Up in the Sky, An Unblinking Eye

This revolution in unmanned warfare has been a long time coming, but it's been spurred by the unique demands of Iraq. Even in the first years after the fall of Baghdad, drones were little more than a cool toy or a battlefield accessory. Special Operations Forces used them for high-priority missions, but they were not considered essential to the war effort. Demand has grown from the ground up, dramatically, as commanders and grunts recognized their usefulness. "We can see into an alleyway, see teams organizing an attack," says Lt. Col. Paul V. Marnon, a battalion commander for the 3CAB. Marnon flies Apache attack helicopters and gets most of his recon and targeting information from the unmanned craft. Over the past two months, he says, 90 percent of his "kills" have been aided by UAVs.

The inability to deploy UAVs fast enough to meet the demand has been a source of frustration to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Flying down to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama late last month, Gates scribbled this paragraph into a prepared speech: "I've been wrestling for months to get more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets into the theater. Because people were stuck in the old ways of doing things, it's been like pulling teeth." Gates pointedly attacked what he calls "Next-War-itis," the propensity of the Defense establishment to prepare for some future Big War—a massive, high-tech conflict against a rival nation-state, tank against tank, ship against ship—rather than coping with the real, messy wars of the present. Besieged with frantic requests from commanders on the ground for more UAVs, Gates recently approved a $240 million boost in spending on reconnaissance surveillance craft, including a stopgap plan to hire private contractors to fly light aircraft, specially equipped with cameras and other sensors, over Iraq and Afghanistan.

The harsh necessities of war and an impatient civilian leader prodding the balky brass—that has been the history of UAV development for decades. Pilotless drones have always been a bastard stepchild of the military, with the institutional bias favoring "manned platforms." (The best way to advance in any service is to see combat—in the Air Force, it's the flyboys who get ahead.) The history of the UAV is deliciously quirky, and a reminder that innovation often comes from mavericks operating outside the military-industrial complex. The story really begins in a factory in southern California in the middle of World War II.

Marilyn Monroe was only the second most-important discovery at the Van Nuys plant of the Radioplane Co. in 1944. The young Norma Jean Dougherty was working at the plant near Los Angeles when a photographer for the Army magazine Yank spotted her, photographed her and told her she might have a future as a model. Radioplane's real contribution to the war effort was the drone—unmanned aerial craft that could be steered by radio signals.

Initially, the drones were used for antiaircraft target practice. In the 1950s, Gen. Curtis LeMay, founding father of the Strategic Air Command—America's first nuclear strike force—acquired drones as decoys to protect his B-52 bombers from Soviet air defenses. Then around 1960, a young Japanese-American engineer named Norman Sakamato began pushing a bright new idea: that the drones be equipped with a camera in the nose and used for aerial reconnaissance and espionage. (It is one of the many ironies of the history of the UAV that the man some call the "godfather" of drones spent the first two years of World War II with his family in a Japanese internment camp in Arizona.)

At first, the military did not seem much interested. But then a manned U-2 spy plane was shot down by Soviet-made anti-aircraft missiles over Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis, pushing the superpowers to the brink. Suddenly, the Pentagon took notice; Sakamato's company, Ryan-Teledyne, was soon awash in contracts for a drone called the Firebee. By the Vietnam War, more than 1,000 Firebees were flying over enemy territory on photo-reconnaissance missions or jamming radars.