How did drones change warfare?

The first mass-use unmanned aircraft, such as the Predator, debuted in the Balkans in the mid-1990s as surveillance platforms. In 2001 they received Hellfire missiles, and with the MQ-9 Reaper from 2007, a new form of warfare was born: aircraft able to remain over a target for more than 24 hours, piloted from bases thousands of kilometers away and capable of striking without putting anyone at risk. The United States used them in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen, opening the debate over targeted strikes and their civilian casualties.

The second shift came when the technology became cheap. In Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, Turkish Bayraktar TB2s and Azerbaijan's loitering munitions destroyed Armenian armor and air-defense batteries, showing that a mid-sized country could achieve air superiority with aircraft costing just a few million dollars. The war in Ukraine since 2022 has taken that logic to the extreme: commercial quadcopters to observe and correct artillery fire, FPV drones costing a few hundred euros that chase down a vehicle or a soldier, and long-range munitions such as the Shahed, which Russia launches by the hundreds against the power grid. Both sides manufacture hundreds of thousands of units a year, and Ukrainian naval drones forced the Black Sea Fleet to pull back from Sevastopol.

The battlefield has become transparent: massing troops or moving a vehicle in daylight is now dangerous dozens of kilometers from the front. The economics of air defense have been turned upside down, because shooting down a 20,000-euro drone with a million-euro missile isn't sustainable, which is driving the development of guns, lasers, and interceptor drones. And electronic warfare has moved to the forefront: jamming the link or the GPS signal is now as decisive as armor, hence drones guided by fiber optics or with autonomous navigation.