Elisabeth Bumiller, who covers the Pentagon for the New York Times, offered a different perspective on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks in today's paper. Although the killing that these planes conduct is remote in every sense of the word, the impact on the operators is a lot like hand-to-hand combat.
Bumiller describes the job of an operator in Syracuse, New York, whose "day job" consists of following targets in Afghanistan using UAV's. He will monitor the lives of these people for days or even weeks, waiting for an opportunity to kill them when their families are away. As a result, he gets to know the targets far more intimately than any conventional pilot dropping bombs, and maybe more than anyone other than a spy in deep cover. He follows their routines, watches them care for their children, and then blows them up if he can.
Legally and militarily, this part of the story changes nothing, but it does have serious moral and psychological consequences. The issue is not, in this regard, the morality of the killing itself, but of the system that forces the killers to form such attachments to the targets. The pilot in the Bumiller story said that he had no qualms about what he did, but I wonder what the long-term effect is or will be.
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