One of the most research and pursued military technologies over the past decade has been the unmanned aerial vehicle better known simply as a drone most people are familiar with the images of the Reaper or predator drone armed with missiles that have been on the frontline to the war on terror but drones have been a part of warfare for a long time the first recorded use of drones in warfare was in 1849 when Austria launched 200 pilotless bomb carrying hot air balloons against Venice the technology quickly grew during World War two with radio-controlled aircraft
The US Army Air Force built tens of thousands of drones most of which were used as aerial targets like the oq2 and the PQ or team others included radio and television-controlled aircraft armed with bombs like modified versions of the b-17 and the b-24
The Cold War saw the rise of reconnaissance drones UAVs like the Ryan fire beat through several thousand missions over Vietnam returning imagery of enemy locations and today we now have drones with many of the same capabilities as piloted aircraft and some even more modern drones can loiter over our target for hours and return valuable intelligence they can be armed with and fire guided missiles and they can be just as stealthy as the most advanced stealth aircraft like the f-35
Top 10 Unmanned combat aerial vehicle / military drones List
Also, a whole new generation of drones is being developed to take off and land on aircraft carriers
Technology is advanced rapidly during the war and UAVs are no exception. At the beginning of the war on terror, the Predator drone was simply a reconnaissance platform in its infancy in a few short years dozens of armed predators were conducting airstrikes on targets throughout the Middle East and newer more capable drones like the Reaper and the Global Hawk have been deployed and seen frontline service
Stealth drones have also been developed like the x-47b and the RQ-170
Other nations have also invested in UAV research China has been developing many different drones like the sword Dragon and the sky wing the French company Dassault are working on a low observable unmanned aircraft called the neuron the UK with Tyrannis and a wide variety of drones coming out of Iran
It is also worth noting that a lot of these aircraft are so-called flying wing designs similar to the b-2 drones and have very few options in terms of countermeasures if they’re attacked so it appears that many manufacturers are favoring the more stealthy designs in order to increase survivability over hostile territory
While these drones offer a wide variety and capabilities at a much lower price they also come with risk drones with stealth coating and advanced technologies can easily fall into enemy hands
During the Cold War the supersonic d-21 drone went off course while over China and crashed in the Soviet Union the Russians were able to recover the parts and utilize the advanced technology themselves
In 2011 a then top-secret state-of-the-art UAV the RQ-170 went missing over Iran. It was revealed that the Iranian cyber warfare unit was able to bring down the aircraft and land it relatively intact they were able to extract footage taken by the UAV and quickly work to reverse-engineer the craft and produce their own variant.
Hacking is a major threat to modern drones since there is no pilot on board the aircraft needs to send and receive signals in order to operate these signals can’t be spoofed and manipulated by the enemy into doing things that it would not otherwise do
These larger UAVs are the ones that we are most familiar with but there is a whole new category that is quickly growing that is a smaller much cheaper drone commonly used by enthusiasts which are being modified for military purposes
In 2004 Hezbollah first used these drones to conduct reconnaissance and to carry explosives over the border into neighboring Israel
Both sides in the Ukrainian Civil War have utilized these drones to gather intelligence on enemy locations and the US Russia China and dozens of other countries quickly began developing these smaller drones to help their soldiers gain situational and battlefield awareness
The relatively low cost of these weapons compared to expensive spy satellites and manned aircraft has allowed smaller nations and even terrorist groups to develop capabilities once only afforded by superpowers these drones have the potential to become a massive threat to the defender of the fact that billions of dollars worth of the most advanced technology could possibly be at risk from a 200-dollar
