Operators of remotely piloted aircraft kill and watch from thousands of kilometres away and then drive home to their families, an occupational reality that fits poorly with a diagnostic model of combat trauma built around personal life-threat. The mental-health literature on these crews has documented real distress, yet it has largely measured that distress with fear-based post-traumatic stress disorder instruments, and it has not articulated why the operators' suffering should take a different form. This article develops that argument. Its original contribution is the Agentic-Exposure differential model, which locates remotely piloted aircraft operators in a twodimensional traumatic-load space defined by fear-based load on one axis and moral-emotional injury on the other, and predicts that this population occupies a distinctive region: high moral injury and attenuated fear, a profile qualitatively different from the fear-circuitry-dominant posttraumatic stress disorder of physically deployed combatants. The model identifies two exposure pathways that drive the moral load, an agentic pathway of precision killing and battle-damage assessment and a witnessing pathway of prolonged intimate surveillance without the power to intervene, and it derives a predicted symptom profile dominated by guilt, shame, loss of meaning, anhedonia, and social alienation rather than by hyperarousal, re-experiencing, and external avoidance. The model is built by integrative theoretical synthesis of the moral-injury and the operator mental-health literatures and is expressed through two conceptual diagrams and two comparative tables. Its central practical claims follow directly: that standard fear-based screening systematically under-detects clinically significant distress in this population and should be supplemented by validated moral-injury instruments; that selection should weight moral-emotional resilience and cognitive and moral-schema flexibility rather than only fear-reactivity; and that first-line support should be meaning- and values-based rather than fear-extinction-based. The model is conceptual and its predicted profiles are illustrative, generating testable hypotheses that the article specifies for empirical validation.