Lt. Col. Harold "Red" F. Smith

Lt. Col. Harold "Red" F. Smith spent thirty-two years in the United States Air Force and was the service's first drone SPO — the Systems Projects Office man for unmanned aircraft, a post that did not exist until the drones did. That he was the first is the Smith family's own account: William Wagner's history of the programme and Red's official Meritorious Service Medal citation both put him in the role, and the book calls the Air Force's SPO people perhaps best typified by Col. Red Smith, but neither uses the word first. He was Marshall Smith's grandfather, and the reason there is a drone museum in Caddo Mills, Texas. He enlisted in the Iowa Air National Guard in 1947. In January 1964 he was selected as a reconnaissance project officer for the Lockheed U-2 and the emerging drone programs and never left the field. Back at SAC Headquarters after his first drone tour he wrote the staff paper that gave Air Force drone crews their own Airborne Missile Maintenance Squadron with equal standing to the U-2 wings, then in 1966 stood up a technical engineering division inside it so the programme had its own engineers rather than leaning entirely on the contractor. In 1968 he was at Bien Hoa Air Base in South Vietnam working the navigation problems that were keeping the drones from flying where they were told, and he was there when the Tet Offensive hit the base with eighteen straight days of rocket and mortar fire; by his own account the drone crews never missed a scheduled launch. Months earlier, holding a Top Secret clearance, he was named senior officer and official courier on a flight rushing replacement cryptographic material into the Pacific theater after North Korea seized the USS Pueblo. He walked the paper through Air Force headquarters that gave air-breathing drones official military nomenclature: before it they were known only by the manufacturer's own model numbers, and after it they were AQM-34s. By 1969 the job had a formal title — Chief, Drone Projects Division, Directorate of Drone Management — supervising four branches that grew from four people to twenty in two years, running on the Big Safari rapid-acquisition model, with program-management credits including Combat Angel, Combat Dawn and Defense Suppression. In December 1971 Defense Suppression put a Maverick missile off an unmanned aircraft, guided in by a ground controller watching its seeker feed on a television screen, hit a simulated SAM site nine seconds after launch: an armed, remotely guided strike aircraft built and flown in under a year. He was one of the original founders of the National Association for Remotely Piloted Vehicles, which became AUVSI, and served as its second national president. He died in 2017 at 86. His decorations include the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, the Meritorious Service Medal twice, the USAF Commendation Medal, the Vietnam Campaign Medal with five battle stars, and the Outstanding Unit Award with Combat V. The page publishes six photographs from Red's own collection, held at the Aviation Unmanned Vehicle Museum: the Teledyne Ryan production line with a row of airframes on their cradles, a Model 147 H hoisted in a hangar beside its placard, a Model 147 SB daytime drone on a print stamped SECRET and initialled by hand, ground crew attaching pylons for an AQM-34 on the flight line, a Model 147 mounted under the wing of a C-130 for air launch, and a helicopter lifting a recovered drone from the runway on a line. The page also carries this site's own summary of a Dallas Morning News profile of Red published on 7 November 2014, headlined "Air Force vet from Parker advanced the country's drone program in Vietnam" — a summary written here, in our own words, and not the article, which belongs to the paper and is published at https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2014/11/07/air-force-vet-from-parker-advanced-the-countrys-drone-program-in-vietnam/. It profiled Red at 83 at home in Parker, Texas, opening on Bien Hoa in 1968, where he had read on the bulletin board that the Vietnamese New Year would be quiet. Two sentences of his are quoted, both to that paper in 2014: "At midnight all hell broke loose with an attack on the base," and "After three days, the drone people went back to work." The photograph that ran with the article is the newspaper's own work and is not reproduced. The page names its sources in one numbered block: Lightning Bugs and Other Reconnaissance Drones by William Wagner, Aero Publishers, 1982; the Recommendation for Decoration, Meritorious Service Medal (1 OLC), U.S. Air Force, 5 April 1971, signed Brig. Gen. Robert T. Marsh; the 2014 Dallas Morning News profile; "Drones have a history and a future," The Dallas Morning News, Business, 14 May 2023, which covers the museum and quotes Marshall; and the Aviation Unmanned Vehicle Museum's own service biography and collection records at auvm.net. It closes on the three generations: Red; his son Doug Smith, who spent three decades in the family businesses including drone manufacturing and who, with his sister Paula and Marshall, spent two years pulling a collection scattered across multiple sites under one roof and opened it to the public; and Marshall Smith, CPAU, an FAA Part 107 remote pilot and IAUA certified appraiser and umpire: instead of finding targets, the aircraft finds hail bruising and lifted shingles, and Marshall is the appraiser on the file, so he is the one who has to defend them. Red's collection became the Aviation Unmanned Vehicle Museum in Caddo Mills — the only US military drone museum in the country. It opened to the public in May 2021: 22,500 square feet, forty-plus restored aircraft spanning the 1930s to today. Open the third Saturday of every month, 10am to 2pm, except in December. None of Red's service record is a qualification of Marshall's, and the page says so: Part 107 is Part 107, and a certificate doesn't care who your grandfather was.