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But surely drones aren’t unmanned? Just their pilot is elsewhere. Curious as to what the real root of this is.

• jackvalentine 9y ago
  I suppose unmanned in that context means 'not sharing the risk of the battlefield by being there' or something.
• goatsi 9y ago
  The focus seems to be on the fact that the pilot is elsewhere. From the article: >Instead, the trust issue was a human issue. Not once did any of our respondents refer to a drone pilot as a human. Instead, drones were discussed in abstract terms that explicitly avoided any reference to a human controlling the machine. UAVs were “robots” or “machines” whose “operators,” as one respondent put it, were playing a video game “a world away.” This is despite the fact that most of them knew there was a human controlling the drone, and some even knew these pilots personally. Yet across the JTAC community, we heard a familiar narrative: drone pilots were coffee-drinking gamers whose distance from the battlefield severed their emotional connection to friendly ground troops. For instance, one of the JTACs explained that he preferred manned aircraft because their pilots “are in the fight, not just sipping a latte playing a video game.”