Book Excursions:: "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Robotic Air Warfare 1917-2007"

"Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Robotic Air Warfare 1917-2007" by Steven Zaloga, published by Osprey Publishing

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.” 

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War [1]

At certain times along the path of growth and learning, it's good to go back and revisit material that has been significant in our progress. It could be a lecture, notes, a paper, documentary, movie and in my case, books. And as those who are voracious readers know, starting with a summary of historical developments on a particular topic is a good way to strengthen the foundations.

During the initial days of my graduate research program, one of the topics I had investigated was in regard to decentralized decision making and co-ordination of objectives by robotic swarms on the battlefield. At the time, a lot of work was being done on Network Centric Warfare and the distributed battlespace. I had also become involved with an Aerial Robotics Group that was developing an autonomous UAV for a DARPA Challenge. The overlap of the two domains seemed to provide synergy to pursue both projects, and try to propose a good solution for a challenging research problem.

Part of my background reading at the time was the book "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Robotic Air Warfare 1917-2007" by Steven Zaloga and available from Osprey Publishing [2]. One of the habits he drilled into me was the necessity and discipline of ensuring strong foundational knowledge, going back to first principles when necessary in order to achieve successful development and execution of the project objective later on. Studying history was one of them, a field that I have found absolutely invaluable over the years since.

Given some of the development work that I've been engaged in recently, I found this book and decided to revisit the fundamentals over the weekend. It's a short volume, only about 48-50 pages and easily dispatched with in a couple of hours or less if one is a fast reader. Although quite dated by now, it is nonetheless extremely helpful in revisiting the fundamental origin and development of the UAV, and how we got to where we are today.

Zaloga lays out a clear and systematic recounting of the initial first steps from World War I, the developments (and limitations) in application during World War II and the improvements in technology and applications during various periods and engagements in military conflict and theatres after - Vietnam, Korea, the Cold War, the first Gulf War and the post-9/11 era. In the process, he provides a succint and effective description of the progress of UAV utility and application, from initial drones for target practice to sophisticated platforms for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance as part of the larger paradigm of C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) for military systems and their effective operation on the battlefield. He also explores some of the initial advances of UAV systems into the unmanned combat space as UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle).

Along the way, I found it interesting to revisit the progress of onbard systems, from: primitive film photography to advancements in sensor payloads due to computers and miniaturization; rudimentary radio control and inertial navigation to the advent of GPS and SATCOM that allowed over-the-horizon platform monitoring and control; autonomous navigation and return; propulsion advancements for high-altitude endurance and loitering; real-time acquisition, fusion and feedback of sensor data; the initial incorporation of guided weapons capability on the General Atomics RQ/MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper UAVs and much more.

One of the interesting takeaways that I found from a systems engineering perspective was the sheer magnitude of complexity that needed to be surmounted along the way. The numerous crashes, system failures, setbacks and obstacles recorded while prototyping and testing experimental platforms as technology improved on the road to operational reliability is impressive. As elsewhere, progress has come through risk-taking and a willingness to tolerate a lot of failure along the way.

Although a short read, I found there to be enough recounting from a military history and technical perspective packed in these short pages to provide an appreciation for the developments in the domain since its inception during the early days of air warfare. In any field of development and progress, it's important to keep one eye on where we've come from in order to effectively understand where things are going, need to go and how to manage the difference between them. While this may be a good book for history buffs, it also serves as a good quick reference for those immersed in the advancements of the field wanting to strengthen the foundations from a "systems overview" perspective.  

See you in the next post!

REFERENCES:
==========
[1] Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Robotic Air Warfare 1917–2007
[2] The Art of War