‘We watched his whole life unfold. . .Then you watch the death’: drone tactics, operator trauma, and hidden human costs of contemporary wartime
| Author | Terilyn Johnston Huntington,Amy E Eckert |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221135036 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221135036
International Relations
2022, Vol. 36(4) 638 –657
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178221135036
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‘We watched his whole life
unfold. . .Then you watch the
death’: drone tactics, operator
trauma, and hidden human
costs of contemporary wartime
Terilyn Johnston Huntington
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Amy E Eckert
Metropolitan State University of Denver
Abstract
Scholars of war and combat posit that soldiers are more willing to execute strikes on adversaries
when they perceive lower risk to themselves or less connection with their targets. Accordingly,
technologies like the drone, which drastically expands the distance between adversaries, should
make it easier to strike decisively and without remorse. The empirical record tells a different
story. Despite operating very far away from the battle theater, drone operators suffer PTSD
at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft. We argue that this unanticipated consequence
of drone warfare stems from the unique way in which drone tactics marry spatial distance and
temporal duration. Drone operators surveil their targets via detailed video footage for extended
periods of time, both before and after firing, in order to identify or locate potential targets, to
measure collateral risks, and afterward to assess a strike’s effectiveness. We argue that the clarity
and duration of this surveillance tempers any advantage derived from ‘distance’. Spatial distance
protects drone operators from enemy fire but temporal proximity exposes them to greater
emotional costs of killing than previously thought. Indeed, prolonged observation temporally
extends ‘contact’ and mitigates the dehumanizing effects imputed to distance. This unexpected
effect highlights a shifting ethical dilemma. In the formulation of the ‘naked soldier’, combatants
in a just war deserve respect due to shared vulnerability. Yet while spatial distance physically
protects the drone operator, it also requires that they identify vulnerable and legitimate targets
Corresponding author:
Terilyn Johnston Huntington, Political Science Department, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Leonard Hall,
Suite 405, 981 Grant Street, Indiana, PA 15701, USA.
Email: thunting@iup.edu
1135036IRE0010.1177/00471178221135036International RelationsJohnston Huntington and Eckert
research-article2022
Article
Johnston Huntington and Eckert 639
through contemporary timing practices that establish intimate knowledge of that target and may
thus denude and even heighten the operator’s emotional vulnerability. While others have argued
that contemporary wartime features technologies and tactics that undercut conventions about
legitimate combat, we uncover an emerging ethical problem in moral and psychological harms
associated with the way that drone warfare trades space for time.
Keywords
Just War Theory, PTSD, technology, time, unmanned aerial vehicles, war
We had to watch a target for days, weeks and even months. We saw him play with his kids.
We saw him interact with his family. We watched his whole life unfold. You are remote but
also very much connected. Then one day, when all parameters are met, you kill him. Then
you watch the death.1
Introduction
On 30 April 2012, the counterterrorism advisor to the Obama administration, John
Brennan, spoke about ‘The Ethics and Efficacy of the President’s Counterterrorism
Strategy’ to a packed room at the Wilson Center. Still basking in the success of the raid
a year earlier that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, Brennan presented weap-
onized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones as a cornerstone of President
Obama’s counterterrorism strategy. He noted the value of using drones as a way to limit
American combat deaths in places like Afghanistan. ‘I think the American people expect
us to use advanced technologies, for example, to prevent attacks on U.S forces and to
remove terrorists from the battlefield. We do, and it has saved the lives of our men and
women in uniform’.2
Martin Shaw referred to this type of distance-based warfare as ‘risk-transfer warfare’.3
Because drone operating teams are located very far – often oceans or continents – away,
the physical danger they face is effectively non-existent, and the harm they risk has gener-
ally been understood as minimal. Instead, the risk is transferred exclusively to the combat-
ants, military targets, and civilians being monitored by the drone’s cameras, which are
virtually undetectable from the ground and – when combined with the drone’s ability to
circle overhead – able to ‘lurk’ for extended periods of time.4 However ‘clean’ this image
on novel technologies in contemporary wartime might have seemed, the empirical record
tells a very different story.
While drone pilots cannot be shot down like those in manned aircraft, their remote-
ness from physical danger does not exclude them from the risk of harm, as previously
expected. Drone targets and those around them undoubtedly live and die on the ‘pointy’
end of that risk transfer, and experience substantial trauma and anxiety as a result of ‘liv-
ing under drones’.5 However, when compared with manned aircraft pilots, drone opera-
tors’ comparative physical safety has not translated to harm reduction in terms of trauma
and anxiety. Indeed, as we will discuss later, drone operators experience Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) at the same rate as manned aircraft pilots. We argue that this
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