What’s it like to watch someone die? Ask a drone pilot | Adrian Chiles

Technology used to distance the military from the deaths they caused. Now everything is up close and personal

Microphone in hand, making radio, I don't half find myself in some odd places. The inside of a shipping container, for example. This one was in an aircraft hangar at an RAF base somewhere in England. What it contained was the cockpit of a drone flying high above Syria and Iraq. For company in there, as I remember it, I had the pilot, the person in charge of firing whatever weapons this drone carried and a lawyer whose job it was to advise on who and what were legitimate, legal targets. And there was an RAF press officer, of course - I hadn't just snuck in there.

I don't want to get into the morality or otherwise of drone warfare here - you may or may not be minded to put inverted commas around the words legitimate" and legal" above. It's just that this whole fascinating, unsettling, disorientating experience came back to me during the furore over Prince Harry's book and what he had to say about his experience of visiting death and destruction upon, it is to be hoped, legitimate and legal targets from Apache helicopters.

Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and Guardian columnist

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