Inside The Hidden Toll Of Drone Warfare And The Fight For Mental Health w/ Tanner Yackley

We explore the hidden human cost of remote warfare through the lived experience of an MQ‑9 Reaper sensor operator and the practical ways to build real support. Hard truths about shift work, moral injury, and surveillance fatigue lead to actionable resources and a message of hope.

• operating tempo, medals and hours without relief
• myths about “video game” combat
• what HD sensors reveal and why that matters
• shift rotations and sleep debt harming judgment
• pattern of life surveillance and moral injury
• surveillance fatigue and exposure to atrocities
• stigma, complex PTSD, and care that doesn’t fit
• Remote Warrior resources and free guides
• adaptive housing ideas that lower daily triggers
• a direct message to those silently struggling

If this episode helped open your eyes or strengthen your mindset, share it with someone, drop a review, or just push it along

Chapters

• 1:17 Setting The Mission And Stakes
• 2:05 Tanner’s Path To The MQ‑9
• 5:39 Medals, Hours, And Unseen Costs
• 7:48 Misconceptions And “It’s Just A Video Game”
• 12:32 Shift Work, Training Grind, And Burnout
• 18:56 How A Drone Crew’s Day Really Runs
• 25:55 Pattern Of Life And Moral Strain
• 29:09 Clarity Of The Camera, Weight Of Decisions
• 33:18 Moral Injury, Surveillance Fatigue, And Grief
• 41:00 Building Support: Remote Warrior
• 49:12 Actionable Help And Housing Solutions
• 56:19 A Message To Those Quietly Struggling

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:50

Welcome back to Mind Force, the podcast where we talk about resilience, purpose, and navigating life's unseen battles. Today's conversation takes us into the high-pressure world of military drone operations, a mission environment where the emotional and psychological toll often goes unnoticed. We'll unpack what it means to operate in a remote battle role and the unique stressors drone crews face and how mental health, education, and real coping strategies can make all the difference. Whether you're active duty, a veteran, or someone who wants to better understand the people behind the screen, this episode is for you. We'll start with the guest introduction. Tanner, let's start with you. Who are you and how did you first get involved in the drone community?

SPEAKER_03: 1:33

Absolutely. Nate, thank you so much for having me on the show. I greatly appreciate it. Uh so I'm Tanner Yackley. Uh, I am a former MQ9 Reaper sensor operator. And so a lot of people, especially, you know, with the media and everything else nowadays and what's going on in the Middle East, you hear drones and you think of the little small ones and the ones buzzing around and everything else. And it's just not the case uh with this. This is the one that, you know, back in the teens, uh, it was in every movie, it was in everything like that. It's the it's the big one. Uh 66-foot wingspan, 21 foot in length, uh, with that one. So it's it's a it's a pretty bird for sure. But I got into it straight out of high school, joined the military, didn't know a thing about it, didn't know even what I was getting into truly. Um, it was just, you know, it's pitched to me of like, hey, there's this career field, and you can go and and become, you know, get Intel and things like that. And I'm like, well, that sounds kind of cool and purposeful, so let's go with that. And then about halfway through training, they're like, oh yeah, by the way, you're you're gonna be lazy in weapons and doing all these high stress things and everything else. And it's like, oh, okay. Um, so it was uh, you know, definitely a mind shift, um, especially at, you know, 19 years old when I was doing it. I'm sure we'll get into this, but you know, I was 20 years old when I pulled my first trigger on it. So it's you know, talk about, you know, making an impact early on in your life. That was a pretty telling moment uh. But uh, but yeah, I got into it. Oh, went into the went in the US Air Force, got into the career field and spent eight years in it. I spent four years in combat. That's not four deployments, that's not four, you know, patients, anything like that. It is four sustained years of no breaks, anything like that with it. We especially back then, we spent about at a minimum six to seven hours in the box, as we call it being the ground control station there where we operated out of. And so it, you know, it was uh it was an interesting environment, with it to say the least. And, you know, a lot of the issues were it was just sustained operations. There was, you know, we're doing shift work on top of it with it as well. So it made it for just a very convoluted process and being able to navigate. And unfortunately, especially back then, it just wasn't done very well with it as far as mental health concerns go with it all, because now a bunch of people are are struggling, you know, with it because of and dealing with things like complex PTSD that we'll get into here. But yeah, I over the four-year time, put this into perspective, I flew over a thousand combat missions um in in under four years, uh, which is unheard of uh in any other career field. Uh I amassed almost 3,000 combat hours and in that exact same time, which when you go and look at you know the fighter community, and uh I love I love taking shots at them just because they they established our community, and I have very a lot of good friends that are fighter pilots with it because they brought over their tactics to the community in 2010 and in that area. But you know, those guys, you know, they they just did it's a very different area, very different, you know, lifestyle with it and how the mission and training environment works. And that was the unique part to what we did is you know, we didn't have this split between the two for it. So that's how all these hours just racked up so quickly throughout the process. And you know, and we were doing, like I said, it was not uncommon. I mean, they had a thousand hour a year wards for people because of how much we flew sustained all the time.

SPEAKER_00: 4:56

So, do you guys get air medals at the same rate that pilots do?

SPEAKER_03: 4:59

We get it, we crush them, man. I got 25 aerial achievement medals, and I think I probably have 15 that aren't even on there because it was just it was just like, what am I doing?

SPEAKER_02: 5:08

I don't care anymore. Like, I just uh don't want any more of these things.

SPEAKER_03: 5:12

So that's wild. Yeah, it was, it was. So that alone was was made for an interesting work-life balance.

SPEAKER_00: 5:21

I think one thing that's just crazy is like I hate to take the shot at the recruiters, but recruiters, I mean, there's 128 different jobs or whatever it is, and they can't know them all, but it's just always so funny, like how badly they kind of describe the jobs. Like it reminds me, I came in guaranteed air traffic control, and I remember there was one other guy in my BMT flight that was air traffic, and I was like so excited to find him and meet him, and I was like, cool, we're both in this career field. And I was like, Hey, why did you choose air traffic? And he was like, Because I love being outside. I was like, wait, what? Who do you think you are? I was like, You you got you think you're the guy with the batons, don't you? And he was like, Yeah, I was like, that's a flying crew chief, completely different career field. Your maintenance versus but he thought he was gonna have those Lackland lasers and sit on the ground. I was like, I gotta break this to you in the third week of BMT. Like, that's not what you do. You're a group who did not tell you the right thing, but I mean you gotta hit your goals and whatnot. But uh, it's just always so comical how they because um for yours, I'm sure it's super insulting, but you always hear like, oh, you want to go play a video game? It's like Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. And that's not what that is.

