I am chuffed to bits to have my 4-page feature article Deja Drone published in the fantastic Royal Aeronautical Society AEROSPACE magazine this month!
Eighty years after the US first used attack drones in the Pacific, the idea is back on the agenda for the South China Sea.
Download the magazine here. Read it in full below. The text follows at the end.
This feature was inspired by my Aerospace Media Awards 2025 award-winning feature, The Secret History of Drones, which I wrote for The Smithsonian’s Air and Space Quarterly.
This was in turn inspired by my feature for BBC Future The robot aircraft with a nightmarish nuclear mission, which was an Aerospace Media Awards finalist 2024.
Off the back of these articles I was asked to write this for The History Channel’s website History.com (accessible only from within USA or via VPN connected to a US server) How Drones Have Upended Warfare.
Eighty years after the US military first used drones in the Pacific, the idea is back on the table for any future operations in the South China Sea. MARK PIESING asks what lessons can be learned from the past.
According to US intelligence, President Xi Jinping has called on China’s People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. If so, the US military will have its work cut out to defend an island a long way from home against the country with probably the largest navy on Earth, the largest number of military aircraft in the region and what is likely to be a formidable arsenal of combat drones.
China’s impressive industrial base means Chinese manufacturers currently control around 90% of the global commercial drone market and its components have been found in UAVs built for the US military.
In 2024, the commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Paparo, declared that the US military’s plan to ensure that the Chinese invasion does not succeed depends on its ability to turn the Taiwan Strait into an “unmanned hellscape.”
Replicator
This plan seems to depend on the US’ ability to rapidly build and deploy thousands of disposable AI-enabled attack drones that can operate either independently or as loyal wingmen to buy the US some time. In turn, this seems to hang on the success of the US Department of Defense’s directive to unleash “US military drone dominance” and initiatives, such as the Replicator programme.
Replicator’s goal is ‘rapid innovation’ by using existing commercial technology to produce drones cheaply, quickly and in large numbers – all while bypassing the Pentagon’s slow and bureaucratic acquisition process.
At a recent Pentagon event to demonstrate the results of these initiatives, 18 autonomous prototypes were revealed that, it is claimed, had been developed over 18 months rather than the usual four to five years. These included aerial systems, a 36ft span long-endurance uncrewed aerial system dubbed Vanilla, as well as surface and sub-surface systems.
“The affordability of drones is something that is very attractive to the US military, [given] the need for a lot of munitions and platforms to fight China,” says Stacie L Pettyjohn, Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, DC think tank and co-author of the report Swarms over the Strait: Drone Warfare in a Future Fight to Defend Taiwan. “Some people argue they have been decisive in Ukraine and can offer a cheap form of standoff strike that the US just doesn’t have right now.”
However, she warns that “they just don’t have the money in the near term. So, it is more aspirational than anything and, in reality, right now, most US combat power would still come from traditional, crewed platforms, whether it is B-52s or B-2s and short-range fighter aircraft early in the fight.”
Project Option
However, this is not the first time that the US military has not had air supremacy, lacked an industrial base and turned to cheap, uncrewed platforms for a way to try to create a so-called ‘unmanned hellscape’ to defeat a formidable opponent.
In the first half of 1942, the US faced a precarious situation in the Pacific. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor had crippled its Pacific fleet, in the Philippines it had suffered
one of the worst military defeats in its history and Japan now seemed to be threatening Australia, the Solomon Islands and even Hawaii with invasion.
Moreover, the mobilisation of its industrial muscle and its population had only just begun, and the US lacked the pilots and aircraft needed to fight the Japanese. On 22 May 1942, less than two weeks before the Battle of Midway, Fleet Admiral Ernest King, Chief of US Navy Operations, launched Project Option, ordering the deployment of assault drones “at the earliest practical date.”
Project Option was first envisaged to be a billion-dollar programme involving the construction of 5,000 remotely piloted assault drones. Their mission would be to overwhelm the Japanese defences in the Pacific for ‘maximum impact’ before countermeasures were launched against them.
