Drone warfare,
for many years, meant mostly one thing: A U.S. Predator drone, a missile-armed winged lawnmower in the sky, stalked a single target and then assassinated him. Or someone, at least.
Top-secret
Pentagon documents showed that
90 percent of those killed
during one campaign in Afghanistan were not the primary targets, according to a 2015 investigation by The Intercept.
This type of drone war now seems quaint.
Last week, Ukrainian forces unleashed a blitz of almost 800
drones
on Russian targets, only two days after launching a
similar salvo
. Ukraine has increasingly let loose swarms of hundreds of drones to overwhelm Russian air defenses, not unlike more modest Iranian efforts —
using attack drones and ballistic missiles
— that defeated U.S. countermeasures and resulted in a massive
increase
in American casualties in the Middle East.
Russia claimed to have shot down most of the drones, but last week’s attack did set fire to a warehouse owned by Wildberries, Russia’s biggest online retailer. Ukraine has
pummeled
Russia’s analogue to Amazon
all summer
, claiming it helps supply the Russian military. (Moscow denies this.)
Ukraine also reportedly has (or at least had) a plan to shutter Moscow’s airports, cutting the capital off from the rest of the world, by unleashing
swarms of around 1,000 autonomous drones
equipped with artificial intelligence guidance systems each night. These drones would apparently use so-called “map matching,” in which the drone’s AI would compare uploaded aerial maps with what its onboard camera views; when it sees something resembling the image of the target, it streaks toward it and explodes. You can imagine the many mistakes that could be made — not to mention the potential risk to passengers, airport staff, flight crews, and others, even if the AI works seamlessly.
Ukraine has yet to unleash such a drone barrage, but after Russia’s use of fully autonomous AI-guided drones to
kill three people
in a July attack, th
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