Military drone (UCAV) (1930s): Radioplane / Queen Bee · 566

Military drones are older than jet fighters as an idea and younger as a public political problem. Charles Kettering's 1918 "Bug" was a flying bomb that did not decide the First World War. Interwar and 1939-45 target drones (Reginald Denny's Radioplane among them) trained gunners. The type's first large combat-reconnaissance career was the 1960s Ryan Firebee / Lightning Bug family over China, North Vietnam, and other denied airspace -- a CIA and USAF history, not a hobby-kit story.

Abraham Karem's Amber lineage and General Atomics' Predator made a long-endurance remotely piloted aircraft famous. The public armed-UCAV hinge is 2001 in Afghanistan, after earlier Hellfire tests. From then the English-language file is less aerodynamics than law: targeted killing, signature strikes, and the Obama-era disclosed numbers. This page names that debate. It will not teach you to fly, build, spoof, or arm anything.

TechShift is high (90) because staff colleges rewrote "persistence" and "risk to aircrew." Scale is mid-atlas: a type used in many theatres, not a world war. Korean industrial memory is a later KUS and chaebol-UAV chapter -- see Hanwha and the ROK military pages -- not a 1960s Lightning Bug war on the peninsula.