Playstation warfare
Killing via remote control and home in time for tea. Symon Hill investigates drone warfare.
A man sits at a computer in Nevada, in the middle of America. He is British. He does his work, like millions of other people around the world, by operating a keyboard and mouse, looking at a screen. He will go home at the end of the day and spend time with his children. However, unlike the millions of other people working at computers, at that point he may have killed people in Afghanistan. He is the new face of warfare – one of several RAF pilots who operate ‘drones’ in America. ‘Unmanned aerial vehicles’ (UAVs), as their manufacturers prefer to call them officially, have become known as ‘drones’ after the sound they make passing overhead. Drones were used for the first time in 2001 and have quickly become a feature of modern warfare: by 2010 UK forces had fired drones in Afghanistan at least ninety-seven times.
