The Gulf War marked a new era in American Warfare. When Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein invaded his oil rich neighbour Kuwait in August 1990, he promised that the American people would face ‘the mother of all battles’ – a war for which he believed there was little public appetite or political will from President George H.W. Bush.² What Saddam had not planned for, however, was the vast technological transformation that had taken place in the US military during the latter decades of the Cold War. As a result of advances in all the systems Wohlstetter had been highlighting since the 1960s, a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) had taken place.³ The defining features of this RMA are still hotly debated, but needless to say it involved the advancement of computer data gathering and transmission, missile range and yield, and improvements in offensive accuracies and reliability.⁴ As a result, by the time the Gulf War began the US military had grown to control the most technologically sophisticated conventional precision strike force in the world.

From cruise missiles reportedly turning left at traffic lights, F-117s launching 2,000-pound laser-guided ‘smart’ bombs on bunkers in Baghdad, and Saddam’s forces ultimately surrendering to new Pioneer surveillance drones, the air war above the Gulf would become known as ‘the most successful war of the 20th Century’.⁵ In a feat that Gorrell or Mitchell, Hansell or Arnold could only have dreamed of, US airpower enacted the most precise war in history. As the New York Times reported in February 1991, ‘[f]or the first time in history, precision-guided bombs and missiles have played a decisive role in war, paving the way for the invasion of Kuwait and Iraq. With their help, the United States and its allies critically weakened the fourth-largest army in the world while suffering surprisingly light casualties’.⁶ After a 38-day air war and 100-hour ground campaign, victory against Saddam was secured.

Figure 7.1 An F-117 conducts a live exercise bombing run using GBU-27 laser-guided bombs

This is not to say that the war was ‘perfect’ and waged without mistake. The estimated 2,300 civilian fatalities, 100,000+ Iraqi military fatalities, and the 247 coalition battle deaths,⁷ show that this war – like all wars – resulted in significant loss of human life.⁸ In addition, the infamous ‘Highway of Death’,⁹ ‘Al Firdos Bunker Strike’,¹⁰ and ‘Bulldozer Assault’¹¹ exemplify the imprecision and reputational damage of the war. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the war marked a new epoch in the successful deployment of precision technologies and precision-based strategies.¹² In fact, what is interesting to note is that the strategy itself was intellectually inspired by the early American airpower thinkers who had persevered with precision bombing during the first half of the twentieth century.

This was revealed to me during an interview with Lieutenant General (ret.) David Deptula. We met at his office in Washington, DC where he explained how it was the writings of Major General Haywood S. Hansell Jr. that had been at the forefront of his mind when planning the air campaign in the Gulf. Hansell was a precision pioneer and one of the chief architects of precision bombing during the Second World War. It was he who had been abruptly replaced by LeMay as Commander of XXI Bomber Command in 1945 – a move which marked the dramatic shift from precision bombing to area bombing and the start of the firebombing of Japan. As such, Hansell’s influence on Deptula bares great historical significance. This is because Deptula was the principal attack planner for the air campaign in the Gulf and the ghostwriter of the underpinning US Air Force White Paper on the Air Force and US National Security titled ‘Global Reach – Global Power’.¹³ I also spoke with Deptula about this same issue on my Warfare podcast where he went into greater detail about his inspiration.¹⁴ To be specific, Deptula detailed how in the summer of 1990 he had ‘read two books, both by retired General Hayward Hansell’. The first one, he explained, ‘was The Air Plan That Defeated Hitler and it was about how Hansell and some of the early planners had put together Air War Planning Document 1 (AWPD-1)’.¹⁵ AWPD-1 was a founding document of US airpower doctrine and focused on the strategic utility of Industrial Web Theory. Reading about this history ‘entranced’ Deptula to the point where he picked up Hansell’s second book, which was the Strategic Air War Against Germany and Japan.¹⁶ As Deptula recalled:

All books possess the power to pass on lessons through history, and in this case there can be little doubt that Deptula admired, identified with, and adopted the ambitions of those early air power thinkers. As Deptula recounted, ‘what the planners had done in World War Two, in retrospect, the theory, was pretty similar [to what] we were trying to apply when you move forward to Desert Storm’.¹⁸ As Deptula clarified, the key difference ‘was that the technology of the times in World War Two simply had not advanced to be able to accomplish what they wanted to do … there was not a lot of precision involved in World War Two precision bombing, but what had happened now, by the time you got to Desert Storm, I could target one bomb one target’.¹⁹ Deptula’s detailed explanation highlights the considerable influence Hansell’s work had on him and ultimately on how the Gulf War was fought and won. As Deptula concluded:

Such realities had a monumental impact on how American warfare would be fought through the 1990s. The Gulf War, and its rapid victory, set the blueprint for the future of American warfare in a post-Cold War world. Thanks, in part, to Wohlstetter’s pioneering of precise conventional weapons and precision strategies during the Cold War, and Deptula’s harnessing of Hansell’s theories, precision was now the spearhead of American force deployment.

Precision after the Gulf War

There were, of course, many other factors that contributed to the rise of precision strike technologies and strategies during the 1990s. Beyond the Wohlstetter, Hansell, Deptula connection, historians can (and have) looked at how tactical bombing, laser guided munitions, and the use of Lightning Bug drones during the Vietnam War impacted future US military investment in precision missile and drone systems.²² In addition, satellite control, microprocessing, and CIA experiments with various drone initiatives – including attempts to assassinate Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi – all influenced the effectiveness, reliability, and readiness of precision weapons by the 1990s.²³ Additionally, and worthy of specific mention, is the impact of Israeli engineering innovations and the work of Abraham Karem – known as the father of drones – who laid the design and engineering foundations for the first mass-produced and armed American medium-altitude long-endurance drone, known as the Predator.²⁴ When combined – and considered alongside the broader technological and strategic trajectory of the America precision ethos outlined in this book– it is clear to see how precision became the underpinning strategic concept of American war planning during the 1990s (and beyond).²⁵

In fact, it is hard to find an example of American warfare during the 1990s that was not greatly influenced by precision strike technologies and the underpinning American precision ethos. As the Soviet Union crumbled and former communist nations descended into internal conflict, the new administration of President Bill Clinton (1993–2001) chose to continue where the administration of President George H.W. Bush had left off during the Gulf War. Noting the seemingly war winning capabilities of precision technologies, the Clinton administration chose to intervene in a limited fashion, where needed, but at arm’s length and with distancing weapons of conventional precision.

Figure 7.2 Tomahawk cruise missile during a flight test

It would take a second volume to provide the in-depth analysis needed to fully understand the political and strategic motivations behind the Clinton administration’s reliance on precision weapons. But even a cursory glance at US-led conflicts during this period highlights the continued importance of precision strike technologies and precision strategies. When Milošević’s forces perpetrated the Bosnian Genocide (1992–95), President Clinton turned to conventional precision strikes to halt the killings. As Albert Wohlstetter stated at the time, ‘[p]recision and discriminate air power can help disarm the Serbian military forces that are slaughtering civilians and can reduce any unintended harm by the coalition’.²⁶ Although it took many months, Clinton did finally choose to follow a precision-based strategy to end the bloodshed. As former US Air Force Historian, Richard P. Hallion, explained, ‘the vast majority of NATO munitions employed in the Bosnian conflict were precision ones: in fact, over 98 per cent of those used by American forces’ were precision munitions.²⁷ For Hallion, and indeed Clinton officials, this was yet another example of what precision could achieve – a war winning and alluring technology that enabled a rapid and low-cost victory.²⁸ In fact, when Milošević once again enacted violent attacks against minority populations (this time in Kosovo, 1998–99), it was precision airpower that was relied on to end the killing.