SPEAKER_03: 6:32

No, it couldn't be farther from the truth. You know, it's it's life or death decisions every single day. It's watching death and destruction on repeat, and because that's the part that nobody realizes is that it wasn't just, hey, we go in and I laze in a weapon, you know, and and things like that. It was after the fact, right? It was the I have to go in, pull the video from what I did because everything's recorded, right? And I go in and I and I nitpick and I nitpick and I nitpick on it and sit there and strip it down, strip it down to pull out the exact second, you know, that I could have done something better uh as a crew member. And so you're watching it continually, you know. And I mean, I remember one time I was tasked with scrubbing all of the strike videos to see if the tactics that we were utilizing at the time were effective and if we needed to, you know, change them and bring in more weaponry for it. Uh, and so what did that mean? I had to watch every person that we had ever taken out in the squadron die on repeat over and over and over for a week straight as I analyzed every piece of it and with it. So, you know, it's there's so much to this that just the the common misconceptions are honestly getting guys killed because it's you know, you got guys that are even getting separated now for PTSD, and flight docs are looking at them and going, Well, you didn't deploy, how can you have trauma? And that's the whole reason why I got into psychology is trying to fix this because those those misconceptions are are running just rampant throughout, you know, the world. They're throughout everything. Everyone thinks it's just a video game. Everyone thinks that, you know, you're in a cushy air-conditioned seat, you know, with a cushy seat, you know, what's the big deal? And it's like, it couldn't be farther from the truth.

SPEAKER_00: 8:13

Yeah, I can't imagine. Because the only thing that I can even relate it to is like watching film for football. And that's like massively not even close. I mean, they're trying to improve and do better. So that aspect of continual growth and improvement is there, but you're talking about a game that's for fun versus like you said, life and death. So geez, I can't even think of anything that's really even comparable. And when I was sitting down to, you know, write work on the script and whatnot, I was talking to my wife and just crazy because uh she actually grew up in Vegas, so you know, near being near Creech and things like that. But we were talking through how, you know, normally you go and you disappear, not disappear, you go into the AOR, you go into the area for six months, and you're game on, you're away from family, and you're in that thing, and you do your job, and then you get to come home and reintegrate. But I just cannot even wrap my head around like sitting in the box, removing someone from this earth, and then going to a kid's birthday party. Like that's insane. Like that doesn't but we'll try to get through some of the myths today, Tanner, and hopefully educate some people along the way. I want to know for the warm-up, if your crew had an unofficial motto or inside joke that's maybe not too dark, what was it? Sure.

SPEAKER_03: 9:23

It means, you know, something to do with just, you know, hey, it's just a video game, right? You know, I mean that that's the you know, we we we embodied it, you know, and it was just you know, and that was part of the compartmentalization and desensitization to it all is by making those jokes and then, you know, utilizing that and the gallows humor and everything else. I mean, that's rampant in the military already, right? But it it's you know, we we took it to a you know another weird extent because it was like we had to, uh, you know, because just like we're talking about, nothing that we did was normal, you know. It was and it was just like just keep pressing on. And I'm like, really? Like we're just gonna keep letting these people do this and not not worry about what happens when you open the box, you know, at the end of that four years. And uh, you know, that was the reason why I got out, is I I I went down to the schoolhouse after my combat tour, went down there, got absolutely beat up by the schedule. You know, we were on 20-hour windows there. So you worked, you you could work a 12-hour shift in there, and a lot of times we did because for people don't realize the training environment can sometimes be more brutal than the combat with it because you're you're you know, I was double turning events, I was doing two events in a day, I was doing multiple evaluations in a day with it, and you know, and so then I'm having to like jump around debriefs. I'm gonna go, all right, I'm gonna debrief this guy first, and then an hour later, I'm gonna debrief you and switch this and change this. And it wasn't, you know, you always had the with like any air crew, you've got the 12-hour window that protects you, right? And with it, you've got your crew rests that can't be on it's you know, a 12-hour window after you walk out of the box that you were essentially protected and can't get put back on to a shift, which is great, but it doesn't affect the shift the other way. So there's mornings because of the monsoon season, um, and and thunderstorms rolling in around 1-2 p.m. every day, that we for two months we would shift our entire schedule eight hours to the left. And so we would start at 2 a.m. That means I'm up at midnight getting ready, waking up, getting ready, rolling into work, writing up a board, looking over the student's grade sheet, prepping him for the lesson, everything else, and then standing there at 2 a.m. Like 50% of the time the student didn't show up because it's 2 a.m. No one should be awake at this time. So then I'm calling a dude, going, Hey man, where are you at? Like, all right, can you get here and we can get this training event done that I just woke up two hours ago for? And so you'd start with that, and then there was so many times where maybe the next day they go, Oh, hey, you started at 2 a.m. that day. Let's start at 10 a.m. then 10 a.m. the next. And you're going, wait, what? You know, Zerkadium rhythm at all. None. And and you know, and that stuff is is the stuff that was just brutal, you know, to come off of four years of shift work and then roll into that environment and everyone just be okay with like, it's okay. Uh, you know, and and I was uh I was a lead instructor at one point there. And so I had com you know, I would I would entertain generals, I would entertain different things like that, you know, for when they came through and and did the uh what do we call it, the uh dog and pony shows, if you will. Um with you know, and and rolling through it, and they'd go, well, how can we, you know, you're the person we want to keep in this in the military. How can we keep you? And I'm like, freaking pay me more and it's fix my schedule because this, you know, and it's like, and they're like, well, we can't do that, but you know, what else? And I'm like, no, no, no, no, you don't get it. Like that's that's it. Like those two things, and this would be so much better, you know. And they've opened a couple other bases, but uh, you know, Florida, South Carolina, things like that. But it's not, it's we're still we're talking 20 years, and that's the only thing that's changed, arguably, in the entire thing. So it's it makes it very difficult for those operators to still continue to navigate it. Um you know, and that was it was at the schoolhouse, you know, when I got when I was coming up on my end and waiting for orders, you know, hot for orders at that point. And they're like, they're like, all right, uh, well, you're a young staff, so you're gonna go back to combat. And I'm like, no, I'm like, God, hell no. I'm like, I'm out, man. Like, I'd rather go put on a polo and you know, make six figures doing this and live where I want and not, you know, be in a in a horrible spot, you know, with this, because unfortunately, all the bases we're talking about are in the freaking desert. And, you know, for a snowbird like me sitting up here in North Dakota, I don't like that. I melt, right?

