‘We watched his whole life unfold. . .Then you watch the death’: drone tactics, operator trauma, and hidden human costs of contemporary wartime

Abstract

Scholars of war and combat posit that soldiers are more willing to execute strikes on adversaries when they perceive lower risk to themselves or less connection with their targets. Accordingly, technologies like the drone, which drastically expands the distance between adversaries, should make it easier to strike decisively and without remorse. The empirical record tells a different story. Despite operating very far away from the battle theater, drone operators suffer PTSD at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft. We argue that this unanticipated consequence of drone warfare stems from the unique way in which drone tactics marry spatial distance and temporal duration. Drone operators surveil their targets via detailed video footage for extended periods of time, both before and after firing, in order to identify or locate potential targets, to measure collateral risks, and afterward to assess a strike’s effectiveness. We argue that the clarity and duration of this surveillance tempers any advantage derived from ‘distance’. Spatial distance protects drone operators from enemy fire but temporal proximity exposes them to greater emotional costs of killing than previously thought. Indeed, prolonged observation temporally extends ‘contact’ and mitigates the dehumanizing effects imputed to distance. This unexpected effect highlights a shifting ethical dilemma. In the formulation of the ‘naked soldier’, combatants in a just war deserve respect due to shared vulnerability. Yet while spatial distance physically protects the drone operator, it also requires that they identify vulnerable and legitimate targets through contemporary timing practices that establish intimate knowledge of that target and may thus denude and even heighten the operator’s emotional vulnerability. While others have argued that contemporary wartime features technologies and tactics that undercut conventions about legitimate combat, we uncover an emerging ethical problem in moral and psychological harms associated with the way that drone warfare trades space for time.