Special Forces & Drone Warfare: LTC Daniel Pace Part II

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from LTC Daniel Pace. Pace served in the U.S. Army, deploying to Afghanistan twice as an infantryman before deploying to Iraq as a company executive officer. Pace then decided to join the U.S. Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, where he did foreign internal defense in places like Columbia, Peru, and Europe. At the end of his career, Pace returned to Afghanistan as a part of Special Operation Forces and oversaw drone warfare.

In this interview, Pace talks about his deployment to Iraq, joining the Green Berets, and the horrors of drone warfare.

LTC Daniel Pace:

We worked with SF in Afghanistan before, pretty extensively, and then, we worked with SF in Iraq. But our relationship with SF in Iraq was kind of strange. So sometimes, we would be tasked to pull security for them. So they had team houses scattered around the area, and those team houses required security, right? An SF detachment is only 12 guys. And so, if you want them to be doing anything operational, you need the ability to secure their area, otherwise, they really can't project anything. And it is super glamorous looking from an infantry grunt to look at the Special Forces way of life. It sounds super petty, but when you live in a world where it's eye pro, gloves, boots bloused, a hundred percent lock solid discipline, because that's kind of how our brigade ran things. And no harm on them for that. But when you look at the SF guys, "Why are you doing that? It's hot. I'm going to grow a giant ridiculous mustache, so that I look like somebody the Iraqis would be impressed by." Iraqis love mustaches at this time. So mustaches were heavily associated with their high-end security units. The Fedayeen was famous for having these really large mustaches. And so, SF, of course, they're going to try and do their best to match the impressive thing in sector, which is what they're supposed to do. So they all had glorious facial hair, ball caps, sunglasses, all of the things that a young 1st ID lieutenant did not have and really would've loved. And so, that kind of glamorous image was, of course, super appealing. "Wow, if I just had that, it would be so amazing."

But it's funny, because when you talk about operational integration, that was totally different. And from my view, it was actually really frustrating, because you know that, at some level, SF and the conventional forces were supporting the same government. Obviously, we're all there to support the same war effort, but, because that integration was way up the chain, we really had no visibility on what they were actually doing. So they're not going to tell us what targets they're working, and we don't really know how that impact is. But when you looked at how the task force has operated, it actually sometimes ended up being counterproductive. And I'm not dinging on the SF guys specifically here, because they're just doing what they do. But when they would dev out targets, that would span the various AORs in the Baghdad area, what you'd find, sometimes, is that they needed a guy picked up in our sector, for example. And so, at night, aggressively, they would go and get this guy and they would go get him in a hard knock, as you would call it. They would go get him very aggressively. And we'd come in in the morning, the gate's destroyed, there's people weeping, there's dogs dead. It's just this debacle that you're just handed 8:30 in the morning, you've just had your coffee, you're looking at 10 hours in sector, and it's a hundred degrees. And you're like, "Oh, good. I've got a mess to clean up. We didn't know that anybody was coming. We didn't know that anybody was going to cause this horrible scene. And we have no ability to answer these questions, except I don't know what happened, except I'm here to help put this back together for you."

But the silly part about it all is you know that, if the coordination had happened, I knew the guy that lived there, we could have knocked on his house, told him we had a job offer for him, put him in the car, and taken him wherever we wanted. But because that targeting, I guess, mesh, that targeting coordination, never really happened, mostly I think we ended up causing each other friction. They would be irritated at our interference and our compromise of the objective of our like, "Hey, you've got way too much pattern of life around this guy. You need to drop it, so that we didn't think US guys are after him." Our pattern of life has this there all the time. We didn't know that we're not supposed to do that. And conversely, they cause huge amounts of damage in areas where they're just doing what they're supposed to do, but it would've been much easier to just have us go pick these people up.

And so, it revealed a lot of problems that I kind of took with me later in my career on the challenge of iterating SOF and conventional forces at the theater level and kind of what those impacts can be, because it could have been better done. I don't know if, realistically, it could have, it's a huge sprawling mess to try and coordinate all that, but certainly, it seemed like it could have been better from my point of view then.

So we came home from Iraq in 2008, right around the summertime. So I just missed my kid's second consecutive birthday, which was super popular with the home front, as you might imagine. Two anniversaries, two birthdays, two wife's birthdays consecutively. Very popular time in our household for the Army, as you might imagine. And the icing on the cake is that, as soon as we came home, we had a redeployment date. So we had another deployment date for 12 months out. And so, that's not unique to us. That's just the Army of 2006-9, but you knew when you came home, in 12 more months, you're going to be gone again.

