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LiveScience
November 11, 2013
In the final years of his nearly 30-year career in the U.S. Air Force, Slim spent 10 to 12 hours a day in a cool, dark room in the Arizona desert, stationed in front of monitors that beamed back aerial footage from Afghanistan.
Slim’s unit operated around the clock, flying Predator drones thousands of miles away over Afghanistan, to monitor — and sometimes eliminate — “targets” across the war-ridden country. As a sensor operator for these remotely piloted aircraft, or RPAs, it was his job to coordinate the drones’ onboard cameras, and, if a missile was released, to laser-guide the weapon to its destination.
These types of missions are part of the military’s expanding drone program, which has developed a reputation for carrying out shadowy and highly classified operations — ones that sometimes blur legal or moral lines. As such, their use in warfare has been steeped in controversy. [How Unmanned Drone Aircraft Work (Infographic)]
Critics say firing weapons from behind a computer screen, while safely sitting thousands of miles away, could desensitize pilots to the act of killing. What separates this, they argue, from a battlefield video game?
But war is rarely so simple, and distance does nothing to numb the emotional impact of taking a life, said Slim (who is referred to here by his Air Force call sign in order to protect his identity).
“People think we’re sitting here with joysticks playing a video game, but that’s simply not true,” Slim, who retired from the Air Force in 2011, told LiveScience. “These are real situations and real-life weapons systems. Once you launch a weapon, you can’t hit a replay button to bring people back to life.”
Killing machines?
In video games, players rarely make a human connection with the characters on their screen, but Predator drone operators often monitor their targets for weeks or months before ever firing a weapon, he added.
“While the enemy is the enemy, you still understand that they are a real person,” Slim said. “To extinguish a person’s life is a very personal thing. While physically we don’t experience the five senses when we engage a target — unlike [how] an infantryman might — in my experience, the emotional impact on the operator is equal.”
Still, the idea that being far away from the front lines could desensitize people to killing is not a new one. Arguably, the first weapon to give humans standoff distance in battle was the bow and arrow, said Missy Cummings, an associate professor of aeronautics and engineering systems at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., and director of the school’s Humans and Automation Laboratory.
Cummings, who served as a naval officer from 1988 to 1999 and was one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots, said the argument that killing at a distance could desensitize soldiers has evolved in tandem with advances in war-fighting technology. The issue was similarly discussed when airplanes were introduced into warfare.
“You could make the argument that pilots haven’t really been on the front lines since before World War II,” Cummings said. “With some of the high-altitude bombing in World War II, pilots became pretty far removed from the actual combat.” [Rise of the Drones: Photos of Unmanned Aircraft]
But drone pilots are sometimes thousands of miles away from the battlefield, and their physical distance takes on another dimension, since the entire operation is controlled across a network of computers rather than by soldiers on radios in the field. Yet, Cummings said the only difference is the location of the pilot and the amount of danger he or she may be in.
“Whether you’re 5,000 miles away or 5 miles up, there aren’t huge differences,” Cummings told LiveScience. “When I flew F-18s, you saw everything through cameras and TV screens, just like how drone operators see today. I can’t think of anybody now who releases a weapon purely on sight — you just don’t do that anymore, because you have computer systems that do it for you.”
