Drones are changing the character of war in Africa. For decades the continent's wars were land-based, fought largely by light mobile infantry; air power was too costly for most armies. By 2023 some 30 African governments had bought an unmanned system of some kind. Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED) show 484 drone strikes across 13 African countries in 2024, more than twice as many as in 2023, killing more than 1,200 people.
Unlike the smaller first-person view (FPV) drones that litter the skies in Ukraine, most systems deployed by African forces are medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) drones. They are bulkier, fly at higher altitudes for longer and carry larger payloads. The most popular is Turkey's Bayraktar TB2, which costs around $5m. Other suppliers include the UAE, China and Iran.
In Ethiopia, drones from Turkey, Iran and the UAE gave the government a decisive advantage against Tigrayan rebels in 2021, destroying exposed supply lines and beating back an offensive that had reached the gates of Addis Ababa. Yet drones have been ineffective against rebels in Ethiopia's mountainous Amhara region. In 2023 Turkish drones helped Mali's junta retake the northern city of Kidal from Tuareg separatists who had ruled it for more than a decade. In Sudan, the SAF used drones to help recapture Khartoum in March 2025, while the RSF launched drone strikes on Port Sudan from more than 1,000km away. In the Sahel, jihadist fighters have adapted by using motorbikes instead of pickup trucks to disperse and evade aerial surveillance.
In eastern Congo, M23 fighters used jammers to blunt drones fielded by UN peacekeepers and reportedly shot down a Chinese MALE drone used by the Congolese army. On June 13th 2025 Tuareg insurgents in northern Mali appear to have used FPV drones, similar to those in Ukraine, to devastate a convoy of Russian mercenaries crossing the desert.
Because drones are cheap, plentiful and easy to transport, they can be acquired by all sides in a conflict, potentially making African wars easier to start and harder to end.
Drone warfare has come to Latin America. In Colombia, armed groups have turned cheap commercial drones—mostly Chinese-made—into weapons, modifying them to carry bombs. ACLED recorded more than 80 drone attacks by non-state groups in Colombia in 2025 (to late November), up from fewer than 20 in 2024. The Gulf Clan, a drug gang, was using drones for smuggling by 2016; the ELN began surveillance flights in 2018; weaponised use started in 2023. In July 2025 a FARC faction struck a navy patrol boat with a first-person-view (FPV) drone—perhaps the first deadly use of FPV drones in the country. Colombian gangsters in Mexico have also increased drone use.
Thousands of Colombian fighters have joined the war in Ukraine as mercenaries, some enlisting in the foreign legion to gain experience with drones. Colombian operators remain much less skilful than Ukrainian ones, and few strikes succeed in killing their targets, but the threat alone limits what soldiers are willing to do.
In response, a Colombian state-run aerospace firm developed the Dragom, the country's first domestically produced attack drone, and the air force started a dedicated drone unit in October 2025. The government has spent $25m on American-made jamming equipment. The technology is spreading regionally: in September 2025 a drone attacked a prison in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and in Brazil gangs used drones to launch grenades at police in Rio de Janeiro.
China controls 80% of the global drone market. America has banned the use of Chinese drones by its armed forces and federal agencies and may implement a broader ban on some Chinese drone companies.
Taiwan is cultivating a domestic drone industry to supply its own armed forces and export to other democracies. President Lai Ching-te has called Taiwan the "Asian hub of UAV supply chains for global democracies". American military officials have described a plan for Taiwan to hold off a potential Chinese invasion by creating an "unmanned hellscape" of sea-and-air drones in the Taiwan Strait.
Since 2022 the Taiwanese government has built a drone-research centre, subsidised AI imaging chips and flight controllers, and awarded $210m in drone-procurement contracts. Taiwan aims to produce 15,000 homemade drones a month by 2028. Non-red Taiwanese drones cost about 25% more than Chinese equivalents.
Coretronic, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, made about 1,000 drones in 2024 and expected to produce 4,000-5,000 in 2025. Only four Taiwanese companies had passed the stringent checks required for defence-ministry contracts as of early 2025.
Western drones have largely underperformed on the Ukrainian battlefield. American Switchblade-300 drones, once cutting-edge kit for special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, struggled against Russian electronic warfare and caused minimal damage when they hit their targets. Various Western companies have sought to showcase their wares, but Ukrainian companies that once looked to emulate Western tech heroes like Anduril and Helsing now find themselves leading. No more than 20-30% of the battleground technology is Western, according to Ukrainian developers.
