Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
Every once in a while, the most effective piece of military technology on the battlefield isn’t some billion-dollar weapons system. Sometimes it’s a $200 hobby airplane ordered off Amazon by a bored cavalry officer with an idea.
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.
Chemical weapons are called the poor man’s atom bomb. The drone is becoming the poor man’s carrier. A three-year-old meme on Facebook discussing the death of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani shows how force projection has changed in the last few decades: Sucks to be him. And I don’t question there were a few more people in the loop …