Predator

The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot's Story

Matt Martin, Charles Sasser

• Publisher: Zenith Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781616739867
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

The Nintendo generation has taken to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan where remotely controlled aircraft are killing America¹s enemies and saving American lives.

Matt J. Martin is considered a "top gun" in the world of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For nearly four years, he has flown hundreds of missions on two warfronts in a new kind of combat that, until recently, was largely classified Top Secret. He and his fellow Predator pilots have been actively involved in virtually every facet of the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan: tracking Osama bin Laden; capturing top al-Qaeda leader al-Zarqawi; fighting with the U.S. Marines in Fallujah; and rescuing aid workers kidnapped in Afghanistan by the Taliban.

This is Matt J. Martin's story and that of his aircraft, the 27-foot long Predator.

PART I

Nellis Air
Force Base,
Nevada

CHAPTER 1

Tonight We Fly

MARCH 26, 2003. SNOW dusted Harir Airfield in northern Iraq during the day, melting into greasy mud and slush by nightfall. In a midnight as dark as the back side of the moon, and a landscape seemingly just as desolate, a flight of seventeen American C-17 Globemaster transports packed with a thousand paratroopers descended from thirty thousand feet toward the airstrip. This would be the first wartime drop for the 173rd Airborne Brigade since Operation Junction City near Katum, South Vietnam, thirty-five years ago, as well as the largest combat parachute jump since the invasion of Panama in 1989.

The jump became necessary only after Turkey balked at allowing sixty-two thousand U.S. troops of the 4th Infantry Division to launch across its southern border. The paratroopers were tasked with securing the rich oil fields around Mosul and Kirkuk and with opening the first northern ground front against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In staggered formation, the fleet roared in at six hundred feet above ground level (AGL) with big engines churning like a tsunami. Jump doors opened. Black wind howled past. Troopers had one minute to catch the wind before the planes passed over the drop zone. There was no need for reserve chutes; if a main failed to open, the unfortunate trooper would smash onto the drop zone before the reserve could deploy anyhow. Blood an’ guts on the risers—and I ain’t gonna jump no more … words from an old airborne cadence.

The mighty ships deposited their spores in the air and shrieked on, climbing. A single flashing light from the control tower blinked, blinked, blinked—maybe three times as nearly a thousand parachutes whispered in the dark before thudding their riders to earth. Thirty-five soldiers failed to make it out the doors in time and left with the planes. Twenty were injured on landing, six seriously enough to be evacuated. The force encountered no hostile fire. That came later when Mosul and Kirkuk disintegrated into orgies of looting, arson, and score settling.

Five days before the 173rd launched its northern ground offensive, I arrived on the Greek island of Crete in the Mediterranean with a deployment of three aircraft, six flight crews, and enough support to help open the northern air front with twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week operations. By the time I linked up with it, the 55th Wing detachment, redesignated in-theater as the 193rd Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, had been on rotating sustained deployments to the Middle East for over twelve years, snooping and sniffing to help keep the skies over Iraq safe for U.S. and coalition forces. Our defined mission was “to provide vital real-time battle management information to mission planners, commanders, and war fighters.”

Each of our four-engine, jet-powered RC-135 Rivet Joint airplanes (a militarized version of the prototype airframe that also led to the commercial Boeing 707) came equipped with an array of antennae and an onboard sensor suite that allowed mission crews to detect, identify, and geolocate signals throughout the electromagnetic spectrum. That meant we could spy on anything electronic in the airwaves within an operations area and listen in on just about everybody. Within seconds after we locked in on a radar or communications signal, we could notify bombers and fighters and have joint direct attack munitions (JDAMs) or rockets screaming down the enemy’s throat. It didn’t take enemy surface-to-air-missile (SAM) operators long to learn that the sky was listening and watching every time they turned on their radars—and that a missile would be straight on its way toward them. It got to the point where they fired their SAMs unguided in a general direction and prayed for the best. “Allah-guided.”

Not knowing what to expect when the northern air offensive kicked off, RC-135 crews were all sucking wind for the first few sorties. Aboard each flight were two pilots, a navigator, and about twenty electronic techs to run the sensors. Cautious of SAMs and MiG interceptors, we flew only night missions as much as possible, each flight anywhere from twelve to eighteen hours long.

An RC-135 is a big, heavy aircraft with a lot of momentum. No 9-G turns for us. Even an expedited 180-degree change of course took a minute and a half. It was a hell of a big target for a SAM and a sitting duck for the Iraqi MiG-25 with its overtake speed of about 1,500 knots.

Although we soon had most of the SAMs intimidated, northern Iraq could still be pretty hairy. It was mountainous country, with peaks up to fourteen thousand feet. The Iraqis took to moving their SAMs every few hours to make it more difficult for us to locate and bomb them. At such elevations, even small SAMs posed a threat and increased our pucker factor fivefold.

Fortunately, the Iraqis had yet to launch a single MiG, at least none that I was aware of. Fearing a repeat of mass fighter defections like those that occurred during the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam ordered bulldozers to destroy runways and taxiways, leaving his warplanes isolated in their hangars. Apparently, he saw his own people as a bigger threat to him than the mightiest army on earth.

