Do You Buy This? A Unique form of Combat Stress for our Drone Pilots (Remotely Piloted Aircraft)???

Stupid is as stupid does.

Sir, I recommend you read On Killing and On Combat. Those books talk about the affects of combat and killing and the distance away from the action/killing etc. It opened my eyes a bit.

I have seen combat stress for real, not this made up stuff some soldiers want us to believe is PTSD so they can sit back and be safe. For the most part my experience with it is Doctors without a spine diagnosing everyone with everything they can think of almost like they get bonuses for every soldier they see. That being said stress takes many shapes and forms. I'm an infantryman by trade and have seen ground combat. I also ran a command post at both company and battalion level so i can also attest to the stress there also. Both exist, and they are very different; as are the ways that people deal with it. Honestly I'm on the fence about calling it combat stress, but it is still stress and if not relieved properly can effect you for years to come.

Maybe it takes longer than 30 minutes to get their pizza delivered.

Maybe it takes longer than 30 minutes to get their pizza delivered. I mean that already get to wear their one-zie and a cool leather jacket.

The way I understand is yes the possibility that a mistake was made and the wrong building was hit is there, however even worse is just coping with the fact that you wake up in your house with spouse/kids or whatever, going to work and blowing things up and killing people only to go home for dinner with the family at the end of the day essentially having to act as though nothing significant has happened that day. I think that it is that particular aspect of it that is what causes so much stress.

Some of the PTSD research from Vietnam indicated that some sources of PTSD come from the person's inability to reconcile what they did in combat with their sense of right and wrong, despite nessecity, situation and justification. Causing in some, to replay that event over and over, a way the brain attempts to make sense of things. It is like people dream about things that happen to them until it clicks. My friends had a similar experience after Airborne school during college. They replayed jump school over and over in dreams, until it clicked and they moved on. I use this as illustration, I do not diminish the real struggles that many have with combat related PTSD. It is a real thing and can shut people down from everything and everyone they care about.

I would hazard to guess that some involved with drone ops, fully aware of what they are doing and the consequences, have miss givings especially as they are not in immediate physical danger. Like somehow they are being skullduggerous. The brain may not reconcile the act with nessecity of survival, like reacting to contact or an IED strike. I would think that conceptually connecting the kinetic strike to protecting other service members or visiting justice upon a known bad guy with American blood on his hands would be useful in mitigating this. Some accounts I have read about those opposed, that have participated in kinetic UAV ops did not feel or believe in the connection. Establishing good pattern of life to avoid killing non-combatants would also help mitigate that mental conflict: ok , I killed people, it is ok because I killed just the bad people that hurt my teammates. We made sure. I did it right.

When talking mental health, there is not a one size fits all solution. If it were simple, we would have fixed it by now.

No I don't. First they can get awarded a medal higher than the Bronze Star and now PTSD. I worked a Dispatcher during some bad mortar and ground attacks does this mean I can get this too. I watched things unfold on a CCTV screen. This also means my wife can get compensation for her PTSD for the 7 deployments because of her stress levels and NOT knowing if I was coming home alive or in a BOX! Their getting just a whinny as Pilots!

Ever spend too much time staring at a computer screen in gaming mode? Your body feels like crap afterwards. PTSD can be driven by short term bad experiences or slow burn. In the early stages of burn out, down time is the cure and monitoring to make sure you don't reach critical mass is warranted. However, Mil mentality is to press the mission and you'll get a part of the drone pilot bell curve going way past burn out. Military brass doesn't worry about it too much so long as they can get replacements and toss their newly created defect over to VA where they don't have to bother with him/her anymore. However, the brass has to pay attention to it because the attrition, body intake, and mission growth curves parted path some time ago.

In many ways, we're in uncharted territory in pushing humans into areas where we can't predict what will happen long term. It took decades for society to buy off on constant keyboarding causing carpal tunnel. We're just beginning to learn the dynamics of prolonged drone work.

I think one factor we may not consider is how intimately some of these drone pilots get to know their targets before eliminating them. I read about a pilot who explained how he had watched this one HVT over three weeks. He felt like a voyeur watching this man play with his kids, go to parties, have sex with his wife, and go about daily tasks until one day he got the word to pull the trigger. Of course this HVT had done some not so stellar things, but the point is, this pilot knew so much about this man's personal life becoming intimate with very personal details, then killing him. There is definitely a different dynamic in this experience than of what we experience in ground combat. I am not diminishing our role, or saying one is harder, they are different and since I have not experienced it, I cannot objectively judge it.