Spiegel’s Nicola Abé wrote a very interesting story on the woes of an American drone operator. It includes the conversation between two drone pilots, right after they fired a Hellfire missile only to see a kid appear on their screens a second before impact.
“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.
“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.
“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command centre somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.
They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?
Terrifying. No wonder drone pilots are burning out. [Spiegel]