Two Air Force personnel operate an MQ-9 Reaper, an unmanned aerial vehicle, from a control room at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
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Schwartz took over the Air Force last month after Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired General Mike Moseley. Gates has clashed repeatedly with the Air Force over its mishandling of nuclear weapons, its push to buy more costly manned warplanes and its foot-dragging in sending more drones to the war zones. He and Moseley also differed over whether non-pilots should be able to operate weapons-carrying drones. Like other previous Air Force leaders, Moseley argued that only a trained pilot had the mental and moral heft to deliver bombs and missiles, or could avoid mid-air collisions with other aircraft. Last April, Gates complained that while running the CIA in 1992 he discovered "the Air Force would not co-fund with CIA a vehicle without a pilot." That stubborn thinking, he suggested, makes no sense as drones have flooded the skies over Afghanistan and Iraq and stretched the Air Force's pilot ranks. The press of war requires "rethinking long-standing service assumptions and priorities about which missions require certified pilots and which do not," Gates said.
Schwartz, significantly, is the first non-fighter pilot to head the Air Force in a generation (he is a pilot, but primarily of special-operations aircraft). To meet the soaring demand for drone operators, he says fledgling pilots will be used. But the service soon will "develop an unmanned aircraft systems operator career field with specialized training potentially distinct from current manned pilot training," he said. That will come as a relief to many young pilots who have feared having their flying careers crimped by being ordered to fly drones from Nevada's Creech Air Force Base. Schwartz said he wanted the separate training pipeline so that drone operators are not viewed as "a leper colony" by their colleagues still flying manned aircraft.
The demand for drone drivers is so great, Schwartz noted, that even retired officers may be recalled to fill the ranks. Some also argue that the Air Force ought to end the practice of regarding only officers, retired or otherwise, as eligible to operate drones. They point out that enlisted Army personnel fly that service's unmanned aircraft, and that enlisted airmen are known to spend a lot of time playing video games — a key skill in this line of work. "It does not take a commissioned officer with a university and leadership background, and years of training flying fighters and such, to fly something like a flight simulator," Air Force Cadet Michael Warzinski said in a message on an official Air Force website reacting to Schwartz's initiative. To which General Schwartz, who is said to be open to the idea, might say: one radical step at a time, Cadet.