In 2011, US Air Force psychologists conducted a mental health screening of 600 combat drone operators. As it turned out, 42% of UAV operators reported moderate or severe stress, and 20% reported emotional exhaustion or burnout. A later study showed that drone operators suffered from the same levels of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol abuse, and suicidal ideation as conventional combat crews. Many will immediately ask—why is this happening?
As far back as the 20th century, many military experts concluded that 98% of people experience strong internal resistance to committing murder, and only up to 2% of individuals with psychopathic predispositions do not. In analyzing the issue of modern warfare involving combat drones, it is important for us to pay attention to what these experts said about the factors influencing the ability to kill and the factors leading to psychological trauma on the battlefield. The conclusions drawn and listed in the works of Dave Grossman will be especially helpful to us in this regard.
Firstly, this example with combat drone operators confirms the conclusion that killing is the most traumatic experience for a human being. As Grossman writes, the contradiction between the necessity to kill and the inability to do so due to internal resistance traumatizes a soldier’s psyche more than any other difficulties of combat operations. And those soldiers who were still able to kill most often suffer for the rest of their lives after the war because of what they committed.
A drone operator does not experience cold, hunger, lack of sleep, physical injuries, the loss of comrades, the risk of dying at any moment, and many other things that an ordinary soldier faces in battle. The only thing that unites them is the necessity to kill. This, therefore, only proves the long-established conclusion that killing is absolutely unnatural for humans and is the most traumatic experience of all possible ones.
Secondly, although military experts of the past concluded that distancing allows one to bypass the resistance to killing, they apparently underestimated how strongly it is expressed in humans. Even for a UAV operator, who may be located on the other side of the planet from the combat operations, this resistance does not completely disappear. The mere awareness of committing a murder is enough to cause psychological trauma.
An analogy can be drawn with the trench warfare of the First World War, in which hand grenades proved to be psychologically effective weapons. A soldier simply threw a grenade toward the enemy trenches, and it was not necessary for him to directly observe the enemy for this or what his actions led to. However, if he did see the result of his actions, or even just heard it, for example in the form of the screams of enemy soldiers, it could already traumatize his psyche.
All of this shows us that as long as a human is fundamentally capable of realizing the fact of committing a murder, no means will make it an easy act for them. By the way, this also aligns with the assumption of the Violence Inhibition Mechanism (VIM) model. Although this mechanism is directly activated only when a person can observe the suffering of their victim, due to the process of conditioning (the formation of conditioned reflex reactions), its functioning from childhood develops the ability to experience a rejection reaction even at the mere thought of committing violence.
As we can see, one cannot underestimate how unnatural the act of killing is for a human being. Every mentally healthy individual possesses a violence inhibitor, the function of which cannot simply be bypassed or suppressed. Even if certain means and methods enable some people to commit murder, it still does not end well for them. Only a tiny percentage of psychopathic personalities are truly capable of easily committing murder.
