Weaponized Drones are Now Cheaper than Ever in the Second Age

Weaponized drones are been honed by burgeoning global commerce

Technology has always had destructive potential, but weaponization is now been honed by burgeoning global commerce. The pandemic has already given the future a distinctly dystopian look and then there's the burgeoning of the second age of drones.

That's how experts are describing the international drone market — which ranges from tiny startups selling US$1,000-to-US$2,000 off-the-shelf technology that can be easily weaponized by terrorist groups like the Taliban, to high-tech unmanned vehicles that can carry laser-guided munitions and Hellfire missiles. It's an even more highly autonomous proliferation of the first age of drones, which has been dominated by the U.S. since its first attack using a remotely piloted craft in 2001. Now, it's an ungoverned, unregulated space with billions of dollars to be made and thousands of lives at stake.

The deadly shortcomings of this high-tech violence were placed squarely in the public eye with the U.S. drone strike in Kabul on Aug. 29 that targeted terrorists but instead killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. It was a failure of military intelligence and, like so many other civilian fatalities of the U.S. air wars, including those featured in a New York Times investigation published in December, there was no finding of wrongdoing against those involved.

Large-scale manufacturers now negotiate sales directly with prospective buyers who have clear military and security uses in mind. It's seen Turkey emerge as a drone superpower in the sector, which market intelligence firm BIS Research estimated was worth US$28.5 billion in 2021. The U.S. has already expressed its concerns over Turkey's sale of weaponized drones to Ethiopia, where the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali is suspected of using them against rebel forces in the Tigray region in a civil war that's killed thousands of civilians and forced more than 2 million people to flee their homes. The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region saw Azerbaijan emerge as the clear victor using Russian, Turkish, Israeli, and indigenous drones to overpower its neighbor's less sophisticated military.