Ron Henson
Humanities 640
Dr. Cortez
Nine to Five Warriors
Our advisors informed members of the cohort early on that we would eventually need to find a unifying theme that would tie all the papers we’ve done together. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to look at technology and how it has impacted how humans interact with each other. For me, this paper is a good opportunity to expand on the first paper I did, “A New Species—the Digital Native” because there wasn’t enough space to get into how technology has affected U.S. soldiers who are fighting the war remotely using drones from military bases several thousand miles from the battlefield.
Abstract
We immerse ourselves in technology all the time from multi-tasking to Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, email, Moodle, Solar, DVRs, smart phones, voice interactive navigational systems, smart boards and laptops. These things are thrusting us into the virtual frontier. We’ve come a long way since the days of; “is it real or is it Memorex?[i]”
Jeremy Balimson runs the Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University. His research shows that the distinctions between real and virtual are becoming blurred. He says; “we’re not wired to differentiate between wired stuff and real stuff.” In the book, Infinite Reality, the publisher writes, “Infinite Reality explores what emerging computer technologies and their radical applications will mean for the future of human life and society. Along the way, Bailenson and Blascovich examine the timeless philosophical questions of the self and ‘reality’ that arise through the digital experience; explain how virtual reality’s latest and future forms—including immersive video games and social-networking sites—seamlessly integrated into our lives; show the many surprising practical applications of virtual reality, from education and medicine to sex and warfare; and probe further-off possibilities like ‘total personality downloads’ that would allow your great-great-great grandchildren to have a conversation with ‘you’ a century or more after your death.[ii] His most startling work involves kids.
When children swim with whales in the virtual world, if you ask them a week later, they will believe that they have gone to Sea World and swam with real whales. This brings up some interesting questions. If the brain isn’t wired to differentiate between virtual and actual reality, does that mean that there will be a new branch of psychology to treat neurosis that develop in the virtual world? That may seem like a sarcastic question, but it is not. Exponential leaps in technology have opened up a host of new possibilities, many of which go well beyond what was envisioned in Science Fiction forty years ago. Today, we have soldiers sitting in air-conditioned, high-tech workstations at military bases in California and Nevada fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan using high-tech tools like GPS, night vision and unmanned drones equipped with plenty of firepower. This changes the dynamics of war completely. The drones have demonstrated that it is possible for Air force personnel to strike targets with incredible precision from 7,500 miles away with absolutely no risk of being shot at. In his book, Wired for War, author P. W. Singer writes, “Technology is wrapped up in the story of war. You know, look at all the things that surround us, everything from the Internet to jet engines, these are all things where the military has been a driver for technology. And technology opens up new frontiers, new directions we can go in, but it also creates new dilemmas, new questions you need to answer[iii].”
One question I intend to answer in my paper is, “what is the psychological impact on the Air Force personnel who engage in the battlefield from a virtual environment?” It is my intention to put a human face on these virtual warriors who go to work, kill the bad guys, get in the car, drive home and have dinner with their wife and kids. “How was your day today, honey?” “Well, let’s see, I blew up a weapons depot, and eliminated several Al Qaeda operatives. It was just another day at the office.”
If you look at the work environment of US Air Force pilots who sit in comfortable chairs in front of multiple screens controlling the drones with a joystick, it’s easy to notice the similarities to playing a video game at an arcade. The pilots know though that they are not playing and their work is not a game. One researcher pointed out that drone pilots have a higher number of cases of PTSD than their counterparts who are physically present in the battle zones because unlike their comrades in arms in the non-virtual battleground, they are relatively the same debriefings following an attack like the ground troops. P. W. Singer, quoted earlier, dubs it “cubical war” although I would call it unilateral cubical wars because the United States is the only nation with the global infrastructure to wage war remotely. It takes a lot of infrastructure on earth and in orbit to wage drone warfare. Also, it should be plural not only because we’re fighting three wars now in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya but also because they also use the drones south of the border for surveillance in the so called “drug wars.”
