Ukraine’s recent mass drone attack on Russian airbases paints a grim future of drone threats to the American homeland. Ukrainian special operations forces hid 117 small quadcopters in the back of flatbed trucks, had unwitting Russian drivers stop the trucks at petrol stations near the airbases, then, when all were in place outside all five bases, blew the tops of the trucks and launched the attack. The United States estimates 20 Russian aircraft were damaged, 10 of which were destroyed, amounting to roughly 34% of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. But the growing and evolving nature of drone warfare is not confined to states; terrorists and organized criminal organizations are employing the technology too.
Although a non-state actor launching such a complex and sophisticated attack as Operation Spiderweb would be quite difficult, non-state actors can increasingly launch drones in mass, across multiple domains, incorporating artificial intelligence and autonomy. American law enforcement and homeland security officials need to prepare.
Current Situation
Drones—especially aerial drones—have already joined the arsenal of various terrorist and organized criminal groups. Aum Shinrikyo first explored drone usage in the 1990s with a remote-control helicopter to deploy Sarin. ISIS launched hundreds of drone attacks in Iraq and Syria over the years. Iran and the Houthi Rebels launched drone and missile attacks against oil refineries in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, criminal cartels and gangs in Mexico, Ecuador, and Brazil are now regularly using aerial drones to attack rival gangs, confront police and military, smuggle weapons into prisons, and drugs across borders, while also using them for intelligence collection. Aerial drones are also used in combined arms tactics, accompanying artisanal armored vehicles or improvised armored fighting vehicles known as narcotanques. Collectively, embracing novel applications of drone technology and drone tactics, techniques, and procedures can yield local tactical superiority. For both terrorists and criminal groups, a major advantage of aerial drones is providing affordable access to the air, occasionally allowing non-state actors to achieve localized air superiority over countries for attacks, intelligence, and propaganda purposes.
But drones are still fundamentally in an experimental phase as criminals and terrorists integrate the new technology into their operational framework. This is especially the case for the American homeland, where only a few attempts at weaponized drone attacks have occurred (though drone smuggling is increasingly a common occurrence). As actors become more familiar and comfortable with drone technology and demonstrate operational effectiveness, their use is likely to expand. And drone technology is growing too.
The Future
Drone technology, like any technology, is not static. Three technological trends could increase the capacity and harm that terrorists and organized criminals can carry out: drones in new domains, autonomy and AI, and swarming.
Waymo, owned by Alphabet, claims a fleet of over 1,500 self-driving cars throughout the United States, while Tesla claims new vehicles have “full self-driving capability.” In theory, a non-state actor could order, rent, or buy a self-driving car, pack it with explosives or a remotely operated weapon system, and send it on an attack against a government building or a crowd. Such non-aerial unmanned vehicles allow non-state actors to carry out suicide attacks without the suicide. That could extend the tactical and strategic benefits to terrorist groups or organized criminal groups that would not traditionally be willing to carry out such attacks. Like aerial drones, attacks using drones in other domains can also be launched from locations with ready escape routes, allowing the attacker to flee before the ground, surface, or underwater drone reaches the target.
Non-state actors can also increasingly employ autonomous drones equipped with various forms of artificial intelligence. Autonomous drones could provide dynamic precision with protection against electronic warfare, while reducing operator risk. A non-state actor might, for example, launch a series of autonomous drones with orders to fly a pre-programmed route to a crowded public square, then use facial recognition to pick out and bomb targets. Terrorists could employ facial recognition to target specific individuals too, such as Congressmen who voted for a specific bill, while criminal organizations could send a drone hunting for a rival gang leader. Greater autonomy would also improve the system’s defenses against law enforcement attempts to jam the drones’ command and control system. That could prove a challenge, as homeland security drone defenses have often relied on jamming. Although countries have growing interest in kinetic defenses, that could create challenging dilemmas: police and homeland security officials firing at a drone over the heads of a crowd entails obvious risks, yet so does failing to respond to a drone terrorist attack.
Non-state actors are increasingly deploying mass drones. For example, on January 10, 2024 the Iran-sponsored Houthi rebels launched at least 18 one-way-attack drones alongside three anti-ship missiles against American ships in the Red Sea. Plausibly, future mass drone attacks could include true drone swarms in which the drones communicate and collaborate to achieve shared objectives. Although drone swarming will necessarily increase the cost and difficulty of carrying out an attack, it may also provide tactical and strategic advantages as drones dynamically attack from multiple angles. Drones within the swarm may specialize for specific tasks like intelligence gathering, counter-jamming, or filming the attack for propaganda. A terrorist or organized criminal drone swarm could be strategically valuable, as post-attack media reports warn of “killer cartel swarms.”
Preparing for the Future
Managing the future threat landscape requires continuous assessment of adversary capabilities, intentions, and general trends. Horizon scanning and sensing can guide operational response and inform the development of policy, doctrinal, and legal frameworks. This effort should be integrated into persistent Intelligence support for countering terrorism, as well as supporting the range of related homeland security, law enforcement, and public safety responses required to counter emerging drone threats. The goal should be to anticipate innovation by prospective adversaries, conduct threat modeling, and risk assessment, and develop integrated countermeasures for a prioritized range of attack scenarios. In short, this means innovation (both detecting and assessing adversary innovation and developing friendly protective innovation using new technology, or new operational approaches, including new tactics, techniques, and procedures. Importantly, assessment needs to include adversarial trade-offs of employing drones versus alternative tactics, because novel does not mean better.
Both assessment and response should consider how different drone trends interact with the broad range of potential targets, including public venues, such as stadia or special events, as well as critical infrastructure such as energy systems, transit systems, aircraft, vessels and ports. Although the threats are novel, old-school protections may be just fine for some targets. For example, federal buildings have had various physical barriers such as bollards and fencing for decades and those defenses are likely to be just as useful against a Waymo packed with explosives as a car bomb. By contrast, a chemical facility may be ill-equipped to handle a flock of dark drones navigating by AI-based terrain mapping, especially with chemical facility anti-terrorism standards still expired. The interaction between threat and site vulnerability should inform larger exercises, plans, training, and other preparatory, prevention, and response actions.
Law enforcement and homeland security officials should also develop proactive relationships with drone manufacturers and technology researchers. Existing business practices like identity verification, geofencing, and vehicle monitoring may reduce, though probably will not eliminate, threats and provide useful information to security officials in the event an incident occurs. Security officials could also support the private sector through information sharing about the threat environment to help inform their risk management.
Drone technology is rapidly evolving, with significant implications for organized criminal and terrorist violence. The time for homeland security and law enforcement officials to prepare is now.