Referred to as the ‘perfect war’, due to the fact that the conflict ended with zero NATO combat fatalities,²⁹ the 78-day air campaign that comprised Operation Allied Force involved 7,000 NATO attack sorties, ‘most of which entailed [the] use of precision weapons’.³⁰ As Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Wesley Clark remarked after the conflict, such were the levels of precision deployed during the operation that ‘couples walked along the Danube and dined at sidewalk cafes while the bombardment went on around them’ safe in the knowledge that NATO strikes would hit military, not civilian targets.³¹ Academic studies continue to challenge this narrative of infallible precision, with the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and the documented 528 civilian casualties dispelling the myth that precision can ever ‘perfect’ war.³² However, the US framing of a sanitized and clean war in Kosovo allowed for continued political and military investment in precision technologies and strategies. As a result, just over two years later, when al-Qaeda attacked the US homeland on 11 September 2001, it was precision airpower that was relied on to spearhead a new War on Terror.³³

Precision and the War on Terror

On Sunday 7 December 1941, at 07:55 local time, the US Pacific Fleet was attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service as it sat in dock at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. As Roberta Wohlstetter wrote in her analysis of the attack, it was ‘achieved with complete and overwhelming surprise’ maximising the death and destruction.³⁴ As President Roosevelt stated, such a day would ‘live in infamy’.³⁵ Just four days after the attack, the US would officially join the Second World War.

In that war, precision airpower played a leading role. As Chapter 2 explained, for better or worse, it was precision bombing – pioneered by Gorrell and Mitchell and built upon by their intellectual disciples, like Arnold – that provided the moral and strategic underpinning for American strategic bombardment against the Axis powers. Interestingly, however, during the initial period after the 11September attacks of 2001, an arguably comparable path to retribution was followed. History, as they say, doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Not only was Roberta Wohlstetter’s work cited by the 9/11 Commission, influencing the final report on the al-Qaeda surprise attack, but Albert’s quest for ever greater precision in war – fostered with colleagues during the Cold War in the fertile environment of Arnold’s RAND Corporation – would go on influence the Bush administration’s response to 9/11.³⁶

Although Albert would pass away in January 1997 (and Roberta almost exactly ten years later in January 2007), select graduates of the Wohlstetter School would be elevated to the Bush administration, influencing the highest levels of national security and defence policy. Richard Perle is but one key example. As a high school friend of the Wohlstetter’s daughter Joan, Perle was mentored by the Wohlstetter’s and would go on to work for Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson as his principal aide in Congress.³⁷ Under President Bush, Perle would become Chairman of the Defense Policy Board (a Department of Defense advisory group that provided informed advice and opinions concerning matters of defence policy to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Defense).³⁸ As reported by the New Yorker, he was also ‘one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq’.³⁹ Next is Zalmay Khalilzad. A student of Albert Wohlstetter’s and a former RAND researcher, Khalilzad would go on to be US Ambassador to Afghanistan (2003–05), Ambassador to Iraq (2005–07), and Ambassador to the UN (2007–09).⁴⁰ Khalilzad was also US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation from September 2018 to October 2021, helping to finalise the controversial Doha Agreement with the Taliban.⁴¹ Finally, and perhaps most influentially for the purposes of our journey through the history of precision, is Paul Wolfowitz.

Wolfowitz was Albert Wohlstetter’s PhD student and he had also worked with Senator Jackson in 1969 while devising a report on ballistic missile defence with Richard Perle.⁴² He also served as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under President Reagan, and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (1989–93) under President George H.W. Bush during the Gulf War.⁴³ Under President George W. Bush, however, Wolfowitz would rise to Deputy Secretary of Defense (2001–05). He would later become President of the World Bank (2005–07).⁴⁴ When I interviewed Wolfowitz back in 2016, he explained to me how important Albert was to the advancement of precision technologies and strategies in the US and to his own understanding of precision’s strategic and political utility during the Bush years.⁴⁵ Wohlstetter, he stated in an earlier interview, was one of the ‘most influential people to understand what a dramatic difference it would make to have accurate weapons’.⁴⁶ As he elaborated, there were two core components of Wohlstetter’s thought that resonated with him most: ‘[n]umber one’ was the ambition ‘to be able to use conventional weapons in ways that people [thought] that only nuclear weapons could be used, to be able to get out of the nuclear mindset … But secondly, and importantly, to be able to avoid unnecessary loss of innocent life in war’.⁴⁷ Such ambitions were important to Wolfowitz during his time in power. Not only did Wolfowitz bolster US stocks of precision weapons by replacing the old Crusader artillery system with precision artillery systems, but at a strategic level he became a vocal public advocate of precision strategies.⁴⁸

