Drones have become a fact of life in modern warfare.  In Sundays Minnesota Star Tribune, columnist Aaron Brown wrote a most interesting column on the topic, with focus on Ukraine and Russia: Drones Aaron Brown June 8 2026.  The column is very much worth your time.

It got me to thinking about the Drones topic in my own little corner of the world.  Searching the word “drones” in my archive, I found 25 posts in which the word appears.

Among them, the one I most remember was December 13, 2011 “The Drones” (see also link to December 20, 2011).  That was 15 years ago.  It was just an honest expression of opinion at the time, and ignited a small firestorm of comments about the technology.

At the time I wrote the 2011 piece, Drones were becoming part of the conversation, but few knew much about them.

Personally, I remember some guy in Hibbing who liked to fly his model plane by remote control (radio) back in the 1980s; and a few years later, just off off Cedar Avenue by the Mall of America, seeing another guy sailing a model boat on a small pond, also radio controlled.

I’m sure there were people thinking of more military grade uses of drones at the time I first observed them, but at that time in history the internet technology was still in the thinking stage, and likely very hard for any of us to even imagine the days when somebody could accurately and remotely control a tiny flying bomb from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

We live in that future.  Think of the boats off the coast of Venezuela, killed by drones.  Etc.

Back in 2011 I suppose we could imagine that we could prohibit these weapons of destruction.  But now they are useable everywhere, domestic or foreign, and no longer abstract.

I offer the articles just for personal discussion and reflection.

We will never get rid of Drones, and as sophisticated as they are now, we’ve not seen the end of their evolution.

I’ll reserve my own comments for a future post after July 4, and I invite you to join in on the conversion.