Year of the drone — how the hi-tech weapon has transformed warfare
From Ukraine to Gaza, the skies are full of unmanned flying machines. Some are just homemade cardboard planes, but robot fighter pilots are on the horizon. Michael Clarke is visiting professor in defence studies at King’s College London
At year’s end, lexicographers like to discuss the “word of the year”. Military lexicographers have no doubt that this year’s word is “drones”. And like all fashionable words, it means several different things. But there is no argument that the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have got war colleges everywhere scratching their heads over what it will mean for the future.
The conflict in Ukraine has become a throwback into European industrial-age warfare which the continent hasn’t suffered since the middle of the last century. The Gaza war has become a massive counterterrorist operation that looks increasingly open-ended. They are very different types of war, but drone technologies have already reshaped the battlespace in both of them.
In fact, drones have been around for a
