The Hand Behind Unmanned

What are unmanned weapons and where did America’s quest for autonomy begin?  The answer takes us back to the birthplace of the country and David Bushnell’s famed kegs of floating gunpowder then to the Civil War when, first Confederate and then Union generals experimented with land and naval mines and tethered torpedoes, and finally, how the invention of aircraft, the radio, and two World Wars ushe...

The episode introduces the technologies of an American military post-WWII and the new influencers of the nuclear age: Air Force generals LeMay and Schreiver, Navy Admiral Rickover, and President Eisenhower. It is the end of World War II and the beginning of the nuclear age. The American response to German rockets is a flurry of investments in missiles, rockets, and “pilotless aircraft” – all to de...

This episode discusses developments in unmanned technologies from the battlefields of Vietnam to the end of the Cold War. 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...

The episode looks at the rise of cruise missiles in the early information age, tracing a belief in military revolutions from the Gulf War to 9/11. It is 1989. The US has won the Cold War and is about to have a dramatic victory in Iraq.  Meanwhile, in the bowels of the Pentagon, a small office of ivy league elites headed by career bureaucrat Andy Marshall, introduces a new idea about the burgeoning...

The episode looks at unmanned systems and the global war on terror, focusing on the rise of the Predator and Reaper.  On September 11th, everything changed. James Roche, then secretary of the Air Force, cut all remaining bureaucratic tape and armed General Atomic’s MQ-1 Predator. Over the next two decades and combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Horn of Africa, the US would fight for...

How will the US respond to new experimentations of unmanned systems? The US built an expensive, exquisite, and highly controlled inventory of unmanned systems for the wars on terror. What would happen to that arsenal when faced with a new political world of a rising China, an expansionist Russia, and a nuclear North Korea?  Enter today’s world where the unmanned investments of the war against terr...

The episode looks at what unmanned the US is currently buying and what it should buy for a war against China.  How is the US responding to unmanned innovation across the globe?  This episode looks at what unmanned systems the US military is currently investing in and then turns to experts to ask what they think the US should be investing in. These interviews highlight a debate between different ch...

Join Julia and Jackie in this bonus episode as they discuss what they’ve learned throughout the podcast, including what this means for the Trump administration and the future of defense innovation. Join Julia and Jackie in this bonus episode as they discuss what they’ve learned throughout the podcast.  Who are the new defense influencers that will shape America’s unmanned arsenal?  What does this...