Isegoria

Early Predator losses were high, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers), but acceptable:

By 2001, twenty of the sixty Predators had been lost to a mixture of pilot error, bad weather, accidents, and enemy fire. “Situational awareness” in unmanned aircraft is notoriously poor because of the limited view and the lack of feedback from other senses. You cannot hear the engine or feel vibration. The extreme case occurred when a pilot crashed during landing because she did not realize that her Predator had been flipped over and was flying upside down. Lesser mishaps are common. The accident rate peaked at one crash per 2,500 hours flown, far higher than any manned aircraft–but not unusual for a drone.

[…]

At less than $3 million an airframe, compared to over $200 million for some manned jets, and with no pilot casualties to worry about, the Predator was expendable. Improvements in training and additional safety features brought the accident rate down to one per 20,000 hours in 2010. By 2013, large drones had a lower accident rate than many manned aircraft.

Russian tactical radars are designed to pick up jets, not small, slow-moving targets:

“The results of field tests showed that the target detection radar of the Tor air defense system provides detection of small UAVs at ranges of only 3-4 km,” writes Makarenko.

This explains why drones are able to get so close and take video of these systems: the Russians are unable to spot a drone unless it is practically on top of them. When the drones are spotted, Makarenko says Tor has trouble shooting them down.

“The practical experience of experimental firing at small targets [with Tor] … indicates the low efficiency of their destruction. The main reasons for this are the imperfection of the SAM warhead detonation control system, as well as large errors in target tracking and SAM guidance on small-sized UAVs.“

This has been borne out in Ukraine, for example by this video of a Tor missile hurtling past a Ukrainian quadcopter without exploding. This is exactly what Makarenko means by a failure of detonation control.

Few would call the Predator a design classic, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers):

It is more a technological kludge of different components tacked together, with an engine derived from a snowmobile at the back, an outsize satellite communications pod stuck on top, and missiles so heavy it can barely carry them slung underneath. According to one estimate, it takes seventeen people just to fly this “unmanned” aircraft. And yet the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator has been immeasurably more successful than any previous drone.

[…]

DARPA, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, identified the need for a long-endurance drone and had carried out a classified study under the codename Teal Rain in the 1970s. This led to the construction of an aircraft called Amber with a wooden propeller and a distinctive upside-down-V tail.

Amber was designed by Abraham Karem, an expert on gliders and other soaring aircraft.

[…]

Leading Systems’ most important asset was a cheap export version of the Amber called the GNAT-750. The Turkish government had expressed an interest in the GNAT-750, a larger version of Amber, with a wingspan of thirty-six feet and an empty weight of five hundred pounds. Being an export model, it had less expensive electronics. The engine was a German Rotax 914 used in sailplanes and light aircraft (a smaller version is used in snowmobiles).

The GNAT-750 flew at barely a hundred miles an hour, but resembling a glider it required minimal power to stay in the air. A flight endurance of around forty-eight hours meant the GNAT-750 could maintain constant watch over a given area for longer than any manned aircraft.

[…]

When the 1993 conflict in Bosnia flared up, the US had no suitable reconnaissance drones on hand. Satellites were unable to see beneath the cloud cover. Existing spy planes were designed to operate in hostile skies, flying at extreme altitude like the U-2 or at extreme speed like the Mach-3 SR-71 Blackbird. The requirement was for a drone that could fly at low speed and low altitude, carry an off-the-shelf camera system, and beam back real-time video via a relay aircraft.

[…]

The GNAT-750 looked like the ideal solution. It provided a stable platform with long endurance and, because it was “export technology,” there was nothing sensitive that would cause problems if one was shot down and the remains analyzed.

All the GNAT-750 needed was the communications link to a relay aircraft.

[…]

One of the modifications overseen by the CIA was a security feature that shut down everything if the speed dropped too low, as it was assumed the aircraft must be on the ground. A gust of wind from behind caused the flight speed indicator to drop below the vital figure. The GNAT-750 duly switched itself off and dropped like a stone.

That sort of accident could kill a manned program along with the pilot, but the loss of a drone is not such a serious matter.

[…]

The CIA operated the GNAT-750 from Albania, flying missions to Bosnia with considerable success. Video was sent back via the manned relay aircraft — like the earlier TDR-1, DASH, and Firebee, radio range was the limitation — and missions only lasted as long as the relay plane was in place.

