However, Karem was unable to convince anyone in the Pentagon to fund his invention, and in 1990 he went bankrupt trying to prove his concept was viable.

Karem, funded with seed money from DARPA, built an initial prototype in 1983 that could stay aloft for at least 48 hours. Working from nature’s model of the albatross –the bird best 'designed' for gliding and soaring - Karem arrived at the epiphany that an RPV should have an extremely wide wingspan. Karem - a brash iconoclast –believed that drones were the last type of aircraft that could be engineered by a lone inventor working in his garage. The first, the 'genius' by Whittle’s account, is an Israeli named Abraham Karem. Whittle begins with the father, or fathers, of the Predator. Whittle’s book is about the Predator, but it can –and should - be read as a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks that a new technology can easily be brought into the military (or, to be fair, any government agency). In Predator, Richard Whittle gives us a long and drawn out tale of the origins of the Predator unmanned aircraft, or 'drone.' The tale is not drawn out because Whittle is an inferior writer, but because the story is one of delay, lack of vision, and frustration. While such attacks are still news-worthy, they hardly make the front page, having become a more or less routine event. This attack came on the heels of a similar attack the prior Wednesday, which killed fifteen people. drone fired missiles into Pakistan’s North Waziristan agency, killing eleven members of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Pakistani intelligence officers are claiming that on Saturday, July 19 of this year, a U.S. Richard Whittle, Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution.

Predator by richard whittle