SPEAKER_00: 13:36

I I turned into frosty real quick there. So Yeah, some of those schedules are are rough. I mean, air traffic, we definitely weren't on 12s or anything, but one of the things that I disliked, I mean most of it wasn't too bad, but we used to do two days, two swing, two mid, two off. And it's like just enough to like give you the crew rest and then get you back to work. And it's like you never have enough time to do anything. You like have enough time to sleep, like maybe do an errand or two, or like wash your clothes, and then it's like off to work. It's like you have no real life for a period of time. I was like, oh, I wish there could be. They've tried different things, and you know, they deal three or six and three or panamas, but yeah, that's uh I didn't sleep for a full eight hours until multiple years after I left Air Traffic. It took quite a while to get through, like the body back to normal and whatnot. That that's okay to rhythm is a real rough. Before we get too deep to Tanner, uh, do you have a question for me?

SPEAKER_03: 14:31

Yeah, um, I would say what's, you know, and you know, with this being the mindfulness podcast, what is one story or episode that sh that truly changed how you think about trauma or resiliency?

SPEAKER_00: 14:45

I think I don't know if I have one specific episode, but I think the trend that I've really noticed that I'd love to like drive home to listeners is trauma shows up in a multiple of ways. I think that's one thing that's like really frustrating is a lot of times people want it to be a horrific car accident or a loss of a family member or something really big. And those also do happen. But being told you're an idiot and you're never going to be anything for years of your life as you're growing up is also traumatic. It's not, you know, a big event. You weren't punched in the face or whatever. But I think we have to like reflect and stop and figure out how to work on ourselves and get over, you know, the things that we've uh experienced throughout our life. Because I've talked to a lot of people and they're like, oh no, my my life was pretty good. And then they like don't want to work on anything because they don't recognize that, but just because it wasn't a huge, massive, you know, thing that they're not gonna work on it because it's not that big of a deal. It's like not everyone goes through terrible things and they're all you know, also those. But I think that's the biggest thing. It just shows up in multiple different ways. It could be, you know, someone demeaning you for years and years, and then you, you know, don't do the things that you should or you could, you're like, you know, not in power to get after those things, or it could be the horrific car accident where you lose your family or whatever. But yeah, I think trauma just shows up in so many different ways. And so I feel like that's the first thing. Just stop and kind of pause and figure out, you know, that self-reflection, slow down and figure out what that looks like for you. It's not going to be the same for everyone. I think it's another thing that comes up quite a bit is for some reason, and maybe it's like a military thing, or maybe it's just a human thing in general. We want like checklists, or we want like this perfect thing where we can apply it to everyone. And humans are wildly too complex for that. That will never happen. You need to take care of people in the ways that they need to be taken care of. Like someone had said the platinum rule, which I heard recently, which is crazy because you know I'm like almost 40 and always heard the golden. I've never heard the platinum. So golden is like treat others the way you want to be treated, but the platinum is treat them the way they need to be treated. Like maybe they need something different. Like you can't just assume what you need, they need and just force it on them. Because I feel like that's the way that's what I like, so you're gonna like it. Like that might not be what they need. So platinum, like take it the next step. Know them enough, have that empathy, connect with them enough to be like, you need something different than I do, and that's fine, and I'll I'll give you that. So what do you think about those two? No, I th I think that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_03: 17:13

And I'm gonna tell you, I wish, I wish a lot of, you know, because I've been through a lot of different programs and things like that for mental health and you know, trying to navigate all this, and so you hit it right on the head, right? Is the square peg round hole uh theory, you know, with it and you know, people just get you and put you into modalities and things like that, being cognitive processing theory, B E M D R, all these different ones that are out there. And while they're great and they do work for some people, the hardest thing that, you know, especially with my community and what we struggle with is we're resistant to a lot of those traditional traumas. So, and providers get pissed when we don't fit in the box. And it's like, and you know, it's like I've stopped stuff before because I really I recognize it's like re-traumatizing when they go, Well, you didn't finish the modality. And I'm like, Well, that's not how this works. You know, it's like that's nope, like uh that doesn't work that way um at all. But, you know, and I think that's that leads on to your second point, right? Of the platinum rule. I love that. I wish people would embody that more because that's one of the things that, you know, talking about these things and and going through these therapies and stuff like that, it's like there's so many times that people are just trying to get through that checklist, right, for their program or whatever their modality is for that veteran, for that person that's dealing with trauma, and they don't recognize that you need to be able to pivot. You need to be able to, you know, go off scripts at times and truly help them because otherwise you're just reinforcing those negative impacts, those negative thoughts about, you know, especially for like my community, we deal horrendously with a negative self-image because of the moral efficacies of what we did and the lack of understanding around it, the lack of support around it, you know. And so then when people throw their hands in the air and go, hey, I have a problem, people go, Yeah, right. And then you go, and then when you hear that, you know, a thousand times, what are you supposed to do? You know, with it. So, so I think both those points are fantastic, especially for, you know, I can tell you from dealing with this personally, um, you know, daily. It's it's my biggest struggle. But when talking with people and talking with providers, is everyone wants to think that they have their own, you know, process or procedure for it. And while it might work for some, you know, don't get mad at the person if it doesn't work for them, you know, and and help them and see, you know, if you have a connection or something else that could work, like push them to that. Don't just go, ah, it didn't work, and all right, on to the next one. You know, it's like there's a reason everybody feels like a meat locker in the, you know, a piece of meat in the healthcare system.

