Reconnaissance and intelligence gathering purposes
Although some trace the ancestry of today’s drones back to the V-1 rockets (‘doodle bugs’) of the Second World War, or even to the use of hot air balloons laden with explosives in the middle of the 19th Century, the real origins of today’s drones lie in the development of the first recoverable and reusable radio-controlled aircraft in the 1930s. The Royal Navy, looking for aircraft to shoot at for gunnery practice, developed out of the De Havilland Tiger Moth a remote-controlled aircraft dubbed ‘the Queen Bee’. Over 400 of these were built and used for target practice by the Royal Navy in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Similarly (and possibly from this aircraft although that is disputed) the US developed a radio-controlled drone for gunnery practice in the late-30s.
After the Second World War, the US wanted to develop a new drone for air-to-air and ground-to-air target practice and the US company Teledyne-Ryan won the contract with its Firebee UAV. Used as a target drone from early sixties, the Firebee evolved slowly through various modifications until it began to be used solely for reconnaissance and intelligence gathering purposes. A model specifically developed for this purpose, named the Lightening Bug, was used in Vietnam and South Asia in the mid to late 1960s At the end of the Vietnam war 33 were given to Israel where they were used to undertake surveillance missions during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The next generation of UAVs would be, as Bill Yenne author of Birds of Prey, a history of US drones, put it, the offspring not of the American initiatives of the 1960s, but of the Israeli initiatives of the 1980s. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, while the US lost interest in drones for intelligence gathering and surveillance purposes (preferring to invest time and money in satellites and hi-resolution imagining) Israel took the lead in drone development, building a number of different surveillance drones. Israeli sold several to the Pentagon, including a drone called the Pioneer which could be launched from a ship or from military base. The US quickly put the Pioneer to use during the First Gulf War where it was used in more than 300 missions.