Main articles:
History of unmanned combat aerial vehicles,
Drone warfare, and
Civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes
1972:
Ryan Firebee with 2 Maverick missiles
One of the earliest explorations of the concept of the combat drone was by
Lee de Forest, an early inventor of radio devices, and
U. A. Sanabria, a TV engineer. They presented their idea in an article in a 1940 publication of
Popular Mechanics.
[7] The modern military drone as known today was the brainchild of John Stuart Foster Jr., a nuclear physicist Lawrence Radiation Laboratory).
[8] In 1971, Foster was a
model airplane hobbyist and had the idea this hobby could be applied to building weapons.
[8] He drew up plans and by 1973
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) built two prototypes called "Prairie" and "Calera". They were powered by a modified lawn-mower engine and could stay aloft for two hours while carrying a 28-pound (13 kg) load.
[8]
In the 1973
Yom Kippur War,
Israel used unarmed U.S.
Ryan Firebee target drones to spur
Egypt into firing its entire arsenal of anti-aircraft missiles.
[9] This mission was accomplished with no injuries to Israeli pilots, who soon exploited the depleted Egyptian defences. In the late 1970s and 80s, Israel developed the
Scout and the
Pioneer, which represented a shift toward the lighter, glider-type model of UAV in use today. Israel pioneered the use of
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for real-time surveillance, electronic warfare, and decoys.
[10][11][12] The images and radar decoying provided by these UAVs helped Israel to completely neutralize the Syrian
air defenses in
Operation Mole Cricket 19 at the start of the
1982 Lebanon War, resulting in no pilots downed.
[13]
In the late 1980s,
Iran deployed a drone armed with six
RPG-7 rounds in the
Iran–Iraq War.
[14]
Impressed by Israel's success, the US quickly acquired a number of UAVs, and its Hunter and Pioneer systems are direct derivatives of Israeli models. The first 'UAV war' was the first
Persian Gulf War: according to a May 1991 Department of the Navy report: "At least one UAV was airborne at all times during Desert Storm." After the Persian Gulf War successfully demonstrated its utility, global militaries invested widely in the domestic development of combat UAVs.
[15] The first "kill" by an American UAV was on October 7, 2001, in
Kandahar.
[16]
In recent years, the U.S. has increased its use of
drone strikes against targets in Pakistan and elsewhere as part of the
War on Terror. In January 2014, it was estimated that 2,400 people had died from U.S. drone strikes in five years.
[17] In June 2015, the total death toll of U.S. drone strikes was estimated to exceed 6,000.
[18]
In 2020, Turkey became the first country to use UCAVs in a large, coordinated attack on a conventional battlefield when they attacked forces in Syria. They were used to attack enemy positions, to provide cover for ground forces and to scout for artillery.
[19] Drones were used extensively in the
2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
[20] Azerbaijan's use of cheaper Turkish
TB2 drones was seen as crucial to their victory against the Armenian forces.
[21] Drones were also used extensively during the
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
[22] Usage of drones offers