SPEAKER_00: 19:42

Yeah. Surprisingly, water and Motrin doesn't fix everything.

SPEAKER_02: 19:47

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00: 19:48

Neither does changing trucks. Your first pillar is military drone operations. This is probably a super difficult question, uh, but I'd love to try to lay the foundation for everyone that is confused or has no idea. So elevator speech, two to three minutes, or you know, whatever. There's one down. Okay, he's back.

SPEAKER_03: 20:13

Of course, right? That's how life is one sec to get this thing booted back on.

SPEAKER_01: 20:19

A little bit of editing.

SPEAKER_00: 20:21

I think it's Monday. All right, let me see now. Are you back? Can you walk us through what a day in the life of Drone operator actually looks like.

SPEAKER_03: 20:29

Yeah, absolutely. So in life a drone operator, usually, like said, you know, we're talking about being on shift work, things like that when you're running combat missions. So, you know, it depended on the unit. You know, there's there's no like again one size fits all per se for this. Some of us ran eight-hour days, granted, it was really like 10 and a half, 11 with briefs and debriefs and everything else. And some some guys and gals were on uh 12 hours, 12 hour shifts as well, too. And and that was 12 hours in the box. You know, that wasn't like uh, hey, you get a nice four-hour break here, you know, you're just at work for that long. It was sustained constantly throughout. So, you know, I was on a typical 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., 4 p.m. to midnight, midnight to 8 a.m. uh uh my rotation was uh every seven weeks, um, which made for a weird thing for your circadian rhythm because it felt like every time that your body finally got adjusted to that shift after about week five, towards the end there of my, you know, year three, my body was was starting to anticipate when I was rotating and it would it would start auto-rotating, meaning I wouldn't be able to go to sleep and I would start staying up because that was my tactic at the time to switch shifts was to turn around and go, okay, I'm going from uh 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., you know, or or even you know, harder. The hardest one was obviously the midnight to 8 a.m. and then 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., right? Going from what we call mids to days, uh there, mid shift, date shift. And so that rotation was the worst because after shift, after that final day on week seven, and I knew I was rotating to the next shift for that weekend, I only had three days to do it. The first day you usually always just slept because you were so exhausted from everything. And so, you know, while yes, it was nice having three days off, almost every single one of those first days was just let me knock out for the whole day and then recover. So it was it was complicated because your body would start rotating. And so then I would start staying up later and later and later with it because that's how I usually rotated my shift schedule was all right, let me come off work. I know I have to, you know, three days to rotate to a day shift for mids. I'm gonna stay up that whole first day as long as I physically can and then crash out, sleep, and then just try to force myself into the next shift with it. And, you know, I was lucky enough to be single at the time. So, you know, but for guys with families, you know, they would they would go on their weekends and they would, and even if they were on night shift, they would flip to a day shift for two, three days on their weekend, and then flip back to a night shift because they've got kids to take care of, they've got families to take care of, you know, those types of things. So it made it very complicated when it came down to it and trying to navigate that, you know, and so again, you got eight or 12 hours in the box uh there. You go into work, you get a briefing on what's going on, you get the weather, you get the intel, you get everything else right. If there's a target on the table, because it's not like, you know, this isn't top gun two, where they're going in and trying to hit that, you know, drop that bomb in the in the crater there and everything else, where they're sitting there and practicing and practicing and practicing. Now we did that, and we did that to a fault some days. Um, you know, with how much we trained and how much we practiced. But at the same time, there was there wasn't just this okay, you know, clear-cut delineation between them. You know, we could walk into shift, get a brief, and they go, hey, we have a target on the table right now. They are ready to go, waiting for the words to clear to engage to happen. And if it doesn't happen in the next 30 minutes, your crew is taking over and you have to be ready to take the shot within 30 seconds of sitting down in a seat. And so, you know, it was this mental gymnastics of every day. I don't know what I'm walking into. You know, I don't know if I'm gonna walk in and stare at the top of a mud hut for eight hours and nothing happens. And I just maybe watch some cows graze around, you know, goats raise around it or whatever there. And I and there's because there's days where I would sit in the seat and never touch a control for eight hours because I didn't need to. You know, they were sleeping, you know, when we were when it was day shift over here, it's night over there. So, you know, that was usually the the you know, day shifts were uneventful. And that also means night shifts were the were the were the hot time, you know. I think I am I think almost every strike I took personally uh was on a night shift um with it. So again, and that's that midnight to 8 a.m. So you're sitting there at three in the morning trying to just run through all these mental gymnastics and push your body to the just absolute brink, um, and making sure that you are needing to perform at your best at any given second. Because you don't know, you know, sometimes it was weeks that we'd build up a training for a target or something like that, you know, months, years sometimes, you know, depending on how big the fish was, because there's different mission sets with it too. And and the super quick and dirty on that is you've got essentially the counterinsurgency mission that a lot of people are familiar with, right? With what we did and how we operated. We're looking for people digging for IEDs, mortar tubes, doing friendly force overwatch, those types of things. And and I did that for a hint for um for almost like about nine months, and then I got pushed out to a different unit that did more of what we call patterns of life uh with it. And that is you're watching the day-to-day, right? You're watching this person wake up, go tend to their goats, drop their kids off at school, go and meet with some bomb maker, um, and you know, pass on schematics or whatever, and then go home and act and and you know, continue on his day. So, you know, and that's where a lot, you know, one of the one area we'll get to with this is the moral piece of this, is because that starts eating away at you at some point, is sitting there and watching this day in and day out. And I know what this dude had for breakfast, I know how many goats he has, I know how many kids he has, and I know how many wives he has, right? Uh, with it. And it's like, so it's it's a mix up mix for a hard environment because you don't know what you're walking into every single day. You don't know if, hey, is this target cold? Are we going in and it's super insane? There's times where they wouldn't have the right people on shift because we were so low on personnel that they would call people in from their weekend and say, we need you here in 45 minutes to execute a strike. And they would drive up from in town 45 minutes to fly up there and roll into the box and pull a trigger. Again, no one's doing that, but when it comes down to it, right? Everything is training, preparation, you know, very structured, and it's it's you know, and I can't imagine it's gotten any better. You know, there's been some improvements, but not a lot.

