Welcome to the inquiry. I'm Tanya Beckett, each week one question for expert witnesses and an answer.

A line of Russian vehicles stretched for tens of kilometers outside Kiev,

poised to take Ukraine's capital by force. Ukrainians in the capital waited,

bracing themselves for the onslaught. But as time went by, it became clear that the convoy

wasn't able to move, and Russian soldiers were being forced to sit in their vehicles during

the long freezing nights, so they kept the engines running to stay warm. But meanwhile, in the

darkness drones were able to locate the tanks, guided by the heat of the engine, and one by one,

they started to be attacked by missiles. This week on the inquiry we're asking are drones

the future of warfare. Part one, the history of drones. It's a political quick fix,

for those who do not like the costs of war, particularly human casualties.

Our first expert witness is Caroline Kennedy-Pype. Caroline is professor of war studies at

Loughborough University in the UK. She explains that drones or unmanned flight vehicles were first

conceived as a way to avoid repeating the catastrophic casualties sustained during the First World

War whilst maintaining military dominance. Western strategists indeed strategists on

side having witnessed World War I. They wanted to find a solution to trench warfare,

and the aircraft in all varieties seemed to offer an opportunity to go over not through the enemy.

We wanted to save our soldiers, our military personnel, from conventional,

attritional war, and we wanted to be able to pound the enemy in their homelands,

pound the civilians, really, really disrupt morale, so that hopefully people would rise up

and refuse to fight for their governments. Some early attempts at using an unmanned aircraft

to carry explosives took place in 1944. The aircraft was taken off in a normal manner by a pilot.

After reaching altitude, control was transferred to the mother plane,

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