Drone Warfare and Social Distance
By 
One of the arguments you often hear against drone warfare is that it has a “video-game-like quality” that mocks the gravity of war and makes it easier to kill. I don’t personally find this argument very compelling as a rationale against drones per se, since it’s basically the same critique of every long-distance weapon in the history of warfare. However I did hear a claim made at the workshop that has a bearing on the argument against the “drones are like video-games” trope and I’m not sure it’s correct: that is the claim that the “social distancing” by drone pilots is vastly overstated as evidenced by their high levels of PTSD.
This claim began circulating back in 2008, and I find three plausible hypotheses for it being correct: 1) drone pilots lack the situational social support of airmen and soldiers in the field to mitigate against the trauma of what they’re doing: they go home to their families and can’t talk about what they spent their day on 2) drone pilots are embedded with their families and therefore have a harder time rationalizing their occupational activities 3) drone pilots actually have a much closer view of what happens to their targets than pilots in the air above the targets, so “technological distance” actually decreases “social distance.”
All these hypotheses may be plausible, but when I went looking to confirm the claim I heard that PTSD rates are higher for drone pilots than for airmen in the field, I couldn’t find it easily. In fact, at Slate I found an argument to the opposite:
Compare this weak, absent, or asymptomatic evidence to the data on post-traumatic stress disorder among Air Force personnel overall. Last year, 871 airmen were diagnosed with PTSD. And that’s the lowest score among the armed services. Eighteen to 30 percent of all military personnel are estimated to have developed symptoms of PTSD or depression.
Anyone know whether the original claim has since been confirmed by an empirical study comparing PTSD rates between RPV pilots and equivalent personnel in the field? Have got a paper on drones in the cooker and would love to know.