Before looking at the psychological impact on the pilots of waging war remotely, I want to back up a little and look at how the army recruits new soldiers in this day and age. In 2009, the PBS televised newsmagazine called “Frontline” did a special report on the Army Experience Center (AEC). According to their statistics:
As of October 12, 2009:
- The AEC had registered nearly 13,000 new visitors
- The AEC had contracted a total of 149 recruits — 134 for active duty and 15 for Reserves
- The AEC had obtained 72 “quality enlistments,” referring to recruits who scored in the 50th percentile or above on the Armed Forces Qualification Test
- On average, 80 people visit the AEC per day
- The HMMWV [Humvee] is the AEC’s most popular simulator
The above statistics come from one AEC in the Philadelphia area where the army has invested millions of dollars on a high-tech recruiting station that entices young people to join the adventure (of being a soldier) by offering them virtual combat environments. The Army knows that teenaged boys are predominant users of violent war themed video games and they use these games some of which are more than just a screen—they’re motion simulators—to give young men the feel of being in an adrenalin pumping danger filled environment. You must be 13 years old to use these centers—the army is thinking five years ahead—and some young impressionable boys get very excited about the prospect of going to war.
These types of centers are obviously not without controversy. Some parents were outraged and were chanting, “shame, shame, shame—war is not a game” during protests outside the centers. One criticism is that they are concealing the harsh realities of war because they are just showing the exhilarating parts while concealing the experience of watching your best friend stepping onto a mine and having his leg blown off. Having been keenly interested in this topic it was really quite a surprise recently to have U.S. Supreme Court justices saying that there is no definitive evidence that exposure to violent video games increases a child’s propensity toward violence because I have seen plenty of studies that show a direct cause/effect relationship between taking part in these video games and an increase in aggressive behavior in both adolescents and adults but that’s a topic for another paper. The simulated experiences at these recruiting stations are almost as real as being in a combat environment in real life. Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars on video games each year, and the gaming manufactures continue to improve on their technologies. When you merge 3D technology with gaming, and you couple that with a motion simulator, you’re getting something that is close enough to reality that the brain isn’t able to distinguish it from real reality.
There is plenty of scientific evidence that these games desensitize young people to violence, and proof of that is documented by credible researchers. The army knows that these games desensitize young people to violence because when they encounter a soldier who in combat situations freezes because he or she is reluctant to kill; they put them through additional training in simulators. According to one source, the U.S. Army has invested 50 million dollars in combat training games.
Some have applied the same criticism (that the military is concealing the harsh realities of war) to the drone program and have questioned the ethics of waging a war that is so unilateral or one sided, the pilots who carry out their lethal missions are in absolutely no danger. They can sit in their air-conditioned cubicles and dole out what they appropriately call “hellfire” with no anxiety associated with the risk of the enemy shooting back. Back in the day, warfare required a certain resolve that if you were a soldier engaged in battle, you would be in an environment that is so dangerous, there was a very real possibility that you would never see your loved ones again. Contrast this with the drone pilot’s account of killing the bad guys at work and picking up the kids and some milk on the way home.
In doing research for this paper, I came across several articles that expect a future where the business of war is completely automated. George Lucas has already envisioned a clone army. James Cameron has envisioned robots called terminators that are programmed to kill and you have to wonder how far into the future will it be before there are robot soldiers? In the film Judge Dredd, a robot warrior was one character and it wouldn’t be right not to mention the Cylons—a race of sentient cybernetic beings who try to destroy humanity in the TV series, Battlestar Galactica. As an avid fan of science fiction, the prospect of an army that can wage war with no risk to human life is astonishing. Just today, Discovery News published an article about the next generation of drone aircraft called the X47B.
