UAV, Drones, video games and “Playstation warfare”

I recently wrote a blog about how a video game I had played made me consider the choices made by UAV* pilots however this reflected a problem I have with campaigns around UAV usage. Many campaign groups which have attacked the usage of UAV have suggested that UAV make warfare like playing a video game. Whilst I’ll argue till the cows come home that video games can create compelling emotionally connecting experiences I will say that from what I know about piloting a UAV, it is less like a video game than other forms of warfare.

Whilst working for the Methodist Church I had the opportunity to take minutes whilst experts on the Morality of UAVs helped create a report on the morality of UAV use. There were some very interesting debates around the use of UAVs and I highly recommend reading the report. Something that I found very interesting was some of the arguments on ways in which UAVs could be more ethical than other forms of warfare. The arguments against how UAVs are currently used I wholeheartedly agree with and think that groups should be campaigning against extra judicial killing. My problem is with the idea that UAVs are simply bad and that they resemble playing a game.

A massive portion of what UAV operators spend their time doing is simply watching suspects. They establish what military jargon calls a “pattern of life” but essentially means following a person constantly for days on end to find out where they go and what they do with their lives. If a decision is then made that the person should be killed the UAV operator continues watching afterwards. In order to confirm the kill a UAV operator watches as weeping relatives dig through the rubble to find bodies. The psychological costs of being a UAV pilot are only just being recognised. Unlike other military operations, UAV operators return to civilian life at the end of the day. After spending the day watching someone in Pakistan going to the market, they may go into a supermarket on the way home to pick up some milk.

In this way UAVs are completely unlike video games and for that matter unlike high altitude bombers. Neither of these involve observing the banalities of a person’s life. Violent video games spend seconds dealing with the lives of people on the screens, high altitude bombers see the targets house for less than that. UAV operators may be more distant physically from their victims but they get to know them far better than anyone else does. To simplify the job of UAV pilot to playing a video game undermines the emotional and psychological scars that it can cause them.

If you read descriptions of life as a UAV pilot there are some superficial similarities with playing video games. Whilst both involve operating a computer in a dark room there is a crucial difference, the person playing the video games knows nothing that is going on is real. A UAV pilot knows that the person who they see playing with their kids is real and they know that when they have to kill them. Although (as far as I know) there has not been a publicly released systematic study into the prevalence of PTSD amongst UAV pilots there are several accounts out there. One study of 900 drone operators found high levels of stress in 46% of those surveyed.  Video games don’t bring this kind of stress. UAV operators have an incredibly difficult job and it should not be minimised and belittled by talk of PlayStation warfare.

*I use the term UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) rather than the military preferred RPAS (Remotely Piloted Air System) because it’s better known but doesn't have the same connotations as the colloquial Drones

Payment by results: Doesn't get the results

Upfront, I should say that the debate about whether or not something should be run by a private company or charity rather than the government is not something that I find inherently interesting. I believe that neither are the golden bullet that their supporters claim they are. More important than who runs a service are questions of how that service is resourced, how it’s run and how it’s evaluated. Last week Chris Grayling made amonumentally stupid comment in the House of Commons: “The last Government was obsessed with pilots. Sometimes you just have to believe in something and do it.” This was in reference to his idea that the probation service should be privatised. Now at the moment I have no idea whether or not this is a good idea but a pilot* would be a good way of finding out. Mr Grayling is calling for policy by ideology rather than policy by evidence. Whilst there is a necessary place for ideology in government throwing out evidence is not the smartest idea. But I’ve discussed that before so today instead I’m going to look at why payment by results isn’t a magical cure-all.

To find an example of payment by results being a comprehensive failure you have to look no further than the last project Mr Grayling was in charge of, the Work Programme.  The Work Programme paid providers for every unemployed person that they got back into work for six months. Of course the contracts for these schemes were not that simple because for making privatisation work the devil is in the detail. A recent evaluation of the work programme showed its most glaring flaw. The government was paying out millions of pounds and were seeing fewer people go back to work than if there had been no program at all. As flaws go, that one’s a big one. However, concentrating on the big failure masks the little failures that still have a lot to teach us.

Firstly, the Work Programme nurtured fraud on a large scale. A4E, one of the private organisations that received some of the large contracts from the Work Programme, was found to have been committing fraud in several of its services and to have had a culture which fostered fraud. It was caught not because of government checks but because of a whistleblower. If a scheme pays by results then it encourages behaviour which will fulfil the checks, rather than necessarily getting the results. Fraud is more likely to happen when you incentivise it. There’s an interesting discussion on whether bonuses incentivise risky behaviour and whether that was partly responsible for the economic crisis. Payment by results may create a similar culture and need strong checking systems to make sure the results are ones worth paying for.   

Those who were given priority in the work programme were not those that needed the most help butinstead those most likely to get a job. As many of these were already perfectly capable of getting a job the work programme took up their time from when they could have been seeking a job and then got paid for “helping” them despite them already being job ready. This artificially buoyed the performance of work programme contractors.

The Work Programme also ended up damaging some of the most effective service providers. Although I’ve not seen the evidence for it, many in the sector believed that small charitable organisations were the most efficient at helping those with multiple problems return to the job market. Additionally one of the stated aims of the Work Programme was for more people to be helped by these small highly effective organisations and for their funding to increase. However by many accounts the opposite has happened. Due to the nature of the contracting process many of these organisations saw a dramatic decrease in funding and have been forced to close. This was not due to them being ineffective but rather because they had a lack of referrals.

For the power of the market to have full effect there needs to be true competition, innovation and failure. A recent talk I went to featured John Kay from the FT talking about what makes capitalism great. He used the example of the computing industry. No single company had the all the successful ideas which ended up transforming the sector and placing a computer in every home. Many of those that had successful ideas still went bust as they failed to come up with the next idea. Public service markets don’t work this way though. Provision comes from one of a handful of very large companies, G4S, A4E, Serco etc. Government contracts work against small organisations that would encourage innovation and against these big companies failing if they can’t be the most efficient providers.       

Small companies are not the answer by themselves either though. The problem with using small companies in payment by results schemes can be seen in TV license enforcement. In TV license enforcement companies are paid for every household they find illegally using a TV without a license. As anyone who has had contact with these deeply unpleasant companies (or done any research on it) will know the sector is rife with abuse, houses are illegally searched, people are pressured into signing forms admitting wrongdoing when they have done and people are frequently mislead as to their actual legal rights and duties. When misconduct is found and punished rather than it being stamped out many of these small companies dissolve and return to the same practices as a new company with almost the exact same people.

The point I want to make is not that payment by results is a bad idea but rather that it is very difficult to get right. To neglect to do a pilot and get as much information as possible to help design the best scheme that you can is a moronic show of arrogance.

*Just to be clear that this is not a partisan idea, a pilot of this very idea was set up by Grayling’s predecessor Kenneth Clarke.