The following is an excerpt from an article on 'Small Wars Journal': ======================== An illusion persists where people seem somehow convinced that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or drones to kill is somehow safer or better than available alternatives. Unfortunately, it appears that drones actually expand the scope of conflict by exposing people who might not have been impacted by a different modality. What is emerging is the evolution of punishment where unmanned pilots and operators are traumatized while simultaneously the people they fly over are traumatized. Drones bring the peril of violence to the masses. It is necessary to reiterate that terrorism is simultaneously against criminal statutory law and the laws of war. Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll asks, “Was terrorism a law enforcement problem or a national security issue? […] The policies set out in [National Security Decision Directive] NSDD-207 came down on both sides of these questions.” The discrepancy arises as a result of interpretations that place terrorism into either category at different times. Obviously, each particular paradigm of category informs behaviors, priorities, and responses. The drone figures prominently into the conceptualization of kill/capture as a strategy to deal with high-value targets (HVT). High-value targeting is the euphemism for actions taken to neutralize or detain leadership elements or other important members of a terrorist organization. Targeting by drone via missile strike is one option. Second, targeting by specially trained raiding forces to kill/capture is another. Thirdly, local security forces or even local civilians can be utilized for interdiction. The prevailing paradigm has been to evaluate or attempt to choose between these options based on notions of policy, strategy, or geopolitics. While these approaches are interesting they are also insufficient. At one and the same time, it seems both amazingly overdue and impossible to deny that the mind is central to all endeavors. There is a different level of analysis available if we apply the insight neuroscience provides. There is risk inherent in any option. However, the risk is not co-equal, and neither is our understanding of the potential for mitigating those risks. “First, as a highly screened and selected group, USAF pilots are likely less prone to MH [mental health] outcomes as compared to airmen in other occupations. All USAF pilots are college graduates who have passed stringent physical requirements, psychological standards, legal and behavioral background checks, and rigorous operational training programs. Flight surgeons evaluate all pilot candidates for occupational suitability, which includes emotional and behavioral screening. Discovery of psychoses, neuroses, or personality disorders, for example, may result in disqualification. Second, these findings may reflect the effects of special preventive measures for pilots. As compared to airmen in other occupations, pilots undergo more robust periodic health assessments and may have better access to care given the relatively low ratio of pilots to flight surgeons.” An incisive way to quantify this is to reference someone like John Robb. Robb, a former United States Air Force special operations pilot whose education, “Other than the AF Academy, the government spent over $2.5 million training John.” And yet, someone somewhere would object highlighting the unnecessary nature and excessive expense. If the price is too high maybe it shouldn’t be a priority? Does having drone pilots/operators flying manned aircraft make any sense? If not, why not? Even if obvious, the unspoken truth here is that they would not and could not be given the abilities to discharge the duties of operating a manned aircraft safely. As Mark Twight points out, “So it's true: Shortcut Road is a fucking dead end. And what was wrong with the long, hard way around in the first place?” On a small scale across all service branches, those that handle stress disproportionately well have already volunteered, gone through training, and been identified through physiological and behavioral markers. Most commonly, if incorrectly the public identifies individuals simply as Special Forces. For our purposes, without getting into unnecessary specifics, the individuals of particular import are those that operate behind enemy lines and require survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE) training. Special is either misnomer or a revealing description depending on your vantage point. The necessary prerequisite however is to establish that that not everyone in the United States military is equally capable or equally suited. As an important clarification, this serves not as a pejorative but as a statement to focus awareness. A loss of awareness is actually only an initial mistake that serves as a harbinger for other often more serious ones. The key is to identify how and why military personnel might be placed into situations where they cannot be expected to perform successfully and not just in an ephemeral sense either. “In essence, NPY [Neuropeptide Y] is one of the fire hoses that your brain uses to extinguish your alarm and fear responses by keeping the frontal-lobe parts of your brain working longer under stress. Morgan found one very specific reason that Special Forces are superior survivors: they produce significantly greater levels of NPY compared with regular troops. In addition, 24 hours after completing survival training, Special Forces soldiers returned to their original levels of NPY while regular soldiers were significantly below normal. With so much more NPY in their systems, the Special Forces soldiers were much more clearheaded under interrogation stress and performed better according to the trainers. Special Forces soldiers really are special and different from the rest of the Army. They stay more focused and engaged in a crisis and bounce back faster afterward because their bodies produce massive amounts of natural anti-anxiety chemicals. In the fog of war—and everyday life for that matter—that's a major advantage.” Are drone pilots and operators prepared or inherently capable of handling the stress of their jobs? Does it make any difference if those pilots or operators were trained to fly manned aircraft previously? Conversely, the human raiding alternative is likely comprised of individuals specifically suited for unusually stressful operations as they come from the special operations community. The principle distinction between these options is not the capability to finish a high-value target, but the capacity for personnel to manage stress and arousal successfully during and after an operation. A mismatched relationship between physiological capacity and performance demands is going be problematic because there are at least some discernable predictive limits. What does the human body do when it encounters more stress than it can readily process? Unfortunately, the body’s coping mechanism is to detach from reality. In psychological parlance this behavior is known as dissociation, and it exists on a continuum, but it can be quite serious. “Previous clinical research has shown that combat veterans suffering from PTSD and symptoms of dissociation exhibit a reduced capacity for NPY release as well as increased symptoms of anxiety and sympathetic system arousal […] The capacity for NPY release and for experiencing symptoms of dissociation therefore may be related and may influence risk for the development of PTSD. Based on these findings, one might hypothesize that military personnel exhibiting diminished capacity for NPY release during stress and increased symptoms of dissociation are at greater risk for the development of stress-related illness such as PTSD.” “How would he feel, living beneath the shadow of robotic surveillance? ‘Horrible,’ he says now. But at first, he believed that the mission was vital, that drones were capable of limiting the suffering of war, of saving lives. When this notion conflicted with the things he witnessed in high resolution from two miles above, he tried to put it out of his mind. Over time he found that the job made him numb: a ‘zombie mode’ he slipped into as easily as his flight suit […] Other members of his squadron had different reactions to their work. One sensor operator, whenever he made a kill, went home and chugged an entire bottle of whiskey. A female operator, after her first shot, refused to fire again even under the threat of court martial. Another pilot had nightmares after watching two headless bodies float down the Tigris. Bryant himself would have bizarre dreams where the characters from his favorite game, World of Warcraft, appeared in infrared.” Michel Foucault’s thesis in Discipline and Punish states that justice has undergone a transmutation from a punishment of the physical body to punishment of the soul. He explains how: “Punishment, then will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms.” The key transition lies in the migration of intense public threat (torture, dismemberment, execution) to the inevitability of a very private even invisible punishment. If nothing else, drones are a lethal symbol of patience and omnipresence. The body does not require injury for very real suffering to occur. Directed at the body or directed at the mind is a difference without distinction. What is understood to be true (as predicted) is a pattern of violence of punishment directed not at the suspected guilty parties’ body, but at his essence, his decision making, his freedom, and his ability to be unique. To damage what you are rather than merely damaging what constitutes you. There is evidence that the consistent presence of aerial drones, the auditory signature, and the anxiety and paranoia associated with attacks can impact psychological health potentially leading to a myriad of behavioral problems.
