Seven years ago, U.S. Army Spc. Bryan Welch wandered through the crumbling Soviet-era buildings at Bagram Air Field outside Kabul as a young enlisted soldier, picking through the blasted hulks in the early days of the war in Afghanistan.

In 2009, the now 26-year-old staff sergeant came back to a vastly different Bagram to perform another mission. The new Bagram houses several thousand NATO troops, along with Burger Kings, Pizza Huts, wireless Internet and a bus system. Welch’s job this time is to be one of the new breed of Army enlisted men entrusted with piloting and operating the sensitive intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) equipment on the Army’s Warrior Alpha unmanned air system.

“We’re hoping this opens the Army’s eyes—actually all of the military’s eyes—on what an enlisted man can do with an unmanned platform,” Welch says.

That’s how I kick off Part One of a two-part look at ODIN-Afghanistan in this week’s Aviation Week. The second part will be in the November issue of DTI. While ODIN-A is relatively short on assets—it only has four hellfire-armed Warrior Alpha UAVs in its unmanned arsenal, two of which are flying at any given time—and a classified number of unarmed manned aircraft, the soldiers of the Army’s 214^th Aviation Regiment are adding capabilities where they can. While at the ODIN HQ at Bagram air base last month I had the opportunity to watch real-time training missions where a Warrior laser designated a target while an Apache helicopter fired a Hellfire missile from beyond line of sight, hitting the test target square on the nose.

Captain Richard Koch, who runs the unmanned side of ODIN-A, told me that while the Warriors have only fired one lethal mission with their Hellfire missiles, “we’re doing a lot of designating” of targets for “a multitude of assets—Apaches, fast movers, indirect fires.” And before the manned aircraft even come on the scene, he said, “we’ve picked out targets so that as soon as they start arriving, we’re getting lethal and doing what needs to be done.”

Last week at the AUSA meeting in Washington, I had the chance to chat with the recently returned commander of ODIN-Iraq, Lt. Col. Mark Moser, who redeployed about a month ago. Moser told me that in Iraq, where ODIN has been operating since 2007, “we’ve reversed that where the Apaches lase and point out targets for us, as well as the other way around. It’s really manned and unmanned going both ways.”

While ODIN-A isn’t racking up the kills that ODIN-Iraq has become famous for, (the last count I can find is from January 2008, which listed 2,400 kills of insurgents planting IEDs, while arresting 141 more), you can probably consider it more of a resource problem than a lack of will. The enlisted soldiers I spoke with who are flying the UAVs out of Bagram are tied to some pretty restrictive—and largely classified—rules of engagement that make any Hellfire shot from a Warrior one that has to go through a long approval process in order to happen. Staff Sergeant Jason Irwin, who flew Hunter UAVs in Kosovo, and Warriors as part of ODIN-Iraq, and is now in Afghanistan told me that the long process required to fire a Hellfire, as opposed to the trust given to enlisted men to fire an M-1 tank round, “comes down to the pilot mentality because this is aviation. In armor they’re used to a grunt drives a tank, a grunt fires a tank, but in aviation it’s a rated pilot who flies and who decides when to shoot, so I think it's that mentality. I think its seeing PFC Carter [a 22 year-old Army Warrior pilot] over there on the trigger, there might be a little bit of pride there.”

We also shouldn’t expect miracles from unmanned aircraft. As SSgt. Welch told me, “These unmanned aircraft are doing great things, but you don’t hold ground with technology, it takes boots on the ground to hold it.”