Bryant, Brandon. Letters from a Sensor Operator.

This chapter consists of ‘letters’ written by former drone sensor operator Brandon Bryant who served in the United States Airforce. Addressing the readers directly, Bryant describes his experiences and the psychological impact of working as a drone operator, illustrating his view on the ethical and moral dilemmas of drone warfare. He also explains that he has been given the epithet ‘whistleblower’ for speaking out about the ethical dilemmas of drone warfare, having received the 2015 Whistleblower of the Year Award (322). Bryant expresses his feelings of internal conflict, guilt, and the toll his work took on his mental well-being. Moreover, he highlights the disconnect between the reality of drone operations and the perceptions of the public, emphasizing the need for honesty, integrity, and active involvement in decision-making processes that affect human survival.  

Notable in his ‘letter’ is his deflection from responsibility and blame, positing ‘leadership’ as cruel, forcing Bryant and others to kill on orders regardless of their own moral objections (317–318). His letters display a strange ‘juggling’ of self-ascribed heroism (“I was […] the best”; “I excelled”) and descriptions of the guilt that made him feel physically ill (315 –320). Regardless of his ‘guilt,’ Bryant writes he could not help but be ‘good’ at his job, presenting his complicity as honouring his “oath” and a desire to not become a “failure” (317–319). He writes that he “had to continue, regardless of what my instincts and conscience were telling me” (317).  

 In one of the most striking accounts in his letters he describes a case in which what he perceived to be a child was killed by a drone strike and identified as a “dog” instead (320). Joseph Pugliese considers this occurrence in Bryant’s account a slippage between the perceptual and the conceptual in the process of dehumanization, stating that: “in this case, the perceptual is mediated and made intelligible by the racio- speciesism of the zoopolitical: a child- dog on two legs that can be killed in an act of noncriminal putting to death of the animal” (185). In his account, however, Bryant quickly passes over this recollection, focusing instead on his feelings of guilt and the ‘wounding’ of his soul (320).  

Bryant’s letters will be of particular interest for researchers in the field of perpetrator studies who are interested in questions of responsibility in contemporary (drone) warfare and US war crimes during the War on Terror, as well as the perpetrator’s rhetorical strategies employed to deflect moral responsibility and to elicit reader sympathy through his narrative. Moreover, his accounts provide an interesting example of ‘perpetrator guilt’ and perpetrator trauma in relation to technological warfare.  

 Author of this entry: Mohana Zwaga. 

Works Cited 

Pugliese, Joseph. “Drone Sparagmos.” Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence, Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 166–198. 

Bryant, Brandon. “Letters from a Sensor Operator.” Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, edited by Lisa Parks, and Caren Kaplan, Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 315–324.