Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Drone pilots on the edge of collapse

They say war is hell. Don’t believe it? Ask any of the US servicemen
suffering from the battlefield blues, as a new study reveals that
launching strikes overseas is overtly stressful, even from thousands
of miles away from warzones.
 
According to new study released by the US Air Force, an overwhelming
number of the pilots that command unmanned robotic drones from
operation centers in America are suffering from intense stress, even
if they are on the other side of the world from where their attacks
are being carried out. With the US continuing drone strikes despite
opposition from allies overseas such as Pakistan, the toll that the
task of commanding the controversial crafts could be having on its
pilots could be detrimental to the Department of Defense, who insists
on pushing through with the program even with the end result including
droves of dead civilians since the missions began.
 
When quizzed by Air Force personnel to gauge their level of stress on
a scale of 0-to-10, with 10 representing the most stress, 46 percent
of pilots commanding Reaper and Predator drones say that their stress
level meets or exceeds a standing of 8 points, according to the new
study.
 
Additionally among the findings is the fact that a smaller but
significant number of pilots also suffer from what the Air Force
describes as “clinical distress,” a condition which includes symptoms
such as anxiety, depression and severe enough stress that job
performance is impacted.
 
Despite soldiers being subjected to work that brings on these
conditions, the Department of Defense continues drone usage all over
the world, with 57 American-led drones being in international skies at
any given moment. A report issued earlier this year out of Britain’s
Bureau of Investigative Journalism put the number of civilian
casualties carried out by American drones in Pakistan alone to be at
400 since US operations began there, and in just the few months that
the US involved itself in the Libyan uprising, the American military
dispatched almost 150 airstrikes with drones, despite Congress never
declaring a war. While troops thousands of miles away dispatched
drones and fired missiles into the land beneath Libyan skies, now it
is being revealed that an overwhelming number of the pilots put in
charge of such missions were suffering from conditions that could
impact their job performance.
 
While the men and women that command the stealth aircraft are
thousands of miles from the battlefields where bombs are dropped, the
toll on their health can have consequences on Americans back home.
Earlier this year RT reported that a computer virus made its way into
the cockpits of drone aircraft dispatched from Creech Air Force Base
in Nevada with pilots going weeks without being aware of it. Even more
recently, the US managed to lose communication with two separate
drones in a manner of two weeks, costing America upwards of not just
$100 million in parts but a priceless toll on the nation’s security as
Iranian authorities insist that they have decoded the top-secret
technology onboard a recovered Sentinel RQ-170.
 
As a cyber war sprouts between American and Iranian intelligence,
Tehran is becoming aware of an extremely exploitable target in the US
military. The Pentagon says that almost 30 percent of its drone pilots
suffer from the military calls “burn out.” In their own follow up on
the report, National Public Radio reports that a large majority of the
pilots say that they are not getting any counseling for their
increasing stress.
 
Instead, the US is upping its drone operation. In the last decade the
number of drones has grown from 50 to 7,000. At least half a dozen spy
craft planes currently fly over America to conduct clandestine
surveillance, and the FAA is working out plans to approve the drones
for use among local law enforcement agencies.
http://rt.com/usa/news/drone-pilots-us-stress-193/
 

 of miles away from warzones.
 
impiegati statali... sempre a cercare scuse per darsi malati o
scroccare qualche pensioncina :-)
 
P.S.:
 
che mi dici della fine del tudeh?