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- Drone Strike!: UCAVs and Unmanned Aerial Warfare in the 21st Century
The idea of the armed, combat-configured unmanned aerial vehicle entered the 21st Century in the same manner as the idea of military airplanes had entered the 20th Century. It was an untried and untested concept suddenly thrust into the spotlight in an unexpected global war. By 1999, few people outside the military recognized the potential of armed, unmanned flying vehicles, or Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs), as they were called. Today, UCAVs form a vital arm of U.S. strike forces and are controlled from halfway around the world.
In this book, the author picks up the UCAV story where he left off in his 2010 Specialty Press book Birds of Prey: Predators, Reapers and America's Newest UAVs in Combat. Since that time, both technology and battlefield doctrine have evolved considerably and this book is a new window into that world. It provides a detailed look inside the present and future of robotic aerial warfare systems and technologies.
Yenne's first book on UCAVs covered the period of early development through the end of the 20th Century. Drone Strike! takes you from that time through today's latest technical wonders, covering such amazing unmanned aircraft capabilities as aerial refueling and landing aboard aircraft carriers even more accurately than manned aircraft. This book also contains recently declassified photographs of the latest U.S. Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, and provides detailed coverage of international UCAVs with a great deal of hard-to-find insight into UCAV development in Israel, Turkey, Iran, and China (among others).
Pages: 192
Size: 10 X 10 (inches)
Format: Hardback
Illustrations: 284 color
Publisher: Specialty Press
ISBN: 9781580072380
Product Code: SP238
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
Chapter 1:
In the Home of Persistent Situational Awareness
Chapter 2:
Evolving Systems Technology
Chapter 3:
Communications as the Keystone of UAV Operation
Chapter 4:
Data Transmission and the Kill Chain
Chapter 5:
Except on a Cloudy Overcast Day
Chapter 6:
A Limited War Against a Worldwide Caliphate
Chapter 7:
Sons of UCAV and Other American Drones
Chapter 8:
The United States and International Collaborative Programs
Chapter 9:
Inside the European Collaborative Programs
Chapter 10:
European Non-Collaborative Programs 94
Chapter 11:
Unmanned Aerial Combat, the Middle East Standoff
Chapter 12:
Unmanned Aerial Combat, the South Asia Standoff
Chapter 13:
National Programs
Chapter 14:
Unmanned Aerial Combat Technology in China
Chapter 15:
The Beast of Kandahar, Mystery and Pedigree
Chapter 16: The X?47B, the Tip of the Unmanned Spear
Chapter 17:
The Travails and Tribulations of UCLASS
Chapter 18:
The Future of Unmanned Aerial Combat
Appendix A:
Specifications for Selected Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Appendix B:
American Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Index
Reviews
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SpeedReaders.info
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(Posted on 2/5/2017)"It is a complex subject and Yenne, with dozens of books to his name already, ably corrals it."
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Midwest Book Review
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(Posted on 3/16/2017)"An impressively informed and informative study that is thoroughly 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation."
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Cybermodeler Online
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(Posted on 4/9/2017)"Recommended."
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Aviation History
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(Posted on 10/11/2017)"Highly recommended!"
Bill Yenne
San Francisco-based author Bill Yenne has written more than two dozen books on military and historical topics. A member of the American Aviation Historical Society, he contributed to encyclopedias of both world wars and won the Air Force Association's prestigious Gill Robb Wilson Award. His extensive writings about aviation and aerospace include corporate histories of the Boeing Company, Convair, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, North American, and Rockwell International. Aviation biographies penned by Yenne include Dick Bong and Tommy McGuire in Aces High: The Heroic Story of the Two Top-Scoring American Aces of World War II, described as "The greatest flying story of all time." Yenne has appeared in documentaries for the History Channel, Smithsonian and National Geographic channels, ARD (German television), and NHK (Japanese television), and his book signings have been covered by C-SPAN.
