This episode discusses developments in unmanned technologies from the battlefields of Vietnam to the end of the Cold War.

After decades of armed service budget sparring and a strategic focus on nuclear-armed ballistic and cruise missiles, an unpopular ground war in Vietnam refocused America’s unmanned investments away from the strategic and back to the battlefield. American leaders are looking for ways to use technology to win the war and save American service members’ lives to insulate presidential administrations from the wrath of an angry public.

Meanwhile, the US is on the edge of a digital revolution–one in which microprocessors offer a real possibility to bring intelligence from giant computer server rooms to battlefield munitions. These political, technological, and battlefield realities lead to new unmanned aerial vehicles for battlefield reconnaissance as well as the advent of a “precision-guided munition” revolution. As the US brings this unmanned arsenal out of Vietnam, it will make decisions about the future of its arsenal in the context of a Soviet Union on the cusp of destruction, an American military in the midst of its largest reorganization in half a century, and a president keen to be the one that sees the US out from behind a nuclear shadow.