And so, what we ended up with is you get this kind of honeymoon period of six to eight weeks when you're first home, everybody's on leave, the old chain of command is still in place, and everybody's just taking a breath and trying to put their lives back together. But over the summer cycle, the Army runs like a PCS cycle. It runs, everybody changes over in the summer. And so, all of the new command comes in and all of the old command goes out. And so, by the end of 2008 or the end of the summer of 2008, you've got a brand new chain of command. You've got brand new commanders. You've got a new squadron commander. Everybody's ready now, because they're looking at the clock and saying, "Okay, now, nine months from now, we're going back to Iraq. We need to crack this unit back together. We need to really get it together."

But what you bump into is this huge friction. So you've got guys, in some cases, who've just come off, like I've been off my third deployment, other guys were off their third deployment, some seconds, and you started to see, around that time, really the cracks, to me, the first cracks in the Army from PTSD and TBI. So not really a thing anybody talked about or knew about, I would say, prior to 2006. I won't say nobody, but I'd never heard of it. Mostly, people were like, "What do you mean, "mental health?" What are you talking about? You wuss, why don't you just get back to work, huh? We all complain and we just want to go to sick call?" That was the mentality going into around 2006 in the Army. But by 2008, when guys were looking down the barrel of this next deployment and this new chain of command really starts cracking the whip to get everybody ready, to get back in the field, to get back qualified on everything, you started to see people start falling apart. So people have already had maybe a failed marriage, already had maybe their second failed marriage now, or already been rattled enough. Guys would eat these enormous blasts.

And to that point, there's not really a lot of treatment. Unless you were actually unconscious or you were bleeding out of your eyes or something, mostly, it was, "Take a day to recover. You feel all right? Get back out there." But that long-term accumulation starts to show in ways that I did not appreciate at the time. And so, guys would start putting on 30 pounds and not coming to work, guys would start having domestic problems at home, and those cracks at the time looked like just guys being, "Whatever, they're just troublemakers." But really, it was the signs of the force starting to wear out a little bit. Like those senior NCOs in particular, who'd had a lot of time out front, getting blasted, just started to come apart. And that friction of, "Let's go, let's get ready," and other guys kind of falling apart, caused a lot of trouble that year.

So we had a lot of people to shuffle out. We had a lot of people to bring in, but a lot of people to try and just keep going. But at my family level, my wife pretty much was like, "Look, no, you don't need to go back to Iraq for 12 more months." And she was right. I didn't need to go back to Iraq for 12 more months, but if you're in the Army, hey, well, what do you do, if you need to get out of this deployment cycle, if you need to just do something else? And that's where SF came in. So it sounds strange that anybody would go to SF to take a break, but the reality is is the training pipeline, just looking at it and talking to buddies who'd done it, and you're like, "Wow, so I'm going to get 18 months to go train and that's going to be busy, but I'll be home generally." And then, at the end of that, they also did shorter tours. And so, if you were looking at a 90 day to six month tour, "Well now, if I go back to combat, I could do a 90 or 180 day tour. I'll have more access to a satellite phone. I can talk home more." It actually sounds like better quality of life. And honestly, that ended up being the case, at least in my experience, although the deployment cycle slowed down enough that, maybe, on the whole, I'm not sure that I got more time at home, but that's not what it was really all about.

But yeah, in that year, it was a hundred percent a necessary decision, for me to stay married and stay in the Army, to find something else to do then go back to Iraq for 12 months. And so, ended up putting in a selection packet. Went to selection January of 2009. Passed, which was good. It's actually on TV, so Two Weeks in Hell, Discovery Channel filmed it. So you can see me looking all sad, if you want to check that out, but I actually thought that film crew was fake at the time. I was sure that that was just part of something that they were doing to mess with our heads. But yeah, who could say? It's a weird environment.

