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.

Welch is part of Task Force ODIN-Afghanistan, a largely classified Army program which employs a mix of manned and unmanned airborne surveillance assets that have successfully tracked insurgent suspects and targeted individuals planting roadside bombs first in Iraq starting in 2007, and now in Afghanistan. The capabilities of the ISR assets in Afghanistan are becoming more lethal, and they saw a first in August when a Warrior engaged a target and chalked up three kills.

ODIN—which stands for observe, detect, identify and neutralize—was thrown together at the behest of Gen. George Casey in Iraq in 2006 to help in the fight against improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and shadowy insurgent cells, and it was quickly able to spread a persistent blanket of surveillance over target areas. In Afghanistan, the unmanned portion of the program relies on four General Atomics-manufactured Warrior Alpha unmanned air systems (UAS), which carry both electro-optical/infrared or synthetic aperture radar payloads, laser rangefinder designators and laser target markers, as well as two Hellfire missiles.

Manned aircraft play an important role in ODIN too, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manned assets reported to be part of the arsenal include C-12 King Air 350s, which have been outfitted with aerial reconnaissance multi-sensor (ARMS) or medium-altitude reconnaissance and surveillance system (Marss‑II) target acquisition platforms. While the manned assets are flown by a mix of Army active duty, Reserve and National Guard pilots, the UAVs are operated by enlisted personnel and contractors.

Capt. Richard Koch, the commanding officer of Alpha Co. of the 214th Aviation Regiment, which operates the Warriors, says his enlisted pilots “have to maintain the same medical [status], have the same understanding of the aircraft and its employment” as other pilots. He says his Warrior operators are “pilots, whether they wear stripes or bars, and all pilots have to be treated accordingly.” Koch has sometimes butted heads with superiors who wanted to assign his personnel some external tasks as they might any other soldier, but Koch says that results simply from a “misunderstanding” of the outsize job his pilots have to perform flying 4-6 hr. every day.

It is a learning process for the pilots and warrant officers who manage them as much as it is for their leaders. ODIN is so new that the Army is still trying to figure out what it can and cannot do, and how to treat this new batch of enlisted soldiers being entrusted with some of the most sensitive surveillance gear in the service’s arsenal.

A living, breathing history lesson in the unfolding story of the Army’s embrace of unmanned assets is Staff Sgt. Jason Irwin. A veteran of several tours’ worth of Hunter missions over Kosovo in the late 1990s and a deployment with ODIN in Iraq, Irwin was an instructor at the Army’s unmanned aviation school at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz., before his current deployment with ODIN-Afghanistan.

The training for enlisted UAS pilots lasts six months for a basic RQ-7 Shadow course, followed by two more months of intensive Warrior training. Irwin says it is most challenging for his students to become proficient at simultaneously watching their speed, altitude and avionics while keeping an eye on the live video feed. The UAS school at Ft. Huachuca graduates 3-4 classes of 10-12 soldiers each year. As more Army enlisted personnel and officers learn more about unmanned aircraft, management of them is also improving.