The U.S. Navy Wanted to Send Drones on Ship-Killing Suicide Missions

An excerpt from ‘Drone War: Vietnam’

A Model 147SK launches from USS ‘Ranger’ in 1970. U.S. Navy photo

The U.S. Navy was a big user of Ryan Aeronautical Q-2C target drones, and Navy carrier battle groups operating in the Gulf of Tonkin borrowed imagery from the U.S. Air Force’s operational Model 147 Lightning Bugs flying from Bien Hoa in South Vietnam.

By 1967 the Navy had decided it wanted front-line drones of its own. What follows is an excerpt from Drone War: Vietnam, my nonfiction book about the first drone war.

At first, the fleet wanted the Lightning Bug as a sort of fast-acting anti-cruise-missile platform. During the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors in June 1967, Egyptian forces used a Soviet-made Styx cruise missile to sink the Israeli destroyer Elath, killing 49 sailors.

The sinking chilled U.S. Navy leaders. They imagined Soviet missiles overwhelming American ships in the event the Cold War turned hot. While ship-launched surface-to-air missiles were getting better by the month, these were defensive systems. The Navy wanted an offensive weapon that could strike Soviet ships before they could launch their own anti-ship missiles.

The Navy asked Ryan Aeronautical to develop a version of the Lightning Bug that could launch from a ship at sea…