(Newswire.net — May 31, 2015) — Peter Gray, the Birmingham University lecturer and former Royal Air Force navigator claims the remote warfare is quite less secure than it seems, the Telegraph reported. During discussion chaired by Telegraph’s Defense editor Con Coughlin, Gray said that drone pilots suffers much more from Post Traumatic stress than military jet pilots, or any other soldiers.
“What does a drone pilot look like?” Gray asked. “The image, the perception, is that it’s somebody in a Portakabin, in an airforce base in the United States, who sees nothing of the enemy, is totally safe, and after an eight or 10-hour shift goes home to his wife and family. Does he still hold that ‘warrior’ status?”
Every soldier with combat experience acknowledges that in state of war, the mind and the body adjust to a ‘kill or be killed’ mode. The ones who are having trouble to adapt, often suffer serious consequences. But what about modern remote warfare when killing is equaled with the day job after which the drone operator walks home? The mind and the body cannot function apart, and there is no ‘survival’ mode that protects the body and eases the conscience.
“It’s interesting when you talk to some of the people who are doing this kind of thing. It’s interesting when you start getting statistics that show that post-traumatic stress disorder is higher in drone operators than it is in many aircrew,” Peter Gray said.
Earlier this year, dehumanizing effects of a drone pilots were shown in Andrew Niccol’s film Good Kill, which starred Ethan Hawke as Major Thomas Egan – the “armchair killer,” based on a true story of real-life drone pilot Brandon Bryant, who in 2013 spoke out about being diagnosed with PTS disorder. In a movie, Egan (Hawke) suffers a mental breakdown.
Speaking about the drone pilots, Peter Gray noticed that drones are not fully autonomous and there is still a person behind the decision to pull the trigger. However, the military technology is certainly going in the way of full autonomy, Gray said at the discussion.
“Artificial intelligence? How close are we to that? Who knows? I’m certainly not in that game,” Gray said, adding that “that’s the level of autonomy that we’re talking about, and that’s part of the debate that you very rarely hear.”
The human conscience, however, does not follow the military technology development that fast, and it is still about the honor, and about doing the right thing, at least for now.