UAV...

Unmanned Ariel Vehicle.

The history of this type of aircraft, began in World-War-II (1939-45) when Nazi-Germany under the Dictatorship of Adolf Hitler demanded a series of vengeance weapons to be designed and built in secret if all else failed in his Axis conflict. It was the Von Braun (designer of the U.S. Saturn rocket and the Space shuttle) team who initially came up with the V-1 flying bomb (known in the UK as the doodle bug). 

After the war in 1945 both Russia and the U.S. made a mad race to capture as much German technology, and so work started on the modern family of unmanned aircraft we today see being deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to take out militant and terrorist strongholds.

Israel over the years has built up its series of unmanned aircraft in it Scout and rangers, which much smaller than the U.S. counterparts but do the same jobs. This technology in combination with satellite guidance, saves troops on the ground, but it also has been adopted into civil aircraft flight systems, the various space programmes, Mar's lander's and the ISS.