The big advance with the X47B besides the fact that it is of a stealth design is that these drones are unmanned and unpiloted. There will no longer be a need to worry about PTSD since these drones will carry out missions without a human pilot unless it is possible for the computer programmer who programs the drones to develop the disorder, which is highly unlikely. That drone pilots suffer from PTSD affirms Jeremy Bailenson’s & Jim Blascovich’s research that asserts that the human brain cannot differentiate between virtual reality and real reality. I read several scholarly articles dealing with human factors of using unmanned drones and they deal with fatigue, boredom and monotony as being the downside of high altitude long endurance (HALE) UAV’s. Besides boredom and monotony, there are some much more serious conditions that arise from being a drone pilot. PW Singer did an interview with Spiegel Online who asked him if the drone pilots suffer from as much stress and trauma as those on the battlefield. His answer was:
Singer: Yes, all this doesn’t mean we’re not seeing all sorts of new stressors. In the beginning we feared that drones may make the operators not really care about what they’re doing. But the opposite has turned out to be true. They may almost care too much. We’re seeing higher levels of combat stress among remote units than among some units in Afghanistan. We found significantly increased fatigue, emotional exhaustion and burnout. Drone operators are more likely to suffer impaired domestic relationships, too.
There are different theories as to why. Traditional bomber pilots don’t see their targets. A remote operator sees the target up close, he sees what happens to it during the explosion and the aftermath. You’re further away physically but you see more. Also, the drone war takes place 24/7, 365 days a year. The war doesn’t stop on Christmas. It’s like being a fireman when there’s a fire every single day, day after day after day. That’s emotionally and physically taxing. On top of that, many units are understaffed.
“Fatigue in Pilots of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Before and After Shift Work Adjustment.” Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine. 80.5 (2009): 454-461. Print.
One stressor Singer doesn’t mention is the condition known as “whiplash transition.” It’s a condition called “whiplash” because of the sudden transition from the virtual battlefield to what the military would call civilian life and we’ll get back to drone pilot stress in a moment but first there was something that Singer said that sparked my interests and that has to do with the operation to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden. I don’t want to digress, but it is amazing to me that President Obama and his senior staff could watch the operation from the Situation Room in the White House in real time because the assault team had cameras mounted to their helmets.
Microsoft Word – Introduction to Portfolio.Final Draft.docx
In a PBS Frontline interview, PW Singer78 says that there is an element of truth in the stereotype that drone pilots are just gamers. He mentioned that in doing research for his book; he came across a 19-year-old drone pilot who entered the US Army to be a helicopter mechanic, but the military offered to train him to be a drone pilot instead. He’s a high school dropout who turned out to be incredible at piloting drones because he was so good at video games. The US Air force doesn’t like the story because for one he’s in the army, he isn’t even an officer and he has taken out more enemy combatants (the time frame was not specified by Singer) than all the F-16 pilots put together.
Microsoft Word – Introduction to Portfolio.Final Draft.docx
In conclusion, one of the main reasons I chose the theme of how technology has impacted humanity is that it is current and relevant. Some references I used I found right until I turned this paper in. For example, in the book, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, author Glenn Reynolds points out that the emergence of technology and interconnectedness have empowered ordinary people to do extraordinary things. We in the West take things like freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly for granted mainly because those values are interwoven into the fabric of our democracy but in oppressive regimes such as Libya, Syria and Yemen we are seeing those freedoms asserted and the conduit is technology. The “Arab Awakening” is a demonstration that George Orwell’s classic iconic futuristic 1984 vision in which the power elite would use technology to enslave humanity was unfounded. To the contrary, technology—specifically Facebook, YouTube and Twitter—have been essential tools used by the masses to throw off the shackles of autocratic oppression and assert their independence.
References:
- Zur, O. & Zur, A. (2009). On Digital Immigrants & Digital Natives. Zur Institute available online
- Caruso, D. (1998). Critics Pick Apart Study on Internet and Depression. Available online
- Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. (1994).
- Billitteri, Thomas. “Drone Warfare.” CQ Researcher. 20-28.1 (2010): 1. Print
- Quinn, M. J. (2009). Ethics for the Information Age (3rd ed.). (M. Hirsch, Ed.) Boston: Pearson.
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