Collateral damage from kinetic operations persists and accidents will continue, but there is deafening silence regarding unintended consequences that punish all the same. Michel Foucault explains that: “Punishment had no doubt ceased to be centred on torture as a technique of pain; it assumed as its principal object loss of wealth or rights. But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment – mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement. Are these the unintentional, but inevitable, consequence …” The Stanford and NYU report highlights an emerging societal aspect of the drone dilemma in Pakistan. The report relies on interviews and often protects the identities of sources. It does, however, offer penetrating insight into the disruption of normative social patterns in afflicted areas. As mentioned above, there are strategic and geopolitical concerns involved, but there are aspects of this phenomenon that are moving in an entirely different direction. “‘In the past, mothers used to tell their kids to go to bed or I will call your father. Now, they say, 'Go to bed or I will call the planes.'" “The Red Queen's Trap is a paradox torn from the pages of Lewis Carroll's ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ The Red Queen, in the book, uses it to explain how different her kingdom is from all the others. She says: ‘It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’ Why is this paradox useful? This paradox is the basis of a very interesting strategic trap. A trap that has destroyed organisms of all types, from nation-states to companies to industries to individuals to (for my purposes here) terrorist groups. The Red Queen's Race is [a] good analogy for a destructive evolutionary struggle. It is what happens when competition between highly adaptable competitors gets out of control. In the Red Queen's Race, every improvement one competitor makes is rapidly matched by the opposition and so on, forever. This struggle increases in intensity and frequency until one or the other competitor falls behind -- all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. When that happens -- finito. So far, that sounds like a standard competitive struggle in the natural world, business arena, in warfare, or on the playing field. However, the Red Queen is different than a normal competition. The Red Queen is destructive to both of the competitors. Here's how: The Red Queen consumes all of the energy (adaptive capacity) of the both competitors for as long as it persists. No other adaptation is possible. The Red Queen forces competitors to specialize to win this, and only this, competition. This specialization is almost certainly maladaptive -- it's of little use outside of the competition and of zero use when the competitor is dead. An organism can get into a Red Queen's race with itself. Essentially, a competition that results in suicide.” The utility of using drones to kill high-value targets is ephemeral. The capability is over-specialized in that it doesn’t readily translate to other objectives. As mentioned above, there are inherent biological advantages in using Special Forces for raiding. The secondary and tertiary aspects of those advantages manifest as high-value targeting progresses beyond the binary kill/no kill into kill/capture. Special Forces are particularly tailored for use in conjunction with indigenous forces. “Jim believed reintegrating the Taliban was vital to any lasting peace in Afghanistan. He also realized that the formal reintegration program run by the Afghan government and U.S. military was slow, bureaucratic, and corrupt. As a result, it was destined to fail, because it could only appeal to a narrow subset of the Taliban. It required the former Taliban to hand over their weapons and publicly renounce the insurgency, yet it allowed the government to arrest them at any time. So, working quietly through the tribes, Jim reached out to the Taliban using his own, more sophisticated, nuanced, and ultimately flexible approach-one that was riskier and more time-consuming but which offered more options for both him and them. For example, short of public reintegration, a Taliban member could become a source of intelligence or could even conduct ‘red-on-red,’ or surrogate force, operations against other insurgents. In many cases Jim's approach was not one approved by his command, but now that outreach was paying off.” In clinical terms, trauma is quite difficult to manage or treat, and it can persist for decades. Additionally, trauma has to the potential to be epigenetic meaning it can influence genes in external ways.
TBH the issue in afghan is simpler - they like fighting, they've been doing it for hundreds of years against the british, against each other, against the russians, against each other again, and now against the British and Allied forces. Whatever we do in Afghanistan (short of nuking it flat and killing literally everyone which no sane person would advocate) we aren't going to win because for the afghan war is what they do. Even if "jim's" efforts to reintegrate the Taliban are successful (hah) we have as much chance of creating a stable western democracy in Afghanistan as I do of winning the world series and getting a date with Angelina Jolie
