Jane Meyer‘s excellent New Yorker article, The Predator War, suggests that the U.S. reliance on drones to carry out overseas assassinations may be quick and efficient, but it’s hardly without consequence.  Sticky moral issues aside, delivering death from above—and beyond—has been taking a toll on the drone pilots safely ensconced at their video feeds thousands of miles away. 

I found it oddly telling that pilots sometimes feel compelled to, “wear flight suits when they operate a drone?

Forever Peace by Joe Haldemen, 1997, describes this phenomena exactly.  As soon as I heard of the drones, I thought of this novel.  Thank you for a timely post.

I love the idea of “pilots” feeling they should put on flight suits before taking out the drones. Great. Shouldn’t there be by now another name for their kind of flight - “dronenauts” or “monitor jockeys” etc.

The “carry out overseas assassinations” is a polite euphenism for….?  How many plausibly helpful “assasinations” exist so that a whole military industry is being fashioned for it?

The drone industry is so busy far beyond the James Bond scenarios of carefully picking off only big-league politicos and terrorists. If this was working so well, why didn’t the U.S. take care of Castro, Saddam and others this way, etc… Their role is about Orwellian policy and total war. Israel most naturally as not only the recipient of shared military funding and secrets but also a “test site” in this field. It has been a formidable partner in testing drones as evidenced in but one case with the ongoing, daily military policing of the world’s largest contained camp that is Gaza. But they also use it over Lebanon and other surrounding states. Drones are not just “targeting” but following people around, in their cars, hovering over what their operaters (sitting back in their comfortable settings) think is “unusual” gatherings and so on. They aren’t based on case-by-case event-orders as it is constant “war” or justification under suspicion of being Gazans. The use of drones started to become “natural” extensions of power, in the hands of young, inexperienced zealots, whose whims are allowed. Once you get a taste of being able to go in and swoop down and observe all kinds of daily life of people you essentially mistrust or learn to despise (who gets to fly those drones, right?) from that “fly on the wall” vantage point, there is a sense of entitlement building, a god-like sense that it’s ok to do what you want from those “clean” (yes I am using that word particularly) heights as well.

The idea that it is ok for one culture - a generation now - to live with another country’s drones flying around watching - perhaps threatening, judging and executing - is becoming normalized in the media’s focus on only when a bomb drops. The question is never asked, how does that expression of paranoid logic effect BOTH sides over time.