A clash of doctrines is at the heart of the issue. Western countries concentrated on exquisite wares suited to limited battles against lesser opponents. The Ukrainian-Russian battlefield is total, balanced and highly democratised. Disposability is crucial: the average ground drone (UGV) in Ukraine has a life expectancy of just one week. Western ground systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars make little sense when Ukrainian near-equivalents can be manufactured for $10,000-20,000.
The Blyskavka ("lightning"), a fixed-wing drone reverse-engineered from the Russian Molniya, entered serial production in late 2025. Built from the cheapest materials available, it lifts 8kg of explosives over 40km with a price tag of $800. Quantum Systems, a German company producing reconnaissance UAVs, is among the Western firms that have succeeded by establishing a significant early local presence; its Vector drone has been well reviewed by commanders.
Perhaps 40% of Ukraine's overall drone-making capacity lies idle. At a Brave-1 event in Lviv, Ukrainian firms raised $100m in a round of new private investment—four times more than the previous year, but trivial compared with the tens of billions being spent on defence abroad. NATO countries are ramping up spending to 5% of GDP, of which 3.5% is "hard" defence.
Ukraine produced 2.2m drones in 2024, roughly 95% of the total deployed by Ukrainian forces, and says its domestic industry can produce 5m per year. Drone production has surged from 800,000 three years before 2026 to a planned 7m in 2026. Ukraine currently enjoys a 1.3 to 1 advantage over Russia in first-person view (FPV) drones. It has also extended the range of its fixed-wing drones to as much as 1,500km, enabling strikes against energy infrastructure and air-defence systems deep inside Russia. Production of interceptor drones has increased to well over 1,000 a day. Some in Taiwan debate whether, if the war ends, they should buy Ukrainian drones and stockpile them.
On June 1st 2025 Ukraine launched "Spider's Web", a raid in which 117 drones emerged from trucks across Russia—from Siberia to the Chinese border—and destroyed a dozen or so planes in Russia's long-range air fleet. In 2022 drones were responsible for around 10% of casualties on both sides. The Royal United Services Institute, a British think-tank, estimated in March 2025 that drones are now responsible for up to 70% of the damage done to Russian installations and about half of all casualties. Ukrainian drone factories are more like garages than factories, spread hundreds of kilometres apart to avoid presenting too tempting a target. Some firms design a new model every few months, with each taking just four weeks to come to life.
Most Ukrainian drones are single-use, short-range "kamikaze" ones that travel just a few kilometres. Their batteries store as little as 77 watt-hours of energy, compared with 20,000–100,000Wh in electric vehicles. Production takes place in suburban homes and garages to minimise disruption from Russian airstrikes. Wild Hornets and Pawell are among the firms making drones; Wild Hornets now imports battery cells from South Korea and assembles its own packs, selling batteries for simple drones at $90. Pawell is developing its own battery chemistry. As of mid-2025, the most pressing supply shortage is motors rather than batteries, because magnetic components containing rare-earth metals are produced and refined by China.
The US Army seeks to put 1,000 drones in each of its dozen divisions. The Pentagon's Replicator Initiative aims to field "tens of thousands" of AI-enabled drones. Ukraine produces drones at far lower cost than America, in part because it is less squeamish about using Chinese parts.
The Chinese government is vigorously promoting a "low-altitude economy"—a proliferation of airborne devices operating below 1,000 metres, from delivery drones to electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Early in 2025 Li Qiang, the prime minister, declared the low-altitude economy an engine of growth alongside artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In December 2025 the state planning agency created a dedicated department to foster it—an unusually narrow remit signalling high-level enthusiasm.
The civil-aviation authority projects the low-altitude economy will reach a turnover of 1.5trn yuan ($208bn) by the end of 2026 and 3.5trn yuan by 2035. By the end of 2024 some 2.2m civilian drones were operating in China, a 455% jump in five years. Around 2.7m packages were delivered by drone in 2024 (excluding meals). China Post uses drones in Fujian province; dozens of cities transport blood to medical facilities by drone; a quarter of a million drones spray fertiliser and pesticides on farmland.
Six cities, including Shenzhen and Hefei, have been given autonomy to open airspace below 600 metres for commercial activity. Shenzhen had approved 250 delivery routes and built nearly 500 terminals by the end of 2025, enabling more than 776,000 drone deliveries that year. Six universities established degree courses in "low-altitude technology and engineering" in 2026.
Meituan has delivered more than 520,000 orders by drone since launching the service in 2021, with more than 200,000 meals delivered in 2024 alone—almost double the number of 2023. EHang became the first eVTOL company to receive a commercial passenger licence in March 2026. Chinese carmaker Xpeng has designed a six-wheel electric vehicle holding an eVTOL in the boot, with mass production planned and more than 4,000 orders received; the price is less than 2m yuan ($280,000).
