“It is a lot like playing a video game,” admits a former Predator drone operator matter-of-factly to the artist Omer Fast. “But playing the same video game four years straight on the same level.” His bombs kill real people though and, he admits, often not the people he is aiming at.

The remarkable insight into the working life of one of the most modern of military operatives is provided in a 30-minute film which will show at the Imperial War Museum from Monday, the first in a new programme of exhibitions under the title IWM Contemporary…

What Fast’s film does brilliantly is evoke the weirdness of people in Nevada endlessly trawling foreign countries for “bad guys” which they then get permission to fire on.

Fast interviews a former US air force drone operator who admits to making mistakes. “You see a lot of death,” he says before pondering why he carries on – perhaps because if it was not him then it might be some “new kid doing it badly”.