Drone pilots could be experiencing 'sniper's syndrome'
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
> My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, "George, I'm sorry but tens of millions must die." He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It's reality brought home.
> When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, "My God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President's judgment. He might never push the button."
> — Roger Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1981
I can't help but view this as similar to someone offering to work as a nurse "because they don't get sick".
Its different, because everyone can get sick. The more accurate analogy is someone offering to work as nurse because they are not afraid of blood.
I suspect people like that cause far more problems than they solve. How many war atrocities do you need to make the entire idea cost more than its worth?
And before someone jumps in that these are already atrocities, there's a huge difference between a mistake killing innocents or the idea of acceptable losses and slaughtering every man, woman and child in a village, because we've seen that before.
The war atrocities is either the issue of the leader making wrong decision or the soldier not following order.
Assuming the leader made the correct decision of killing and the solider who execute that order is a solider who doesn't have moral qualm about the killing then what is the issue ?
Beyond people having problems killing others, the nature of the job in question is that you will have visuals on people you are responsible for terminating, and there will be mistakes made, often on Intel you've provided ("it looked like a terrorist meeting to me, how was I to tell it was guys shooting the shit around a campfire?")
I used to think of myself how I think you think of yourself, where I thought I could view killing and death rationally. Since then I've had a few points where I had to deal with the death of people I knew and while I was somewhat clinically detached most the time, there were instances, sometimes months later, where I was overcome with emotion for the first time regarding that incident. There's a fine line between being able to rationalize your decisions and being in denial, and the human mind doesn't always act as you want or expect. And besides making people accidental murderers, how do you test for this? Seems like many people in the army would probably identify just as you are, yet we still have this problem.
I think the issue is you are viewing the killing solely from your own perspective and your own morality. While I understand it can be emotionally traumatic for you, for others it won't.
Just like killing animal, for some people it can be devastating and highly traumatic but for some other people it was nothing.
Giving people with no qualms or moral struggles with taking human life the tools to do so on a massive scale is an absolutely terrifying idea.
Yes Indiscriminate killing is a problem but that is a different problem. The article is in regards of actual pushing the button, I'm assuming the killing is already decided after careful judgement .
I'd imagine that someone with no qualms about taking human life would be far less likely to confirm the validity and accuracy of those justifications.
I don't think anyone wants drone operators who dismiss a group of children playing near a target because they don't place a value on human life.
Of course, thats the leader job to make sure that the information is not flawed and take into account the time decision being made and it's execution.
>I'd imagine that someone with no qualms about taking human life would be far less likely to confirm the validity and accuracy of those justifications
Sure but the solider, during actual combat situation, can't always second guess and debate your commander. There might be simply no time.
The solider utmost job is to execute the action that the leader has ordered.
Thats why you have chain of command, separation of concerns.
If every soldier or drone operator has to do the job of making strategic decision and operating drone at the same time, I think that would be too much cognitive load.
The DOD is pretty clear on this point ( https://tinyurl.com/yxqfwyrx [link to PDF of the DoD Law of War Manual] )
""" 5.10.2.4 Duty Not to Comply With Clearly Illegal Orders and the Principle of Proportionality. In the context of the principle of distinction, it would often be clear whether a given situation implicates the duty not to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations – such as the duty of a subordinate to refrain from complying with an order to attack the civilian population. However, the nuances involved in applying the principle of proportionality could make it more difficult to know whether an order given is clearly illegal. The duty not to comply with orders that are clearly illegal also applies to violations of the principle of proportionality, in particular, the case of a commander who orders subordinates to conduct an attack that is expected to result in civilian casualties that the commander himself or herself acknowledges would be excessive """
You're absolutely right that the ability to make those assessments in the field isn't always going to be there, but that doesn't mean that there is no requirement or need for subordinates to be able to assess orders and actions.
