Lessons from the past

In the next few years our soldiers will be killed by drone strikes. The reason why is buried in history from 1884.

Hiram Maxim, a British-American was the inventor and developer of the first “modern” machine gun. It was first used by the British in the Battle of Shangani in Rhodesia, later Zimbabwe.

Fifty soldiers held off 5,000 natives with just four Maxims. It was such a destructive device, that it was thought that wars would end as both sides potentially suffering enormous casualties. The idea was, that the thought of mass killings would deter governments from using them. It didn’t. During World War I, just the Battle of the Somme accounted for over a million soldiers being killed; the British lost 60,000 men on the first day! Many from both sides using modern versions of the Maxim machine gun, the device that was supposed to stop wars.

It will be this way with new UAVs, future versions of Predators and Reapers that will be used by many nations to attack each other, with the operators going out to dinner after battle, perhaps followed by a movie. Today our government is firing an occasional missile from what we think are sophisticated UAVs. Development will proceed very quickly and today’s systems will seem like antiques in the near future.

Before the development of sophisticated bombing strategies, a lone pilot dropped the very first bomb, by hand over Libya in the 19th century. A decade after that single bombing mission, the world had changed. The US Government has spent a lot of taxpayer money being the first country to develop a workable aerial observation and attack system, that began with radio controlled hobbyist planes with film cameras used in Vietnam to the variety of drones used today. These are the equivalent of the early Maxims. As long has only one nation has them, then that nation has superior capacity.

Unfortunately for us, forty countries are now busy developing their own, even including Iran and organizations including China, Russia, Iran and even Hezbollah. They are all watching how we use ours and are learning very quickly. We will see wars and combat where both sides with thousands of drones used by both sides.

There will be from huge bombers to tiny versions. Some will be used like the Kamikazes’ of World War II and be hurled against their enemy so that some will get through. At this time, we are working on 95 different public designs, the British, 38, Israel, 35, China, 30 and Russia, just 12. The future looks bright if you manufacture them; dismal if you don’t.