How much accountability do remote pilots have for incidents like this? I.e., is there an ammo budget? What happens if a pilot decides to "go GTA" and destroy things for fun?
To be clear and so I’m not misleading, I was neither a pilot or a sensor operator so I cannot guarantee you that there isn’t more to it than what I know. As far as I understood the drone pilot works in conjunction with a sensor operator. Because the drone pilot is an officer he is the one to fire the missile but the sensor operator controls the laser to direct the missile. I would strongly believe that there are other emergency stops available due to my experiences but at the bare minimum, the sensor operator could always direct the missile away and the sensor operator themselves can’t do anything without the pilot actually launching the missile.
Editing to add in that hellfire missiles cannot be redirected once launched.
Is this an actual thing people think drone operators do? Surely the same that would happen to any military personnel who did the same with their weapons, except with a drone there's perfect camera footage to evidence it as well.
One of the other major things that made me want to offer any information I can is the lack of knowledge on the topic I’ve seen posted on here and places like Reddit. I just would never attempt to have an actual discussion on Reddit though. When you have a topic so shrouded in secrecy and the only articles that people see about them are articles like these, it’s not too surprising though. There’s just so many variables to account for from the administration in office during the strike, to the human managers that happened to be on the clock at the time.
Editing to add in that hellfire missiles cannot be redirected once launched.