A feature of drone warfare has generally been that opponents have been highly asymmetrical. One side has been very highly technically advanced while the other has been reduced to receiving drones stoically or having to listen to drones fly overhead for lengthy periods without being able to do anything about them. The US is currently sort of half-in and half-out of Syria. As far as American strategy is concerned, whether to go "all-in" in Syria risks getting into a costly and unwinnable quagmire. US citizens are concerned that as we're not at war there because we have no national security interests there. In a poll taken by Quinnipiac University last year, only 44% thought that it was "in the national interest of the United States to be involved in the conflict in Syria."
Now it appears that Russia, which has been deeply involved in Syria for around 40 years and has use of a year-round, warm-water port there, has been jamming the electronics of US surveillance drones. "The drones impacted so far are smaller surveillance aircraft, as opposed to the larger Predators and Reapers that often operate in combat environments and can be armed." In May 2016, the US admitted that, in December 2011, Iran had successfully hacked into a US military drone and had caused it to land. Will such a thing ever happen again? US engineers say no, but Russian engineers have not been motivated to make a serious attempt yet, either.
A new advance in drone warfare has been the arrival of swarms of small, cheap drones. Such an attack was use against two Ukrainian ammo dumps. "Ukraine's intelligence service believes that Russian drones are bombing the country's ammo dumps with thermite grenades. Ukrainian authorities recovered a Russian-made ZMG-1 thermite grenade at the Balakliya site in December 2015." Bombings have not taken place were ammo is securely stored in bunkers.
The US appears to be using drone swarms as well. "The US military has invested in electronic countermeasures, believing that the key to stopping drones is the use of jamming. But as drones become more proficient at making decisions on their own, the need for a remote uplink could vanish altogether. And as the report notes, simply shooting at the diminutive drones isn’t a great option for stopping them."
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"The United States is working on its own drone swarms, including a recent test of a deployment of more than 100 robin-sized micro-drones designed by Perdix from a pair of F-18s. The Perdix drones are being built as part of research into using large swarms of drones with a distributed intelligence."
So how's the main theater of the drone war doing? What's up in Afghanistan? For the first time, drones outnumbered conventional weapons. There were more unstaffed aircraft than staffed ones. Significantly, 16 years after the 2002 US invasion of Afghanistan, US forces are dealing with a "worsening Taliban insurgency." As US forces and thereby capabilities shrink, drones are a cheap way to augment the forces we have there. How is the opposition doing? "The Taliban have also forged closer links with al Qaeda, Nicholson said, potentially blurring the lines between what is a legitimate target and what is not, while the Taliban themselves have made gains in the north and south."
Drones are very much a part of the Afghanistan occupation. The violent Khost Protection Force (KPF) works hand in glove with the CIA, which makes heavy use of drones for surveillance. An Afghan citizen says “You have the feeling of always being watched and monitored. It’s weird and you don’t really feel free.” A real problem is that drone strikes are likely to happen during clear skies, thus Afghanis fear skies that people in other countries regard as beautiful and reason for happiness