So we come home, passed selection, go back to Kansas, and all of a sudden, I'm the guy on the way out. Everybody else is getting ready to leave in X months, and now, I'm just the guy that's a loss. So like, "Okay, well, you're leaving." Everybody was good with it, on the whole, people were congratulatory. You hear horror stories in the infantry about people who are really, really ruthless on people that want to go SF. I did not experience that. My leadership was positive about it, but at the same time, I was a loss. And so they're like, "Well, I got nothing for you, so it's time for you to go." And it was. I did some staff work for a couple of months, and then, we loaded up the van and we moved to Fort Benning to go to the Captain's Career Course and Airborne School, which is what do they say, three days of training crammed into three weeks of tradition maybe. Yeah, I think that's the little moniker for it. Finished the career course there, and then, moved to Bragg, go do the Q course. And it was a good time. It was a very different world.

SF is really kind of this economy of force, so we do a lot of gap filling for the rest of the military. And that's because our primary mission is so partner nation focused. So we do a ton of foreign internal defense, so strengthening governments, ensuring that partnerships remain secure. And we do that all over the world. So it's funny, but between the time I graduated SF and then, 2019, 8 years later, I didn't go back to CENTCOM. I didn't go back to Iraq and Afghanistan. I just went just about all the other places. So we did work in Colombia, we did work in Peru, around Central America and the Caribbean. And all of that is really just building strong partnerships. So you end up with some operational work and you end up with some training work, but almost all of it's focused around ensuring that you've got strong partnerships down there. Because really, from SF's mindset, if there's a conventional invasion, that kind of means we lost in a lot of ways. That means we didn't do what we were supposed to do, because if we'd succeeded, then we could have shaped the situation, we could have made sure that that situation didn't boil over. And then, the government that we were partners with, our friends, these long-term relationships that we built, we're able to keep things in check with a much smaller amount of aid.

Now, sometimes, I will say that could be frustrating to guys, and it certainly doesn't always look very sexy. Because a lot of times, it's just training and talking to people and planning with people, but helping people solve their own problems provides a ton of efficiency for the US government. And it's one of the things that SF does better than anybody else. So I did a lot of work in South America. I did a bunch of security missions down there and a bunch of operational advisors just kind of stuff. And then, ended up moving actually to Europe, did a lot of work with our European partners, and then, did work in Africa too, which is, you're solving, ideally, tomorrow's problems today in Africa. It's kind of strange. A lot of times, we end up on one side or the other of almost every civil war down there, it seems like. There was a famous scene a few years ago where there's a bunch of Green Berets riding around in the truck with the guys that had just conducted the coup. And that's bad, on the one hand, it looks bad, but on the other hand, it's a huge win, because it means that you've developed relationships, you've identified the correct partners.

So that the folks that kind of come out on top, the folks that are the new force of stability in that region are the folks that you're friends with. And so, kudos to those guys who kind of recognize that and plugged in the right places. But Africa definitely has a lot of challenges with that. And that was kind of that eight year period was weird partners in strange places, a lot of really interesting work. Because combat is exciting, and it's hard to say that it's not, but I say it gets a little old doing the same things all the time, doing the same things against the same people all the time. So it is nice to get kind of a fresh look at things in different places. And SF definitely provided that.

So I went back to Afghanistan in 2019 as the Deputy 3 for the element that controlled SOF operations in that country. It was a staff job, so it was a six month staff gig. And so, that was my first look at drone warfare. So through combat before that, we'd had very small handheld kind of stuff, but this was the first time I'd really seen the kind of operational level really high flying Hellfire armed drones. And honestly, it was kind of horrible. So I'll talk about it a little bit and talk about drone warfare and just give people a taste of why I think it's distasteful and try to put it in the context of Afghanistan.

But so, one, it's really effective. You can have a drone flying in the air for hours and hours and hours. You've got a ton of loiter time and you can watch people, you can develop targets on people, you can develop packets and pattern of life. On the one hand, you can develop really safe ways to kill people. So if there's a bad guy and he rides around with his family, you can watch him long enough ,so that his family is not there and you can kill the guy when he's by himself.