I'm assuming the type of person who has no issue at all with taking life lacks (or has seriously damaged) capacity for empathy. Beyond the basic issues of morality and human decency, someone without the capacity for empathy is severely disadvantaged when it comes to assessment and awareness.
Being able to conceptualize and examine the intellectual and emotional state of another human provides a huge predictive advantage. Assessing someones potential to be a threat is far easier when you can understand what could potentially cause them to justify violence towards you.
To sum up, If you have no qualms with taking life, and you lack the capacity for empathy, you are not properly equipped to serve in the military.
I've killed a rat with my own hands, I felt bad even though I never thought I would. It's different when you hear it squeak and bleed, then die in convulsions. I can't see myself killing a goat, let alone a person, unless I am fighting for my life.
A purely speculative opinion of how you would feel is of little value.
Recent headlines about the US killing 30 farmers make it easy to confuse the context. I'm sure the operator(s) involved with that operation are traumatized. But that's not really the discussion here.
As per the article
> The rates of drone pilot burn out were in fact higher than that of traditional pilots.
> Given that the target often posed no direct threat to the sniper, there was a moral dissonance about taking the life of someone who is no direct threat. This has obvious parallels to drone pilots.
> Couple this with the familiarity that the drone pilot might have developed through long-term surveillance, and the target becomes an informationally rich human, rather than simply a blip on a screen.
> Posing a threat to someone is often seen as a moral requirement in order for a solider to use lethal force against a target. However, the drone pilot is acting remotely, and they lose this sense of moral justification for their action.
> One important thing to recognise is that such moral injury is not dependent on the pilot actually committing something morally prohibited.
> For instance, if a soldier must use lethal force to protect an innocent family against an enemy soldier threatening the family's lives, the soldier's actions are typically deemed justified.
> However, given the features of drones, this moral justification might not be properly felt by its pilot.
Take it to the extreme, and you have nazi atrocities and 'just following orders'.
The former is about operational readiness. If your army is unable to shoot at the enemy for whatever reason, you don't have a functional army. Wars are lost because of this (which leads to political concessions and loss of resources/influence/etc), and it's an important topic to consider when your goal is to maintain a standing army like the US.
The latter is, well, morality.
Of course, these two topics clash. How far do you go to ensure an obedient and effective army, while allowing leeway to refuse orders that are immoral?
Same army will be far more motivated to fight to defend the homeland than to kill a poor sod in a faraway land for unclear reason. So it's not a static quality.
And every time there is a fuckup from the higher ups it affects morale.
"Further, there needs to be proper counselling and supports for pilots following use of lethal force.
While such pilots might be removed from physical risks, we have a moral responsibility to ensure not just that drones are used in ways that adhere to the ethics of warfare, but that the pilots are adequately supported in their roles."
As far as the article itself, it feels somewhat worrying that the people who implemented these programs didn't think people would be bothered about killing other people. Someone had to have thought of that.
The fact that you associate the term "drone" with hobby aircraft is a sad inditement of todays "press", who, in their attempt to demonise said multi-rotors (or to downplay the rise of the military drone?) have managed to confuse the general public as to the difference.
Reading "drone pilot" along with "sniper" instantly gave me the idea that the article was talking about military personnel and not hobbyists, long before I clicked.
Maybe part of the problem is that the drone killings are occurring in a nontraditional conflict with no formal declaration of war and remote or conjectural threats to the territory of the United States....
"To access this site, please click on all the boxes that contain males over 16 years old".
I don't really give a fuck about the psychological condition of the drone pilots except insofar as it puts their children at risk. They and their commanders should feel ashamed to look other people in the eye.
So, what do you suggest instead?
> After Taraki was murdered the new Afghan Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin repeated requests for Soviet military support, at least to protect his residence. Finally, in December the Politburo decided to deal with the situation in Afghanistan,[8] and in early December sent special forces which attacked Amin's palace and killed him, putting the exiled Babrak Kamal in his place. These forces were subsequently reinforced by the 40th Army which entered Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. As the Kremlin foresaw, this intervention would cause problems around the world for the USSR, with the policy of detente and, not least, at the forthcoming Olympic Games due to take place in summer 1980 in Moscow.[9] The result was a far-reaching boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, supported not only by the United States but by many of the 65 other invited countries that did not take part.
