Isegoria

In the early 1980s, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), the Israelis demonstrated drones’ potential:

In 1982 Israeli drones fitted with TV cameras located Syrian surface-to-air missile radar, while other drones carried radar jammers or acted as decoys. A squadron of Firebees mimicking fighter jets tempted the surface-to-air missile units to turn on their radar and reveal their location; the Firebees evaded every single one of the forty-three missiles fired at them. The defenders were left vulnerable to a follow-up strike by manned aircraft before they could reload. Using this combination of drone tactics, the Israelis destroyed seventeen missile sites with no loss.

The US Army’s Aquila drone would serve a slightly different role — a role that looks familiar to us now:

Aquila would give a soldier a view of the other side of the hill, and would be able to direct artillery fire without the need for an observer on the spot. It also provided a new, high-tech means of tackling the Soviet tank divisions massed on the border between East and West Germany. Artillery was vastly more effective against armored vehicles thanks to new “bomblet rounds” that scattered the area with hundreds of armor-piercing mini-bombs instead of a single warhead. However, an observer still had to make sure that shells were landing in the right area, calling corrections if the aim point needed to be shifted.

There was also a brand new laser-guided artillery shell called the M712 Copperhead, which could knock out a tank from ten miles away with the first shot–but there had to be an observer on the scene with a laser designator to illuminate the tank.

Alas, it was a very American Military-Industrial Complex take on the concept:

The project was not managed well. Aquila went from being a cheap and simple drone to a “gold-plated” one with every modern development. The Israeli drones cost around $40 thousand each; Aquila started out at $100 thousand and went up rapidly from there.

[…]

Aquila needed to be stealthy, which demanded an elaborately shaped body, limiting space inside. The cheap daylight TV camera was supplemented with an expensive thermal imaging camera. Communications were made jam-proof with the aid of complex steerable antennas and state-of-the-art radios that fired off data in short bursts. It gained a sophisticated navigation system: in the days before GPS, this was an inertial measurement system based on gyroscopes, a sort normally fitted to manned aircraft.

[…]

In order to ensure that expensive drones were not lost, Aquila had an automated recovery system using infra-red sensors and beacons, supplemented with an emergency parachute.

On top of this, the whole thing was hardened to withstand the effects of a nuclear blast. Aquila really was designed for World War Three. By 1984 the sticker price was somewhere over a million dollars per aircraft.

[…]

Nobody could understand why it was so difficult and complicated simply to put a TV camera on a remote-controlled plane. The failure of Aquila was a strong argument against further drone development for many years: “We tried them before, and they didn’t work.”

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 3 Comments »