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This media kit is intended to make working together straightforward. Bios are provided in three lengths for direct use in articles, programs, and event copy. Credentials, topics, and prior media appearances are listed for reference rather than promotion.
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A practitioner-scholar whose work originates from operational experience and is developed through observation, instruction, evaluation, and research.
Tanner Yackley is a former USAF MQ-9 Instructor & Evaluator, former General Atomics Evaluator, and former Assistant Professor. He is the author of The Reaper's Shadow, founder of Remote Warrior, and a researcher focused on human performance, supervisory control, autonomy, and remote warfare.
Tanner Yackley is a practitioner-scholar whose work focuses on the human side of remote and increasingly autonomous operations. A former USAF MQ-9 Instructor & Evaluator, former General Atomics Evaluator, and former Assistant Professor, his current work focuses on human performance, supervisory control quality, context reconstruction, authority migration, and irreversibility in operational decision-making. He is the author of The Reaper's Shadow and the founder of Remote Warrior, a research-informed community and public understanding effort focused on remote operations. His research is guided by a single question: how do humans maintain effective supervision, understanding, and decision-making in remote and increasingly autonomous systems?
Tanner Yackley is a practitioner-scholar whose work emerged from operational experience in remote warfare. He served as a USAF MQ-9 Instructor & Evaluator, conducting long-duration remote missions and standardizing how crews supervised increasingly complex systems under uncertainty. He continued that work in industry as a General Atomics Evaluator, evaluating operators and studying human–machine interaction at close range, before serving as an Assistant Professor, where translating operational experience into curriculum sharpened the questions that drive his current work. He is the author of The Reaper's Shadow, a first-person account of life inside the MQ-9 enterprise. He is also the founder of Remote Warrior, a research-informed community and public understanding effort dedicated to making remote warfare operators, instructors, and crews more visible, understood, and supported, while preserving practitioner knowledge that would otherwise disappear. His current research focuses on Human Performance in Remote Warfare, with Context Reconstruction Cost, Supervisory Control Quality, Authority Migration, and Irreversibility & Prioritization serving as related lines of inquiry. The work is consistently framed by one practical question: how do humans maintain effective supervision, understanding, and decision-making in remote and increasingly autonomous systems.
Factual categories. Operational, combat, industry, academic, and publications.
Topics typically delivered as keynotes, panels, podcast interviews, and seminar talks. Each can be scoped to the audience, whether practitioner, academic, program, or general interest.
The operational, cognitive, and psychological demands of conducting warfare from a Ground Control Station across months and years.
What it actually takes for an operator to supervise an autonomous or semi-autonomous system well, not just monitor it.
The hidden cost of rebuilding a usable mental model of the mission after every handoff, interruption, and shift change.
How decision authority should move toward whoever holds the highest-fidelity understanding of the situation, and what makes that possible.
Treating actions that cannot be undone as a first-class constraint in training, supervision, and autonomy design.
Why distance does not remove the human factor. It relocates it into less visible parts of the system.
Cover imagery, quick facts, and a working description for reviews, features, podcast preparation, and program copy. Amazon serves as the authoritative source for book metadata.
Print-ready cover image. High-resolution versions available upon request.
The Reaper's Shadow examines the operational, cognitive, and human consequences of conducting warfare through remote systems. Written from inside the MQ-9 enterprise, it explores attention, prediction, responsibility, compartmentalization, and the transition home from persistent combat operations.
The book is intended as a practitioner-focused examination of how remote warfare affects operators, families, clinicians, and institutions.
Amazon remains the authoritative source for book metadata.
Selected images, book materials, biographies, and reference documents are available upon request.
For media inquiries, interviews, conference organizers, podcast hosts, and researchers, materials can be requested directly by email.
Selected public-facing interviews, reporting, documentary appearances, and speaking engagements related to remote warfare, human performance, autonomy, and supervisory control.
Business Insider documentary feature examining MQ-9 operations, remote warfare, operator experience, and the realities of conducting military missions through remotely piloted aircraft systems.
Our guest today is Tanner Yackley: a former USAF MQ-9 Instructor & Evaluator, former General Atomics Evaluator, author of The Reaper's Shadow, founder of Remote Warrior, and researcher focused on human performance, supervisory control, autonomy, and remote warfare.
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