How Were Drones Used During WWI and WWII?

Military drones as we know them actually originated more than a century ago.

Tuesday, June 06, 2023 at 01:55 PM ET

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The Kettering Bug, one of the earliest combat drones, inspired the UAVs that flew in World War II and beyond. [Courtesy: National Museum of the U.S. Air Force]

Key Takeaways:

Drones (UAVs) are fundamentally changing modern warfare, as evidenced by their extensive use in the Russia-Ukraine conflict for combat, surveillance, and logistics.
The concept of drones is over a century old, with foundational innovations tracing back to World War I and II, rather than being a recent development.
Early drone development in WWI introduced the first radio-controlled aircraft and "flying bombs," while the interwar period and WWII saw the mass production of target drones (like the British Queen Bee, which inspired the term "drone") and the deployment of combat drones (such as the German V-1 flying bomb and American GB-1 glide bomb).
These early conflicts established key drone technologies and applications, including remote control, beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, and various combat roles, forming the basis for today's advanced UAVs.

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War isn’t waged like it once was. In Russia and Ukraine, drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are shifting the tides of battle. And in the era of social media and mass communication, their use for combat, surveillance, logistics, and more has been well documented.

Recently, drones have dominated coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war, epitomized by last week’s media storm around Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow and the Kremlin. We take those capabilities for granted today—they’re just a feature of war. But plenty of active service members were alive during a time when today’s UAVs were inconceivable.