This can be evidenced through Wolfowitz’s interviews and public declarations during his time as Deputy Secretary of Defense. During the opening stages of the War on Terror, it could be said that precision was paramount to Wolfowitz. As he made clear in a statement to the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee in 2003, ‘U.S. military forces will rely on speed and precision weaponry to win future conflicts, such as the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and battles in the War on Terror.’⁴⁹ Indeed, Wolfowitz went on to inform the committee that ‘the use of precision munitions, and full use of information technology … are all key lessons taken from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq’.⁵⁰ It is, of course, almost impossible to look back on the highly destructive and controversial War on Terror as a war of precision. The war cost thousands of US and coalition lives and hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. The American precision ethos was pioneered to avoid such risks to American life and to reduce unintended costs to civilians. There is, however, an argument to be made that during Wolfowitz’s tenure, in the early years of the War on Terror, there were initial attempts to keep in line with the ‘precise’ lessons of the Gulf, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

Between 2001 and 2003 the precision airpower components deployed during the early stages of the War on Terror were frequently represented as war winning successes. As the historian Rebecca Grant argued in 2003:

Afghanistan was a markedly different war, however. As Wolfowitz’s boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, stated, there were ‘not a lot of high value targets’ in the country and thus less reason to launch a full-scale strategic precision air campaign.⁵² This does not mean precision airpower was absent from Afghanistan. On the contrary, as Grant explained, ‘the role of strategic airpower was to work with special operations forces on the ground and carry out swift strikes that stayed in step with constantly shifting command priorities – for example, hitting leadership targets’.⁵³ This meant that after the initial ‘short, sharp air campaign’ that opened the war in Afghanistan, precision airpower would be used to provide close air support to those on the ground and to hunt down and kill the perpetrators of 9/11.⁵⁴ This was aided by the fact that by 2001 the pinpoint accuracy of the conventional precision missile had been combined with the loitering capacity and near real-time video link up of the surveillance drone to form the Predator, and so a revolutionary precision technology was born. The administration of President George W. Bush would be the first in US history to deploy such weapons in active conflict, paving the way for an exponential increase in the use of drones.

The first drone strike

The first drone strike took place on the opening night of the War on Terror, 7 October 2001.⁵⁶ It was a strike that Deptula, and his boss Lieutenant General Chuck Wald, were closely involved in as they orchestrated ‘air operations over Afghanistan during the period of decisive combat’.⁵⁷ As Deptula explained in a 2015 interview, it was Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, who was the target of the strike. Omar had been spotted by a newly armed Predator drone as he neared ‘his facility in an entourage’, just outside the southern city of Kandahar.⁵⁸ This ‘entourage’ was believed to be made up of key members of Omar’s Taliban leadership. Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, such a decisive ‘decapitation strike’ (a strike which removes the leadership of a hostile organisation) may well have led to a very different history of the war in Afghanistan. Yet it did not go to plan.

Due to complications in the chain of command – which involved a confusing mix of the CIA, CENTCOM (United States Central Command), and the Air Force – an order was given to strike an empty truck outside the compound Omar had entered.⁵⁹ The details are still contested, but it appears Omar and his team had left his home in a convoy of vehicles, which was then tracked by the Predator as it drove to another compound across the city. Here, Omar and his team moved inside one of the buildings. With this in mind, the aim of the strike that followed was likely an attempt to lure Omar out and get a more precise strike without broader harm to unidentified people (possibly civilians). All the strike did, however, was unintentionally hand Omar an opportunity to flee. As Wald explained, ‘whether out of malice or incompetence I still don’t know … The first I knew the Predator was [engaged] was when I heard an unknown voice on my radio say, “You are cleared to fire”.’⁶⁰ As a result, the first drone strike was a failure, kicking up a giant cloud of dust, smoke (and confusion), which allowed Omar to make his escape. He would remain on the run for over a decade until his death from ‘health problems’ (suspected tuberculosis) in 2013.⁶¹