According to a McKinsey survey, 86% of Chinese consumers are keen on drone delivery, compared with 53% of Americans. In June 2025 America issued an executive order to accelerate the use of drones and eVTOL, with the explicit goal of warding off foreign competition.
The Garpiya-3 is a Russian military drone—essentially a knock-off of the Iranian-designed Shahed—developed and flight-tested in China by AO IEMZ Kupol, part of a Russian state-owned arms company, with the help of Chinese firms. In October 2024 America's Treasury Department sanctioned two Chinese companies involved, one of which had provided the drone's engine. Sir Grant Shapps, then Britain's defence secretary, declassified intelligence on the drone in May 2024 to expose the co-operation. The Garpiya-3 was a lethal system, not a dual-use aircraft.
First-person view (FPV) drones—racing drones packed with explosives and flown into tanks or soldiers—are playing a role in the Ukraine war similar to the machinegun in the first world war, making infantry attacks so costly that they favour defence over offence. FPV drones have also made tanks vulnerable; Russia has lost nearly 11,000 tanks and almost 23,000 armoured infantry vehicles since its full-scale invasion. Russia now depends largely on infantry attacks by small groups of men, sometimes on foot, sometimes on motorcycles.
The range at which drones can target soldiers on Ukraine's front lines has been extending rapidly. Eighteen months before mid-2025, drones could target anyone within 5km of the front line; by mid-2025 that had extended to 15km. Near Kostiantynivka, Ukrainian forces controlled the ground but Russians controlled an estimated 90% of the sky; fibre-optic drones put areas within range of the railway station off-limits. Tunnels of netting protect drivers on roads into the city.
Fibre-optic drones, controlled by a fishing-line-style filament rather than a radio signal, are proving much harder to jam than conventional drones on Ukraine's front lines. The technology is redolent of wire-guided missile systems first deployed in 1945. The fibre-optic cable delivers crystal-clear HD-quality video to the pilot, compared with the fuzzy picture of standard radio-linked drones. Their range is a relatively short 10-15km, requiring the pilot to be near the front.
Russia began deploying fibre-optic drones in large numbers by late 2024; Ukraine followed a couple of months later. They played a significant role in Russia's successful counteroffensive in Kursk in March 2025. The spool flies with the drone, unwinding as it goes. China dominates the fibre-optic cable market, with both Ukrainian and Russian buyers vying for supply in Chinese factories.
As of mid-2025 at least 11 Ukrainian companies were in the fibre-optic drone business. 3DTech, one such firm, was scaling production from 600 drones a month to an expected 10,000 by the end of summer 2025.
Both sides are constructing nets over key positions to counter fibre-optic drones, and troops use shotguns when they hear drones overhead. Ukraine is also testing its Tryzub laser system, which aims to blind or fry the electronics of incoming drones, missiles and aircraft. Vadym Sukharevsky, head of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, demonstrated the system at a tech fair in April 2025.
Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) are rolling around the front lines in Ukraine, with about 40 mostly private firms producing some 200 models. In spring 2025 Ukraine announced plans to deploy 15,000 ground robots. On April 13th 2026 Volodymyr Zelensky said the army had passed a milestone by capturing a Russian position using only UGVs and drones, without any human troops. Over the first three months of 2026 Ukrainian drones and robots conducted more than 22,000 missions. They fall into three categories: logistics, engineering support and combat support. Key players predict their proliferation could mirror the explosion in aerial-drone manufacturing in 2023.
The 3rd Assault Brigade is among the pioneers. Mule drones transport tonnes of materiel; evacuation drones spare stretcher teams from drone-heavy skies. The Hyzhak ("Predator") uses AI to identify and shoot drones from 200 metres; the Liut ("Fury"), a machine-gun platform, first saw action during Ukraine's incursion into Kursk in August 2024. Operators now connect via Starlink from command posts far from the front, though communications remain the biggest brake on mass deployment—Starlink fails in difficult terrain or under tree cover. Engineers estimate that an AI or machine-vision upgrade, perhaps a year away, is needed before mass combat use becomes realistic.
Ukraine is currently ahead in the UGV race, largely out of necessity. Russia, whose army is increasing by 8,000–9,000 men per month, does not feel the same manpower imperative. Ukrainian developers expect Russia to eventually copy and scale up the best designs, as it did with first-person-view drones.
