FPV drone pilots in combat burn out in 3-4 months because they watch people die through a first-person video feed all day

A Ukrainian FPV drone operator sits in a basement 5km from the front line. They pilot a $500 drone with a camera and explosive payload toward a Russian soldier. Through their VR goggles, they see the soldier's face in the final seconds before impact. They do this 5-15 times per day. After 3 months, the operator cannot sleep, has nightmares about the faces, and is rotated off the position — but there are not enough trained replacements. The intimacy of FPV drone combat — seeing your target up close, in real time, making a conscious decision to kill a specific individual you can see clearly — creates a unique form of PTSD that is different from artillery or air strikes where targets are distant abstractions. So what? Every military is scaling FPV drone programs (US, China, Iran, Turkey) without addressing the psychological cost to operators. The US Air Force has already documented higher PTSD rates among Reaper drone pilots than among fighter pilots who face physical danger — because drone operators see the aftermath in high-resolution video. FPV drones make this worse: the operator is not at 15,000 feet watching a building — they are 10 feet away watching a person. As militaries deploy thousands of FPV operators, they will face a mental health crisis among personnel who are physically safe but psychologically destroyed. Why does this persist? Military culture treats psychological resilience as an individual trait, not a systemic design problem. The solution is autonomous terminal guidance — the drone flies itself in the final seconds so the operator does not see the impact — but this creates legal and ethical issues under Laws of Armed Conflict (human must be in the loop for lethal decisions).