History of unmanned combat aerial vehicles
[7] He drew up plans and by 1973 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) built two prototypes called "Prairie" and "Calera".
In practice, shooting at a specific ground target is much trickier than flying over an area and taking pictures, and it wasn't until the 1970s that the US Air Force seriously experimented with the concept.
HAVE LEMON involved a number of Ryan Firebees equipped with a weapons pylon under each wing, a forward-looking TV camera, and a datalink mounted in a pod on top of the vertical tailplane.
These UAVs were given the designation "BGM-34A" and used beginning in late 1971 to perform remote-control strikes on simulated air-defense sites with Maverick missiles and HOBOS TV-guided glide bombs.
However, in the summer of 2003 a UAV "airshow" of sorts was conducted, in which a Firebee was displayed carrying two Hellfire anti-armor missiles, as well as a pod for dispensing remote battlefield sensors.
[8] On 10 May 1971, the MASTACS exercise was ready to commence off the coast of California, against two USN F-4 Phantom IIs flown by Vietnam combat experienced pilots.
No restrictions were placed on the F-4 pilots, the air battle was to be a "no holds barred contest",[9] with the very real possibility of a Phantom being rammed by a UAV as it maneuvered during the dogfight.
The first action was a head-on maneuver, as the Phantom lined up for the kill, the UAV (drone) pulled a high-G turn and flew over the F-4's canopy.
[10] 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.
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.
[11][12][13] The images and radar decoying provided by these UAVs helped Israel to completely neutralize the Syrian air defences in Operation Mole Cricket 19 at the start of the 1982 Lebanon War, resulting in no pilots downed.
[15] Over the next two decades, more reliable communications links were developed, automated systems came into much wider use, and the military learned to be much more comfortable with such new technologies.
One UCAV could carry a number of smart GPS-guided munitions and hit multiple targets on a single sortie, and then return home to be used again.
UCAVs missions would be conducted by an operator in a ground vehicle, warship, or control aircraft over a high speed digital data link.
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.
After the Gulf War successfully demonstrated its utility, global militaries invested widely in the domestic development of combat UAVs.
The goal of the J-UCAS effort was to select a single contractor to provide from 10 to 12 machines for operational evaluation in the 2007-8 time frame.
[29] Belarusian partisans in BYPOL also claimed to have used drones in a successful attack on a Russian military aircraft at the Machulishchy airfield in February 2023.
[32] Some commercial drones such as DJI Mavic and Phantom have been modified to carry light explosives for combat missions in recent wars.
Some commercial drones such as DJI Mavic and Phantom have been modified to carry light explosives for combat missions in recent wars.
