How the End of World War I Brought the Beginning of Drone Warfare by Priya Satia

While their counterparts in France were locked in stalemate during World War I, British troops protecting oil resources in the Persian Gulf were anything but.

They pushed north against the Ottoman Empire, taking Baghdad in 1917. They routed the Ottomans at Mosul in October 1918. The news of their adventures boosted British morale. And they built an occupation administration as they went, even as they promised the region’s inhabitants imminent freedom.

After the war ended on Nov. 11, 1918, the British broke those promises and incorporated “Iraq” (made up of the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul) into their empire, along with Palestine and Transjordan. They were unwilling to relinquish a region that had become crucial to imperial land and air routes, and whose potential wealth offered redemption from the losses of the war.

The people who lived there, however, were unwilling to accept that decision quietly.

Iraqis rebelled in 1920, while Britain also faced rebellion in India, Ireland, Egypt and elsewhere. Using the deadly new Royal Air Force, Britain crushed the rebellion in a year. In this they built on wartime use of airpower in Iraq. Baffled by the region’s shifting rivers and deserts, mirages and sandstorms, the British turned to airpower as a panacea for a land where, they felt, “little can be trusted that is seen,” and which they imagined as uniformly flat, despite its mountains, cities, marshes and rolling dunes.

Thus it was that aerial photography and signaling were developed in wartime Iraq. Aircraft also supported the uniquely innovative deception and irregular warfare tactics the British used in the Middle East, which inspired the tactics of World War II. It was in the Middle East that the British invented the aerial trap — bombarding an Ottoman column retreating through a canyon — and the airlift. Most significantly, they realized airpower’s “political possibilities” in disciplining tribes: “[A]n aerial raid with bombs…inspired terror in the Arabs,” noted an official memo.

 

Royal Air Force Westland Wapitis carry out a reconnaissance flight over the mountains of Kurdistan, March 1934.

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