With U.S. air supremacy over the theater and with most of the SAMs knocked out in the beginning of “shock and awe,” paratroopers of the 173rd on the ground were experiencing more of the war in their first actions than I was apt to ever see. Not that I and the other crews of the 193rd weren’t kept busy or weren’t putting in long days and nights in “combat.” By the time a crew attended mission briefing, conducted preflight, flew the sortie, returned to base, shut down the aircraft, and attended post-flight maintenance and mission debriefs, we had put in a twenty-hour workday.

Tech operators in the aircraft’s belly didn’t actually start to work until we were on-station, about three hours into the flight. They could nap, read, or talk. Even the two pilots relieved each other at the controls to reduce stress. I enjoyed no such luxuries. As the only navigator aboard, I had to stay awake and alert from takeoff to touchdown.

The plane’s sophisticated navigation used an initial gyro system, a Doppler radar, a global positioning system (GPS), and an auto-star tracker that shot celestial headings even during the day, supplemented by air and pitot-static data. Computers took all the information through some complicated mathematical process and spat out our position.

However, since the computers were not always that accurate, the navigator had to constantly verify the readings using ground-mapping radar. At short and regular intervals, I compared the picture of the ground presented by radar against charts and the position from the computers. If the pictures did not match precisely, I used a plotter, a pencil, and a pair of dividers to determine the magnitude of the error. Just like from the good ol’ days when guys like me flew B-17s over Europe.

This work occupied about half my hours in-flight. Managing the mission to place the aircraft in the optimum position to collect intelligence on targets and avoid enemy threats took up the rest of my time. Since my computer controlled the autopilot, I flew most of a mission from my keyboard.

I swigged a lot of coffee. Not that I complained; I could have been breathing sand and sleeping on a dune. While paratroopers of the 173rd were slogging around in mud eating meals, ready-to-eat (MREs) and getting picked at by snipers, I returned to base and bedded down between clean sheets at Souda Bay on Crete, as brief as sleep sometimes seemed, and awoke to a leisurely breakfast miles away from peril. No wonder dogfaces sometimes viewed the high-flying air force with envy.

I often felt more like a spectator at the singular event of my military generation than an actual participant. Nonetheless, I sometimes enjoyed a fine box-seat view of the fireworks.

One afternoon, B-52 bombers dumped JDAMs on the Mosul area while my plane provided electronic coverage. I counted a dozen explosions, great fireballs, and mushroom clouds of smoke rising into the air. Bomber pilots on the command net begged for more targets. One B-52 turned for home base still carrying thirty-eight bombs.

The U.S. military went to superhuman lengths to avoid civilian casualties. The Iraqis took advantage of our restraint and painted warnings on the roofs of strategic installations: Contains Human Shields. That worked until the “human shields” got wind that the Americans were coming. Then they headed for the hills, leaving the target open and ready to receive attention.

Enemy electromagnetic activity all but ceased after a few weeks. With few targets to monitor, I brought along a pair of binoculars to conduct a little sightseeing of the ground war. By now we were flying daylight missions. I saw long lines of U.S. tanks and Kurdish trucks, but no enemy activity. We stared down at Saddam Dam bridging the Tigris River. It had been so well defended before the invasion that coalition fighters patrolling the no-fly zone avoided it. Now we were gawking at it like so many tourists.

On the night of April 16, 2003, less than a month after my detachment deployed, my crew became the first to fly an RC-135 over Baghdad. Saddam had intended to make the city his last stand. A shield of SAMs and antiaircraft artillery (AAA) sites, he claimed, made the city impervious to attack. What he hadn’t bargained for was his troops turning off their systems, abandoning their weapons, and walking away.

Most of the city, still without power, sprawled across the desert like a jumble of children’s building blocks. A full moon allowed us to gaze down upon the cradle of civilization at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. As there were no windows at the back of the plane, members of the crew came forward to the cabin one by one to look at the miracle of Baghdad subdued and under coalition control.

“I can’t believe what we’re looking at,” someone murmured. “In such a short time.”

Everyone had expected the war to drag out for months or more and claim thousands of American lives. Instead, the northern air war was considered over. This was my last sortie. The 55th Wing, after three weeks in combat, would begin redeployment to Offutt Air Force Base on April 17.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Instead of occupying a box seat to watch history unfold, I should have been a fighter pilot taking on my part of the war, sharing the risks and making history. What none of us realized at the time was that Operation Iraqi Freedom was far from over.

It was never that my future in the air force or any other branch of the military could be considered preordained. If anything, it was an anomaly that I ended up there. I was a farm kid. My folks met at a racetrack. Thoroughbreds, not NASCAR. They were both “poniers,” riders who led the jockeys and their mounts onto the track, exercised the horses, and, in general, took care of the animals before and after a race. I was all but born on a track. In between races, as it were. The eldest of two sisters and a brother, I traveled with my parents to tracks all over the United States, living in trailer parks.