King’s order for 5,000 assault drones was reduced to 500 and, of these, only around 300 were eventually delivered. Their effectiveness is still a matter for debate 80 years later.
“Project Option was, in reality, literally that – an option on the table,” says Roger Connor, curator in the National Air and Space Museum’s aeronautics department. “It was a point of exploration. It was an experiment.”
Lessons from the past
What then are the lessons from the past for the Pacific drone war of the future?
In 1939, anti-aircraft gunners of the battleship USS Utah had their first chance to try to shoot down the US Navy’s latest piece of high-tech kit – uncrewed target drones.
These were in fact obsolete aircraft, such as Curtiss N2C Fledgling trainers, that had been “droned’ by turning them into radio-controlled aircraft flown from an aircraft nearby. The Utah had recently been reclassified as a target ship and re-equipped with anti-aircraft guns for training gunners to shoot down the new generation of faster-turning aircraft. Two years later it would be sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
However, in 1939, it immediately became clear that the US Navy had a problem. “During the gunnery trials in 1939 [in Guantanamo Bay], it was clear that the gunners were struggling to hit these manoeuvring drones,” says Connor, “and the realisation dawned on those present that the ships themselves might be vulnerable to drones armed with a large explosive payload.”
“It was then, even before Pearl Harbor, that the idea of the attack drone really starts to gain traction in the higher echelons of the US Navy,” he says.
“That they might be a useful contingency for when they are in a situation where they do not have air superiority and must attack an enemy battleship without needlessly risking a valuable aircraft and crew.”
First-person view in the ‘40s
The fact that attack drones were even technologically possible was due to convergence with another new technology: television. What is today known as first-person view (FPV) technology is traced back to this innovation, which then allowed the pilot a remote ‘inside out view’, as though they were flying the drone itself – albeit on a 7in screen.
It was perhaps no wonder that King seemed at first to envisage Project Option involving thousands of attack drones, formed into 18 operational squadrons, with a workforce of 10,000 civilian and military personnel. However, the admiral’s vision hit the hard reality of a nation mobilising for war and conflicted with the need to maintain a supply of new aircraft and trained pilots, particularly after the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea.
Non-strategic materials
The US Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics persuaded King to scale back the order of drones to 500, using non-strategic materials and manufactured by suppliers with little experience of making aircraft, such as the Wurlitzer musical instrument company and the Schwinn Bicycle Company.
“The programme was a challenge,” says Connor. “It needed to use non-strategic materials, like wood, and the assumption was that if you do that, it should also be probably easy to build, which was not really the case. It took a long time to iron the bugs out. Additionally, the corporate infrastructure for this project was such that it was not really well suited to mass production of military aircraft in a wartime environment. Some of it was using manufacturers that had little aircraft experience, so that the aircraft were really slow to roll out.”
The production run was split almost equally between two main types, those built by the Naval Aircraft Factory (designated TDN-1s) and the Interstate Aircraft and Engineering Corporation (known as TDR-1s). The two assault drones looked similar, although with its streamlined dihedral low wings the TDR-1 looked more the part compared to its rival’s more conventional shoulder-mounted overhead wings.
Both were equipped with a pair of low- performance six-cylinder Lycoming engines, yet could carry a 2,000lb bomb or torpedo and were controlled from a converted Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bomber with the drone pilot and radar operator squeezed into the rear cockpit hunched over a black- and-white TV screen.
The drones came catapult-ready for carrier deployment and jettisoned their landing gear before heading for their target. There was a rudimentary cockpit for a human pilot – for testing and ferrying – which was replaced by a fairing flush with the fuselage to reduce drag when operational.
The first were delivered at the end of 1942, but delays meant that only around 300 were built (195 TDR-1s and around 100 TDN-1s) by the time the programme was abruptly cancelled in August 1944 at the apparent insistence of the Bureau of Aeronautics.
