Face Of The Day

Child’s portrait puts a face on drone strikes in Pakistan http://t.co/ZCbM1nAxby pic.twitter.com/ctQMsEQhlt

— Mashable (@mashable) April 7, 2014

Andy Cush captions:

The latest work in street artist JR‘s “Inside Out” series aims to remind military drone pilots that their victims are not faceless, anonymous specks, but people with lives and families. Often, they are children. This particular child, whose name was not released, lost two siblings and both of her parents in a Predator drone strike. A group of artists, using the printing technology behind JR’s work, placed a massive portrait of the girl in Pakistan’s Pukhtoonkhwa region, where drones have killed over 200 people. Now, they hope, pilots flying overhead might see her face and be reminded of their victims’ humanity.

Mike Pearl pushes back a bit:

Far be it for me to tamp down our collective moral outrage over the use of predator drones, but I also hope we won’t turn the military personnel who work as drone pilots into bogeymen.

Granted, drones are a weapon that takes the attacker even further out of harm’s way than if he or she was using a rifle and, before that, a sword. And even more than rifles, drones do seem to take down a shit ton of civilians. But the pilots with the joysticks are also people with names and faces. While I’d much rather be the pilot than the villager dodging a rain of bullets, drone pilots aren’t just playing Space Invaders. They have to monitor the comings and goings of a place for hours or even days, staring at the people they’re eventually going to target as they take smoke breaks and stand around chatting.

Nancy Cooke, cognitive science professor at Arizona State University’s College of Technology and Innovation told Livescience.com a few months ago that the emotional drain on drone pilots comes from close monitoring. The Air Force reports that PTSD in drone pilots is one-third the rate seen in those who saw actual combat overseas, but they are still getting PTSD, and it’s probably because they aren’t psychopaths.

Previous Dish on drones and PTSD here and here. A reader deepens the critique of the public art piece:

Isn’t the responsible thing to reply with an image of the thousands of faces that would be killed in the kind of massive ground invasion this country pursued before we had drone technology? Without acknowledging the results of the military alternatives to drones, the drone hysteria doesn’t translate to much more than “violence is bad”, which no one disagrees with and does not advance a useful discussion about these technologies.