The modern combat drone began with a physicist's model airplane hobby
In 1971 a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who flew model planes for fun wondered whether his hobby could become a weapon. John Stuart Foster Jr. sketched plans, and within two years a defence research agency had built two prototypes running on modified lawn-mower engines. Military aviation has not been the same since.
Those first test craft, named Prairie and Calera, could stay up for two hours carrying a 28-pound load. The notion itself was older. A 1940 issue of Popular Mechanics featured a radio-commanded vehicle dreamed up by Lee de Forest, a pioneer of radio control, and U. A. Sanabria, an engineer working in early television. Foster's contribution was turning the idea into hardware that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency could actually fly.
A combat drone, or unmanned combat aerial vehicle, differs from its cousins in a specific way. Unlike a surveillance drone it carries weapons such as missiles or bombs, and unlike a one-way attack drone it is meant to fire, loiter for long periods and return to base. Because nobody sits in the cockpit, designers can drop the life support, seats and controls a pilot needs, so the aircraft ends up lighter and smaller than a crewed plane lifting the same payload. Most are still flown remotely by human operators over radio links.
Their military value was demonstrated in the 1991 Gulf War, sometimes called the first drone war; a Navy report noted that at least one unmanned aircraft was aloft throughout Desert Storm. After that, armed forces around the world poured money into building their own.
The current push is toward autonomy. Newer machines can merge sensor data, pick out targets and replan missions on the fly, easing the load on their operators. One emerging role is the loyal wingman, a drone that flies alongside a crewed fighter and takes on the riskiest jobs, such as scouting ahead or jamming enemy electronics. That has in turn triggered a race to build jammers, directed-energy weapons and other anti-drone defences.
Source: Unmanned combat aerial vehicle
