Are drones changing modern warfare?
- Unmanned aerial systems are now often armed
- Videos have shown drone attacks in Ukraine
- Kallenborn: Drones aren’t sophisticated, but they’re useful
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(NewsNation) — From the destruction in Ukraine to the war in Israel against Hamas, are drones the new way of war?
Drones have inflicted carnage in the war in Ukraine, and they were an instrumental weapon for Hamas in catching Israel off its guard. Drones are also part of the recipe in this month’s multiple air attacks on U.S. troops.
“We’ve been attacked at least 10 separate times in Iraq and three separate times in Syria via a mix of one-way attack drones and rockets,” Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder with the Department of Defense said.
U.S. drones, like the MQ-9 Reaper infamously downed by a Russian fighter over the Black Sea this March, have a unit cost of more than $50 million. Other fighting forces are successfully using drones right off store shelves.
“Like literally any of us can go buy at Walmart; these aren’t anything sophisticated. But they’re incredibly useful because they can provide awareness of what’s going on in the battlefield. You can fly it around, take pictures of enemy tank movements and stuff like that,” Zachary Kallenborn, an adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.
Unmanned aerial systems are often now armed. Videos have shown drone attacks in Ukraine and on the Kremlin and Hamas using one to reportedly blow up an Israeli tank.
Terror organizations with low-tech devices have the full attention of American military experts.
“Hamas uses drones to deadly effect against the Israeli iron wall in Gaza. Iranian operatives or its proxies might try to use UAS here in the United States,” Thomas Warrick with the Atlantic Council said.
The U.S.’s new replicator initiative will put thousands of unmanned vehicles on land, at sea and in the skies to counter China’s growing military. They’ll be small, smart, cheap and plentiful, says top brass.
“There’s no person in there. If a drone gets shot down, like, they don’t have a mom, they don’t have a dad, they don’t have sons or daughters. No one really cares that much. The only people that are sad are the accountants,” Kallenborn said.
Commercial drones have proven to be so useful that in Ukraine, organizations are collecting donations for them. One group took in a whopping 16,000 donated drones from the public.
