Inside Vietnam's Forgotten Drone War (msn)
David Axe 21 hrs ago
2 Comments
On Oct. 7, 2001, a U.S. Air Force MQ-1 Predator drone flying over Afghanistan fired a missile at a building CIA analysts suspected of housing Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The Predator missed and instead struck a vehicle, killing several of the mullah's bodyguards.
The botched Predator strike was hardly the first time U.S. military and intelligence agencies had sent aerial robots into battle. As early as World War II, the military tinkered with remote-controlled bombers.
And drones played an important—and today largely unheralded—role in the bloody, two-decade U.S. air war over Vietnam and surrounding countries in the 1960s and ’70s. Drone aircraft spotted targets for manned U.S. bombers, jammed North Vietnamese radars, and scattered propaganda leaflets, among other missions.
My new nonfiction book Drone War: Vietnam explores that obscure chapter of history. Drone War: Vietnam is based on military records, official histories, and published firsthand accounts from early drone operators, as well as a survey of existing scholarship.
The Ryan Aeronautical Model 147 Lightning Bug subsonic drone, a mainstay of the Vietnam air war, launched in mid-air from a DC-130 motherplane, navigated along preprogrammed checkpoints while snapping photos and, at the end of its mission, popped a parachute and floated toward the ground. A helicopter buzzed in to retrieve it.
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more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/inside-vietnams-forgotten-drone-war/ar-AANiRTH
Already read something about this in Skunk Works. Truly amazing how advanced these things got without civilians knowing anything about the program. OTOH, DUers will remember that the first experiments with drones date back to WWI, and, in 1940, it was a "semipiloted" drone bomber that killed Joe Kennedy Jr.
