Chapter 1: How are drones reshaping modern warfare?
We seek to leave you seeing the world anew. Radiolab adventures right on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get podcasts. When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently spoke to the Senate Armed Services Committee, he talked about the massive amounts of money the U.S. military wants to dedicate to its drone program.
You're looking at $54 billion in the FY27 budget dedicated to drone dominance. Drone dominance isn't just a buzzword. It's the Defense Department initiative to scale up its drone program. And the money being requested has been called, quote, the largest single commitment to autonomous warfare in history. In other words, drone AI.
Drones have reshaped warfare and given all kinds of countries a powerful weapon. President Trump attended the dignified transfer of the remains of the first Americans killed in the war. On the day after the U.S. and Israel launched war against Iran, an Iranian drone made it past air defenses in Kuwait, striking a U.S. command center at a civilian port.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of drone dominance in military budgets?
Six Army reservists killed by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait. They were the first U.S. casualties in the war. Since then, thousands of drone strikes have been launched throughout the Middle East. And it's catching the U.S. off guard. The Pentagon has begun a huge push to buy hundreds of thousands of small attack drones.
They were once the domain of major militaries, but they are now spreading rapidly. They are cheap, efficient, and easy to dispatch. Now the fastest growing sector in the Ukrainian economy. Russia, which was already using AI to automate how its drones pick targets, now has begun experimenting with fully autonomous systems.
Even in the war between Ukraine and Russia, drones have allowed a much smaller, less powerful country to defend against a superior one. Although most of the hundreds of thousands of drone strikes have come from Russia, in some places a nightly occurrence, Ukraine has been able to strike back with accuracy and increased cadence.
Drones are responsible for about three-quarters of that war's casualties. Drones are also being used in civil wars in Myanmar and Sudan. This year, there's been a surge in attacks. And while many drones never reach their destinations, intercepted by intricate defense systems, those that do can demolish anything from a single soldier to entire bridges and beyond.
And the ability to be more precise than, say, carpet bombing, plays into a larger narrative that many politicians on all sides sell to us, that somehow technology can make war less ugly, less costly, and more distant. This is what war historian James Rogers calls war by remote control. And that remoteness isn't just in the technology, but it's also in our minds as well.
Because no one's going to write a letter to the family of a drone if it gets shot down. It is a robot in the sky. That is the point. It has zero risk of taking a drone out to American military lives. Now, of course, it has lots of risk to civilians within that theatre of conflict.
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Chapter 3: How have drones changed the dynamics of warfare in Ukraine and Russia?
But it means that you have that public disconnect and that democratic disconnect to the conflict of which you're involved in and what you're waging. As more and more countries embrace this war by remote control, we have to confront some difficult questions. What is the cost of distance? How does it change the way we as a society think about killing?
And what happens when precision attacks go wrong? So on this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're exploring the past, present, and future of drone warfare. Because one thing is clear. This is just the beginning. This is Tori in Corvallis, Oregon, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. This message comes from Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian.
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Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Hey, Rand here. We want to try something new on the show, and we need your help. Have you ever had a question about something in the news or wondered why something is the way it is?
Anything from big geopolitical things like how Russia's Vladimir Putin came to power to everyday quirky things like how did astrology make such a strong comeback? We already have an episode about both, by the way, if you really are wondering. We would love to hear your questions. Send them to us at throughline at npr.org or call 872-588-8805 and leave a voicemail.
And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. And thanks. Part 1. Destroy Everything. On a cold, cloudy day in December of 1903, on the outer banks of North Carolina, two brothers made history. The world's first airplane, created by Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur, is about to take flight.
Here at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, this primitive kite made aviation history. Wilbur Wright had tried and failed to pilot their newly invented flying machine just a few days earlier. So on this next attempt, his brother Orville geared up, braved the wind, and climbed into the flyer. With this first catapulted takeoff, man's age-old dream of flight became a reality.
The invention of aviation would change the world forever. It would change travel. It would change trade. And it would change war. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.
But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy. On April 2nd, 1917, less than 15 years after the Wright brothers took that first flight, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to formally enter World War I. I shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.
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Chapter 4: What ethical considerations arise from drone warfare?
And as this generation comes home, this lost generation, as it's often called, you have mass public outcry. You have protests in the streets. Why is it that America is sending its troops, its best, its brightest, its youngest, its sons, over abroad to fight these foreign wars? There wasn't the public appetite for this. This is James Rogers.
He's a war historian who's written several books about drones, including Drones, What Everyone Needs to Know. And there's a branch of the military, a fledgling branch of the military that starts to listen to this public outcry. And this is the U.S. Army Air Service. The American people made it clear that they weren't going to stand for so many casualties.
And so the military responded, not by deciding to fight fewer wars, but how to fight wars with fewer deaths. A novel pursuit of how to fight ethically. And this brand new branch of the military, the Air Service, thought, well, planes could help.
They're like, well, if we don't want to send our troops on the ground into these trench warfare battlefields, then maybe air power can provide us with an alternative. And they come up with this idea of instead of going through the enemy, you go over the enemy. over the enemy with planes and bomb-specific targets that were crucial to the enemy war effort. Maybe weapons depots or industrial sites.
