Closer to our own times, the psychologist Rachel McNair has suggested expanding the overly narrow notion of PTSD by defining a condition called "Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress" (PITS). Noting that recent literature has focused almost exclusively on the traumas inflicted on passive victims by external forces, she tries to isolate the active component of the anxiety, the one that stems from the fact of having been the agent of violence, in fact a perpetrator of it. Within the mixed experience of a soldier, it is hard to sort out one particular element from the rest, but McNair studies cases of pure perpetration, for example the nightmares of executioners haunted by images of the last moments of their condemned prisoners. She does not cite the case of drone operators, as her book was published too early for that, but it looks as if that might be a good means by which to test out her idea, for it presents a case of pure perpetration, armed violence reduced solely to its active aspect and without any vital threat to its perpetrator.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 389