You can avoid collateral damage, you can conduct the strike in a way that only kills what you want to kill. And that's good, on the one hand. But the other side of it is, honestly, it feels kind of creepy, if that makes sense. So my day job is I'm sitting in a room for 12 to 14 hours a day just running screens. We're just looking at 20 screens up on the wall, and we're watching feeds. And as things develop into a situation when we're ready to conduct a strike, we'll staff through the packet, we'll collect the recommendations from the guys flying the drones, we'll get the boss to approve it, and we'll execute a strike. But what that means is, a lot of times, you're watching a guy for 12 hours, 12 days, 20 days, you're watching him play with his kids, you're watching him, and it's all night vision. So it's all thermal, but it's high enough resolution that you could see what's going on. So like, "Oh, this guy's got a dog, he's got a dog, he's got a dog, two donkeys, he got three kids and a wife." He walks around, he plays with his kids. He's a person, he's a person like everybody else. Is his night job that he supplies the insurgency with weapons and explosives? Oh yeah. So he's a bad guy, plenty, but he's still human. And when you blow him up, you get a very detailed view of this guy exploding in kind of high resolution, and then, he's dead. And then, the drone's still watching, so you get to see the kids run out, you get to see the wife run out, and you get to see this scene. And that's kind of horrible. And the truth is, you see this scene multiple times a night, every single night, and it completely destroyed drone warfare for me.

So you read a lot about it and you see the value that it provides. It's a safe way. It puts no risk to US forces to kill very precisely very bad people. And so, on the one hand, that's really good. As a guy that has to put people in harm's way, as a guy that's got to send my team out there to do things like, well, if I could do this, I could do this on the cheap, I could do this without putting my guys at risk, then my guy's not going to get killed, and we will achieve the fact of killing the bad guy and we also won't alienate the population. And so, it's an awesome capability, but in execution, it's just horrible. You just see it and...

Obviously, I spent a whole professional life dealing with combat, in and out of war. And so, there's a positive virtue, to me, that comes from combat. And I don't want to glorify war. There's plenty of bad things about it, but there's a goodness in being out there with your guys and working against a common enemy and you're overcoming challenges and there's pain. But there's this kind of gratification and team building. And there's heroism that you see on the battlefield with guys caring about one another, caring about partners, really struggling against an enemy. And to me, drone warfare, it just takes all that away. And so, it became very mechanical, and I started to feel like I was running some kind of weird factory, where our product was human tragedies, where we're just blowing up these people over and over, we're just watching it night after night. And it started to bother me, but it did achieve its desired effect. It did achieve its impact. Again, it's a very effective way to do business. But by the end of the rotation, I was kind of increasingly convinced that the entire kind of program of drone warfare is a fairly horrible thing that probably is on par with chemical weapons and other horrible inventions that maybe we should consider not using in the future.

But it also gave me a new insight when we talk about PTSD, right? I will be honest, I completely scoffed at the idea of drone operator PTSD for most of my career. Because you have this idea that, "Well, you're playing PlayStation, and somehow, playing PlayStation is going to be comparable to getting rocked by an IED or to getting blood all over yourself when you blast somebody? We think that's comparable?" But I'll be honest, it is. It sounds strange. And as a ground guy, I'm sure I'll catch hell from some other ground guys about it. But watching, night after night, these human tragedies play out became really horrible.

But anyway, so we finished up, we did the drone thing, ended up coming home, and then, obviously, not so long afterward, Afghanistan kind of fell apart. And I remember sitting, it was during COVID, so we had a lot of time to sit, I remember sitting there and just thinking about it and just thinking about this whole kind of career and what we were doing in '19. And I realized that, in both wars, and maybe too often, we just keep making the same mistake. We keep building these systems, these parallel systems, with nations that we're trying to prop up, that involve us so heavily, that it never gives the partner government the ability to solve its own problems. So we create almost like a parasitic structure that requires us to be there. And it comes from the best intentions, right? Because I think, on the whole, the military is populated by really hard-working guys that want to solve problems. And so, we solve problems, we go over there and we solve problems, but sometimes, we solve the problems so well that we're solving the problems that they need to be solving themselves and we end up creating a situation that we can't pull out of without leaving such a vacuum that it immediately collapses. And we saw it twice in a row. I feel like that's not the first two times that the US has done that in history. And it just gave me kind of insight on thinking about, well, moving forward, how would we do this in a different way? How would we do this in a way that doesn't kind of make that same mistake again? And I'm not necessarily sure I know the answer to that, because obviously, it's easier said than done. But that was kind of my Afghanistan experience, not the most glorious or sexy one unfortunately.

