Hello everyone welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast I'm your host James

Rogers and as you'll know each week twice a week I bring you brand new cutting-edge

military histories as I interview experts veterans and policy makers about the history of warfare.

But once a week, as a bonus episode, I delve deep into the Dan Snow's history hit archive to put out an episode that I think deserves a little more attention and I'm incredibly biased this week

Because I pulled out an episode that I did with Dan a few years ago on the history of drones based on my own research in the US

archives. Now the reason why I bring this back is because this week we continue to see

the fallout from the US lethal drone strikes in Afghanistan

during that hectic withdrawal last month. An investigation has shown that it

killed 10 Afghan civilians and so I thought I'd bring this

episode back because it puts drones and drone warfare into its appropriate

historical context. We go all the way back to the first world war, to the first uncrewed aerial systems,

the aerial torpedoes that were invented to reduce the cost to American life in war to do warfare at arms length and you could say by

remote control and we trace that technology and the ambitions behind it all the

way through to the present day. So here's me and Dan Snow on the podcast. You cannot hear about warfare now without hearing about

drones. Yeah, they're pretty kind of dominant. Are they dominant because they are incredibly

effective tools in the battle? Are they dominant because politicians love them because they don't involve their lads getting killed.

A bit of both. I mean, I think they're really popular with the public as well because they stop both men and women on the battlefield from being

killed but for politicians they're kind of a panacea weapon you know after the

cost heavy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq remember the support was there early on, post-9-11.

We wanted to go to war in these countries.

The public support was there.

But as the bodybags came home, the support kind of invariably faded.

...