After decades of armed service budget sparring and a strategic focus on nuclear-armed ballistic and cruise missiles, an unpopular ground war in Vietnam refocused America’s unmanned investments away from the strategic and back to the battlefield. American leaders are looking for ways to use technology to win the war and save American service members’ lives to insulate presidential administrations from the wrath of an angry public.
Meanwhile, the US is on the edge of a digital revolution–one in which microprocessors offer a real possibility to bring intelligence from giant computer server rooms to battlefield munitions. These political, technological, and battlefield realities lead to new unmanned aerial vehicles for battlefield reconnaissance as well as the advent of a “precision-guided munition” revolution. As the US brings this unmanned arsenal out of Vietnam, it will make decisions about the future of its arsenal in the context of a Soviet Union on the cusp of destruction, an American military in the midst of its largest reorganization in half a century, and a president keen to be the one that sees the US out from behind a nuclear shadow.
ABOUT THE PODCAST
The Hand Behind Unmanned is a limited series podcast about the people who design, direct, and deploy America’s arsenal of unmanned weapons. The limited series podcast tells stories about their beliefs, identities, and the ways in which human ideas about warfare created and continue to shape today’s drone revolution. It is a history of US investment in mines, torpedoes, missiles, satellites, bombs, and drones from the point of view of the generals, admirals, career bureaucrats, academicians, politicians, and entrepreneurs that guided, dictated, and sometimes manipulated technology to create autonomous systems.
You can also pick up a copy of the book “The Hand Behind Unmanned: Origins of the US Autonomous Military Arsenal” by Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia Macdonald. Available now: https://www.hoover.org/research/hand-behind-unmanned-origins-us-autonomous-military-arsenal?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=thbu_description
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