By then the US had achieved air superiority over the Japanese but opposition to the cancellation from the US Marine Corps meant that an estimated 50 TDR-1s did see action for evaluation purposes. During September and October 1944, Special Task Air Group One (STAG-1) operated TDR-1s from Banika on the Russell Islands, in combat action against enemy targets in the Solomon’s area. They were launched against Japanese anti-aircraft positions, bridges and airfields around bases with a total of 31 striking their targets. A further 19 were downed by radio interference or mechanical faults. If they reached their target, it appears that the
drones were often flown directly into the positions, bombs and all. In other cases, they dropped their bombs and – if they did not crash or were not shot down – crashed intentionally into the same, or secondary, target.
Too little, too late
“I think the story of Project Option is speaking to this moment,” says Roger Connor. “One lesson with the TDN and TDR is that they were far too late to justify their places. If it had been earlier, when US air supremacy was nowhere in sight, there might have been a lot more interest in that kind of capability.”
Scroll forward 80 years, and two US companies are working on drones that could also turn Paparo’s plan into a reality as part of the USAF’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) programme. The sleek, shark-like and appropriately named YFQ-44A Fury is under development by Anduril Industries, while another is General Atomic’s YFQ- 42A prototype which flew for the first time on 27 August, just 16 months after the contract was awarded.
Another lesson, Connor believes, is the necessity for speed in innovation and production.
“I think the ability to shorten the production tail, using 3D printing techniques and the kind of rapid prototyping ability, that the Ukrainians have shown, is vital,” he says, “as well as the ability to modify a whole existing array of technologies in the field and deploy them within days or weeks.”
These kinds of fast production capabilities are something the US has always struggled with. “We produce good stuff, but also, we spend a long time doing it right,” Connor says. “The Ukrainians have shown that the ability to have something that is low- cost, easy to produce and easy to update, and able to adapt to changing conditions is crucial.”
This lesson may be evidenced in the Replicator programme itself. “If you talk to folks who ran early parts of the programme, it was as much about breaking the process, as [designing] the drones themselves,” says Pettyjohn. “It was intended to establish the procedures and norms for buying things that you don’t tend to keep for a long time.”
“Most of the stuff the US military buys is around for decades and is built to last, and the Replicator programme was about trying to short-circuit this long arduous process and get Congress and the services used to spending money on things that probably would be obsolete within a few years.”
According to Pettyjohn, this caused a great deal of consternation on the part of congressional appropriators. “Even though the dollar amounts were really, really small for the DoD, because it was being spent in a more flexible way … I think senior defence officials, including former Deputy Secretary Hicks, were on the Hill [Congress] four or five times a month justifying what they were doing.”
Cultural resistance among the military to attack drones was a problem 80 years ago and remains a problem now. “There is a developing culture of resistance to drones in the USAF, because CCAs are seen as more of a replacement for a crewed fighter,” she says. “But for smaller drones I think the cultural resistance among the ground forces to drone dominance is more down to hubris on the part of the US and Western NATO countries that their ground forces fight differently than the Ukrainians or Russians and their sophisticated combined-arm manoeuvres would restrict the drones’ acitivities.”
However, this cultural resistance extends, conversely, to the threat posed by drones to US forces themselves. “I do not think they grasp the scale of the threat that they are going to face from these drones, which can be bought very cheaply and are very useful,” adds Pettyjohn. “When you deal with a couple at a time, it is one problem but when you deal with dozens or hundreds, it becomes a very different problem, and it is much more difficult to defend yourself.”
High above visitors to the US Navy’s National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida hangs the sole surviving TDR-1. In the end, the similarities in the challenges faced by the US in fighting Japan in the Pacific in 1942 and China in 2025 mean that the US military has turned to the assault drone as the solution in both situations.
However, the feasibility of Poparo’s vision of a ‘hellscape’ remains in doubt and, with the future
of the Replicator programme uncertain, it is clear that the Pentagon has not fully taken on board the lessons learned from Project Option.