A drone operator killed more people than he thought himself capable of

Evidence

Bryant completed 6,000 flight hours during his six years in the Air Force. “I saw men, women and children die during that time,” says Bryant. “I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn’t kill anyone at all.” — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 420

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Drone warfare adopts assassination ethics while refusing assassination’s self-sacrifice; Drone-weaponized remote control radicalizes war into one-sided killing from safe zones; Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 453 (+2 more)

Related

• Risk-free drone operators morally resemble assassins, not soldiers (similarity 0.82)
• The psychological effect of drone killing on operators remains empirically unresolved. (similarity 0.82)
• A few hundred drone operators’ moral feelings can be dismissed as irrelevant (similarity 0.81)
• Drone operations constitute a pure case of perpetration-induced traumatic stress. (similarity 0.81)
• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. (similarity 0.81)
• Drones’ necroethics embody a nationalism of self-preservation (similarity 0.81)
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good (similarity 0.80)
• Drones are morally justified by preventing one’s own casualties (similarity 0.80)
• Drone war turns strategic evaluation into disconnected body counts. (similarity 0.80)
• Impersonal long-range killing is aseptic homicide rather than rational progress (similarity 0.80)
• Drone warfare adopts assassination ethics while refusing assassination’s self-sacrifice (similarity 0.80)
• Remote killing free from retaliation creates a moral hazard problem (similarity 0.80)
• Drone psychopathology lies in produced compartmentalization, not operator trauma (similarity 0.80)
• Combat indifference to killing spread to accept civilian deaths by mistake (similarity 0.79)
• The Pentagon aims for drones to exert lethal force without human control (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Risk-free drone operators morally resemble assassins, not soldiers #corroborates (0.70) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 509
• Drone warfare adopts assassination ethics while refusing assassination’s self-sacrifice #corroborates (0.60)
• Drone-weaponized remote control radicalizes war into one-sided killing from safe zones #expands (0.60)
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good #expands (0.55) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 453
• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. #expands (0.55) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 111