> The trauma is actually a bit higher in drone operators from the moral injury aspect. When you teleoperate a drone you cannot say to yourself that you killed to protect your life and that of your buddies.

That's a really interesting insight. I wonder how well "I did it to protect my country" stands in for those other rationalizations (this is to say, how effective is propaganda at mitigating that effect?). I mean, after the drone murdered a bunch of aid-workers & kids recently (but before we knew that's who ended up dead), our media & political figures were out preaching that they were saving our troops and the vulnerable Afghanis with our drone strikes.

> Unless the CIA is involved with the designs there is a small upside that the robot dogs probably wouldn't be capable of rape at least.

Yeah, that's very true and that's something I hadn't considered, and I appreciate that you added it to the context of this conversation. This just seems like a weird way to deal with the fact that soldiers do a lot of wrong when we're all told that they're fighting for what's right.