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The resolution on the ground was eighteen inches — as good as many satellites, with the advantage that it could be sent when and where needed, whereas satellites only appear every ninety minutes as their orbit allows.

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The drone turned out to be stealthy, not from design but because it was largely made of composite material and there was not much metal to give a radar return.

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The Pentagon was not content to let the CIA have a monopoly on drones. As it was apparent that there might be further limited conflicts where such drones could be useful, they funded their own development of the GNAT-750. This was an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration or ACTD for a version known as the 750-45 or 750-TE Predator. The Predator name was chosen after a competition among General Atomics employees.

The result was a larger aircraft; the empty weight almost doubled to a thousand pounds. It could stay in position five hundred miles from its base for twenty-four hours. Most important, it had extra communication equipment, including a large and unwieldy but effective Ku-band satellite communications setup with a gimbaled antenna that swivels around under its cover to keep pointing at a satellite. Sudden maneuvers tended to break the link and contact could be lost for a minute; the autopilot kicked in while the drone found its satellite again. While it was not be entirely reliable, armed with this capability, the new drone could beam back video from anywhere in the world without a relay plane. And it could fly anywhere, watching for as long as fuel lasted. It entered service in 1995 as the RQ-1 Predator.

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At ten thousand feet it was inaudible, and rarely noticed by those on the ground unless they actually craned their head back to look at it. Skilled operators learned to use the cover of the sun to shield their aircraft from those they were watching.

In former Yugoslavia the Predator was of little use in directing air strikes due to a lack of training and poor communication between different units. One officer complained it took about forty-five minutes to get a strike aircraft into the same area as the drone, while the drone operators sometimes provided poor descriptions of the target — “the house with orange tiles” was not enough in a village with twenty of them. This experience prompted the addition of a laser illuminator to the Predator so the operator could highlight an aim point by shining the laser light on it, “sparkling” it, in in Air Force slang.

[…]

In a later addition, originally known as Wartime Integrated Laser Designator (WILD), Predators were fitted with lasers to mark targets so laser-guided weapons could home in on them — “lasing” rather than just “sparkling.”

Silent Arrow has been selected by the USAF’s accelerator, AFWERX, for an SBIR contract focused on its CLS-300 (“Contested Logistics System, 300 Nautical Miles”) long-range attritable cargo drone — which sounds suspiciously like it’s not for cargo:

The CLS-300 is based on the commercially successful Silent Arrow GD-2000, which according to the company, is the world’s first heavy payload, autonomous and attritable cargo delivery aircraft designed to carry 1,500 lbs. of cargo over 35 nautical miles when deployed from cargo aircraft such as the Lockheed Martin C-130, Boeing C-17, and Airbus A400M.

Whereas the GD-2000 is a glider, the new CLS-300 can travel nearly 10 times as far by utilizing an innovative propulsion unit and propeller system that are inexpensive enough to allow the entire cargo drone to be attritable. In addition to being air droppable, it will also be capable of taking off from the ground including from unimproved surfaces, naval vessels and other launch points.

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.”

In contrast to the DASH, which started out as a combat aircraft and ended as a target, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), the Teledyne Ryan Firebee started out as a target and ended as much more:

The Firebee was a sleek, jet-powered machine, twenty-three feet long and with a top speed of over 700 mph. It could fly at any height from the treetops to fifty thousand feet. It could be launched from an aircraft and remotely controlled from two hundred miles away. The Firebee would return to the ground on a parachute, an easy feat for a small plane with no human inside risking broken bones.

There was little interest from the Air Force’s mainstream, but the highly unconventional BIG SAFARI team liked the idea. BIG SAFARI was set up to circumvent the usual complexities of Air Force procurement, to provide quick solutions to urgent problems. They funded development of a version of the Firebee called Fire Fly or Model 147, and it went through their streamlined channels without the interference it might have otherwise endured.

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In the first trials the F-102 Delta Dagger and F-106 Delta Dart pilots never even saw the drones they were trying to shoot down, and only caught brief glimpses of them on radar. Further tests followed. In one, a Delta Dagger fired a burst of cannon fire at the drone, but the rounds missed. Before the pilot could line up for another shot, his jet engine flamed out because of the high altitude. He dropped to lower altitude to reignite the engine, at which point other planes mistook his aircraft for the target. Fortunately, they did not shoot, but the Fire Fly had escaped. Later on two Delta Darts achieved a radar lock on the Fire Fly, but not for long enough to fire a missile.