SPEAKER_00: 27:24

That's crazy. Some of the integrations and stuff with like the family. It's interesting you mentioned that because I think that's really bizarre. I think a lot of times we think of the, again, like I mentioned earlier, we think of the big things, but we don't do a good job of thinking the smaller things. So when I was at SOS, I got a chance to interview uh a Miss Alear, she was one of my classmates, and she would do like a week on or a week off or something like that. But I always remember that part of the interview because she was talking about the integration with her wife when she'd come off shift. Her wife would get used to doing the chores and putting the trash out and doing stuff, and then she'd come off shift and she's like, wait, I do that now. She's like, No, that's mine. And like, that's such a minor thing. But like when that happens all the time, like that must be so frustrating where you don't know where you fit and how it goes. And are you on the week on or the week off? So sounds cool to have a week off, I'm sure, initially. Uh, but some of those smaller details I think are really difficult. I did want to ask you like the biggest public misconception, but I think we kind of touched on that with the, you know, it's a video game, but maybe expand upon that or drive that home more for people. I think people believe that it's pixelated and kind of grainy and you can't really tell. Can you briefly touch on like how much you can like you were talking about the goats and things like that? How much can you actually see? Absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03: 28:42

So the biggest, the best example for this is I'm gonna take what you're wearing right now. And I used to, I used to use this when I was teaching in a university to the students there and explaining some of the operations and and what you could see and things like that uh there. So your shirt and your hat, right, uh that you're wearing, you know, we're operating 20 to 30,000 feet in the air with it. You're up at airliner altitude sometimes, you know, with it, and which is insane. And it's all in, you know, high definition. So you can see a decent amount, right? I could see things like, you know, if I had it, and because you've got an infrared camera and you've also got a what we call a day TV or an electrical electro optical camera that we utilize. And then there's also a couple others that we won't talk about. There's those are the two main ones, right? Uh, that you utilize for it. And the biggest thing with it is especially that day TV, you know, it was pretty clear uh with it. If I was looking at you standing outside your house in your driveway uh at 26,000 feet in the air, um, I could tell what color hat you're wearing, I could tell what color shirt you're wearing, I could tell that you have red writing on your shirt. Now I probably I'm not gonna be able to make it out and you know tell that it says USA on it, but I can at least tell that there's other colors in there. So while it's not perfect, it's pretty it's pretty dang good, right? I mean, you you know, you you'd watch people through infrared, you know, smoking a cigarette and stuff like that, and man the cherry on that would light up uh the whole screen kind of thing. And and you know, you could tell what people were wearing, you know, if they had a vest on, if they had a thobe, if they had, you know, that type of things. Um, you know, you could you could see even in infrared, you know, the details enough there. And so much so, and this is the part that people don't understand, is we analyzed everything. And so it was this crazy, you know, you know, uh work of I'm needing to think about what's the worst case scenario that can happen in this environment constantly. Because again, what are we always going for at the end of the day? Well, we're strike ready, right? We are ready at a drop of a pin to go in 30 seconds, doesn't matter what we're doing, where we are, who we're with, who we're paired up with for the night, whatever, we're ready to employ it any at any given second within 30 seconds. And that was our mantra, and that was exactly what we did, right? Um, and like everything we did was down to the absolute seconds with it. And so everything was planned, everything was thought out, you know, with it, and that takes its toll mentally, because you're sitting there and trying to process things and process for, you know, any good aviator has their contingency plan at the end of the brief, right? Let's talk about the things that could go wrong so that way when they, you know, things hit the fan, we're we're good to go and ready to prep for them. Uh, we know exactly what everyone's gonna do. Well, we did that 24-7, you know, as we're operating, because every little thing that we did, we had to plan for what's the worst case uh here and be prepared in the back of our minds to always be ready to employ a weapon.

SPEAKER_00: 31:44

Yeah, I think that really just drives home that point. You know, we'll transition into your next pillar, which is mental health of drone operators. But I think that connection is like the biggest thing that might be missing, where people, you know, it's just a video game. Because I think video games, you know, even though PS5 or whatever is getting pretty realistic, it's always not quite realistic. Absolutely. But you're talking about real people and enough clarity and high definition where you are now connected to another human, like whether you want to or like to or not, like you are connected, especially like you said, the pattern of life and you are watching this person. And so that's one thing I would love to just, you know, press out to people where it's not pixelated, it's not squares on a screen, it's like a clear human that's standing in there. So we'll transition into the next one, that mental health. What do you think, or what have you seen or experienced as signs of fatigue, detachment, or even that moral injury you talked about earlier? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03: 32:40

