From the Kettering Bug and Firebee to the public UCAV era -- a history of remotely piloted combat aircraft, not a flying or building guide.
Educational history. Casualty figures are documented ranges. This is not operational advice, a ranking of nations, or a how-to for weapons or coups.
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.
Deep introduction
The UCAV is a hundred-year hardware story that only became a civilian argument when the public learned names, videos, and body-count ranges.
Kettering's Bug, the British Queen Bee (the word "drone" in some English tellings), and Radioplane as a Hollywood-adjacent industry. The Second World War used these as targets and as experiments, not as a decisive arm.
No airframe drawing belongs here.
Ryan's Lightning Bug reconnaissance drones over Asia in the 1960s-70s are the first thick operational file. Loss rates were high; the point was photographs without a prisoner.
Vietnam's manned air war remains the larger story on that war's page.
Karem to General Atomics to a 2001 armed deployment is the English newsreel. John P. Jumper and CIA directors sit in the political paragraph. The 2010s "drone war" essays are a legal-memory industry.
No sensor-to-shooter diagram, no frequency, no airframe how-to.
Later states bought or built remotely piloted types. ROK programmes (KUS family and chaebol lines) are an industrial-national chapter -- history of procurement, not a flight school.
Hanwha's UAV work belongs on the firm page as business history.
Dated history of Military drone (UCAV) (1918 experiments; combat reconnaissance 1960s; armed UCAV public era from 2001) in From Kettering's 1918 "Bug" to Firebee, Predator-era public debate, and later export politics.
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02Historical forces and institutions of Military drone (UCAV) -- not a live order of battle.
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03How Military drone (UCAV) unfolded as historical sequence, not instruction.
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04Human and material cost of Military drone (UCAV), as documented ranges.
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05People and debates around Military drone (UCAV).
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06Afterlives and unresolved questions of Military drone (UCAV).
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07Maps, portrayals and rituals of Military drone (UCAV).
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