> At its greatest extent the Soviet military contingent in Afghanistan numbered 100,000 personnel. This presence remained for a decade and kickstarted U.S. and Saudi funding for Islamic Mujahideen groups opposed to both the Afghan government and the Soviet military presence. The local Mujahideen, along with fighters from several different Arab nations (Pathan tribes from across the border also participated in the war; they were supported by the Pakistani ISI), fought the Soviet forces to a standstill. On 24 January 1989 Gorbachev's Politburo took the decision to withdraw most of the Soviet forces,[10] while continuing to provide military assistance to the Afghan government.[11] Eventually, in-fighting within the Mujahideen led to the rise of warlords in Afghanistan, and from them emerged the Taliban.[12] The Soviets left behind the only highway in the country as well as many concrete structures built in the major cities, and airfields that are still in use (e.g. at Bagram).
Then what would you call the 9,000 or so civilians killed by US and allied forces in the past 10 years. Or the 30,000 injured civilians?
O'Rly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War#Muja...
> The mujahideen favoured sabotage operations. The more common types of sabotage included damaging power lines, knocking out pipelines and radio stations, blowing up government office buildings, air terminals, hotels, cinemas, and so on. In the border region with Pakistan, the mujahideen would often launch 800 rockets per day. Between April 1985 and January 1987, they carried out over 23,500 shelling attacks on government targets. The mujahideen surveyed firing positions that they normally located near villages within the range of Soviet artillery posts, putting the villagers in danger of death from Soviet retaliation. The mujahideen used land mines heavily. Often, they would enlist the services of the local inhabitants, even children. Mujahideen praying in Shultan Valley, 1987
> They concentrated on both civilian and military targets, knocking out bridges, closing major roads, attacking convoys, disrupting the electric power system and industrial production, and attacking police stations and Soviet military installations and air bases. They assassinated government officials and PDPA members, and laid siege to small rural outposts. In March 1982, a bomb exploded at the Ministry of Education, damaging several buildings. In the same month, a widespread power failure darkened Kabul when a pylon on the transmission line from the Naghlu power station was blown up. In June 1982 a column of about 1,000 young communist party members sent out to work in the Panjshir valley were ambushed within 30 km of Kabul, with heavy loss of life. On September 4, 1985, insurgents shot down a domestic Bakhtar Airlines plane as it took off from Kandahar airport, killing all 52 people aboard.
> Mujahideen groups used for assassination had three to five men in each. After they received their mission to kill certain government officials, they busied themselves with studying his pattern of life and its details and then selecting the method of fulfilling their established mission. They practiced shooting at automobiles, shooting out of automobiles, laying mines in government accommodation or houses, using poison, and rigging explosive charges in transport.
In May 1985, the seven principal rebel organizations formed the Seven Party Mujahideen Alliance to coordinate their military operations against the Soviet army. Late in 1985, the groups were active in and around Kabul, unleashing rocket attacks and conducting operations against the communist government.
You barely hear about it because western media reports on western things, if a thousand people die in Kenya, they barely get a footnote.
Beyond that, what's the international opinion on Erik Prince?
It's almost as if you're looking for excuse to kill people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Afghan_War
(and so on and so forth..)
Sounds like you're describing warfare before Geneva conventions or the somehow permitted US war crimes to me.
"this Protocol must be fully applied in all circumstances to all persons who are protected by those instruments, without any adverse distinction based on the nature or origin of the armed conflict"
(Aside from the fact that the Geneva Convention doesn't work that way, as the other guy pointed out.)
Any cop would be in death row for pulling something like this in American Soil.
That’s a dubious claim.
Because they have entirely different jobs, in entirely different contexts, with entirely different rules, serving entirely different purposes.
