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D Military drone (UCAV)

Campaigns

How Military drone (UCAV) unfolded as historical sequence, not instruction.

Educational history. Casualty figures are documented ranges. This is not operational advice, a ranking of nations, or a how-to for weapons or coups.

Lightning Bug over Asia; 2001-2010s disclosed US campaigns as a legal-political sequence; later export-war headlines as news history.

Sequences are dated. They are not a targeting syllabus.

Principles

1918 Bug

The idea is older than the jet.

Lightning Bug

The first thick recon file.

2001 public arming

The legal-memory hinge.

Predator

The public English name of the early-2000s long-endurance type. Read as a 1918 experiments; combat reconnaissance 1960s; armed UCAV public era from 2001 concept in From Kettering's 1918 "Bug" to Firebee, Predator-era public debate, and later export politics.

Signature strike

A 2010s legal-political term for strikes on pattern-of-life, not identity -- named as debate. Not a present instruction.

Steps

  1. Kettering Bug

    1918: A flying-bomb experiment at the end of WW1.

    A dated type-history beat of Military drone (UCAV) (1918 experiments; combat reconnaissance 1960s; armed UCAV public era from 2001). No employment, arming, or build steps.

  2. Radioplane / Queen Bee

    1930s-40s: Target drones as a training industry.

    A dated type-history beat of Military drone (UCAV) (1918 experiments; combat reconnaissance 1960s; armed UCAV public era from 2001). No employment, arming, or build steps.

  3. Lightning Bug years

    1964-75: Reconnaissance drones over Asian denied airspace.

    A dated type-history beat of Military drone (UCAV) (1918 experiments; combat reconnaissance 1960s; armed UCAV public era from 2001). No employment, arming, or build steps.

  4. Israeli and other RPVs

    1970s-80s: A separate public file of remotely piloted reconnaissance -- named as history.

    A dated type-history beat of Military drone (UCAV) (1918 experiments; combat reconnaissance 1960s; armed UCAV public era from 2001). No employment, arming, or build steps.

  5. Amber to Predator

    1980s-90s: Karem lineage meets a US procurement story.

    A dated type-history beat of Military drone (UCAV) (1918 experiments; combat reconnaissance 1960s; armed UCAV public era from 2001). No employment, arming, or build steps.

  6. Armed public hinge

    2001: Afghanistan deployment enters English news.

    A dated type-history beat of Military drone (UCAV) (1918 experiments; combat reconnaissance 1960s; armed UCAV public era from 2001). No employment, arming, or build steps.

Diagrams

Military drone (UCAV): 1918 to 2020s
People around Military drone (UCAV)

Limits

Source limits

Figures such as "not a war -- a type; human cost sits in the campaigns that used remotely piloted aircraft" stay in ranges because records are incomplete, political, or still closed. Who was Abraham Karem? is answered as a band.

No how-to

Military drone (UCAV) is systems history and employment as a past fact. This page does not teach manufacturing, arming, aiming, or attack procedures.

Memory bias

English-language fame of Military drone (UCAV) and local memory in From Kettering's 1918 "Bug" to Firebee, Predator-era public debate, and later export politics are not the same map. Kelly Johnson is often the correction the first photograph drops.

Signature-strike debate is a paragraph about law and error ranges, not a technique.

Manned fighters and bombers still flew the larger tonnage in the same years -- keep proportion.

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