Figure 7.3 MQ-1 Predator drone, 2012

Still, such tactical failures did not stop US political and military officials from recognising the broader allure of ‘war by remote control’.⁶² The ability to hunt down, loiter, and kill suspected terrorists and insurgents with precision missiles launched by robotic drones, all controlled from distant safety in Ground Control Stations (GCS) back in the continental United States, was an appealing prospect – one the Bush administration would exploit.⁶³ There were around fifty known drone strikes during the Bush years, a slow ramping up of the US Air Force and CIA drone programmes that ultimately laid the foundations for a growing reliance on armed drones in American warfare.⁶⁴ It would not be until the Obama era began in 2009, however, that the deployment of armed drones would really ‘take off’.

The Drone President

The controversies and inconsistences of the Obama administration’s relationship with armed military drones have been outlined in the Prologue. Nevertheless, it is important to note that it was Obama’s obsession with precision strikes and drones – and his declaration of ‘precise’ and ‘just wars’ – that first inspired our journey through the history of American precision. As we reflect on this history, it is clear to see how, when Obama came to power, he saw drones as a way to overcome an age-old American problem: to reduce the costs of war while remaining decisively effective in the deployment of military force. As Chapter 1 explained, during the First World War, when American casualties began to mount and the public’s appetite for large expeditionary ground campaigns faded, early precision pioneers, like Arnold, experimented with the Kettering Bug and Norden bombsight to reduce the costs of war and increase the effectiveness of military airpower. In 2009, when Obama came to power, he turned to the drone.

Obama’s reliance on drones would see him anointed ‘The Drone President’. It has never been easy to ascertain the true number of strikes Obama approved, but his title is reflective of the 1,878 estimated strikes that took place during his eight years in office.⁶⁶ It used to be said that there were ‘only’ 540 drone strikes launched during this period – a ten-fold increase on the Bush era – yet this number is limited to strikes deployed outside active war zones (for example in Somalia, Yemen, or Pakistan).⁶⁷ Due to the top secret character of the CIA drone programme, which is operated separately to the US Air Force programme and in a covert manner, and the ongoing uncertainty of the data, it will likely be many decades before we know the true extent of the administration’s drone use and the deaths caused. What we do know, however, is that drones gave Obama – a constitutional law professor turned president – the perceived moral and legal justification he and his administration needed to carry out as many drone strikes as they believed were necessary to keep the amorphous threat of terrorism at bay.⁶⁸ As the President declared in 2013, ‘conventional air power or missiles are far less precise than drones and are likely to cause more civilian casualties and more local outrage’; they are, he stated, part of a ‘just war – a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense’.⁶⁹ Such claims are contested, and it will be up to future historians to pass judgement on Obama’s successes and failures as the files are declassified. Nevertheless, what he was trying to achieve was akin to the long-held, unique, and often illusory American ambition for precision in warfare.

In truth, as has often been the case with the pursuit of precision over the last century, mistakes were made during the Obama era and innocent people were killed.⁷⁰ Precision, after all, is only as precise as the intelligence at hand, and if the intelligence is flawed, all precision really means is guaranteed death and destruction for the unintended victims. Despite Obama’s claims to White House staff that he had become ‘really good at killing’ – and that he had waged ‘the most precise air campaign in history’ – his administration’s own estimates stated that between 64–116 civilians had been accidently killed during his time in office.⁷¹ These numbers continue to be hotly disputed, with separate investigations by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the New York Times, and Airwars frequently putting the true number of civilian casualties into the hundreds, if not thousands. Nevertheless, this collateral damage did not stop those who came after Obama from continuing, and even expanding, the drone programme. Due to the fact that drones delivered many political and military successes for Obama, such as the death of up to 2,581 suspected terrorists and insurgents, the drone’s allure remained.⁷²

