July 20, 201015 yr CV32: Hard to believe in some ways that UAVs are old enough to constitute "military history", but there it is. Air Force UAVs: The Secret History This comes by way of Bill Sweetman at Aviation Week's Ares Blog, who offers this synopsis: Tales from the Crypt: Secret UAVs Tales From The Crypt - Secret UAVs Posted by Bill Sweetman at 7/19/2010 1:07 AM CDT Click-of-the-month-club selection at Ares is Tom Ehrhard's report on the history of UAVs in the US Air Force, just published by the Mitchell Institute. It is based on Ehrhard's unpublished 1000-plus-page thesis on the subject, and sheds new light on many programs - some of which were, at the time, closely held secrets. Among the stories in this paper is the history of the extremely exotic, expensive UAV project known as the Advanced Aerial Reconnaissance System, designed to loiter above the Soviet Union for tens of hours on end, tracking mobile ICBMs. It was never built but its shape eventually flew as the much smaller RQ-3 DarkStar. You will also find the intended mission of Boeing's Condor, the parent of today's hydrogen-fueled Phantom Eye: it was conceived as a Navy sensor platform, a picket that would provide early warning of incoming Tu-22M Backfires aimed at Navy carriers. The early history of Leading Systems' Amber, progenitor of the Predator and Reaper, is here too. Ehrhard, by the way, is now a principal civilian advisor to USAF chief of staff Gen. Norton Schwartz. He was a key architect of the initial air campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the first US air campaign in which UAVs played a leading role. One of his recent publications, discussed here in 2009, was a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Affairs report on the future of the USAF.
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