Um, you know, I mean, there's so many areas that can be hit with this, right? Starting with the moral injury piece of this, you know, being, which again is that feeling in your body that you don't have all the information all the time, right? You don't exactly know what, you know, we all we uh everything we did, right? And this is the beautiful, this is the easiest way to put this into perspective with it, is every single training event I ever taught, every single combat line I instructed, every single mission I was on personally, the number one question you asked the student or you put in your head was, what's the intent? So you're trying to then in turn uh go ahead and you know be able to utilize this and figure out exactly what's going on within that area um, you know, of operation there. And so it plays this moral piece to it because you don't always get to see what happens, right? I could be sitting on a target for hours, for days, for weeks, for months, for years on end, right? And sitting there, and then all of a sudden the next day I walk in a shift and that target's gone. That plays it, that plays its own toll on your body. And there's an there's a great veteran named Wayne Phelps that wrote a book called On Killing Remotely that does an exceptional job talking about these points there. And I've I've had a lot of personal conversations with him too about this exact thing because it's it's absolutely insane how you know you're sitting there and watching things horrific happen, right? And it's not always everybody always thinks like, you know, you guys are these, you know, robot killers and everything else, and you talk about the stigmas and all that. And it's like, man, that couldn't be farther from the truth. Like it took its toll across the board. And I mean, you're there's times where unfortunately you're watching kids die, you're watching, you know, wives die, you're watching different things like that, because while we can plan and plan and plan, we always said the enemy gets a vote, right? Oh, with it all. It's not, it's not in our control. We can control as much as we can. And man, would we control about 98% of that scenario? But that 2%, you know, that was the uncertainty. That was the unknown. That was what we didn't know every single day. Of all we need is this person to take a left and weapons off the rail, right? And they keep taking rights and they keep taking rights, and you're just going, come on, you know, take a left, you know, and it's like, because that's in your brain, that's the goal, right? That's what you need to achieve. That's what that gives that serotonin and everything else, right? And within your brain going, hey, good job, you know, with it, because that's always the end goal, is is lethality, is being able to do it and do it with absolute a hundred percent precision um across the board. And so you dealt with, you know, surveillance fatigue because of it, because you're sitting there and watching and watching and watching. You dealt with the moral injury piece, right? And all and a lot of piece or a lot of things with this that people don't realize is it's not always what the weapons did to them, it's what the locals are doing to each other. If you can imagine some anything, you know, especially on with the internet and things like that, um, and you talk about, you know, how can you compare? Well, the people at Scrub Facebook for absolutely horrible atrocities, I feel like can probably compare to our career field because we had to sit there and watch some of the most horrendous things, and I won't even give examples because I don't want to throw somebody into an episode here with the things that could come out of my mouth right now of what I've seen through a camera with it. If you can imagine it being done to a human in any way possible, either fictitious or real, I've seen it with it. And it's horrible. Uh, you know, to sit there and you watch, you know, some guy get gunned down in the street by another person and they're laying there bleeding out on the ground, and you're going, can't do anything, right? That's that would break rules of engagement. That would cause, you know, a national incident, that would cause all these things. Because while diplomacy is great, it only works so well because when war hits the fan, everything's all bets are off. Uh, you know, when it comes down to it. And so it was so terrible because you're, you know, and then you're dealing with a split identity, right? I may, you know, we we got told every single night when we walked into our squadron that we were stone cold killers and nothing else with it. And we believed it, we embodied it. We had to, right? That compartmentalization was how we survived throughout it. And then, but then an hour later, you're sitting at a dinner table with your kids or your wife or your spouse, and they go, Hey, honey, how was your day? And you just watched 30 people, you know, die in some of the most horrendous ways possible, and all you can do is go, it was good. Because you can't talk about it. You can't say anything, you can't bring it up with it. And it's not necessarily that you can't, it's just that we were never trained on how to do that. We were never given the tools to be able to have those conversations. And, you know, I'm not saying we need to go out here and and break operation security and and everything else. Good God, absolutely the opposite. But there's there's so many ways that this can still be discussed, and that's the hardest part with this, is so many people are terrified because of how we were institutionalized to go, hey, you can't talk about what you did. You can't talk about what you did. You can't talk about the missions that you did, the specifics, anything like that. And so our brains then calculate it with we can't talk about anything that we did with it. And now it's getting guys killed, you know, across the board. It's like we we lost an instructor to suicide three weeks ago in a location here in the United States. Um, and it's it's horrendous, you know, that this is still happening and and people are still so ignorant and going, oh, it's not a problem. And it's like, you just couldn't be farther from the truth. It's only not a problem because, you know, unfortunately, too many people are ignorant on the subject and they just don't know. That's not their fault, but that's exactly why I'm doing what I'm doing, is because I'm tired of losing friends. I'm tired of answering those calls at 3 a.m., you know, with it. And, you know, you bring in the lack of recognition with it too, of you know, saying, hey, well, you weren't in real combat, you sat in a box, everything like that, right? And you know, and what kills me is is the other communities, you know, the communities that we supported and things like that, and they still have those stigmas. And we and and so many people want to sit there and and do trauma comparisons, right? Well, I saw this happen, but you only saw this, and exactly like you opened with, right? At the end of the day, trauma's trauma. It doesn't matter how it happened, your brain rewiring is still eerily the same, which is why things like EMDR and things like that are set as the gold standard. And while they're great, but they don't always work with, you know, with people that have this complex PTSD with it. And the quick note I'll touch on that is is the unfortunate part about that diagnosis in itself is that isn't recognized in the United States, but it's recognized by the World Health Organization and the ICD 11, so which is their essential DSM V or the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual for Mental Health Disorders, which is what we use here in the States. And again, I'm not trying to come in here and bash anything and like that. It's just that there are major gaps in these areas and they're getting people killed, you know, at the end of the day. And so it's like when we stop with the trying to push these narratives and push that, oh, this works, this is it, this will help. You know, there's some great directions that we've moved as a society in the last five years, but there's still so many areas that we could be doing better. And recognizing a remote warrior combat is absolutely number one because it's not going anywhere, right? Especially with what's going on right now in the world. This is literally the epitome, and we're still sitting here as a society going, they're in a box, they're okay with it. And it couldn't be farther from the truth.

SPEAKER_00: 40:14

Yeah. So hopefully we can dispel some of the myths. But another thing I like to do on the show is really try to get after the actionable things. I think a lot of books and things, like about hypotheticals and things like that, sort of in the mental health uh section. What kinds of support systems, formal and informal, are out there for drone operators? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03: 40:32

