Near the end of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, the video game player must rescue the President while a swarm of unmanned aircraft demolish Los Angeles. Players navigate a landscape of collapsed skyscrapers and burning cars, the air thick with ash and yellow smoke. Remote controlled helicopters, airplanes and tanks ambush the player, rogue drones blasting the city to pieces.

The game concludes in 2025 with this nightmare scenario: terrorists have seized control of the entire United States drone fleet. The game has spawned deviantART collections and fan art as players create wallpaper stills, posters and scenes from the game.

Unmanned airplanes and other robotic fighting machines will obsess popular culture for years to come, and deviantART has already become a hub for drone art. Artists have tagged more than 19,000 posts with the word "drones” inventing everything from robots with laser cannons to My Little Pony drone horses to alien machinery to sleek unmanned airplanes to gorgeous robot blimps mining gas on distant stars.

According to Navy historians, drones first took flight in 1937, as the military tested remote controlled airplanes for research and missions. Just like drone bees under the command of the Queen, these early Navy drones were used for dangerous missions, target practice and other disposable tasks.

The humanitarian organization Human Rights Watch recently published a report about drone warfare around the globe. According to the study, US Department of Defense has invested about $6 billion every year into “the research and development, procurement, operations, and maintenance of unmanned systems for war.” In May 2010, U.S. drones surpassed one million flight hours and a short time later, in November 2010, achieved one million combat hours.

Winged violence from the sky is not a new artistic theme.

John James Audubon

The rain is driven in sheets which seem scarcely to fall on sea or land; I can hardly call it rain, it is rather a mass of water, so thick that all objects at any distance from us are lost to sight every three or four minutes, and the waters comb up and beat about us in our rock-bound harbor as a newly caged bird does against its imprisoning walls. The Great Black-backed Gull alone is seen floating through the storm, screaming loudly and mournfully as it seeks its prey; not another bird is to be seen abroad”

In the 20th Century, aviation art captured airplanes with the same gorgeous detail that Audubon brought to real birds. The movement took flight during World War II as airplanes brought mass destruction to the prosecution of war. Artists romanticized the deadly beauty of military machinery, painting a species of bird created by mankind.

An explosion of science fiction in the late 1940’s and into the 1950’s introduced rocket ships. There is a direct line to Star Trek and Star Wars through Blade Runner from Sputnik, the first unmanned satellite in space launched in 1957 by the Soviet Union. The real thing and the imagined blend together.

Anime has also explored drone warfare, especially the mecha anime genre that “revolves around the use of piloted robotic armors in battle.”  These colorful stories show epic battles between enormous fighting machines.

Inspired by mecha anime, deviantART artist ~izo84 has been developing a “Drone Army” video game concept for many years, posting some of his work on the site. He also cited professional devinatART members like `ukitakumuki, *Avitus12, *KaranaK and ~flaketom as inspirations.

~izo84 feels conflicted about his work:

I do not feel good about designing war machines. But I think as long as what I envisioned is pure fiction, I can continue working without remorse. On the other hand, I can see how fast the real development of unmanned war machines changed, and I have concerns.”

War as a Video Game
by ~turningaway

Inspired by press accounts of drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, artist ~turningaway posted “War as a Video Game” on deviantART. The political painting shows what a drone attack feels like for innocent civilians on the ground and reminds us of the consequences of these unmanned attacks.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was not created as science fiction. An Australian gaming site AusGamer interviewed Treyarch studio co-founder Mark Lamia who worked on the game. The founder explained the realistic art design behind the drone attacks: “We wanted to make sure that this is Call of Duty, it can’t be too sci-fi, it’s gotta feel like this is plausible. It’s part of the DNA of Black Ops where we set up these plausible scenarios and then we have our fiction going through it and our story... the flipside of major advances in robotics and technology is that sort of— on the flipside— is the dependencies on that and things that might be happening in cyber-warfare in the future. Things that used to be the domain of great science-fiction books is no longer, it’s reality; it’s happening; starting to play out in the headlines today, but certainly in the coming decade.”

While developing Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, the video game designers and artists consulted with P.W. Singer, the war scholar who wrote the most important book about drone warfare, Wired for War.  Singer described why video game players are highly valued as drone pilots: “Having spent their youth online gaming, sipping Red Bull, and talking on their cell phones all at once, young drone pilots come to the unit with an ease at multitasking already wired into their DNA.”

Artists are training warriors.