Comment Paper #4: Psychological Impacts of Using Drones

Throughout this course, my comment papers have mostly focused on the beneficiary side of the increase in drone use. Therefore, I'd like to address one aspect about drone warfare from this week's readings that appears to not be beneficent, at least in the sense that it hasn't alleviated a problem that was already present. That aspect would be the psychological impact that warfare has on drone operators. According to a Pentagon study, about 30% of drone pilots suffer from what they call "burnout" and 17% of active duty drone pilots could be labelled as "clinically distressed." There have been many possible explanations for the apparent distress that the drone pilots suffer, including long shifts that could be up to 24 hours. However, the explanation that I see as the most likely is that drone pilots are expected to essentially exist in two different realities at once; to not only see, but also have a role in a war transpiring in a foreign country during the day, and then at night, to resume their civilian lives here in the US. Its a hard transition for anyone to be expected to make.

When drone pilots are playing their part in the war effort, they are expected to watch "close-up video of people killed in drone strikes", some of which they may have in fact killed themselves. For obvious reasons, this experience can be expected to be a source of at least some sort of trauma or stress. Therefore, the question that should be asked is: how isolated can someone really be from the battlefield?

The answer can be found in the very nature of war. War, by definition, necessitates casualties of some sort. Now, many times those casualties can be metaphorical or intangible (i.e. crippling the enemies industrial capacity). More times than not, however, those casualties manifest themselves as human lives, which are the basis for the enemies ability to wage war in the first place. Because of this, in order to wage war effectively, there must be an effort of insuring that our side was able to kill their intended targets, hence the close-up videos of dead bodies being seen by drone pilots.

While this may be necessary for the waging of war, it also means that people will never truly be separated from the battlefield. Every time an attack is made, there has be human confirmation that the enemy soldiers or combatants have been neutralized (which means either incapacitated or dead). The casualties have to be seen with human eyes to be believed. This reality means that even with our high-tech wonders that make it so drone pilots don't literally see the blood on our hands, it can never be made so that they can't feel it there.