a moral justification to the Reaper pilots’ mission. A squadron leader told The Daily Signal:

When you are in a situation where there is a loss of life, you think about who the enemy is. Knowing that the enemy has oppressed so many people and done such brutal things helps with the compartmentalization. There aren’t many reservations about what we do.

“We’re professional about it, but Daesh’s brutality only reinforces our conviction that what we are doing is just,” Troy said.

Consequently, killing the enemy is not what weighs heaviest on the pilots’ consciences. The safety of coalition soldiers on the ground is of far greater concern.

“What haunts us the most is when we can’t help the guys on the ground,” a RAF squadron leader said. “And that applies to the Iraqis. They’re standing up for freedom and we want to help them out.”

This piece first appeared in The Daily Signal here. 

Image: Creative Commons.