Ten years after the Predator drone first flew spy missions for the Air Force, and four years after the U.S. added missiles to the airborne robots to transform them into remote-controlled killing machines, the overworked, under-appreciated community of men and women who actually fly and maintain the Predators hit rock bottom.

And stayed there. For another decade. Drones continued to play a larger and larger role in conflicts around the globe. But no one in charge—from the president to the secretary of defense to the generals overseeing America’s wars—seemed to appreciate that drones require people. More than ten thousand people, in fact. And those people are tired.

It doesn’t help that a Predator, built by California firm General Atomics, is also an unnecessarily labor-intensive bit of technology.

“It’s at the breaking point, and has been for a long time,” a senior Air Force official told The Daily Beast earlier this year. “What’s different now is that the band-aid fixes are no longer working.”