And actually, they ended up using the term precision bombing doctrine. So this term precision goes all the way back to 1917. And here's how it worked. You fly over the enemy, you bomb their ammunition factories, you bomb their oil refineries, you bomb the places they make tanks, you bomb the places they make rubber, you bomb these things that weaken their ability to fight on the battlefield.
And that means that when you eventually do send troops in to face the enemy, you won't have that entrenched bloody muddy warfare where it's a stalemate for years on end because the enemy has nothing to fight with so you move through and you move through swiftly to victory because air power allowed you to do it
Because World War I sparked a public outcry over the hundreds of thousands of American dead and wounded, the pressure was on politicians to figure out a way to avoid this from ever happening again. And they saw precision bombing as the golden ticket. And so quite a lot of money then goes into developing technologies that will allow this to happen.
Money that funded the first iteration of the drone. Although it was perhaps more accurately known as the aerial torpedo. And this was the Kettering bug. The Kettering bug.
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Chapter 5: What historical context led to the development of drone technology?
And this was invented by somebody called Charles Kettering, who was responsible for inventing all sorts of strange things. And it was a partner project with someone called H.H. Arnold. H.H. Arnold, one of the first ever military personnel who was taught to fly by some of the only people who knew how to fly. The Wright brothers. Like, this is how early we're talking here.
This is fledgling air power. I mean, the planes have only just taken off the ground. And now we're already thinking how to use them and how to bomb and how to bomb in more of an ethical way, I suppose, if you can call it that. So 1917 is when Charles Kettering developed this first drone prototype or aerial torpedo. And as many male inventors like to do, named it after himself, the Kettering bug.
And what made this plane so drone-like? There was no pilot. It was about the size of a normal single engine plane. It was set on rails. It had a Sperry gyroscope to keep it stable in the air. It had a motor. And so it would take off in the air off these rails. It would fly straight as the crow flies. And then once that motor had spun its certain amount of revolutions, it would shut off.
Because technically then that would be when it was above the target. At that moment, the wings would fold up against the body of the plane. And then it would swoop down on its enemy, on its prey, like an eagle. And it was automated, right? Yeah. Wow. It was as high-tech as you could get in 1917-18. Which, turns out, wasn't high-tech enough. The bug had some bugs. It was a complete flop.
In reality, it was worse than useless. It would flail around in the sky and it would even sometimes turn back on its own people who were testing it. So it was really unpredictable. But that almost doesn't matter in what we're talking about because what matters is the intention behind it and the intention there.
was to separate the human from the practice of killing, to separate American troops from having to be sacrificed in war and to be put at risk by deploying robots, remote systems, systems that could be sent off to go and kill the enemy without putting American service personnel at risk. And that was the birth of this idea. The Kettering bug was revolutionary, but at the same time, a failure.
The idea of a plane without a pilot that shed its wings and turned into a torpedo that could hit a precise target was literally too good to be true. But lessons were learned. They learned that they had to use piloted aircraft to do the bombing because you needed the pilot to guide the aircraft. That in order to be precise, you still needed a human being to make the call.
You needed a person behind the robot. And what they did actually was they invented a thing called the Norden bombsight. And this was by an engineer called Carl Norden. Right in time for the U.S. to use this technology in World War II. The Norden bombsight wasn't a drone, but was basically an early analog computer that helped the pilot drop bombs with more precision.
You could put in wind speed, you could put in altitude, the velocity, and it would compute when you should drop the bomb. And so when you were over the enemy cities and you had your target, it would tell the bombardier when they needed to release the bomb. Strategically, this was important.
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Chapter 6: How did drones evolve during the Vietnam War?
There's not much precision in Nepal and there's not much precision in these vast conscripted wars in which thousands of US troops are sent into this battle.
I can't say that I'm scared of stuff, but I'm scared. I mean, after a while, you know it's going to come. You can't do nothing about it. And you just look to God. It's about the only thing you can do.
There's one side where precision missiles continue to be developed, and there's another side where drones continue to be tentatively developed. Some of the most remarkable contributions to aerial reconnaissance during the Vietnam War came from an unusual assortment of remotely piloted vehicles.
And those remotely piloted vehicles, those drones flying high above the thick rainforest canopies of Vietnam, became known as... The Lightning Bug. The Ryan Firebee drone, otherwise known as the Lightning Bug. The lightning bug was a small aircraft, so small that it would be attached to a much larger one. And once that was in the sky, the lightning bug would be deployed and split off from it.
They were used to take pictures over enemy territory. And then the drones would swing back round and they would crash land almost. At a designated location and time, the drone shut off its engine and deployed a parachute system.
And then they would be picked up by Intelligence Corps and then that film would be taken back to US bases and it would be processed and pieced together and then you would try and create a picture of where the enemy were. They were also used, quite interestingly, as almost wingmen to crewed aircraft, to bombers going in. They would fly off the wing of them to draw enemy fire.
They would be like a deflective shield for aircraft. It would look like more aircraft were coming in, and so it would hopefully protect the central aircraft going in and fulfilling its mission. They were disposable in the air in order to try and reduce the risk to American pilots' lives. The US military believed the lightning bug drones saved American lives, and so they called it a success.
