If you read a story about the United States military using a drone to capture or kill a terrorist in Iraq at any point between 2004 and 2010, there's a decent chance that Brett Velicovich was somehow behind it. Velicovich, who dropped out of college after September 11th to join the Army—he spent his 21st birthday chugging "near beers" because U.S. troops weren't allowed to drink in Afghanistan—was a member of the Army's elite Delta Force, and over the course of five deployments, he became part of a select group of military personnel responsible for using unmanned aircraft to gather intelligence on insurgent leaders. Working alongside drone pilots operating out of secure locations in the United States, Velicovich's team at one point was credited with capturing or killing 14 of America's 20 most wanted terrorists in Iraq in the span of only three months.
In the prologue to his account of his time in the military, co-authored by the Wall Street Journal's Christoper S. Stewart, Velicovich writes that the manuscript took years to be authorized for public release, and had been exhaustively vetted and cleared by organizations within the government that most people don't know exist. The book, Drone Warrior: An Elite Soldier's Inside Account of the Hunt for America's Most Dangerous Enemies, is out this week, and it's being adapted for the big screen by—who else?—Michael Bay. I spoke with Velicovich about how drones revolutionized warfare, what soldiers do to cope with civilian deaths, and why the next wave of problems that drones are used to solve will look very different than the first one.
GQ: How did you end up in your role within the military? What drew you to drones in particular?
Brett Velicovich: For me, it was less about the drones themselves, and more about using drones as a tool to do my job: working on a task force that hunted down leaders of terrorist groups. Between advances in human intelligence, cyberwarfare, and drone technology, we’ve never had the ability to know this much about our enemy. Today, when soldiers are fighting house to house, drones give them the ability to know what they’re walking into beforehand. That’s what drones do. They’re an important piece of the puzzle, but they are just one puzzle piece.
My job was to support the guys on the ground and to help the guys on the ground find the people we were looking for. I wasn’t actually pulling the trigger. If we used missiles, it was commanders far above my level who ordered those strikes. But they wouldn’t know who to launch the missile at if not for me. It was my job to gather intelligence and to tell those people, “This is the person who needs to be captured,” or “This is the man who needs to die today.”
hat decisionmaking process is a heavy burden, and there are moral and ethical dilemmas that come with it. These are human beings. It’s a sad thing to take a life. And we had to make these calls in matter of days, or even hours. We couldn’t sit waiting. If we didn’t get him the same night, or follow him to try and unravel the network, we knew he was going to kill more innocent people.
We would watch a terrorist go into the bookstore that he minded, and that he used to conduct terrorist meetings. We saw him get ice cream cones with his friends at their favorite frozen yogurt store. We learned how they thought, what they ate, and who they hung out with. And then we decided what to do next.
In your book, you recall a botched opportunity to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with a drone strike. [Note: The day before this interview was conducted, Russian officials claimed that an airstrike had killed the ISIS leader at the end of May. U.S. officials have expressed doubt at the veracity of this statement, and Baghdadi's death has not yet been confirmed.] Do you think this would have been decisive or had a lasting impact on defeating ISIS? We have used drones to kill the leaders of prominent terrorist organizations before, only to see those organizations survive and, in some cases, continue to thrive.
It’s not my decision to decide that. My job was to beat up the network and take these guys out. But I think it could have made a difference. Osama bin Laden’s death didn’t stop al Qaeda, but they are nowhere near as strong as they were before.
We could sit here and talk about missed opportunities, but it doesn’t really matter in the end. The reality is that al-Baghdadi is dead. He just doesn’t know it yet. American forces are going to kill him, just like we killed his predecessor, and his predecessor, and the predecessor before that. He is being chased every single day, and there’s no doubt in my mind that his demise is near.
What we should be concerned about is identifying the next al-Baghdadi. ISIS will be brought to the brink of extinction, but they’re going to morph into something else, and there will always be somebody who hates us. This is why I think our leaders should listen carefully when people at my level, who watch terrorist networks so closely, identify who they think the next important target is. If we’re only in the business of revenge—as we are in the hunt for al-Baghdadi—then we’ve already lost the war.
What did you do when you weren't working? How did you unwind?
There was no disconnecting in my job. There was nothing I was doing that was not directly related to hunting the enemy. I regularly worked 20-hour days, and even then, when I got back to my trailer, I would have them route the drone’s video feed to my TV, falling asleep to the image of my target’s location because I felt like I couldn’t risk missing anything—even if I knew they were just at home sleeping. Some of us literally built beds next to our computers so we wouldn’t lose the time it took to walk to and from the trailers.
There’s a tremendous emotional high that comes from knowing that you’re protecting American soldiers, but there’s also an emotional toll: You’re at the tip of the spear, and when you hear the news about terrorists doing evil things, you’re realize that one of the only people in the world who can do something about it. You don’t ever want to stop. You don’t ever want to sleep. You feel that if you don’t find this terrorist, he lives another day to try and kill U.S. soldiers.
