FORT IRWIN, Calif. – In the center of a vast dry lakebed, a squad of soldiers from the nation’s first Stryker brigade combat team has just launched a Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle for a five-hour training mission.
For soldiers such as Sgt. Michael Trogdon, operating UAVs is nothing new. He did it when he was in Iraq with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, in late 2003. One major difference is that three years ago, there were far fewer drones flying in the skies. Even experienced UAV operators now have to learn how to navigate in an increasingly crowded airspace.
“In Iraq, whenever the brigade needed a UAV up in the air, the commander would call our squad and tell us to launch and we could do it right away. In this exercise, when the troop commander calls us and says he needs a UAV, we have to go through all sorts of channels to get it up in the air,” he says.
Airspace control has become a big issue in Iraq, where the Defense Department is reportedly flying some 1,500 unmanned aircraft in addition to hundreds of smaller hand-launched drones.
In preparation for a second deployment to Iraq, Trogdon and his squad are learning to navigate air-space coordination procedures, which include gaining numerous clearances to ensure a safe flight.
“One thing we find is when a unit comes out here, and they bring all these UAVs … there’s a problem of airspace control,” says Brig. Gen. Robert Cone, commanding general of Fort Irwin and the National Training Center.
The demand for unmanned systems continues to soar. At a recent conference in Washington, D.C., Lt. Col. Jeff Gabbert, of the Army’s unmanned aerial systems project office, said the service currently has 15 Shadow platoons and it plans to field eight more next year.
With an increasing number of units acquiring their own unmanned aviation assets, training centers have had to adjust accordingly.
Cone says he hired a former battalion commander of the 1st Cavalry Division fresh out of Baghdad as the center’s lead aviation trainer. His first-hand knowledge of airspace de-confliction has proved advantageous in training troops for deployment.
“We have replicated that [process] so that the brigade air element will control air the same way here as in Iraq,” says Cone.
In addition, he has forged a relationship with nearby Creech Air Force Base, which was designated as a “center of excellence” for unmanned aerial vehicles. The 1,100 square miles of the National Training Center offers ample testing space for unmanned aircraft technologies, he says.
On day 10 of the brigade’s training exercise, the Shadow squadron has accumulated 107 flight hours.
“We fly a lot, probably 16 out of 24 hours a day,” says Trogdon. Much of that time is spent flying over the 12 villages scattered throughout the training center.
“They can see everything that’s going on in town,” he says.
Staff Sgt. Timothy Wilson, from the 1st Squadron, 221st Cavalry Regiment of the Nevada National Guard, is one of several hundred insurgent role players in the exercise. Standing outside the Kamel Dog Café in the town of Medina Jabal, Wilson, who plays a food vendor named Latif Abon, says that he sees UAVs flying constantly. At night, he can see the red and green clearance lights in the sky. During the day, he spots smaller ones.
“These guys have more eyes on the ground than anyone else I’ve seen,” he says. “It’s making me sweat.”
But about an hour northwest of his location, another group of insurgent role players have a different perspective of the surveillance capabilities of the Shadow.
Nestled in between large rocks with a machine gun, Pfc. Michael Nuss stops scanning the road for Stryker combat vehicles and looks up into the clouds slowly turning orange and pink. He searches in vain for the UAV that he can hear overhead.
“It sounds like an angry lawnmower,” he says. “You hear it constantly, but you don’t know where it’s at in the sky.”
He and a group of soldiers from the 1st Battalion 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment based in Fort Richardson, Alaska, have spent five hours holed up in the rocks waiting for the brigade to launch an attack against them.
Capt. Pat McCleskey, troop commander of the insurgents, from Nevada National Guard’s 1-221, says the brigade wasted time looking for them using a UAV that was having technical difficulties with its sensors.
“They have relied too much on air reconnaissance so they don’t really have a good picture of what’s up here,” he says.
Still, the Shadow has become the Army’s unmanned aircraft of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year, it flew almost 15,000 sorties, accumulating 63,215 flight hours, says Gabbert.
“The most significant increase in unmanned flight hours has come from the Army and primarily from Shadow,” says Dyke Weatherington, deputy for the Defense Department’s unmanned aerial vehicles planning task force.
In addition to insurgent surveillance operations, the brigade’s UAV squad is often tasked to conduct improvised explosive device searches, says Sgt. Edward Powell, who monitors the Shadow in flight from inside the ground control station parked near the launching site.
“We can see if insurgents are placing improvised explosive devices and ambushes along a certain route, or we can see if there’s anything strange or unusual, such as a person out and about at two in the morning,” he says.
The aircraft also is employed in counter mortar operations, he adds. “I think the brigade is pleased with the Shadow system … I think they will use us a lot more when we go back.”