The United States just used a $35,000 drone to blow up targets in Iran.1 The drone was reverse-engineered from an Iranian design. Iran, meanwhile, used the original version of the same drone to kill six Americans in Kuwait.2 Both sides are, in the most literal sense possible, hitting each other with the same weapon.
The word “drone” now refers to so many different machines that using it in a sentence is about as precise as saying “vehicle.” A Predator flying at 25,000 feet for 24 hours and a $400 racing quadcopter duct-taped to a hand grenade are both “drones.” They share a category the way a cruise ship and a kayak both share the category “boat.”
These are five different weapons with five different purposes at five different price points, and lumping them together would be like writing a single essay about “guns” that covers both a hunting rifle and a naval cannon. But the defense discourse does this constantly, because the word “drone” is exciting and the distinctions require homework. I will try to do the homework.
The place to start is how old the idea actually is. In 1917, the U.S. Army asked an inventor named Charles Kettering to build an unmanned flying bomb that could hit a target 40 miles away. Kettering — who had previously invented the electric starter for automobiles — assembled a team that included Orville Wright and built the Kettering Bug: a 600-pound biplane with a Ford engine (the engine alone cost $50), a pneumatic control system cannibalized from Kettering’s personal player piano, and 300 pounds of explosives. Total cost per unit: $400. The government ordered 20,000. The war ended before any were used.4
The idea of the expendable flying weapon is 108 years old.