Um, and this is a big thing with what I'm doing now is I've started an organization called Remote Warrior LLC. And what we do is we provide trauma resources for these veterans. We have an entire library of them, and I will be sure to get you the link to it. That's a link in here. But uh yeah, it's you know, it's an entire library built around remote combat and how to help navigate it. And that's not anything cosmic, it's not anything like necessarily clinical. Now there's clinical aspects to it because of the work I'm doing in psychology, but it's just being able to put words behind some of these thoughts and make people realize it's okay to be okay. And I think that that I heard that somebody, another host said that to me a week ago, and I love it. Because I think that's one of the biggest things with this is you know, you hear the, oh, it's okay to not be okay. But it's okay to be okay, right? And it's okay to get help, and it's okay to go out there and talk about this because it offers healing, it offers help to everyone else because the isolation that we do within this community is horrendous. So, you know, we've created an entire guide written for remote combat warriors and that lives that deals with things like disassociation, complex PTSD, and moral injury, because that's where areas like you know, the the PTSD checklist and things like that for intake miss um a massive amount for it. We've got a ton of different social media followings with it that we provide updates anytime that we have a new resource. And we have a we have a complete resource library with 10 different guides in it, hand built by this community, by spouses, by family members, all of it with it. And you know, it's different things. Like we have this, what's called the fog of war complex PTSD guide. And that little guy sits here on my desk every single day if I can get the camera to pick it up. Um, and you see, it's it looks like a J fire for a reason. Um it's because that's that's what this community knows, right? They want the little pocket, small, you know, guide there. And you see, it's it's not real thick. It's it's only about 15 pages in total, but you know, it can literally save somebody's life because it puts words to things that people, the thoughts that this community is having, and I know this because I get to I listen, I read the messages every single day of people going, thank you for finally putting words to what's going on in my head. But besides that, we have things like the spouse guide. We've got a separation and transition guide, right? Because a lot of sensor operators, right, the camera operator on an MQ9, get out and go, Well, I can either put on swap a flight suit for a polo and go do this as a civilian and keep re-traumatizing myself, or I can then turn around and and you know, I don't know, maybe go chase a hockey puck with a camera. You know, I'd and there's so much more to that with it. There's so much more that people can do in the skills that they don't even realize that they have with it. So we've got a separation guide on there. We've got an active duty mental health guide, we've got a comp and pen exam guide for if people are trying to put words to this to their doctors, family guides that to help civilian guides with it. And all of these resources are absolutely free. We're not charging anybody, we're not trying to make a buck off of this. The only reason that we have a we call it's called a co-5 campaign uh out there is so that we can print more of these guides because I'm shipping them down to places like Holloman Air Force Base and being able to get them out there and get them into the hands of these people that need them directly there, you know, and and we're developing training programs to fill the gaps for VA, industry, clinicians, garden reserve. We we have training outlines and programs that I'm where I work furiously, feverishly throughout the day to to crank out and you know, with you know, smart backing behind it. So that's the thing is we're always looking to bring on new people, you know, if people are willing to talk about this area, bring in their expertise for it with it because I'm just one guy and my team is just one team. We we have about six of us on this team that are doing all of this, and everything you see in this site was built in the last 60 days. The thought didn't even exist 60 days ago. I hit me one night in the middle, and I shot up out of bed and looked at my spouse and said, I need to change the mental health world for this community. And I went on a fever pitch for a week and cranked out a ton of this stuff because I was just so sick of getting those calls and so sick of dealing with, you know, and I don't want to say dealing with that's a horrible choice of words. I'm so so sick of, you know, but to some extent, um, but it just so sick of the lack of understanding and everything else with it, you know, and people, you know, that are again losing the battle to suicide because they they this this disease alters your brain in a way, chemic and chemically changes it to tell you that every day that you wake up and every second that you're not good enough, you can't do what you're setting out to do, and why are you even still here? And it's it's one of the most horrendous parts of this is just the negative self-image to it. And it's something that I have to literally fight every single day to even wake up and want to put my feet on the ground because I am so just exhausted from fighting this war and fighting this, you know, war in my head, and also dealing with you know the ignorance around it and the things like that and the stigmas, and it's like, you know, you talk about fight, flight, freeze, and fawn uh with your sympathetic nervous system. I get a bastardized version of all four that just beat the crap out of me like a punching bag on any given minute of any given day. You know, I walk out of the house and go, oh, I'm going to buy milk today. Cool. What's everything that can go wrong in this scenario on my way to go going buying milk? Because that's the way I was trained and that's the way I was wired with all of it. And so, because of that, it it causes just this horrible way of living, honestly. And one of the ways that we're hoping to fix this is we've got a campaign out right now for mental health adaptive housing with this. And it's things like soundproof walls, right? It's things like bringing in uh, you know, a therapy space into people's homes that they can take that they can work on themselves and things like that. And again, this isn't gonna be for everybody. It's not gonna just like we talked about, it's not like a one size fits all, but the ripple this could have across law enforcement, special operations, mental health as a whole, kids with disabilities could be insane with it. And we sit there and we spent$500 million in the last five years, uh, and that's what's out there publicly on failed mental health campaigns and failed mental health, half a billion dollars on stuff that just doesn't do anything and has no ROI. And it's like, why don't we just take a couple grand for a person or a lot more for the people that are suffering severely and fix and help them at where they live, you know, and where they spend 80 to 90 percent of their day, you know, every single day by just giving them peace and quiet by not getting throttled by, you know, their kids dropping a, you know, bowling ball upstairs or something, and you go through the roof because of, you know, jumping, or you know, having you know, layouts being safe and things like that, automatic blinds at night to give you that safety and security, you know, in your own home, because it's all of those things that you glance out and you make a quick look out a window and go, what was that? So what is it? What's on that tree line? What's what's over there? Is that okay? It's just a deer. All right, never mind. We're okay. Uh, you know, and but it's but it's exhausting, you know, sitting there and doing that every single day because your brain is just playing, what's the worst case right now with what you're doing? You know, every single day. And it's like, I could be cooking chicken and my it's like, and it hits me and goes, Oh, well, you gotta move the handle on this because if your three-year-old runs up behind you and bumps you, then you need to make sure that you don't do this and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's like make it stop. Uh, you know, and so that that's a big push for us right now is with this plan and being able to find, you know, we're work, we're looking for organizations to partner with that would, you know, provide some of these services, being able to, you know, uh, VSOs, veteran service organizations, different things like that, to be able to push this initiative out there because, like I said, the ripple could be insane. And there's so many different ways that this could have this could affect people in such a positive way. And and and honestly, and at the end of the day, you know, looking at you, US government, it's gonna save you a bunch of money, right? You're not gonna burn a bunch of money. And also, who are the people that go and do your contract work and fill the billets for all of these companies like General Atomics and Northrop and all these big big ticket companies is your prior military. So why we're not taking care of them at every single level, starting at the active duty units, starting at you know, professional military education um and all of it. And my team, my team has a plan for all of it. You know, we're just trying to find the right people to push the message and get this out there because we see the gap, we see the suicide rates within our community. You know, I've lost 40 to 50 people in the last, you know, 15 years um of being in this community. You know, most I've known personally. Unfortunately, I was standing in the room where somebody pulled the trigger two days uh 24 hours uh later, and I had no clue. Uh and I was standing in the exact spot he did it, and it was on my team when I was running combat operations. And you want to talk about, you know, do you think we got a bunch of therapy after that? And you know, hey, you know, you just went through this whole super traumatic event. Heck no, it was all right, back in the box, uh, you know, kind of thing, and right back into a mission the next day, and sitting there and and and fighting that over and over and over again in your head. So that's really what it what it comes down to in the message pushing out with this is just being able to have a place that people can go and they can feel okay, right? And this isn't just with the Reaper and everything else, right? This can be cyber, this can be Intel, you know, this can be anyone that's looked at traumatic events through a screen and told that what they what they experienced isn't real, isn't valid, and isn't okay to not be okay. And because it's all BS at the end of the day, and these guides need to be out there, these resources need to be out there, and that's why anyone that wants them, they're available, they're out there, you know, uh with it. And thank goodness we get a lot of really great support uh through funding and things like that. I'm with it for both individuals and organizations that and all the money goes to is just printing more guides, like I said earlier, and getting them out there because I want these guides on every every veteran service organization's office. I want you know this website to be a go-to for everybody in this. Um, and we're always open to partnerships and things like that on how to bolster it, how to bring in other expertise, right? Like I said, I might be one guy that's going through a psych program, but I sure don't know everything when it comes to this, and I will never say that I do. But I can't sit here and let these people pass by and wait for organizations and things like that to even get educated on what a drone is, and then turn around and try to wait another 10 years for them to figure out, oh, yeah, there's a bunch of mental health issues with this.

