Trust, Troops, and Reapers: Getting ‘Drone’ Research Right
Cory T. Anderson, Dave Blair, Mike Byrnes, Joe Chapa, Amanda Collazzo, Scott Cuomo, Olivia Garard, Ariel M. Schuetz, and Scott VanOort
April 3, 2018
Commentary
Would you trust a Reaper crew to keep you safe in the face of enemy fire? In their Foreign Affairs article, “Why Troops Don’t Trust Drones,†Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia MacDonald argue that U.S. troops “see drones as riskier and less trustworthy than manned aircraft.†In a later article, they elaborated on the details of the terms used in their survey research. They defined confidence as “the belief that unmanned aircraft can effectively complete a mission,†and trust as “the willingness to use an unmanned aircraft to complete a mission.†The crux of their argument appeared in their concluding paragraphs:
In short, [respondents] were looking for pilots with skin in the game. Without that, how could they trust the machine or the machine’s operator? … There are important, unresolved trust issues between humans and machines that make battlefield personnel wary of employing unmanned aircraft in situations in which their lives are at risk.
https://warontherocks.com/2018/04/trust-troops-and-reapers-getting-drone-research-right/