The only problem was, initially, the lightning bugs had a short lifespan. They weren't particularly reliable. They would crash an awful lot and you would just lose drones. And that's why, you know, well over a thousand of them were used during Vietnam because they just churned them out almost disposably to try and use them for those intelligence and surveillance gathering uses.
While more than 200 drones were ultimately shot down, their use prevented the loss of at least that many reconnaissance crews, and undoubtedly many more.
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Chapter 7: What role did drones play in the Iraq War and Operation Desert Storm?
It's here that you start to hear stories coming out that when Saddam's troops saw drones flying high above them, they knew that it meant certain death and certain destruction was coming. And so they tried to surrender to the drones in the sky. The live video feedback showed five Iraqi soldiers waving white flags as they surrendered to the drone.
It's the first time in the history of warfare that you had a human try and surrender to a robot. During Operation Desert Storm, precision weapons seemed to do their job. The war only lasted about a month. There was no massive protest movement like Vietnam. And the U.S. military lost 143 soldiers, a relatively low number. And then something happened that would totally change the game.
You start to see this coupling of the lethal targeting and the utility of the drone itself. And this continues. Now, drones became armed with missiles. The angel in the sky watching out for soldiers had now become the angel of death.
The Air Force's Predator system, its unmanned reconnaissance and strike plane, hunts enemies covertly from the sky, attacks on commands received by satellite, and removes enemy leadership with precise geographic target information. And so you have the merging of the drone and the precision missile into one integrated system.
But it's good enough if we see a truck or an HVT, a high value target that we need to prosecute immediately, that we would be able to at least scare them a lot. It's a precision asset and it's very, very accurate. With this new weapon, some in the U.S. military believed they'd fulfilled the promise of the Kettering bug, the Norden bombsight, and the lightning bug.
It was the culmination of generations of research and development. And it suddenly gave the U.S. high command a godlike ability to stalk enemies and kill them at a moment's notice. You do definitely get the sense that you are sort of a guardian angel. You're like an eye in the sky for them. You're sort of their third eye, if you will. When we come back, the drone wars begin.
Hi, my name is Lindsay. I'm calling from unceded Duwamish territory, and you are listening to ThruLine from NPR. I love the show. I've been binging all of the episodes for probably two weeks now. The ones that I think I'm not going to be that interested in are always the ones that I end up being the most interested in and learning the most from.
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Chapter 8: What are the future implications of drone warfare on international relations?
On October 7, 2001, a plane glided in the sky over the city of Kandahar, Afghanistan. It looked down on Earth like a giant hawk circling its prey. But there was nothing alive inside it, no pilot. This was an MQ-1A Predator drone, controlled by operators thousands of miles away. It was a 27-foot war machine carrying Hellfire missiles, and it was looking for a target.
It flew so high that it would have been virtually undetectable by anyone looking up at the night sky. Almost one month had passed since the U.S. was attacked on 9-11 by al-Qaeda, a terrorist group based in Afghanistan. The Taliban, the rulers of Afghanistan, were harboring al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, and it appeared they were in the crosshairs of the U.S. military.
But on the ground on October 7th, the stillness of a Kandahar fall night would tell you nothing of the things that were to come. Yet. The target for the Predator drone was a man named Mullah Omar. He was the leader of the Taliban government. The US military thought, maybe if we take him out, the Taliban will fall apart. This was it. This is what the drone was built to do.
Use precision bombing to take out the leader of the enemy and use limited numbers of special forces fighters and their allies to avoid a costly full-scale invasion, saving thousands of American lives. Mullah Omar sat in a building with no idea that a predator drone was above him, watching and waiting for the command to fire. U.S.
military and intelligence staff were keeping tabs on him through a satellite feed from thousands of miles away. But what they were seeing wasn't some crystal clear image of the ground. Nothing even close to that. Back at that point, it's like viewing the world through a kind of grainy straw, I guess.
You're looking through a straw at a small part of that country, focused in on what these people are doing, but you can't really tell. You're kind of just filling in the gaps. Even with this fill-in-the-gaps type of information, the U.S. military personnel still had to make a call. They had to decide where the drone should shoot its missile. They take the strike...
But they end up blowing up a truck near to his compound, sends loads of smoke into the sky, loads of dust into the sky, and Mullah Omar escapes. Just think of the implications for that. What different war would we have had if a drone had taken out the head of the Taliban on the first day of the war in Afghanistan? the predator drone strike missed its mark.
Mullah Omar would live, and the US ground invasion of Afghanistan would follow. But this wasn't seen as just a failure. No, in fact, the drone program continued. So this tells us that many of the military personnel in that room, the officers, drone operators, and intelligence experts, must have on some level realized that they just witnessed the beginning of a new era in warfare.
I've spoken to a few of those who were in the room on that first strike. And they were in the room thousands of kilometres away, watching the video feed. This is that first case of remote warfare. And you can't escape feeling that that is a fundamental revolutionary change in war. It's that achievement of that longstanding U.S. Air Force ambition that goes back to U.S.
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