In the years directly after the Obama administration, President Trump doubled down on the use of drones, broadening and widening the remit for lethal strikes. It was the Trump administration’s expansion of the drone programme, the reduction of controls designed to protect civilians, and the loosening of the criteria under which a drone strike could be undertaken, which paved the way for a number of contentious deployments.⁷³ These changes were carried out alongside modifications to the required reporting on drone strikes, which reduced transparency, oversight, and democratic accountability.⁷⁴ This simply meant that when drone strikes went wrong, or caused international incidents, there was a veil of secrecy that kept the American public in the dark and the Trump administration safe from scrutiny.⁷⁵

Perhaps the most controversial example of a Trump era drone strike was the killing of General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.⁷⁶ There can be little doubt that Soleimani, an Iranian official who headed the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was an enemy of the United States.⁷⁷ Yet his death by US drone strike – ordered directly by President Trump – was a watershed moment in international security.⁷⁸ Setting a worrying example to the world about what was acceptable in terms of the use of armed drones, it marked the first time the weapons had been used to assassinate a state representative, in a third-party country (Iraq), without that country’s permission.⁷⁹ Although only in power for one term, the Trump administration certainly highlighted to both state and non-state actors around the world how drones could be used and misused inside and outside the bounds of international law.⁸⁰

It was for this reason that, when President Biden came to power in 2021, a review was launched into the US drone programme.⁸¹ This review mainly reintroduced the Obama era polices on drone strikes that had been amended or removed during the Trump years.⁸² This included ‘curtailing the use of armed drones outside of war zones as part of a new counterterrorism strategy that place[d] a greater priority on protecting civilian lives’.⁸³ As White House Homeland Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall stated in 2022, the President’s new guidance required ‘that U.S. counterterrorism operations meet the highest standards of precision and rigor, including for identifying appropriate targets and minimizing civilian casualties’.⁸⁴ Yet despite this declaratory policy of reintroducing ‘precision’ as an ambition in the drone programme, the flaws and shortfalls remained.

Global events overwhelmed Biden era restraints on the use of drones. For example, the Time Sensitive Strike (TSS) by an armed US drone in Kabul in 2021 exemplified the continuation of drone controversies.⁸⁵ During the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, which saw a suicide bomber kill 170 civilians and 13 US troops at Hamid Karzai International Airport, the TSS was launched to stop a suspected repeat attack.⁸⁶ Unfortunately, due to intelligence failures and confirmation bias, the drone hit the wrong target, killing 10 civilians, including 7 children.⁸⁷ This is not to say that Biden has had zero ‘precision successes’ during his time in power. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number two and an architect of 9/11, was killed by a CIA drone’s Hellfire R9X ‘ninja’ missile (which releases blades from its sides as it hurtles to earth) as he stood on his balcony in Kabul.⁸⁸ As Biden stated at the time, this was ‘justice’ delivered.⁸⁹ ‘No matter where you hide’, he declared, ‘if you are a threat to our people, the U.S. will find you and take you out.’⁹⁰ Yet despite these lauded precision strikes, the truth is that Biden’s drone policy was altered more by an international climate of Great Power tensions and less by the preplanned and intended designs of the administration.

