Decommissioned: The Kettering Bug

Before cruise missiles. Before drones. Before anyone called it unmanned warfare — the United States Army built a flying bomb that could hit a target 75 miles away with no pilot on board. It was 1918. It was called the Kettering Bug. And it was never fired in combat. In this episode of Decommissioned, we trace the full story of America's first autonomous weapon — from the engineering genius of Charles Kettering, to the test fields of Florida and Ohio, to the museum shelves where the surviving airframes sit today. We also trace the lineage that runs from this four-hundred-dollar wooden airframe directly to the Tomahawk cruise missile. The Final Chapter.