Pilots are only part of the story. As many as 180 people, from military lawyers and commanders to private contractors from Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, are required to maintain each patrol of three to four Predator or Reaper drones around the clock. Many technicians who review footage and other data are employed soon after high school, with less than a year of training.

None of the veterans mentioned earlier ever came close to an actual battlefield. Mr. Westmoreland worked at a military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he helped set up a relay system to beam aerial footage to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Mr. Bryant managed cameras on a Predator drone from Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Ms. Linebaugh’s job was analyzing video feeds at Beale Air Force Base in California.

Yet they all attest to the stress and psychological impacts of their work. Working up to 12 hours a day, sometimes six days a week, analysts watch their targets up close for months on end. They often witness their subjects’ final moments. In follow-up surveillance, they may even view their funerals.

“Watching targets go about their daily lives may inspire empathy,” said Julie Carpenter, a research fellow at California Polytechnic State University who has studied human-technology interactions in the military. The Air Force is providing psychological support for drone personnel, but this interim solution seems unlikely to be adequate.



“We can say we see children and we think you shouldn’t do it. But it isn’t up to us,” one former analyst, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. “We are completely outranked, and at the very bottom of the food chain.”

Stories of the psychological trauma suffered by lower-ranked Air Force personnel are starting to emerge. Veterans like Mr. Bryant, Ms. Linebaugh and Mr. Westmoreland have attested in documentaries and the media to deep-seated flaws they’ve observed in drone warfare.

We need far greater transparency about the targeted killing operations. From the glimpses we have seen, we know there have been tragic failures. In 2011, a transcript of a drone strike, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by The Los Angeles Times, revealed widespread confusion among imagery analysts in Florida, pilots in Nevada and the missile operators on Kiowa helicopters in Afghanistan, resulting in the killing of some two dozen innocent civilians with no terrorist connections.