FarSight, a system developed at Michigan State University and funded by IARPA, aims to extend biometric recognition to long-range aerial surveillance. It fuses three markers—gait, body shape and face—into a combined profile, using "whole-body biometric recognition" to compensate for the low resolution and atmospheric turbulence inherent in drone-mounted cameras. FarSight outperformed all other systems in NIST testing but is not yet deployable: accuracy remains too weak at high camera angles, in warm weather or beyond a kilometre. IARPA's broader programme, BRIAR, envisions similar technology on any high or distant camera, from tall buildings to border-surveillance towers.
Navies around the world are reinventing the air wings that fly from aircraft-carriers, steadily replacing crewed planes with drones that can be developed more quickly, used more aggressively and fly farther than short-range jets.
In August 2025 America's navy gave contracts to four large defence firms to design combat drones—loyal wingmen—to accompany crewed jets off carriers. The MQ-25 Stingray, a large refuelling drone, began flight-testing in 2025 and is planned for carrier deployment from 2026; it could later be equipped with weapons. America's CCAs are expected to cost $20m-30m each.
Britain's Royal Navy chief, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, said the government had ordered him to deploy a "hybrid" air wing of drones and crewed jets within five years. With two exceptions—F-35 jets and helicopters—the aim is to make the air wing completely uncrewed by 2040. Drones will handle airborne early warning, aerial refuelling, anti-submarine warfare and eventually some strike missions. The T-150 Malloy quadcopter, capable of hauling at least 65kg, flew supplies to a destroyer from HMS Prince of Wales—a first at sea. Jenkins said loyal wingmen would eventually escort every F-35 at sea, serving as intelligence collectors, decoys and missile carriers. He envisaged each warship having two uncrewed escorts, dispersing weapons rather than concentrating them on carriers. Ukraine's Magura V7 uncrewed speedboat, armed with Sidewinder anti-aircraft missiles, has downed Russian Su-30 jets.
Turkey deployed armed drones on the TCG Anadolu, an amphibious assault ship, in September 2025. The Mojave, a large 1,600kg-capacity drone, was flown from the ROKS Dokdo, a South Korean vessel, in November. France plans to fly smaller drones from its future carrier by 2038 and larger armed ones by 2040. China launched the Type 076, the world's largest class of amphibious assault ships, equipped with a catapult for large drones.
Mark Milley, America's chairman of the joint chiefs of staff from 2019 to 2023, declared the aircraft-carrier would "be dead in the water in 20 years". Proponents retort that as mobile runways which can sail anywhere, carriers are more survivable than airbases on land.
America's "low-altitude economy" remains largely theoretical even as China's advances. More than a decade has passed since Amazon unveiled Prime Air, stoking expectations of unmanned vehicles zipping packages to homes. Amazon only in 2024 got a federal special regulatory waiver permitting it to operate drones beyond operators' line of sight. It now delivers packages weighing up to 5lb (2.3kg) to customers in two cities.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is still mulling how to relax restrictions on flights beyond operators' view. Donald Trump issued an executive order in June 2025 ordering it to speed up. In August 2025 the FAA responded with new proposed rules: companies would still need federal approvals, but the government wants standards to be clear, uniform and feasible. Drone flights would be forbidden over outdoor public gatherings and above 400 feet (122 metres) in most cases. Operators would have to buy drones capable of flying without visual supervision, but each drone leaving a production line would need only testing, not a full federal airworthiness certification.
Potential commercial uses include dispatching patients' blood for rapid lab testing, precision agriculture (spraying specific amounts of pesticide and fertiliser), and bridge, power-line and railway maintenance. Conflict is especially fierce over how to prevent mid-air crashes in low-altitude airspace. Pilots of helicopters and other aircraft say drones should always give way to manned vehicles. Some industry advocates suggest all aircraft in low-altitude airspace should be obliged to broadcast a location signal. Regulators have until early 2026 to refine their proposal.
Drone swarms—in which multiple drones co-ordinate autonomously rather than each requiring a dedicated operator—are fast becoming a reality, particularly in Ukraine. Inspiration comes from animal swarms such as murmurations of starlings, in which movement emerges from simple rules rather than central direction. In a military swarm a single mission commander selects targets and the software handles co-ordination.
Swarms come in many levels of sophistication. The simplest involve deconfliction so that multiple drones do not all attack the same target. Britain's Brimstone anti-tank missile, which entered service more than 20 years ago, can be fired in salvoes that attack targets in priority order. Russia's V2U attack drone assigns targets by wing colour.
The Israel Defence Forces used the first combat-drone swarm in Gaza in 2021 to track down Hamas groups firing rockets. In February 2025 Mykhailo Fedorov, then Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation, announced that a dozen Ukrainian companies were working on drone swarms and the first was intended to be in service by the end of that year.
