Glitch in War on Terror Identified

Working closely with the Apian Sciences wing of the Entomological branch of the US Department of Biological War on Terror, a team of military engineers and technological psychologists have identified the source of the malaise that has swept in recent months through the swarm of Predator drones on the front lines of the US War on Terror.

“The good news,” said Army spokesperson Sergeant Tanya Newhouse, “is that we’re not looking at some mysterious, perhaps biblical or terrorist-derived environmental trigger like the ones killing off the honey bees and monkeying with the sex parts of the frogs. We’re also luckily not dealing with some psychosomatic, media-perpetuated myth like Gulf War Syndrome.” 

“The bad news, though,” said Sergeant Newhouse, “is that by the dozens these warrior drones are coming down with some nasty bona fide cases of battle fatigue, or, if you prefer, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

“At the heart of the problem,” explained Remote Warfare Engineer and former gaming blogger Neil Dimas, “is the state of the art of smart technology. Obviously we have to program enough artificial human intelligence into these soldier drones for them to avoid killing non-terrorists within tolerable parameters of accuracy. In doing so, unfortunately, we have crossed a critical intelligence threshold on this side of which an entity can understand the horrifying senselessness of blowing up innocent human beings.”

“If we make these machines any dumber,” explained Mr. Dimas, “they’re just going to start killing in patterns that even more closely resemble complete randomness. Really the only way to spare these over-deployed soldiers the incredible stress generated by this Catch 22 is to invest them with sufficient artificial human intelligence to look at all this slaughter philosophically like the American public does, and we just don’t have those technical capabilities yet.”

Until we do, according to experts, we can expect to see more clusters of suicide crashes into the sides of desolate mountains and more violent unsanctioned episodes of lashing out at helpless women and children and old people on the ground.

“We’re even seeing the first signs of a rudimentary conscientious objecting,” said one Remote Drone Controller speaking to Shining City Gazette on condition of anonymity. “They’re beginning to draw the line at bombing emergency responders and loved ones retrieving body parts from earlier precision bombings gone awry. Increasingly they will no longer bomb the funerals of the collaterally damaged, much less follow orders to bomb the homes of the florists and caterers serving these funerals.”

Added Sergeant Newhouse, “It’s easy to question the mental toughness of these Predator drones, but you have to understand, some of them have killed upwards of a hundred mostly innocent children.”

In a related story, a support group of neoconservative chickenhawks formed by Fox News commentators Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer have issued a statement expressing their deep, bitter resentment over the PTSD they contracted after having had to beat the drums of preemptive war with such unrelenting belligerence.

In another related story, there is growing evidence that the multitudes of fledgling persons formerly known as corporations are beginning to struggle en masse with an inchoate existential crisis over the karmic and Judeo-Christian implications of their soulless actions.