How Drones Went From Tools of the Powerful to Weapons of the Masses |
Drones
How Drones Went From Tools of the Powerful to Weapons of the Masses
Two very different sorts of drone warfare
Matthew Petti | 10.8.2026 9:45 AM
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Lebanon was the birthplace of drone warfare. In a 1982 battle nicknamed the "Bekaa Valley turkey shoot," the Israeli air force used drones to distract and destroy Syrian air defenses over Lebanon. Over the next two decades, Israel would occupy a "security belt" in southern Lebanon, pioneering the use of drone surveillance to root out local rebels.
But lately, "drone warfare" has meant something rather different to the southern Lebanese. Since April 2024, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah caught the Israeli army off guard with cheap fiber optic attack drones.
Yemen witnessed the first known CIA drone assassination outside the battlefield in November 2002, when the U.S. government tracked a member of Al Qaeda through his cell phone signals and executed him with a missile. Yemen—along with Pakistan and Somalia—would become a central focus of President Barack Obama's "light footprint" air campaign. It was also the place where the Obama administration killed an American teenager by drone.
In Yemen as in Lebanon, the meaning of drone warfare has changed a lot. As the country's civil war heated up this week, militias on both sides have been using similar cheap attack drones.
"Something darkly poetic about watching Yemen go from the frontline of drone-centric American [counterterrorism] policy to watching Yemeni conflict parties increasingly embrace drone warfare," writes the journalist Adam Baron. But the "drone warfare" these fighters are embracing is very different from U.S. surveillance and targeted killings. "Drones" are now a big and diverse class of weapons, united only by the lack of a pilot inside the machine. Lumping them all together conceals a huge revolution in aerial warfare that has taken place over the past decade.
The first generation of military drones was a way to reinforce top-down power. They were expensive machines of use only to someone with the resources to conduct mass surveillance. The new generation of drones are a poor man's air force. Built or adopted from consumer products, they allow........