Do Drones Present New Military Opportunities or are they Simply an Updated Technological Variant of Age-old Weapons and Tactics? Hoover Institution / Stanford University background paper by Thomas Donnelly.
In 1907, just four years after the Wright Brothers had flown a few hundred yards across the beaches of North Carolina, H. G. Wells imagined The War in the Air. In Wells’ dark fantasy, the German Empire employs a fleet of airships to preemptively attack the United States, its only potential scientific, industrial, and geopolitical peer. The German target was New York.
More:
Drones—An Evolution, Not A Revolution, In Warfare by Mark Moyar
What, If Anything, Is Strategically New About Weaponized Drones? By Kenneth Anderson and Benjamin Wittes