The utilization of an Unmanned Air System (UAS) for warfare carries similar ethical considerations as one for a manned aircraft for scenarios where an operator is in the decision making loop.  Warfare brings difficult questions and situations that till strain even the most experienced war fighter.  There are distinct differences between what is legal and what is ethical during war.  Modern nations enforce codes of conduct and laws for military personnel.  In the U.S. there is the Uniformed Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), which applies to all military members worldwide (USAF, 2016).  The UCMJ was designed to “promote justice, to assist in maintaining good order and discipline in the armed forces, to promote efficiency and effectiveness in the military establishment, and thereby to strengthen the national security of the United States” (USMC, 2016).
Combat operations require additional guidelines in terms of rules of engagement.  These are outlined by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Instruction 3121.01B.  The Instruction provides for self-defense guidelines as well as the definition of the use of force to accomplish a mission against hostile forces (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2016).  This is where ethical and moral considerations come in to place when using UAS for national defense.  A manned aircraft pilot is deployed to a theater of operations with an intended purpose; there are Intelligence, Search, and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions that can turn into attack opportunities.  UAS can be deployed for long duration ISR missions and identify threats with their payload.
The identification of a threat and its ultimate elimination becomes controversial when automation is included in the decision making process.  “It is not quite clear whether robotic/autonomous weapons can be considered just as an evolution of smart weapons and another progress toward making warfare more ethical – a view taken by Ronald Arkin (Arkin 2008), or whether they would amount to the exact opposite: simply a new means of making war more destructive and brutal and thus representing a very negative tendency” (Krishnan, 2009).  The decision to utilize force is affected by the removal of the pilot from the aircraft, essentially out of harm’s way.  While this is an inherent benefit to the pilot, it can result in an erosion of the barriers to kill: “fear of being killed and resistance to killing” (Lin, Abney, & Bekey, 2011).
Training for UAS operators must be different than the one for pilots of manned aircraft to ensure decision making is not affected by geographic separation from combat.  The fact that UAS operators are exposed to their regular live stressors can add to their level of stress.  This is a human factor that is unique in the sense that an operator can be at home and spend time with their families, only to report to work and perform interdiction missions that will lead to killing.  Research has proven that untrained personnel making a decision that involves harming others causes moral dilemmas, emotional conflicts, which requires a higher level of behavioral control (Majdandzic, et al., 2012).
A high degree of automation can inject a significant human factor for UAS operations.  The US does not permit the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to kill a person without human intervention.  This is not the same in other countries; both South Korea and Israel have deployed targeting turrets for border protection that have the capability to identify and eliminate a person in the case of unauthorized access (Parkin, 2015).  Utilizing AI to kill people does not eliminate human factors, it simply moves them up during the development phase.  This is an inherent flaw with all intelligent systems: they were designed by humans.


References

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (2016). Chapter 5: Rules of Engagement. Retrieved from Loc.gov: http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/OLH_2015_Ch5.pdf
Krishnan, A. (2009). Killer Robots Legality and Ethicality of Autonomous Weapons. El Paso: Ashgate Publishing.
Lin, P., Abney, K., & Bekey, G. A. (2011). Robot Ethics: The Ethicl and Social Implications of Robotics. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Majdandzic, J., Bauer, H., Windischberger, C., Moser, E., Engl, E., & Lamm, C. (2012). The Human Factor: Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Humanized Perception in Moral Decision Making. Vienna: PLOS.
Parkin, S. (2015, July 16). Killer Robots: The soldiers that never sleep. Retrieved from BBC.com: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150715-killer-robots-the-soldiers-that-never-sleep
USAF. (2016). Uniformed Code of Military Justice. Retrieved from AU.AF.MIL: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ucmj.htm
USMC. (2016). Military Justice Fact Sheets. Retrieved from Hqmc.marines.mil: http://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/135/MJFACTSHTS%5B1%5D.html