by David Brennan -Newsweek
The first airstrike ever launched from an unmanned drone was a failure . On October 7, 2001—the first night of the war in Afghanistan—a CIA Predator drone buzzed above a compound where Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his senior commanders were gathered.
But rather than decapitating the Taliban leadership, the strike only blew up a truck parked outside. Alerted to the danger, Omar and his commanders fled into the night.
Despite the outcome, the mission was a watershed moment. Some 16 years later, drone technology has revolutionized the way the U.S. fights wars. Drone technology is used on battlefields on land, at sea, and will soon even be in space.
But drones—or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—are no longer used only by top-tier military powers. The advent of relatively cheap recreational UAVs has made them available to those without the resources to invest in military research and development. According to a report from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) , more than 90 countries and nonstate groups field drones, and 30 have weaponized the
The spread of UAV technology to militants represents the next evolution of warfare by remote control, whereby terrorist groups can build de facto air forces. Weaponized drones are often low-tech but potentially deadly.
The Islamic State military group (ISIS ), for example, was able to import and construct hundreds—if not thousands—of inexpensive and portable drones, using them to terrorize their enemies on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria. When ISIS’s Mosul bastion finally fell in the summer of 2017, Iraqi forces found dozens of drone factories …
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