Several Ukrainian firms are already deploying swarming systems on a small scale. Sine Engineering, based in Lviv, has rolled out Pasika ("apiary"), which handles an FPV drone's communications, navigation and ability to autonomously plan a flight path. Pasika allows drones to find their own way to a predefined area and orbit—communicating with one another via radio—until instructed to strike. An operator with 11th Brigade of the National Guard says Pasika has been effective at stopping massed Russian assaults too rapid to halt with individual drones.
Swarmer, another Ukrainian firm, had its first success in September 2025: a mini-swarm of one scout and two bombers controlled by a single operator. The company has tested swarms of up to 25 drones. The Fourth Law, whose name alludes to Isaac Asimov's fictional laws of robotics, is aiming for "massively scalable autonomy" using AI to enable vast numbers of drones that can fly and find targets on their own.
Auterion, an American company, has supplied tens of thousands of its Skynode strike kits to Ukraine. Skynode adds AI capability to drones, enabling autonomous navigation, target lock-on and swarming. In January 2026 America's Department of War released a video from its "Swarm Forge" programme showing FPV drones hitting targets in quick succession with the aid of Auterion's Nemyx swarming software, which runs on Skynode. Lorenz Meier, Auterion's boss, says Nemyx allows drones to communicate to attack targets in priority order; if one is lost, another automatically takes over.
Some Ukrainian analysts suggest mature swarms of tens of drones are still two or three years away, largely owing to the difficulty of scaling mesh networks for larger groups. But on March 13th 2026 Russian military commentators described "massive" Ukrainian strikes of 300-400 drones over a narrow front, attacking to a depth of 20km and allowing a rapid advance by Ukrainian troops. Swarms may have played a role. Drone swarms, which allow efficient and rapid concentration of firepower, could flip the dynamic that has thus far favoured defenders.
The American air force began testing prototypes of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) in 2025—a drone designed to use runways and be controlled by crewed aircraft to augment their firepower. David Ochmanek of the RAND Corporation argues that, within China's missile "kill zone" close to the first island chain, the air force must shift to runway-independent drones—larger than hand-held quadcopters or loitering munitions, with greater range, sensors and weapons, launched from rails, lorries or rockets. Even runway-independent drones would still need ground crews, fuel and munitions.
High-power microwave (HPM) weapons fire intense pulses of microwave radiation that disrupt or destroy electronic componentry in drones. The energy they deposit generates unwanted currents, overheats sensitive components and floods electronics with electromagnetic noise, causing crashes. Because they only need electrical power to run, rather than ammunition, they are far cheaper to operate than kinetic interceptors—though upfront costs are high.
The US Army's first weapon specifically designed to down a drone swarm with a single shot is the Leonidas IFPC-HPM, manufactured by Epirus, a defence-tech startup based in Torrance, California. The army has a handful deployed in the western Pacific and either in or near the Middle East. Its range is several hundred metres; a new version due in summer 2025 should offer more than 1km. The army's initial contract for four systems, including services, exceeded $66m. Epirus uses bespoke gallium-nitride microchips rather than traditional magnetron technology; these produce microwave blasts with durations in the millisecond range, compared with the nanosecond range of magnetron emitters.
Other Western systems include Thales's RapidDestroyer, a container-size microwave blaster mounted on a lorry with a range of up to 1km, which the British army used to down drone swarms in Wales in April 2025. Leidos, a defence firm in Reston, Virginia, expects to deliver Mjölnir, a microwave blaster with the ability to change wavelength, to America's Air Force Research Laboratory by early 2026. RTX is developing two shipping-container-size systems: PHASER for short ranges and CHIMERA for longer ones. Lockheed Martin is refining MORFIUS, a roughly 14kg microwave weapon packaged in a drone that flies into an attacking swarm, emits blasts and returns to base.
Drone designers are racing to protect drones with reflective metal shielding, but microwaves heat up the surfaces they reflect off and can produce damaging electrical charges in conductive protrusions such as antennae or camera lenses.
Ukraine is pursuing the technology but lags behind. At least two firms are working on counter-drone microwave weapons: Transient Technologies, a maker of ground-penetrating radar systems in Kyiv that quietly began its programme after the full invasion, and First Contact, which built the drones flown in the Spider's Web raids of June 1st 2025. As of mid-2025 both were at early stages. Brave1, a Ukrainian government technology accelerator, is seeking microwave blasters from allies to test in combat. Epirus requested American government permission to export its technology to Ukraine but initially failed to obtain it; as of mid-2025 the Trump administration's thinking was said to have shifted in favour of granting such licences.
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