It took a hundred years to go from hot air balloons strapped with incendiaries to a fully remote radio-controlled plane. The next 75 years seem like small advancements based on appearance and overall purpose, but the technological gap is just as wide if not even more so since the end of WWII.

Constant governance and surveillance overtook the world. As weapons progressively grew and grew to the point of the atomic bomb, the true magnitude of what was created was experienced in tragic events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The U.S. and just about every other country was paranoid, and UAVs were a reliable way to cross borders and learn more about a country’s current standing.

The drone was a perfect piece of technology encapsulating events like the Cold War, hidden threats invading not to initiate combat, but to get as close to that boundary as possible. Several Americans were shot down in U-2 spy planes over Russia and China, which began UAV programs to better the technology and allow for more intensive reconnaissance.

As interest in UAVs grew, the market within the military expanded over the next several decades, becoming a top priority for every military. by 2013, over 50 countries had acquired or built their own UAVs, like Israel’s Tadiran Mastiff, a revolution in 1975 with live-video streaming capabilities to it’s long battery life. Drones guaranteed a minimum of one person saved from potentially deadly situations.

Israeli Tadiran Mastiff

AAI RQ-2 Pioneer

Captain Brian P. Tice of the United States Airforce expanded on the scope of drones in this quote from the 1990’s:

“When used, UAVs should generally perform missions characterized by the three Ds: dull, dirty, and dangerous. Dull means long-endurance missions which, in the future, could continue for several days. Dirty means jobs such as detecting chemical agents and their intensity; certainly a good manned mission to avoid if possible. Dangerous missions for unmanned vehicles are numerous and growing. Two that come to mind, however, are reconnaissance deep behind enemy lines and suppression of enemy air defenses.” – Captain Brian P. Tice of the United States Airforce.

This is now the epitome of modern warfare. Warfare is all three Ds for individuals in the military at some point or all at once, and a drone can solve each one. The Russo-Ukrainian War has relied so heavily on drone warfare with Ukraine standing their ground almost purely due to drones and the proliferation of them as they leaked into the commercial world.

In 2013, DJI released the Phantom model, a cheap, commercial drone available to anyone able to pay $630. This was the second big event revolutionizing UAVs after Archibald Low in the 1910’s. Once DJI released this drone, it opened up an avenue of for a whole new industry and encouraged several companies to start or shift, building a new collective intelligence to develop drones further. Drones have been primarily a technology used within the military, but in recent years and with the understanding of their role as a open product, it has split down several paths in the past decade.

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