Predator

July 14, 2014
Increasingly prominent in recent headlines, unmanned drones have a long history, as veteran military journalist Whittle (The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey) relates in this engrossing book. Thousands of drones were flown during WWII as targets for training antiaircraft gunners, and they played a modest reconnaissance role in Vietnam. But as Whittle shows, today’s long-endurance, missile-firing drones are spinoffs of models developed by entrepreneurial startups during the 1980s. Largely commanded by former fighter pilots, the Air Force was hostile to unmanned planes until the 1990s wars in the Balkans. Peacekeeping forces could not track the marauding Serbian army, which shot down several manned reconnaissance aircraft, but an experimental drone, named the Predator, solved the problem. It was unarmed, but an updated version successfully launched a Hellfire missile in 2001 at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base test range. After 9/11, remotely controlled drones began raining destruction on targets identified, sometimes correctly, as enemies of the U.S. By 2010 the U.S. military possessed 8,000 and the number continues to grow. Whittle concludes this impressively researched, thought-provoking history by pointing out that drones have revolutionized warfare, but like previous revolutions (the machine gun, aircraft, nuclear weapons) they did not make the world a safer place and created as many problems as they solved.

Starred review from August 15, 2014
They may soon be delivering this book to you, but for now, writes Woodrow Wilson Center global fellow Whittle in this follow-up to his excellent The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey (2010), drones are anything but your friends. Put a laser, a cannon and some Hellfire missiles into an unmanned aircraft, and you have a potent killing machine. The impulse to create the unmanned drone came from an Israeli lab in response to a quite specific problem: namely, Soviet rockets with multistage radars aimed at Israeli jets by Syrian and Egyptian fighters. The emergent need for a decoy aircraft that would look just like a full-scale jet to radar surveillance prompted inventor Abraham Karem to come up with an even better solution. Fast-forward four decades, and the drone has become commonplace, increasingly used by American forces after 9/11. Getting there is the subject of Whittle's narrative, which soon lands on a second big problem-that unmanned aircraft are inherently less safe than piloted ones. In between, the author looks at the machinations of defense industry contractors and military procurement specialists to get the latest and greatest (and, it seems, most expensive) hardware into the air. There's plenty of geekery befitting a Tom Clancy novel to keep readers entertained, with Whittle occasionally sliding into jargon-y prose: "After takeoff, the pilot was to fly the Predator to mission altitude, where a technician would bore-sight the MTS ball; next the pilot would put the Predator into an orbit, at which point the mission crew at the GCS at CIA headquarters would take control using the Ku-band satellite link." Such longueurs aside, Whittle's account comes to a pointed conclusion: Drone technology has already changed how we die, but what remains to be seen is how it "may change the way people live." For students of technological history and political wrangling alike, the book is endlessly interesting and full of implication.

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September 1, 2014
The story begins, rather ironically, with an Iraqi-born aircraft designer who imagined a pilotless aircraft capable of staying in the air for many hours, or even days, at a time. Working out of his garage in California in the late 1970s and early '80s, he created something he called Albatross, a machine that worked so well that DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department's scientific research-and-development agency, took a serious interest. This fascinating book charts the evolution of the Predator drone, Albatross' descendent, from its origins as an eye in the sky surveillance tool to an armed weapon, a remote-controlled killing machine. While the importance of the 9/11 terrorist attacks cannot be overstated (the drones were vital to military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan), the Predator has been used as a combat weapon since the mid-1990s. It's a piece of technology that leaped to global prominence in the post-9/11 years, but whose own history is longer, and more surprising, than most readers probably realize. Fascinating both as military history and as a look inside a hot contemporary social issue.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2014

In his second aviation-related book, Whittle (The Dream Machine) intends to describe the recent American drone revolution more accurately and thoroughly than in his previous work. This title fulfills his aim but it would have been richer and easier to understand with accompanying photos and diagrams similar to those in PBS's science series Nova. However, the narrative is enriched by the interwoven stories of key people in the development and deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles, many of whom, including seminal inventor Abe Karem, are interviewed at length. This title is as up to date as possible, with several 2014 sources cited. The epilog serves both as a summary and a look toward the future of increasing drone use in all sectors. VERDICT Military and aviation aficionados will learn from and enjoy this in-depth work that employs a readable, journalistic style. [See Prepub Alert, 3/17/14.]--Sara R. Tompson, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Lib., Pasadena, CA

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