Predator

"This is the only book I’m aware of written by a drone operator. Martin wrote it with a professional writer, so it is extremely readable and the only text that really takes you into the subjective world of a drone operator. He’s not interested in any of these theoretical questions that you and I have been discussing, but he does give extremely vivid accounts of the effects on his psychology and his marriage of this kind of warfare. Interestingly, he felt more at peace when he was deployed to Iraq than when he was working out of Nevada as a drone operator, because he didn’t have to deal with the daily back and forth between being in combat of a kind and then the same night being back at home with his wife. “He felt more at peace when he was deployed to Iraq than when he was working out of Nevada as a drone operator” Martin vividly describes tracking people, and what it feels like to kill them. There’s a chapter in my book where I talk about the ‘remote intimacy’ that drone operators feel with their victims, and another phenomenon which I call ‘remote narrativisation’. It’s almost like a silent movie. You watch people but you can’t hear what they are saying, and there’s a strong temptation to fill in dialogue for them and weave stories about them. It was in reading Martin’s book that I first got a strong sense that if you are tracking a person for hours or even day after day, you start to spin stories about who they are, whether they are a good or a bad person, whether they deserve to live or die. There have been a number of arguments that drone operators have high levels of PTSD, and I think you see the plausibility of that from this book. He accidentally kills two children at one point, he accidentally kills an old man, and it is clear that he’s deeply troubled by it. I think there is something about the drone operator’s remoteness that adds to the trauma. If you imagine being a pilot in a war zone, as soon as you drop a bomb on the ground you disappear very quickly. You don’t get much of a chance to see what you did. But it is part of the protocol of a drone operator that they are supposed to circle for a long time, even for hours, after a drone strike – doing meticulous assessment of the damage and trying to count the bodies, which can be difficult if the bodies are in more than one piece. Although you are physically thousands of miles away, it feels as if you’re just a few inches away on the screen, and you have to look very carefully at what you just did. Right, which is psychologically very jarring. One interesting question that I don’t know the answer to is why the US did not decide to fly drones from remote air bases in the Middle East. I think that in some ways it would be psychologically easier on the drone operators if they were not in the US, if they had more of a feeling of being deployed, even if they were outside of the actual battle zone. The communication link would be quicker as well: there wouldn’t be the two-second delay in each direction as the satellite transmits the signal. To be honest, I don’t know why the American government flies them from the US."