You speak frankly in your book about the civilian deaths that you saw and the toll that took on your psyche. Do you think that these deaths are worth the military and strategic advantages that drones provide?
The federal government spends billions of dollars to train us in a way that ensures that civilians are not hurt. And whenever there was a civilian death, it kept us up at night. It devastated us.
I also knew about the type of people we were going after. I remember tracking a particular ISIS leader, hoping he’d lead us to his superior. One day, we watched him put two small children in the backseat of his car and drive to the market, where he stopped the car and ducked into the store. We watched, thinking he was just going inside to grab something. Five minutes later, the car exploded. He left those children inside the car bomb so that the vehicle wouldn’t arouse suspicion. These are evil people, and I watched it every day.
People tend to talk in terms of how many people and civilians the United States has killed using drones. One question I’m never asked, though, is "How many lives did you save?" I can’t know the exact answer, but I know that the terrorists we hunted were killing thousands of people, and recruiting others to do the same thing. Without drones, the war on terror would have resulted in many more U.S. military deaths and many more civilian casualties. There’s no doubt in my mind that we would have a problem with ISIS on U.S. soil today.
It’s important to understand that 99 percent of the time, drones were not used for a missile strike. They were used to cue soldiers on the ground, who were preparing to kick down a door, capture a terrorist, and bring them back for interrogation. During the time I was doing this, not one soldier in my unit was killed, and that’s because drone support was helping them do their job safely.
I loved what I did. I have no regrets, really. The only regret I have is the fact that we didn’t kill more terrorists while I was there. A part of me still misses it, and misses having that sense of purpose. Since leaving the Army, I’ve spent so much time trying to find a new sense of purpose—a way to use my knowledge of drones to help others. I’m excited that I’m finally able to do that.
Your family and your girlfriend are barely mentioned, except when you talk briefly about the periods between deployments. How did you manage relationships at home while you were in this round-the-clock environment?
When you sign up for this type of work, a part of you realizes—it’s sad to think about, but a part of you realizes that this job is more important than your family and the people around you. In the end, it’s about saving the people around you. Hunting down those who would have no qualms about killing anyone you know is a task so much bigger than you. At some point, you realize that you can’t have both, if that makes sense.
My cousin died while I was deployed in Iraq. We grew up together and were great friends. I chose not to go to the funeral. In my mental state at that point, killing terrorists was more important, because there was a bigger purpose to it. I was thinking so much about the hunt and about stopping these people that I didn’t have time to think about other things in life.
Your superior encouraged you to take a few days and attend the funeral, telling you that you would come to regret the decision not to. Was he right?
I can't say that—let me think about that. I would say... I don't. I don’t. My family loves me, and I love them. Although I couldn't tell them exactly what I was doing, I think they knew that it was good. I never talked with my mother about the things I did. She recently found my closet full of medals and awards, things I had never shown her, and she broke down in tears. Most parents believe that their kids are doing great things and saving the world. I think seeing that, for her, was a validation that she had been right all along.
The first thing I do in the book is dedicate it to my family, because I had been away from them for so long. It’s not that I didn’t care. It was about something bigger than myself, and at the time, I felt like it was the right thing.
Should the Army have more resources in place to help soldiers figure out what to do in their post-military lives?
Absolutely. I didn’t come out of the military with post-traumatic stress. I wasn’t getting shot at all day long. I can’t put myself in the mindset of the guys who were.
PTSD aside, though, every good soldier knows that what they did was for the good of the country. There are so many who leave the military searching for a renewed sense of purpose. When I left, I struggled to find a calling that felt as important was what I was doing, and I went through periods of depression, not knowing what to do next. “What am I doing with my life? Is there anything better than what I was doing before? What can get close to that?”
It wasn’t until years later, after I had finished college, that I found it. I was approached an organization that funds humanitarian projects and uses technology to help solve problems in Third World countries. This is it. This is what I was meant to do. This is the reason for all of it.
Your book ends with an epilogue about how you’re working to use drones to track and arrest poachers in Africa. What does the future of drones look like?
We've done some wild things. We’ve created bars that use drones to make, mix, and shake cocktails, and then deliver them to your table. We developed a program for the U.S. Army’s STEM curriculum that teaches kids how to operate and race drones through an obstacle course we built. We used drones to help conduct security at a Justin Bieber concert.
Those are the fun ones. But beyond that? Drones deliver medical aid. They inspect wind turbines and monitor illegal logging activities. I’m about to join a project in Asia that will use drones to find child predators and fight human trafficking. The U.S. government spends billions of dollars to develop restricted drone technology, and even so, the gap between the military’s hardware and high-end consumer models is closing so fast. What’s available on the market today is, frankly, stuff I wish I had been able to access when I was hunting terrorists.
I’ve seen both sides of what drones can do, and I have no doubt that drones are going to change the world for the better. I love to see that. I want to take these machines that I used to kill people, and find ways to use them to preserve life instead.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
