‘Here’s something I wrote about drones 13 years ago: how much has changed?’, Honest History, 21 March 2026
Thirteen years ago, I published on Inside Story a review of two books about drone warfare: David Sanger’s Confront and Conceal and a collection edited by Shahzad Bashir and Robert D. Crews, Under the Drones. The first was about, among other subjects, President Obama’s use of drones, the second described life in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the threat of drone warfare. The first took the story to 2o12, the second began as academic papers in 2009, so neither was written yesterday.
Given the ubiquity of drones today, especially in Gaza, Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, it is worth picking out a few paragraphs from that long review to hint at answers about the degree of change. The obvious changes are that there are a lot more drones around, in more countries, and they are a lot smaller and a lot cheaper.
Military drones are all about distance — the distance between the operator and the weapon, the distance between the high-flying drones and their targets on the ground, the distance between achieving military or anti-terrorist objectives and the possibility of politically unpalatable casualties …
The political and economic advantages of drones and [cyber] worms are clear. Sanger quotes an anonymous senior intelligence official … who says, “We have a keener awareness than ever of what it costs, in blood and treasure, to go into a country on the ground, and how difficult it is to extract yourself once you are there.” …
The president [Obama] has spoken of a “targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists,” some commentators have found it difficult to distinguish between drone strikes and exploding cigars (with which the CIA failed to blow up Castro) or magnetic car bombs (with which the CIA, or perhaps Mossad, succeeded in blowing up an Iranian nuclear scientist and his wife) …
Drones will continue to appeal to governments attracted by the idea that foreign interventions can involve fewer military casualties, and so we can expect some moves in Canberra to explore the use of this technology … [not sure, 13 years on, how much this has happened]
What emerges, however, is an understanding that the issues afflicting this ancient land [Afghanistan but could be elsewhere] are far too complex to be settled by lobbing skyrockets at them. Claiming that drones are intended as a “surgical” means of taking out terrorist enemies with minimal collateral damage does not meet the case: drone warfare risks exacerbating tensions among the local population … and increasing hostility towards the people doing the lobbing …
Similar hopes are held for drones as were held for carpet bombing in Cambodia and Vietnam, another high-tech strategy that tried to slice through a tangle of nationalist, ethnic and ideological issues in a war zone only dimly understood by the invaders … Forty years on from Vietnam, the weapons may be more precisely targeted but there are still unlearned lessons.