Russia’s offensive war in Ukraine (2022), alongside growing tensions with China over Taiwan, led to a swift reprioritising and expansion of drones as a key weapon for deployment and export. The expedited export of American military drone technologies and precision missiles to key allies around the world (specifically to Ukraine and Taiwan) highlighted the growing importance of precision in the face of mounting threats around the world.⁹¹ This fact was not lost on China and Russia who, in turn, started accelerating their own drone development, procurement, and export programmes, including with autonomous systems controlled by artificial intelligence.⁹² As a result, the early 2020s saw the start of ‘The Second Drone Age’, a world where precision strike technologies left the custodianship of the United States and spread around the world. It is here that we return to Albert Wohlstetter one final time.⁹³

The proliferation of precision

By highlighting the innovative thinkers of the First World War, the experimental technologies of the Second World War, and the surprising Cold War nuclear strategies that made precision the dominant feature it is today, this book has explored and explained how precision evolved as a moral and strategic ambition in American warfare throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Yet the impact of this long-held ambition to achieve precision does not end with American warfare. As Albert Wohlstetter and Fred Iklé warned back in 1988, ‘[i]n the years ahead, weapons production will be much more widely diffused, and the superpowers will have less control over transfers of advanced systems’.⁹⁵ In fact, what they explicitly warned of was ‘the worldwide diffusion of advanced weapons’.⁹⁶

While Wohlstetter and Iklé were keenly aware of the utility of conventional precision strikes for the United States, they also understood that high-tech precision weapons systems are ‘not an American monopoly’ and would one day pose a threat to the US and its allies.⁹⁷ According to the Center for the Study of the Drone, in 2010 the proliferation of drones had progressed to the point where sixty states had a military drone programme.⁹⁸ As of 2022, 113 states had obtained or were developing military drones. This was an increase of 88.3 per cent in twelve years.⁹⁹ This proliferation of precision was not limited to nation states. As of 2023,at least sixty-five non-state actors had access to weaponised drone systems, a conservative figure based on limited data meaning that the number of non-state actors with drones is likely to be much higher.¹⁰⁰

Figure 7.4 Drone Survival Guide

In some cases, commercial technologies had been adapted for nefarious use, and in other cases states supplied non-state actors with advanced precision weapons systems so that they could do their bidding for them.¹⁰¹ Drones were also created in a rudimentary, but effective, manner, by combining military grade designs with commercial technologies to provide terrorist organisations with their own indigenous long-range precision strike capacity.¹⁰² The Houthi terrorist group in Yemen, for example, reportedly obtained an arsenal of drones from state and commercial sources that facilitated strikes on targets over 1,500 km away.¹⁰³ These were used in attacks on the Aramco oil processing sites in Saudi Arabia in 2019, the commercial tanker Mercer Street in 2021, and Abu Dhabi international airport in 2022.¹⁰⁴ As a result, vital energy infrastructure, international shipping, international airports, and the civilian centres of capital cities were all targeted by hostile precision strikes during this period.

The range and precision of these weapons systems will increase over the coming years, with key allied military and diplomatic sites around the world (and even mainland Europe or the US homeland) under threat from ever more advanced and longer-range precision and drone systems.¹⁰⁵ As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, told graduating cadets at the United States Military Academy West Point in 2022, ‘[w]hatever overmatch we enjoyed militarily for the last 70 years is closing quickly, and the United States will be – in fact, we already are – challenged in every domain of warfare’.¹⁰⁶ Indeed, as Milley specifically warned the next generation of US military leaders, ‘[w]e’ve witnessed a revolution in lethality and precision munitions; what was once the exclusive province of the United States military is now available to most nation states with the money and will to acquire them’.¹⁰⁷ This is undoubtably a disquieting prospect, but it is a future better faced with an understanding of the history of precision.

What is it that we can learn from precision’s past to help us understand modern precision warfare and the uncontrolled proliferation of precision strike technologies around the world? Well, as we look to the future, each nation will, if they so wish, develop or acquire their own precision weapons, drones, and military cultures of precision warfare. What the history has shown us, however, is that this quest for precision involves agonising technological shortfalls, unforeseen strategic mistakes, and the deliberate misuse of precision weapons in extreme ways that their inventors and pioneers never intended. Perhaps most important of all, however, is that the history has shown us how precision can also be decisive and effective in war. It is now these same precision technologies – pioneered by the US – that have fallen, or have been placed, into the hands of hostile state and non-state actors around the world. As a result, far from a panacea to the costs and risk of war, drones and precision strike technologies are now among the greatest threats to state security.