The Drone Revolution: Warfare’s Latest Game of Technological Ping-Pong
The basic idea of unmanned warfare actually dates back more than a century. During World War I, armies experimented with remotely controlled aircraft and explosive “aerial torpedoes.” They were crude and unreliable, but the concept was already there: send a machine instead of a pilot into harm’s way. Through the Cold War the idea matured into reconnaissance drones used primarily for surveillance. The United States began using early UAVs over Vietnam and later refined the concept in the 1990s and early 2000s.