CREECH AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. — After a decade of waging long-distance war through their video screens, America’s drone operators are burning out, and the Air Force is being forced to cut back on the flights even as military and intelligence officials are demanding more over intensifying combat zones in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.  The Air Force plans to trim the flights by the armed surveillance drones to 60 a day by October from a recent peak of 65 as it deals with the first serious exodus of the crew members who helped usher in a new era of war by remote control.  Air Force officials said that this year they would lose more drone pilots, who are worn down by the unique stresses of their work, than they can train.  “We’re at an inflection point right now,” said Col. James Cluff, the commander of the Air Force’s 432nd Wing, which runs the drone operations from this desert outpost about 45 miles northwest of Las Vegas.  The cut in flights is an abrupt shift for the Air Force. Drone missions increased tenfold in the last decade, relentlessly pushing the operators in an effort to meet the insatiable demand for streaming video of insurgent activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones, including Somalia, Libya and now Syria.  The reduction could also create problems for the C.I.A., which has used Air Force pilots to conduct drone missile attacks on terrorism suspects in Pakistan and Yemen, government officials said. And the slowdown comes just as military advances by the Islamic State have placed a new premium on aerial surveillance and counterattacks.  Some top Pentagon officials had hoped to continue increasing the number of daily drone flights to more than 70. But the defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, recently signed off on the cuts after it became apparent that the system was at the breaking point, Air Force officials said.  The biggest problem is that a significant number of the 1,200 pilots are completing their obligation to the Air Force and are opting to leave, while a training program is producing only about half of the new pilots that the service needs, Colonel Cluff said in a recent interview. That’s because the Air Force had to pull instructors out of the schools and put them on the flight line in a rush to expand the number of flights over the last few years.  Colonel Cluff said the pilots were “undermanned and overworked,” sapped by alternating day and night shifts with little chance for academic breaks or promotion.  Colonel Cluff said top Pentagon officials thought last year that the Air Force could safely reduce the number of daily flights as military operations in Afghanistan wound down. But, he said, “The world situation changed,” with the rapid emergence of the Islamic State, and the demand for the drones shot up again.  Officials say that since August, Predator and Reaper drones have conducted 3,300 sorties and 875 missile and bomb strikes in Iraq against the Islamic State.  What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.  “Having our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and thinking, ‘All right, I’ve got my war face on, and I’m going to the fight,’ and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Walmart to pick up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home — and the fact that you can’t talk about most of what you do at home — all those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family, putting pressure on the airman,” Colonel Cluff said.  While most of the pilots and camera operators feel comfortable killing insurgents who are threatening American troops, interviews with about 100 pilots and sensor operators for an internal study that has not yet been released, he added, found that the fear of occasionally causing civilian casualties was another major cause of stress, even more than seeing the gory aftermath of the missile strikes in general.  A Defense Department study in 2013, the first of its kind, found that drone pilots experienced mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Drone pilots often “witness the carnage,” said one of the study’s authors, Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist. “Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”  Trevor Tasin, a pilot who retired as a major in 2014 after flying Predator drones and training new pilots, called the work “brutal, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”  “At its worst,” he said in an interview, “it was 12 hours a day, six days a week. Often you are called in on your day off.”  Some drone operators have struggled with the constant killing, especially when civilians or coalition troops are accidentally hit by missile strikes. But Mr. Tasin said being a drone pilot was “not like being on the ground” during combat. “You are not getting blood all over yourself,” he said. “Your buddy is not getting killed.”  The exodus from the drone program might be caused in part by the lure of the private sector, Mr. Tasin said, noting that surveillance operators can earn four times their salary working for private defense contractors. In January, in an attempt to retain drone operators, the Air Force doubled incentive pay to $18,000 per year.  Colonel Cluff said the idea behind the reduction in flights was “to come back a little bit off of 65 to allow some breathing room” to expand the number of instructors again and train more recruits.  The Air Force also has tried to ease the stress by creating a human performance team, led by a psychologist and including doctors and chaplains. All of them have been granted top-secret clearances so they can meet with pilots and camera operators anywhere in the facility if they are upset about a missile strike or need help adjusting to the shift work.  Colonel Cluff invited a number of reporters to the Creech base on Tuesday to discuss some of these issues. It was the first time in several years that the Air Force had allowed reporters onto the base, which has been considered the heart of the drone operations since 2005.  The colonel said the stress on the operators belied a complaint by some critics that flying drones was like playing a video game or that pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made it psychologically easier for them to kill.  He also said that the retention difficulties underscore that while the planes themselves are unmanned, they need hundreds of pilots, sensor operators, intelligence analysts and launch and recovery specialists in foreign countries to operate.  Some of the crews still fly their missions inside sand-colored and air-conditioned trailers baking in the desert sun here, while other cockpit setups filled with map and data screens have been created inside new mission center buildings. Anti-drone protesters are periodically arrested as they try to block pilots from entering the base.  And if the Air Force is having trouble holding onto the pilots and camera operators now, the complications can only get worse when the number of higher-paying jobs in the nascent commercial drone industry starts to soar, some experts say. “If you think you have a problem now, just wait till then,” said one Air Force officer involved in drone operations who was not authorized to speak publicly about the program.  An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the pilot who retired as a major in 2014 after flying Predator drones and training pilots. He is Trevor Tasin, not Tazin.  Christopher Drew reported from Creech Air Force Base, and Dave Philipps from New York. Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
Long hours and the psychological toll of the work have forced the Pentagon to abandon its goal of increasing the flights and to instead reduce the number.