What It’s Like to Control a Predator Drone
WiredI was wired on Rip It energy drinks heart pounding, eyes glued open to the bright screens as we followed a white bongo truck for miles as it drove south, kicking up dust from the Syrian border through the open desert. “If this guy spots us in the air, we’re done.” It was midday, September 2009, and I was in the Box, a secret windowless bunker at the edge of an undisclosed military base south of Mosul, Iraq, not far from the Syrian border, staring at eight flat-screen TVs on the wall, stacked in two rows of four, the shittiest Best Buy you’ve ever seen. Some of the screens streamed live camera feeds from the Predator drone: current altitude, speed, missile laser target designator system, and detailed map of the land below. about the author About Brett Velicovich is a U.S. Army veteran and former military intelligence analyst with 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta. We had our laptops out, running a sophisticated chat program that allowed us to have about twenty different conversations with every intelligence agency running at once, our ground force elements, senior officials in the US government, and the technical side of the operations in Iraq and across the globe.
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