Drones: Tomorrow's terrorist's weapon - A real threat

Drones Will Be Tomorrow’s Terrorists Weapon: A real threat

Drone usage is now spoken of constantly in connection with both the conflicts in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine. But the tide first began to turn with Turkish drone usage in the Libyan civil war — the first war whose outcome was changed because of drones. A handful of Turkish drones saved the Western Libyan government from Haftar’s numerically superior forces, a force that on paper should have overwhelmed it. At the time, few recognized it for what it was, but it was an early indication of a new era in warfare, one where a relatively small and inexpensive investment in drones could offset a much larger conventional advantage.

Today, in Ukraine, more than 80% of losses are caused by armed drones — not bullets, not artillery, not tanks, but drones. A shift is taking place from large, strategic drones aimed at high-value targets toward small, cheap drones armed with simple explosives, used to attack individual soldiers and civilians. As a result, there are no longer clear battlefield lines in Ukraine in the traditional sense: any large, continuous trench line becomes an easy target for swarms of endless drones. What remains instead are small positions of at most a few dozen soldiers, hiding in bunkers or camouflaged positions to avoid detection, since concentration itself has become a liability. At the same time, drones are increasingly using new technologies to evade electronic countermeasures, driving a genuine technological race between attackers and defenders, one that shows no sign of slowing down as both sides continue to adapt.

The pattern is clear: drones are becoming more widespread and cheaper by the day, placing them increasingly within reach of actors far less sophisticated than a state military. It is inevitable that this technology will eventually be adopted by terrorists and other illegal organizations, not as a distant possibility but as a near-term certainty. What defenses currently exist against a terrorist drone attack on an airport, a city centre, or a hospital? Beyond mass-casualty scenarios, malicious actors could use drones for the assassination of politicians, activists, or even personal enemies, a form of targeted violence that would be far harder to trace and far easier to carry out than through conventional means. Underwater drones are already being used to transport drugs, showing that the technology’s illicit applications are not hypothetical but already underway, quietly proving the concept before it is ever turned toward more violent ends.

No matter how strict governments and law enforcement become, it will be impossible to fully prevent terrorists from acquiring and using armed drones. The question we should be asking is no longer whether a major drone attack will happen, but when — and how we will defend against it. At present, there is no available, unclassified technology that can guarantee a target is safe from drone attack. Europe remains unprepared for this kind of unorthodox threat, and it is only a matter of time before we are forced to confront this dark reality, one that current planning and current defenses do not yet take seriously enough.

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