Business and Management Studies (UOA 17)

Peter Lee, Professor of Applied Ethics: I stumbled into the field of drones and military drone use almost by accident.

I was teaching at the Air Force College when I was asked to write an article on the Reaper crew members.

One of the most interesting things for me was interviewing Reaper pilots who had dropped bombs from conventional aircraft, and then later they had dropped bombs or fired laser guided missiles from the Reaper.

What fascinated me was, the brain prompted a physical response that was exactly the same, both in a manned aircraft overhead or operating a Reaper from thousands of miles away.

Drone strike statistics show that UK Reaper drone operators launched 985 missiles or bombs against ISIS between August 2014 and December 2020.

I have a long history with the Royal Air Force, which started during university, and I left to become a chaplain.

I retrained and went back quite a few years later.

So from 2007 to 2008, I served as a Royal Air Force chaplain.

During that wartime period, I was a hospital chaplain for the casualties of the Iraq war.

And it had a life changing effect on me because they were asking me questions like, "Should we be at war?

Should should Prime Minister Tony Blair have sent us to war?" I realised I was woefully ill equipped to answer the questions, to address them even for myself.

And that prompted me to to undertake a doctorate, actually, in ethics and war.

That became the bedrock of my subsequent academic career.

For many years, drones have been controversial, both in public life and in the way they've been represented in the media.

And when I was asked to write about Reaper, the brief I was given was, "Can you write something about the ethics of it?

Is it fair?" Because the crew members can be thousands of miles away from the actual aircraft when they're dropping bombs or firing missiles.

There's no chance that the crews can be attacked because they're on other continents even.

Why, when people are so far away, are they affected?

And I came up with the phrase the distance paradox.

Despite being physically far away, and it can be thousands of miles, visually, emotionally, psychologically, especially with high definition cameras and screens, they have a very intimate view of, for example, a body.

They watch in intimate detail what happens to that body.

Many of the Reaper crew members interviewed did not have a clear ethics framework within which to make their kill or no-kill decisions.

Moral injury is a form of psychological harm that was first identified in the United States soldiers and Marines after the Vietnam War.

Psychologists couldn't work out exactly why some of these veterans were displaying symptoms and behaviour that did not fit with a clinical assessment of, say, post-traumatic stress disorder.

Moral injury is concerned with how an individual's core moral values, core moral self, can be harmed or violated by things that they see and do.

It's a difference between "is it legal?" and "is it right?" To give an example, a crew had been given legal authorisation to kill a Taliban bombing placer who was laying a roadside bomb dozens of miles from from from home.

It was freezing weather and he had a young son with him and the crew refused to take the shot on that occasion because if they killed the father, as night was falling, it's likely the son would have died of exposure.

While they were legally authorised to kill the Taliban fighter, they took the decision not to fire on ethical grounds that it would have this unintended consequence of potentially killing the son.

So by having good ethics training, it helps with decision making.

And I think it it at least partially helps to protect against moral injury.

Lee delivered train-the-trainer ethics teaching to both RAF Reaper Squadrons.

I believe my work has had impact in a number of ways.

After I made my parliamentary submission in 2017, by 2018 I was invited by the Royal Air Force to to go back to both squadrons to help introduce this ethics education.

And people have told me since that it really helped them with their decision making and for some how to live with some of the things they've seen and the powerlessness that they felt.

So it hasn't changed the world, but it's made a small difference to a number of people in this crucial role then that's really important to me.

Perhaps the thing that gives me the most professional satisfaction is looking at the research that started initially just to tell the story about Reaper personnel, then noticing this moral injury and other psychological effects and the need for ethics training and education and then seeing it extend to the police and then seeing new opportunities.

And that's what makes me passionate about it, because there are so many others in fields where they are affected psychologically, emotionally and in other ways.

And if I can help others to come through that and work more effectively and live more effectively, then that will be a life and career well spent.