So veteran mental health is such a huge issue that, as we talked about before, I completely was dismissive of for most of my career, because it just looks too much like the exact same kind of sick call stuff that is private. So we really get hammered into us like, "Hey, if you go on sick call, your buddies have to do the work that you're not doing." And so, anytime you take yourself out of the mission, that means somebody else has to do your work for you. But on the physical side, that can, so often, turn into long untreated injury and like, "Hey, guess what? You broke yourself for real by avoiding small injuries, by overlooking, by ignoring small injuries for so long, you've created now a crippling condition that means you're going to retire. And who's going to help your buddies out then?"

And mental health, I've come to realize, is very similar to that. So over the years, you get these accumulated issues, and I think there's a strong link between physical and mental. So I think brain chemistry, blast explosion, TBI, I'm not an expert on any of this, but as I've gotten older, I've realized that things that physically happen to your brain will drive your mental state. And there's a connection there that shouldn't be ignored. But what I realized is that, over the years, guys can kind of take time to get this stuff fixed, but we just don't. And guys don't recognize what's going on until it's just too late and it's catastrophic. So unfortunately, it tends to snowball, where guys will put things on the back burner for a long time, they'll put it on the back burner physically and mentally for a long time, and then, it will come to a crisis point when there's, let's say, domestic violence or DUI or something that's really a symptom of a greater problem, something of a symptom of what's going on in this guy's life. But at the point that it comes to that, there's nothing else to do, except let UCMJ take its course. You broke a rule, you broke something bad enough that nobody can fix it, and so, you got to ride with it now.

So when I look at recommendations on guys moving forward, I have two. One, it's, at the organizational level, leaders have to be better about not accepting the answer that guys are like, "I'm good, I'm good." We all know. We know when guys are not good, but a lot of times, we kind of fool ourselves. And I'm as guilty of this as anybody else, because a really high performing guy, we don't want him to take a knee for a week to go get help. We don't want him to go get straightened out or to take some time to take care of his family. We need him to keep working, because we've got to get these missions done. But what we're really doing is we're just kind of borrowing against this future problem that we're going to create for either us or our successor. Because this SF world is so small, I've got to see this play out at multiple echelons, and then, we don't do any favors to that guy either. And so, at the organizational level, we've got to get better about helping guys take care of themselves, even against their wishes, because guys don't want to help themselves, a lot of times. Guys want to keep working. We got to get better about just find ways to make them help themselves. And the regiment does pretty good with that, in terms of the THOR program, there's a lot of really good programs that have been put in place to help people, but we need to insist guys use them and we need to make sure that guys are being monitored.

At the individual level, there's the other side of that. You got to be willing to just say, "Hey, I need a minute. I got to straighten this out." And you got to learn to recognize the signs in yourself, physically and mentally. I think, a lot of times, let's talk low testosterone, guys start to have spiraling problems when they hit late thirties into early forties, because as you get enough blasts, as you get enough damage to the old pituitary, you just don't produce stuff anymore. And you don't know why, but you start falling apart. Guys got to get better about recognizing it. "Hey, when I'm starting to fall apart, when I'm losing the edge, when I'm kind of slipping, I need to stop that before it becomes catastrophic. Because the second I have a major professional problem, it's going to turn into a major personal problem, right? If I lose money at work, that can affect my home life. If I lose relationship with my wife and end up in some kind of situation where she leaves, I'm not going to get sleep, and my professional performance is going to perform." We have to stop that snowball. And individuals got to get better about recognizing it.

Now, the resources that are out there, once you retire, you get a little more time for that. The VA catches a lot of hell, but honestly, I think the VA, in my experience, has done pretty well at the retirement process at providing the resources needed. But it's not going to be the proactive organization that's going to force you to do the things. Nobody's going to make you go to dental. Nobody's going to make you go to get your checkups. Nobody's going to make you get taken care of. And so, guys, even though the resource is available, won't use them, because they don't want to kind of accept these facts.

So I hope, I hope that guys will get better about recognizing the problems in themselves and then, recognizing the resources that are available, so that they can stem this stuff. So they can kind of cut it off before it becomes catastrophic. And then, even if it comes catastrophic, I hope they recognize there's at least other ways out. There's always a worst choice. There's always a better way out to put your life back together if you've hit rock bottom than to just dig even deeper. So it's trouble, but I hope we can figure it out.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Pace. To hear more about his time in Iraq, check out his book, It Was What It Was. The link is in the show description.

Thanks for listening to Warriors In Their Own Words. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We’re always looking to improve the show.

And if you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to rate and review.

Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.