[…]

The military was unhappy with the results. Many felt the test was intended to make them look bad. Robert Schwanhausser of Teledyne Ryan says the results were classified Top Secret, and he was ordered to burn every piece of information on them.

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They were sent on virtual suicide missions, to test Vietnamese radar and missile defenses.

When losses mounted, the developers at BIG SAFARI started equipping their drones with electronic bags of tricks. One device, known as High Altitude Threat Reaction and Countermeasure (HAT-RAC) responded to being lit up by radar by throwing the drone into a series of sharp turns.

[…]

When the Chinese downed their first Fire Fly in 1964, it was only after some sixteen MiGs had made over thirty passes trying to hit the little drone.

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A decoy version of the Fire Fly was produced. This was known as the 147N and was fitted with radar reflectors to make it look like a bigger aircraft. The 147Ns were originally purely intended to distract defenders away from the real Fire Flies equipped with cameras, but they survived and managed to return so frequently that they were later fitted with cameras of their own.

[…]

On one mission, the pictures from a Fire Fly captured the subject’s faces from close range: “You could see features on the guy’s face. If it would have been in color, you could have seen the color of his eyes.”

This was at a time when the U-2 spy planes were taking pictures from fifty thousand feet or higher, with resolution only good enough to recognize objects two feet across. The low-level Fire Fly pictures were a revelation in the art of the possible.

[…]

The basic drone could only handle acceleration of about 3G, but a modified Firebee equipped with “Maneuverability Augmentation System for Tactical Air Combat Simulation” or MASTACS could pull 6G for several seconds at a time. This put it pretty much on a par with manned fighters. In 1971, the MASTACS developers challenged Commander John C. Smith, head of the Navy’s Top Gun combat training school – the “Top Gun” of the 1982 movie – to try and shoot MASTACS down.

Smith and his wingman, both flying F-4 Phantoms, made repeated attacks on the remotely controlled Firebee. It was far too agile for them. They fired two Sparrow radar-guided missiles and two Sidewinder heat-seekers without scoring a hit. Meanwhile, the Firebee kept circling around and lining itself up in firing position behind the Phantoms. Had it been armed, the Firebee would have had easy shots.

As usual, nobody liked a smart robot. MASTACS was deemed “too sophisticated” for training purposes.

[…]

Even the memory of the Fire Fly seems to have been lost. In 2014 the US Navy proudly announced in a press release that, “Truman will be the first aircraft carrier in naval aviation history to host test operations for an unmanned aircraft.” It seems that amnesia buried the 1969-70 Fire Fly operations from the USS Ranger, not to mention the TDR-1s flown from the USS Sable in 1943.

Since its founding in 2017, Anduril has argued that it’s a new type of defense contractor:

Instead of taking orders upfront from the US Department of Defense to fund development of products, Anduril has raised money from venture capitalists, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, that it uses to build weapons it predicts the military will want. Its first product was an automated security tower designed for the US border in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency. The company then began shipping early counter-drone aircraft to the US and UK militaries in 2019.

[…]

Anduril started work two years ago on the Roadrunner, a Looney Tunes-inspired dig at Raytheon’s Coyote, because it said the US would need a lower-cost, more nimble way to combat swarms. The tiny fighter jet has a carbon-fiber body and onboard electronics that let it track objects and perform maneuvers that’d be too dangerous for a human-piloted plane. One of its main advantages is that it can be reused, which makes it easier to launch at the first sign of an unknown object. “If you see a threat, you can launch multiple Roadrunners to go out to do a closer inspection of that threat and be loitering in case they’re needed,” says Christian Brose, the chief strategy officer at Anduril. “You can recall them, land them, refuel them and reuse them, so, essentially, you can launch without regret.”

[…]

To start the test, Anduril sent a fixed-wing drone into the air from a runway behind its compound. The sentry tower quickly detected the aircraft and fed information about its speed and trajectory into the company’s Lattice software. The test pilot received imagery of the drone and then manually marked it as a hostile threat. In an instant, the lid of the Roadrunner launch container opened, the turbines fired up and the craft zipped into the air. It took off toward the target and then began feeding its own sensor data and imagery into Lattice. As the Roadrunner closed in on the target, the test pilot gave a final command to destroy the fixed-wing craft, and, seconds later, the Lattice software displayed information showing that it had been a successful attack.