SPEAKER_00: 51:08

That's awesome. Well, Tanner, Tanner, thanks for uh putting all that stuff out there. The next pillar was mental health, education, and coping strategies, but I think you pretty well rounded that out. I wanted to ask kind of king or queen for the day, what would you change? But sounds like a pretty awesome initiative there with housing, a lot of things like back to kind of what we talked about earlier, the smaller things. I think we want the huge Herculean effort, but I think a lot of the things you just touched on, you know, blinds. I mean, some of these minor things would really go a long way, second, third order effects. So love to, you know, push this out. Hopefully, we can get some more people, you know, get some more uh people to help you out and partner and whatnot. But I'd like to try to bring all these three pillars together with a final takeaway. What message would you give to someone quietly struggling in this career field right now? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03: 51:53

For those, and I'm gonna I'm gonna try to I'm gonna try to keep it together here. Uh for those that are struggling with this, um it's you're not alone. That's the worst part about this disease is it makes you alienates you so hard. It makes you feel like everything, every thought in your head makes you feel like I'm the only person with the weight of the world on my shoulders, and that couldn't be farther from the truth. There's so many people out there that are struggling. And I want people to know that it's not the guys, you know, I'll I'll use a funny term here. It's not the it's not the dirtbag airmen, right? That that we all that we all you know dealt with and things like that. It's your high profile people. It's the best of the best with it, and it's it's everybody in between, right? This this doesn't discriminate. This isn't just, oh, because I did XYZ, now I'm struggling, kind of thing. It's like you said, it's this weird, bastardized version of all of it. And it's okay to not be, it's okay to be okay. So reach out, get the help, you know, like I said, utilize our resources. We're there, you know. If anyone needs anything, my org is so versed in this stuff. And, you know, we have, like I said, it's all a bunch of ex sensor operators doing the whole thing. Um, no offense, pilots. But uh, you know, it's it's like that's you know, that's that's the piece of this, is it's like reach out and talk to somebody about it and and realize that you're not gonna find, you know, it is gonna be a little bit of a struggle, right? Because finding someone that truly understands, you feel like you're fighting an uphill battle, but at least, you know, you can come into the community and we've got a Discord with over a hundred members that we're growing every day. You can come in and talk about these struggles, talk about the things you know, and it's completely protected. And we have complete security over the whole thing. We allow family members, clinicians, things like that in there, but they get very limited access to protect the members because the number one thing that we're doing at Remote Warrior is putting the veteran first. And I will never waver from that ever because I've seen what the impact they can have with this community. I see the horrible things that can happen when this stuff goes unchecked. And like I said, at the end of the day, reach out. There's a lot of amazing organizations doing a lot of great things, and I can point you in the directions because I talk to the CEOs weekly and go, here's here's my community, and let me bring them into the fold of what you're doing there. So there's so much more than what's offered with the VA. There's so much more than that's offered, you know, even online that you can find with it. So reach out, talk to somebody about it, and don't be silent because complacency kills, right? And you know, we we we've we've been trained so well to be complicit in this situation that it's costing people their lives. So talk about it, be about it, and there is hope, there is healing, and we absolutely need, you know, more and more with it because this problem isn't going away. This problem's just getting started.

SPEAKER_00: 54:38

Absolutely. Well, thank you, Tanner. I think uh information is, you know, there's no better information from the people by the people, so that's awesome. This is a powerful conversation. Thank you for shedding light on the side of service that doesn't always get seen. Before we wrap, where can people find more about you and connect with you?

SPEAKER_03: 54:54

Absolutely. RemoteWarrior LLC.com is our website. We are on almost every social media out there under Remote Warrior LLC. You can find me uh on there as well. I promote a lot of different things through Facebook, LinkedIn, stuff like that. Um, on my own personal accounts, especially LinkedIn. If you're any type of mental health professional, you want to learn more about this, anything like that, I can get a meeting with you in no time with it and be more than happy because that's the only way we're gonna break these stigmas and break down these barriers is by talking about it and truly, you know, coming together as a community and as a nation to support these warriors.

SPEAKER_00: 55:27

Absolutely. To everyone listening, thank you for joining us today. If this episode helped open your eyes or strengthen your mindset, share it with someone, drop a review, or just push it along. This is Mind Force. I love you all. See ya.