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?��Ǩ�Ѣs remote controls.”  This kind of thing, though, is symptomatic of something that now has a name: Drone Pilot Burnout.  The weekend’s Year In Ideas Issue of the New York Times Magazine explains it thusly:

On its face, it seems like the less stressful assignment.  Instead of being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, some pilots and other crew members of the U.S. military?��Ǩ�Ѣs unmanned Predator drones live at home in suburban Las Vegas and commute to a nearby Air Force base to serve for part of the day.  They don?��Ǩ�Ѣt perform takeoffs and landings, which are handled overseas.  But the Predator crews at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada ?��Ǩ?�are at least as fatigued as crews deployed to Iraq,?��Ǩ�� if not more so, according to a series of reports by Air Force Lt. Col. Anthony P. Tvaryanas.

When Tvaryanas and colleagues surveyed crews who ?��Ǩ?�teleoperate?��Ǩ�� drones in war zones a few years ago, they found an alarming result: crew members had ?��Ǩ?�significantly increased fatigue, emotional exhaustion and burnout?��Ǩ�� compared with the crew of a craft that does have a pilot on board, the Awacs surveillance plane.  In response, the Air Force implemented a new shift system, in which the number of days off in a row was increased.  This year, in March, Tvaryanas released a fresh survey but the results were no better.  There was ?��Ǩ?�a pervasive problem with chronic fatigue,?��Ǩ�� Tvaryyanas writes, which ?��Ǩ?�can be expected to adversely impact job performance and safety.?��Ǩ��  The survey also showed that Predator crews were suffering through ?��Ǩ?�impaired domestic relationships.?��Ǩ��

Why is this? Part of the problem lies in what Tvaryanas calls the ?��Ǩ?�sensory isolation?��Ǩ�� of pilots in Nevada flying drones 7,500 miles away.  Although there are cameras mounted on the planes, remote pilots do not receive the kind of cues from their sense of touch and place that pilots who are actually in their planes get automatically.  That makes flying drones physically confusing and mentally exhausting.  Perhaps this helps explain the results of another study Tvaryanas published with a colleague in May, which examined 95 Predator ?��Ǩ?�mishaps and safety incidents?��Ǩ�� reported to the Air Force over an eight-year period.  Fifty-seven percent of crew-member-related mishaps were, they write, ?��Ǩ?�consistent with situation awareness errors associated with perception of the environment?��Ǩ�� ?��Ǩ��� meaning that it?��Ǩ�Ѣs hard to grasp your environment when you?��Ǩ�Ѣre not actually in it.

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.