For the purposes of this demonstration, Anduril used proximity sensors to confirm that it would have taken out the target and didn’t actually blow up the fixed-wing craft. If it had, the Roadrunner wouldn’t have been able to do what it did next: It turned to fly back toward the Anduril compound, shifted into a vertical position and fired its thrusters toward the ground as landing legs kicked out from its side. During a maneuver lasting about a minute, the machine got ever closer to the ground before finally settling gently on a small concrete pad in a fashion very similar to a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket. A future version of the Roadrunner will be able to land even after destroying a target, Luckey says.

The whole idea, as Anduril sees it, is to allow a single operator to manage dozens or more Roadrunners in the field with Lattice providing a full view of the surroundings, targets and weapons available. If a drone swarm approaches a base, Lattice will quickly see and identify all the drones, and, with a couple of clicks, the operator can send Roadrunners off to combat the threat. This is a major change from many of the other counter-drone weapons that require about a dozen people to operate them.

Anduril has raised $2.7 billion to date and is valued at almost $10 billion.

In the late 1950s, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers), the latest sonar could detect a submarine more than twenty miles away, but the best anti-submarine weapons only had a range of a few miles:

The US Navy wanted to bridge the gap with a Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter or DASH. This was a small helicopter capable of carrying a single weapon and dropping it at the required spot, guided by a controller back on board ship.

The DASH was based on a one-man helicopter called a “Rotorcycle” built by Gyrodyne Company. This had two rotor blades rotating in opposite directions for lift, and a propeller for forward motion. The drone version was the size of a small car and weighed just over a ton. By 1963, the US Navy had eighty of them.

[…]

DASH was designed to be expendable; when it dropped a Mk57 nuclear depth charge it would be within the lethal radius of the resulting explosion. The powerful warhead, from five to twenty kilotons, guaranteed that the sub would be destroyed, and losing one drone for one submarine was a good exchange rate. The idea that DASH should carry a non-nuclear homing torpedo and come back afterwards was a case of mission creep; according to the original design it was only supposed to make one flight.

[…]

Executive Officer Phil King of the USS Blue modified a DASH, adding a television camera for reconnaissance and gunnery direction. Known as SNOOPY missions, these involved the DASH flying out to find targets. The operator identified them via the television link, and the destroyer then opened up with its battery of five-inch guns. The drone operator could see where the shells were landing and tell the gunners how to adjust their aim.

Further developments followed, including NITE PANTHER and BLOW LOW versions equipped with additional fuel tanks for longer range, night-vision systems and airborne radar.

The next logical step was to convert the DASH from finding targets to attacking them. NITE GAZELLE, GUN SHIP, and ATTACK DRONE were all individual modified aircraft with a range of weaponry including a six-barreled minigun firing four thousand rounds a minute, grenade launchers, bomblet dispensers and bombs, as well as a laser designator for directing smart bombs. The idea was that drones with guns would deal with the ground defenses, leaving the way clear for the bomber drones to hit targets with pinpoint accuracy.

[…]

“It became quite evident that the Navy no longer wanted DASH and wanted to move onto LAMPS manned helicopters.”

LAMPS was the Light Airborne Multipurpose System, a new manned helicopter that would operate from destroyers and take over the role of DASH. Removing DASH from the picture meant there would be no competition, and nobody would be able to argue that LAMPS was unnecessary.

[…]

The LAMPS project became the SH-60 Sea Hawk, now a multibillion dollar success story.

The GBU-28 is a 5,000-pound laser-guided “bunker busting” bomb:

It was designed, manufactured, and deployed in less than three weeks due to an urgent need during Operation Desert Storm to penetrate hardened Iraqi command centers located deep underground.

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The GBU-28 is unique in that time between the finalized design being approved to its first use in combat test took only two weeks between the 13th and 27th of February 1991.

The name apparently refers to the fact that this Guided Bomb Unit was designed, built, and ready to drop in four weeks:

The initial batch of GBU-28s was built from modified 8 inch/203 mm artillery barrels (principally from deactivated M110 howitzers), but later examples are purpose-built with the BLU-113 bomb body made by National Forge of Irvine, Pennsylvania. They weigh 5,000 pounds (2,268 kg) and contain 630 pounds (286 kg) of Tritonal explosive.

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It proved capable of penetrating over 50 meters (164 ft) of earth or 5 meters (16 ft) of solid concrete; this was demonstrated when a test bomb, bolted to a missile sled, smashed through 22 ft (6.7 m) of reinforced concrete and still retained enough kinetic energy to travel a half-mile downrange.