When I was about twelve, Dad ventured into the hay business, buying a ranch in Indiana to grow and supply fodder to racetracks. The family had grown too big by then for the footloose life. I went into business with Dad and grew, cut, baled, and hauled hay until I left for college. It was hot, back-breaking labor, with sweat stinging my eyes and hay rash making my crotch and arms itch. On July days when an airplane—it didn’t matter what kind—would fly over the field, I stopped whatever I was doing, leaned against the baler or the truck, wiped my face with a bandana, and gazed longingly after the airplane until it disappeared.

“Matt the Cat. Come down to earth, Son.”

That was my dad’s nickname for me. I suppose it had something to do with my restless nature. My mind often wandered into the skies, catching those wonderful airplanes that transported my imagination around the world.

“Yeah, Dad. I was just wondering …”

I continued to wonder. I saw The Right Stuff twelve times. I yearned to become a fighter pilot.

I graduated from Purdue University in 1994 with a commission as a second lieutenant through the air force ROTC program. To my disappointment, flight training was temporarily closed to volunteers, and I ended up attending missile school. Afterward, I was the officer in charge of an underground nuclear missile silo near Cheyenne, Wyoming, waiting for orders to launch and annihilate the world. The irony—while my dreams soared above the earth, my body was buried underneath the earth.

Since flight training remained closed, I volunteered to be a navigator, figuring I could get what I wanted through the back door if not the front. At least I would be in the air. I trained in T-34s at Pensacola Naval Station and T-43s (the military version of the Boeing 737-200) at Randolph Air Force Base, graduating near the top of my class. At the same time, I acquired a civilian private pilot’s license with an instrument flight rule (IFR) rating, hoping it would increase my competitiveness for air force flight school.

Catch-22. The air force changed its rules while I was attending nav school. I now had to complete two and a half years as a navigator in order to fulfill my obligation to the Department of Defense for the training I received. That would make me thirty-one years old and ineligible for flight training; the new cut-off age was twenty-seven. It was a crushing blow. It seemed I would forever be a bridesmaid and never the bride.

When Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) kicked off in 2003, I was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base, in Omaha, Nebraska, headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command, the Air Force Weather Agency, and the 55th Wing of the Air Combat Command. Prior to OIF I had deployed to Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia a half-dozen times to patrol the southern no-fly zone over Iraq. I also spent a fair amount of time at other hot spots around the world conducting what we called “sensitive reconnaissance.” This included missions over Afghanistan during the opening days of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).

To kick off OIF, I deployed to Crete, then redeployed to Offutt after not quite a month in Southwest Asia with the feeling that my career in the air force had so far been rather unremarkable.

I married Trish shortly after redeployment. We had met three years previously in Omaha. She had been a theater major in college, and I was involved off-post with an improvisational theater group. She attended one of my shows and came to the after-hours party. As bodice rippers are wont to write, I looked across a crowded room and there she was. Lovely, slender, red haired, with a shy smile and warm blue eyes.

Trish was a woman with a heart big enough to embrace kids, animals, and a would-be air force pilot. My family began calling her Ruby, not only because of her hair color but also because there were already two other Trish Martins in the family, including my middle sister. Trish soon sensed that I was not quite satisfied with the lot I had drawn in the air force. It wasn’t exactly that I was discontented, rather that I thought I should be doing more.

The war in Iraq had not ended when special forces dragged Saddam Hussein out of his rat hole. Instead, the United States found itself becoming mired in a sectarian insurgency that pitted Shiite Muslims against Sunnis and elements of both against the United States and the U.S.–backed Iraqi government. Increasingly restless, I often thought of the night the 173rd parachuted into the mud at Harir Airfield. Those guys had contributed up front and personal while I had never even gotten my feet muddy.

“You did your part, Matt,” Trish reassured me.

“But it’s not enough. Don’t you understand?”

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, an unmanned airplane. Not exactly a fighter, although it was armed. It sounded almost like science fiction. Nonetheless, I recognized an opportunity to fly, if only by proxy, and get back into the war. Not in the mud and blood with paratroopers, but certainly closer than thirty thousand feet in the night sky above them as little more than an observer. And certainly nearer than Offutt Air Force Base.

I met the requirements since I was an experienced navigator with a commercial pilot’s license. I called the assignments officer at the personnel center. He eagerly signed me up as a volunteer (the program enjoyed few volunteers in those days).

“If you’re accepted,” he cautioned, “it means you’ll likely deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan sooner or later.”

I understood. I was already looking forward to flying combat missions. Little did I realize that the war for me was about to begin in a way I could never have contemplated.

CHAPTER 2

Feel the Plane

I WAS A DELIBERATE man in spite of Dad’s “Matt the Cat” nickname. I wasn’t the type who, upon hearing about the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter, for example, would have started waving the flag and shouting for action. My volunteering for the Predator program may have appeared whimsical on the surface, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. I had been preparing to fly for the past ten years, almost from the moment I stood in the sun to be commissioned an officer in the U.S. Air For...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• Part I: Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada
• Part II: Ali Air Base, Iraq
• Part III: Balad Air Base, Iraq
• Part IV: Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada
• Epilogue
• Copyright Page