Love this podcast.

Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature.

It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment.

Just click the link in the show description to support now.

The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. When this tall gentleman in white robes walked out of a building in Tarnack Farms just outside of Kondhar,

it was obvious it was him.

Just months,

just months before the September 11th attacks,

Scott Swanson was piloting an early version of the predator drone over Afghanistan.

Swanson and his team were looking for Osama bin Laden, and that day it looked like they'd found him.

The predator, though, was unarmed.

This week on War College, Swanson takes us through the early history of the predator program,

and he tells us how a skunkworks project ended up being a central part of the U.S.

War Machine.

You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines.

Here's your host, Jason Fields.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters opinion editor Jason Fields.

And I'm Matthew Gault contributing editor at Wars Boring. Today we're talking with

Scott Swanson. He's a retired Air Force pilot and Swanson was an early predator pilot and the first to fire hellfire missiles in a combat strike.

Scott, thanks for joining us.

Thank you, glad to be here today.

So that's actually kind of an odd distinction and it really speaks to how long you were

...