Drone pilots suffer moral injury from seeing those they kill

Evidence

The difficulty in distinguishing combatants from civilians can result in a heavy toll on innocent victims. Video closeups of women, children, and other civilian casualties of air strikes are a source of posttrau-matic stress disorder in some drone pilots. As the neuropsychiatrist Colonel Kent McDonald put it, “collateral damage is unnerving or unsettling to these guys” (Bumiller, 2014). Self-forgiveness and peace of mind are especially difficult to achieve when one has killed for a cause that turned out to lack moral legitimacy. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 462 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

And what if drone psychopathology lay not where it is believed to be, in the possible traumas of the drone operators, but in the industrial production of compartmentalized psyches, immunized against any possibility of reflecting upon their own violence, just as their bodies are already immunized against any possibility of being exposed to the enemy? — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 427 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Drone operators endure extreme boredom punctuated by rare lethal action; Drone kill lists defined military-age men as combatants unless posthumously proven innocent; Witnessing civilian casualties distresses drone pilots and blocks self-forgiveness — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 462 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Witnessing civilian casualties distresses drone pilots and blocks self-forgiveness #corroborates (0.95) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 462
• Assumed drone-operator trauma serves to legitimize them as real soldiers #complicates (0.85)
• Drone psychopathology lies in produced compartmentalization, not operator trauma #complicates (0.85) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 427