Soldiers in an active military zone would almost certainly not be subject to any scrutiny or investigation for fatally shooting someone who they believed to be armed in the same situation.
Thanks for the supporting evidence!!!!
I would be more concerned with the classification of any male over 16 killed in a strike as an automatic combatant than a single given operation gone wrong. This is an unavoidable aspect of war.
And this isn't a single operation gone wrong, there's been 10s if not 100s of these incidents. Framing it as a "single operation gone wrong" is ignorant at best.
Total war was justified in WW2 when the Allies were facing a potentially existential threat. It was us or them. That has never been the case in Afghanistan.
If you want to assassinate people outside of regular military conflict, do it in person.
If you care about them so much, maybe you should bend your efforts to reducing their moral culpability and think about the strategic logic of the entire mission, which has now killed 10 times more Afghan civilians than died on 9/11, in a country with 1/10 the population of ours, so as to lower the probability of their being selected as a target.
How much longer is the US going to continue trying to win hearts and minds by throwing the most highly equipped military force on the planet at lightly armed peasants, while ignoring the fact that they probably feel just as pissed off about their friends, family, and selves being blown up as we do about ours, and by now have suffered far more than the original injury we are still attempting to retaliate for?
There are now kids old enough to sign up for the military who were born after 9/11 and for whom the US has always been at war with Afghanistan, and your moral gymnastics serve only to perpetuate that while foreclosing any inquiry they might conduct as citizens rather than soldiers.
"Dehumanizing the enemy involves denying the enemy’s humanity by negating in the enemy the characteristics normally associated with human beings, such as morality and compassion, and instead associating the enemy with acts of evil and depravity that merit forceful action and retaliation."
https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-wa...
The irony here is pretty intense.
I think there's s difference between doubting humanity of someone because of skin color or sexual orientation or natinality or whatever, and someone who voluntarily became a murderer as a day job.
The pilots can stop killing people any day. They continually chose not to.
Perhaps a more profitable line of discussion would be: On what basis would you say that this constitutes murder?
Then goes the spectrum. Suppose someone is taking your property, can you employ violence to protect it? What if there is 1% risk of death to the thief? What if its 10%?
I'd prefer the people whose job it is to make those assessments on a daily basis to have a strong moral and ethical framework, and to have the psychological and institutional support to maintain a connection with their humanity.
I would say that even humans who decided to become monsters (say, Unit 731, Mengele, Breivik, various serial killers, etc) deserve human rights and humane treatment in eyes of the law, because taking those away is a bad precedent for society.
The state should consider them people because the state has to consider everyone people, and making exceptions is very dangerous.
That doesn't mean we as individuals have to morally consider them as anything other than the monsters they are.
When you cast people into the realm of inhuman monster, you're also telling yourself a story that there is no possible way that you could potentially commit the same acts.
Which is, 99% of the time, a total lie. Humans are exceptionally good at creating moral justification for whatever the hell we want to do.
If you're convinced you are constitutionally incapable of committing monstrous acts, then you're not likely to engage in the self reflection that would allow you to catch yourself if you start heading down that path.
Then think again about who is dehumanizing who.
Engaging in the same process and behavior damages the intellectual credibility of an argument because it allows you to ignore potentially relevant information. It also significant diminishes any moral authority you may be laying claim to.
As far as caring for them, I don't think anyone is obliged to care for anyone or anything (free will and all that). I do think that the more people that you choose to place into your own personal out-group of "gofuckthemselves", the more of your own humanity you lose touch with.
I choose to focus my ire on those responsible for creating the policies and making the decisions to create the situation, not the people at the bottom of the ladder who are responsible for enacting them.
I find your lack of empathy disturbing.
I don't think they recruit with "bombing Afghan farmers is great fun!"
Why would you not think that???!?! "Recruited at video game fairs by military leaders who know the value of games that glamourise 'militainment' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGA8RFB0VSw