Unmanned: A History of Military Drones, 1849–2050

In 1849 Austrian balloons drifted over Venice carrying time-fused bombs. Within a century and a half their descendants would loiter for days above mountain valleys, strike with a decision measured in seconds, and be built in garages for the price of a car.

Unmanned traces that arc in full: the aerial torpedoes of the First World War, the Cold War reconnaissance drones that flew where pilots could not, the Predator programme that rewrote the rules of targeted killing, the shift to cheap mass in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, and the collaborative combat aircraft and autonomous swarms now taking shape in laboratories on three continents.

Drawing on manufacturers' records, programme histories and the accounts of the crews who flew them, this is a clear-eyed narrative of how remote war became ordinary war — and of the legal, ethical and strategic questions it left unanswered.