On Killing Remotely: The Psychology of Killing with Drones. Wayne Phelps. New York, NY: Hachette Book Group, Inc., 2021.

On Killing Remotely: The Psychology of Killing with Drones arrives as the latest addition to a niche subgenre of historical analysis that seeks to reconcile the psychological difficulty of killing with mankind’s rich history of successfully waged warfare. While the intense psychological burden borne by the soldier engaged in battle is not in doubt, understanding what specific factors exact the greatest toll, or how the willingness to kill relates to battlefield outcomes, remains ripe for exploration. The academic origin of this line of study is S.L.A. Marshall’s 1947 bombshell claim that less than a quarter of soldiers fire their weapons in combat. Assertions of fabricated and falsified post-combat interviews have tarnished many of Marshall’s historical contributions, but the natural reluctance to kill has generally been reaffirmed, and interest in psychological intent of combatants has been rekindled through popular works such as John Keegan’s The Face of Battle and Dave Grossman’s On Killing.

Wayne Phelps’s addition to this literature, On Killing Remotely, seems to be a direct continuation of Grossman’s work, and Phelps pushes the same thesis as Grossman—that warriors do not naturally want to kill—into the field of Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPAs). Given the prevalence of post-traumatic stress in the RPA community, the weapon system becomes a unique case-study of the psychological factors in warfare as remote operators exclusively shoot without being shot at. After taking the required time to functionally explain the RPA enterprise in terms of machines, people, missions, and methods, most of Phelps’s new findings involve discovering where RPAs fit into Grossman’s existing graphs, describing various difficulties with killing, and simply inserting the new-fangled method of warfare into its appropriate place with appropriate justification. Phelps bases these judgments on RPA aircrew surveys and interviews that seek to quantify the nature of psychological response and impact of killing via armed RPA.

However, the scale of the investigation must be addressed given the certainty attributed to many of these findings. To his credit, Phelps briefly acknowledges the limited size of the data set and calls this investigation a beginning rather than a conclusive treatise on RPA psychology, but that does not stop many of his conclusions from feeling like unsupported extrapolations or anecdotal tidbits rather than real truths. For context, RPAs fly half a million hours and often tally over a thousand strikes in each calendar year.[1] Phelps utilized a mere 254 surveys and conducted and underwhelming fifty in-person interviews to justify contentious assertions.

An especially evident example of potentially misleading information can be found in the graph that details the number of enemy killed by each respondent. Fifty-four percent of respondents reported they killed more than fifty people, and only ten respondents claimed zero kills, which appears remarkable and worthy of additional examination. However, squadron mission sets vary greatly, as do areas of responsibility and associated geographic rules of engagement. This leads to intense clusters of killing wherein some squadrons kill a great deal while others kill rarely. A much larger randomized sampling would likely provide far more insight.

Additionally, with a dedication that reads, “To the unsung heroes fighting our wars remotely,” Phelps finds himself rather unabashedly in the corner of the RPA warrior.[2] Much of the book reads like a public relations piece to exonerate the wrongfully accused RPA warrior from labels like disengaged, damaged, or lesser. While this view finds some merit throughout the work, it detracts from otherwise useful perspectives and conversations. But even through this overtly friendly lens, useful insight shines through.

Having flown weaponized RPAs over a five-year stint during his period of analysis, I found the author’s thorough examination of underpublicized truths especially refreshing. Morality and ethics regarding remote killing get a fair amount of press, but only rarely do the effects of sleeplessness from shift work, or the impacts of an entire chain of command being in the cockpit get looked at. These challenges play an outsized role in difficulties faced by RPA operators and may often cause bigger problems than the inherent moral ambiguity associated with killing from the other side of the planet.[3] Additionally, the role of culture in a new community cannot be understated when analyzing psychology despite not often being addressed. Phelps touches on many of the cultural problems faced in RPA units, with a chapter dedicated to the subject highlighting issues like a painful operations tempo, lagging promotion rates, and norms like wearing a fireproof flight suit that serve no purpose beyond heritage. Specific quotations from aircrew land well in support of these various ideas, lending reasonable credibility despite the small quantity of data. Also, ironing out exactly how RPAs meet certain Grossman-based concepts like the crew-served weapon, wherein distributing responsibility for killing eases its burden collectively, bolsters credibility throughout the book.

While my personal experiences do not perfectly support every conclusion put forward by Phelps, the fact that such a comparison could so easily take place speaks to the relatability of the work. Making such a unique and bizarre mission widely relatable is a remarkable achievement because the physical distance between killer and killed has never been greater in history, but simultaneously the emotional distance between the two has shrunk to an unimaginable closeness. RPA operators may observe an individual for weeks on end, getting to know their habit patterns, social structure, and hobbies only to eventually cause and watch that individual’s death in vivid high definition video. This strange dichotomy merits the specialized focus as the sole weapon system analyzed in the book. Being able to successfully execute such a mission repeatedly relies on training, conditioning, and many other healthy and unhealthy strategies, but is summarized most profoundly in the statement, “RPA warfare is a constant balancing act between dehumanizing the enemy and observing the enemy’s humanity.”[4]

Phelps ultimately attempts to wrangle these extremes toward the middle of Grossman’s killing difficulty graphs, because that is probably where they belong. Firing a missile aimed by someone else when specifically cleared to engage is surely easier than stabbing a victim from a moral standpoint, but watching a wounded victim crawl toward known family members must also be far more difficult than punching in GPS coordinates to a piece of artillery despite the much closer proximity.

Overall, Phelps certainly adds to the conversation started by Grossman and John Keegan. Many of Grossman’s ideas become slightly more refined through the additional analysis and case-study approach of RPA warfare. However, Phelps oversteps in his efforts to portray the “RPA warrior” as a combatant everyman. Despite the almost god-like power of summoning precision firepower anywhere in the world on demand, RPA operators struggle to gain wider cultural acceptance and contend with lesser accolades, awards, and probably fewer shared drinks with warriors from other walks of life. Until RPAs are utilized in areas where humans just can’t go, they will be viewed as an erosion of romanticized combat because of the unmatched level of invulnerability experienced by RPA warriors.

Geoffrey Britzke is an officer in the U.S. Air Force and a graduate of the Air Command and Staff College. He has logged over 2,000 hours of combat support time operating MQ-1s and MQ-9s. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: Lt. Col Debra Lee, 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance and Attack Squadron commander, flies an MQ-1 Predator, Balad, Iraq 2009 (Staff Sgt. Tiffany Trojca).

Notes:

[1] Wayne Phelps, On Killing Remotely: The Psychology of Killing with Drones, (New York, NY: Hachette Book Group, Inc., 2021), 227.

[2] Ibid., ix.

[3] Ibid., 311.

[4] Ibid., 200.