It looks more like a missile than a bomb:

America’s first attack drones date back to World War 2, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers):

Lt. Commander Delmar Farhney worked with the US Naval Research Laboratory in the 1930s building radio-controlled anti-aircraft targets for the Navy. It was an exciting era to be working with radio, and Farhney was convinced that unmanned aircraft would be devastatingly effective. By 1941, he had extended his work to aircraft capable of accurately dropping torpedoes and depth charges. Incidentally, Farhney was the first to officially refer to his aircraft as “drones,” a usage the military has since tried to suppress.

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He could not use metal, so the TDN-1 was made from plywood.

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Some of the work was carried out by organ makers Wurlitzer, with their long experience at shaping plywood. The TDR-1 had a wingspan of forty-eight feet, a speed of almost a hundred and fifty miles per hour, and awkward tricycle landing gear to give space for a 2,000-pound bomb or torpedo slung beneath the fuselage

As an airplane, the TDR-1 was unremarkable, but it was equipped with a remarkable technological breakthrough: remote control by television. Dr. Vladimir Zworykin of RCA was one of the inventors of the television, and he was keen to put it to use in drones. The prototype cameras weighed over three hundred pounds including the transmitter, but this was shrunk into a miniature system weighing ninety-seven pounds, packed into a box the size of a carry-on suitcase. The picture was monochrome with a respectable resolution (350 lines) and a refresh rate of forty hertz, but the image was poor by modern standards. The drone operator had to work under a black cloth to see the green, five-inch screen clearly in daylight.

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It was controlled from a modified Avenger torpedo bomber flying up to eight miles away. The special Avenger had a crew of four, with pilot, radio operator, and gunner joined by a drone operator. The latter had a joystick, a television screen, and a rotary telephone dial. The dial controlled altitude and released weapons by dialing specific numbers, and the television gave a real sense of being in the drone.

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The drones were eventually allowed to attack a derelict Japanese freighter called Yamazuki Maru off Guadalcanal. Three out of four drones hit the target, and, after some hesitation, the unit was sent into action.

The STAG-1 drones successfully attacked anti-aircraft sites, gun positions, ships, and even a lighthouse. Many of them were used in suicide attacks against challenging targets; the Japanese, not knowing they were unmanned, called them “American kamikazes.”

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The commander of the STAG-1, Lt Commander Robert Jones, was convinced that their successes would prove the value of the drone concept. He believed drones would be an important weapon in the assault on mainland Japan. But the Navy top brass did not agree. The drones might be good for precision attacks, but what were needed were formations of heavy bombers. After the drones were all expended, STAG-1 was reassigned. Commander Jones watched unhappily as the thirty Avenger control planes were dumped overboard in Reynard Sound.

The television technology was a limitation, as anyone who has worked with monochrome images can appreciate. Targets that had a clear silhouette, like a ship on the water, showed up clearly and were easy to hit. But any target surrounded by jungle tended to be invisible on the small screen, as they blended in with the confused background.

(Meanwhile, experiments with larger radio-controlled aircraft as suicide bombers against major targets had limited success. In the most famous disaster, Lt Joseph Kennedy Junior was killed when a “robot” PB4Y-1 bomber blew up prematurely in 1944. This left his younger brother John F Kennedy as the family heir.)

Both Farhney and Jones continued the struggle to get drones recognised, and during the Korean War, unmanned attack planes were tried again. In 1952, six obsolete F6F Hellcats were converted to unmanned operation. They were controlled from nearby AD-2Q Skyraiders, with a television system developed from the one on the TDR-1. Flying from the aircraft carrier USS Boxer, the drones successfully hit a power plant, a railway tunnel, and a bridge. Jones wanted to continue operations and attack the Yalu River bridges, which had survived repeated attacks by US heavy bombers.

Farhney went on to become a Rear Admiral and headed the Navy’s guided missile research effort — and in the 1950s he made a number of public statements about UFOs, which he believed to be craft of extraterrestrial origin.

David Hambling opens Swarm Troopers with a history of drones — which is not a history of steady progress:

History shows that drones tend to be ruthlessly terminated by a military establishment that harbors a ferocious antipathy to anything that dares to compete with manned aircraft.

