1. The first armed drones were created to get Osama bin Laden.
In 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration shut down
an operation to kill the al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan with
cruise missiles, given collateral damage estimates of 300
casualties and only 50 percent confidence in the intelligence.
As the 9/11 Commission noted, "After this episode Pentagon
planners intensified efforts to find a more precise
alternative." In 2000 and 2001, the U.S. Air Force struggled to
reconfigure a Hellfire anti-tank missile to fit onto a Predator
surveillance drone. Meeting one week before the 9/11 attacks,
the National Security Council agreed that the armed Predator was
not ready to be operationally deployed. The first known killing
by armed drones occurred in November 2001, when a Predator
targeted Mohammed Atef, a top al Qaeda military commander, in
Afghanistan. drones tend to crash. On Dec. 4, an RQ-170 Sentinel
surveillance drone crashed in Iran; a U.S. official involved in
the program blamed a lost data link