PARTICIPANTS: Jason Fields, Matthew Gault, Scott Swanson

Subscribe to the War College podcast on iTunes

Listen on SoundCloud

Just months before the Sept. 11 attacks, Scott Swanson was piloting an early version of the Predator drone over Afghanistan. Swanson and his team were looking for Osama bin Laden and it looked like they found him.

The predator, though, was unarmed.

“When we started this, we were under the impression that once they had positive eyes on, something would have been ginned up,” Swanson said. “It didn’t happen.”

This week on War College, Swanson takes us through the early history of the drone program and tells us how a skunkworks project became a central part of the U.S. war machine.