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The cavalry officers who could not see the advantages of switching to motor vehicles at the start of the twentieth century were making a rational assessment based on the available evidence. Horses had centuries of successful service, while their motorized replacements had always been clumsy and unreliable, especially on rough going.

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Even when they have proven successful, nobody wants them when the war is over: “The great broom of victory swept all new projects into the ashcan of forgotten dreams,” as Commander Delmar Farhney put it.

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Drone prehistory goes back to 1849 and the use of bomb-dropping balloons in the siege of Venice. These were devised by the ingenious Lieutenant Uchatius of the Austrian army. It was not possible to bring siege artillery close enough to the city. Uchatius, better known to history as a photographic pioneer, rigged up hot-air balloons to release small bombs by remote control via a copper wire. About twenty of the balloons were launched. Austrian news reports suggested the bombs would turn Venice into rubble, but it seems that only one or two hit the city. The rest fell into the waters of the Venetian Lido or outside the city entirely.

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In some ways the true inventor of unmanned warfare was Nikola Tesla, who demonstrated a miniature boat controlled by radio waves at Madison Square Garden in 1898. Tesla believed that a version armed with torpedoes could sink battleships and lead to a new age in which wars were fought between machines with no human combatants. As with many of his projects, Tesla never developed the idea beyond the initial demonstration.

Both Britain and the US developed their own drone aircraft in WWI. The British effort was headed by “Professor” Archibald Low — he used the title even though he was not actually a university professor. Low had a tremendous enthusiasm for remote control and was repeatedly distracted from one project by another. His project was known as “AT,” short for Aerial Target, a designation to mislead the enemy into thinking the device was simply a target for anti-aircraft practice. This name proved to be strangely prophetic.

The AT was a wooden biplane with a fourteen-foot wingspan and an explosive warhead, intended for use against both ground targets and zeppelins. It flew well initially, but the program was terminated after an unfortunate incident in 1917 when it was being demonstrated to a group of generals.

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The first AT to be launched in the demonstration suffered engine failure during take-off and flopped into the ground. A Major Bell delivered the verdict quoted at the head of this chapter: “I could throw my bloody umbrella further than that!”

The second machine fared even worse. The operator lost control and the AT flew right at the audience, scattering them before veering off and crashing a few feet away. As a demonstration of controlled flight, it was unconvincing. Nobody present can have thought that it was advisable to put high explosives on drones.

[…]

By 1918, Sperry’s Aerial Torpedo was able to fly along a preset route and dive on a target, delivering a thousand-pound bomb or releasing a torpedo. The weapon was too late to be used in action, and after the war, the US Navy thought drones were useful only for gunnery practice.

[…]

Even when relegated to the ignominious role of targets, drones developed a knack for embarrassing humans. In the 1930s, the British Air Ministry decided to test the claim that battleships were vulnerable to air attack by flying a radio-controlled Fairey Queen target plane against the British Mediterranean fleet. After more than two hours of sustained anti-aircraft fire and numerous passes, the drone was undamaged.

The Royal Navy accepted that its air defenses needed upgrading. Large numbers of drones were built as a result — but only as targets. Nobody thought the test showed that an unmanned aircraft might be an effective weapon.

When it became clear that drones were playing a significant role in Ukraine, I decided to finally catch up on the topic, and I noticed that David Hambling, whose articles seemed reasonable and well written, had written a book on the topic back in 2013, Swarm Troopers: How small drones will conquer the world.

One of the first points he makes in the book is that the Pentagon used to always be 20 years ahead of the private sector:

Smartphone sales have accelerated from zero in 2006 to over a billion smartphones shipped in 2013.

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Billions of dollars are spent annually on advancing technology just for small electronic devices.

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These days soldiers are less likely to be awestruck at the gadgetry they are issued than shocked by how clunky it is compared to the sleek lightweight devices they have at home.

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Selling to the military means extensive testing and certification, with the related delays and costs. Add to this a military bureaucracy that can take years to agree on the specification it wants in the first place, overseen by a political leadership that may cancel, delay, or divert any project depending on the shifting sands of expediency, and you have a recipe for a long time between generations.

Each generation of electronics roughly translates to a doubling of processing power, memory, pixels, or other relevant metrics. If a commercial product goes through a generation every two years, and the military cycle takes six years per generation, then in twelve years the military product goes from being four times as powerful as the competition to a quarter as powerful.

[…]

A drone is simply a smartphone with wings, and the wings are the cheap part.