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One of the first recorded was in 1849 when Austria launched an attack of 200 balloons armed with bombs on Venice.
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Balloons armed with bombs were used by both sides in the american civil war.
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During the war the USA military launched kites fitted with cameras to take photographs.
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In World War I, aerial surveillance was used a lot. Analysts used stereoscopes to hunt for visual clues about enemy movements. The Royal Flying Corps took over 19,000 aerial photographs and collected 430,000 prints during the five months of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
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In 1917, Elmer Sperry, together with Peter Hewitt, began construction of the radio-controlled “flying bomb.” The Drone was able to fly 50 miles carrying a 300-pound bomb after being launched by catapult
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In the mid-1940s the GB-1 Glide Bomb was developed to avoid German air defenses. It was a glider with a standard 1,000 or 2,000-pound bomb.
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In May of 1964, the U.S. first began to send drones to do spy missions over Cuba.
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In 1995 Predators were shown in a demonstration. Impressed by the drone’s capabilities, the U.S. Air Force soon established its very first UAV squadron, called Creech. Creech remains the current hub of American drone operations in Afghanistan.
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The first ever CIA drone attack was a disaster. It was thought to be an attack on Bin Laden but was not so and civilians were killed
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Since 2004 the CIA has been doing aerial surveillance and assasinations across Pakistan to remove high profile targets and threats
