Sound familiar yet? Because drone operators (those who fly drones by remote control) target and kill enemies, they are targetable as participants in combat. But American drone operators are not normal combatants. They live with their families. Their civilian and military worlds are intertwined.

For example, a drone operator sitting in a base in Nevada may control a drone buzzing over Afghanistan. Though the operation may be conducted within a military compound, far removed from civilian populations, the problem arises when a drone operator completes a shift and goes home.

As combatants, drone operators are targetable at any time. On the battlefield, a combatant does not acquire immunity when he (and now, she) is eating, sleeping, or picking up children from school. And that is the key, because on traditional battlefields, there are no children, and there are no schools. International law does not allow combatants to kill in the morning and then enjoy immunity later in the evening. It is not a light switch. War has never worked that way.

In all the discussion about drones, little attention has been directed at drone operators. When they do come up, the conversation centers on the psychological effects of constantly switching from combatant to civilian life, day in, day out. While that is a significant concern, this duality of civilian and military life under the laws of war gets little attention.

The reason is obvious: nobody is attacking drone operators in Nevada. Al-Qaeda thankfully has no armed drones at its disposal, so U.S. operators risk little by sleeping in their homes at night. And nor are they deliberately using civilians to shield themselves.

But what happens when the rest of the world has drones? That question is increasingly important as manufacturers look to international markets. While only the U.S. and U.K. have ever deployed armed drones, several countries have them, including China, which considered using onelast month to kill a druglord. Dozens more countries are eager to jump on board and are already investing in research, so drone technology will likely be widely available soon.

The advent of drones challenges the notion of the battlefield and we are far from resolving all of the legal and moral questions it raises. Allowing drone operators to live among civilians is a part of that story. Are we comfortable with a tactic that contradicts one of the essential maxims of warfare, the separation of civilian and military targets?

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