Drone Warfare And Its Impact On Africa, Ukraine And Beyond

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) From the deserts of Sudan to the streets of Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine, drones are reshaping modern warfare. Once limited to counter-terrorism by a select few powers, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now ubiquitous, with nearly 50 countries deploying them in conflict. This content was published on July 4, 2025 - 09:00 9 minutes

Multimedia journalist reporting for the International Geneva beat and supporting editorial quality control in the English department. Swiss-Chilean multimedia journalist with two decades of reporting experience in the US, Europe and the Middle East, with occasional assignments in South America and Africa. I enjoy investigative and long-form stories, and have also worked in breaking news and every format in between.

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Africa illustrates this transformation clearly. Since 2021, drone use on the continent has surged.“It's clear that drones are seen as an attractive military 'asset', widely thought to enable modern, 'efficient', targeted warfare, while lowering any risk to army personnel,” says Cora Morris of research group Drone Wars UK and author of the Death on DeliveryExternal link report.

Drones are rapidly becoming low-cost, high-impact weapons that threaten to outpace international humanitarian law (IHL) and undermine arms control norms. Their affordability, anonymity, and autonomy often bypass civilian protections.

People glance anxiously upwards during an Israeli drone strike, as they take refuge away from buildings in Beirut's Dahiyeh neighborhood. Jets and drones often fly at low altitudes, causing fear and distress. Lebanon, September 29, 2024 Keystone / Murat Senguel, Anadolu Agency Surgical precision?

Advocates claim drones reduce collateral damage. But growing civilian casualties in Africa and elsewhere challenge the myth of“clean” war and the adequacy of international laws . Drone Wars UK says drone use lowers the threshold for force, expands targeted killings, and reduces accountability.

The Death on Delivery report, released in March, documents at least 943 civilian deaths in 50 incidents between November 2021 and November 2024. Nearly half- 490 -were from Ethiopian drone strikes. Other attacks occurred in Burkina Faso, Mali, Somalia, Nigeria, and Sudan.

There“appears to be a very broad definition of who qualifies as a target, such that whole areas have found themselves vulnerable to intensive drone strikes, with little distinction made between civilians and combatants within them,” says Morris.“In Ethiopia, for example, many of the victims of these strikes are from the Amhara and Tigray region.”

A few years ago, drone strikes were mostly linked to US counter-terrorism operations. Decisions to carry out extra-judicial killing in countries that were not directly at war with the US – such as Pakistan – were the main source of controversy, criticism and legal debates.

Now drones are widely used in both conventional and internal wars, with hundreds to thousands of civilian deaths attributed to drone strikes.

External Content External Content Why the drone warfare boom?

What's driving global drone proliferation? Cost and convenience. Medium altitude, long endurance (MALE) drones-once the preserve of the US, UK, Israel, and China-are now exported at a fraction of the cost by Turkey and Iran, which have capitalised on off-the-shelf components, modular designs, and open-source tech.

Many governments have seized this opportunity to modernise their militaries. Drones may cost 1/1,000^th the price of a bomber or tank but still destroy high-value targets.

Kai Reusser / SWI swissinfo

Ukraine illustrated their powerful potential in June. In a stunning operation, Kyiv deployed over 100 low-cost, first-person view drones – each with a price tag of $600 to $1,000, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies – to strike 40 Russian war planes across four military bases.

Ukraine launched“Operation Spiderweb” on June 1, 2025, targeting Belaya Air Base in Russia's Irkutsk region in Siberia. Keystone

Drones have also become a go-to tool in asymmetric warfare. More than 65 non-state armed groups now possess drones, according to the Danish Institute for International Studies.

Smoke billows after drone strikes by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) targeted the northern port in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan, Sudan, May 6, 2025. Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Belkis Wille of Human Rights Watch (HRW) speaks of a“paradigm shift.”

Commercial drones can be easily modified and allow low-budget actors-or individuals with a 3D printer and an Amazon account-to carry out targeted urban attacks.

“Now, for cheap, you can target civilians in a highly precise manner,” says Wille, associate director in HRW's crisis, conflict, and arms division.

She published a report in June documenting how Russian drone pilots hunt down civilians in Kherson, Ukraine. Russian drone operators used commercially available quadcopter drones to drop explosives on cyclists, pedestrians and bus passengers.

External Content Is international humanitarian law outdated?

The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols already prohibit indiscriminate attacks and explicitly protect civilians. The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) notes drone warfare is not inherently unlawful.

From a strict IHL perspective,“the person remotely controlling the drone and taking the decision to target must ensure compliance with IHL – such as, applying the principle of distinction, proportionality and precaution to the specific situation at hand,” says Anna Rosalie Greipl, researcher at the Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights in Geneva.

“There is nothing wrong with the law,” concurs Wille.“Drones are just a delivery mechanism. The issue is enforcement.”

In her view, what makes drones dangerous isn't that they fall outside existing legal frameworks, but that they enable violations – such as the deliberate targeting of civilians – to occur more efficiently and with greater anonymity.

Kai Reusser / SWI swissinfo Autonomy, AI, and killer robots

Wille also raises concerns about how the movement towards autonomy of drone systems-especially those integrated with AI-may accelerate that trend. She points to Russia and Ukraine, where drone technology and counter-technologies are advancing rapidly.

AI-augmented drones may become a battlefield reality very soon.“There are various ways that we might see killer robots in the battlefield and one of them is drones,” she says.

The proliferation of drones, Wille explains, has led to a proliferation of jamming technologies in response. Jamming is the deliberate emission of radio frequency signals or electromagnetic interference to confuse, block, or override a drone's systems.

One solution to jamming that some armed forces are advocating for is to create autonomous systems that require no communication line between the drone and its operator once the drone has flown away. The drone itself could be trained with hundreds of thousands of images of tanks, for example, to take out targets.

“Once that happens, these drones might enter the realm of being killer robots because there is no human in the loop,” says Wille.“That kind of a drone system could be trained to take out a child just as easily as a tank. That's the worst-case scenario that we may be barreling towards.”

This evolution is being closely watched by the ICRC.“With just a software update or a change in military doctrine, [drones] could easily become tomorrow's autonomous weapon systems (AWS)... that select and apply force to targets without human intervention,” the Geneva-based organisation warns in its 2024 IHL challenges report.

Legal grey zones

IHL principles require warring parties to distinguish between combatants and civilians, ensure that attacks are proportionate to the military advantage gained, and take precautions to minimise harm to civilians. But the increased use of drones in complex environments raises challenges accurately identifying lawful targets and assessing potential civilian harm.

Greipl highlights the issue of AI systems' outputs: using AI to gather the data, to analyse the data provided by drones and provide outputs to military decision-makers. This“can be very problematic depending on how the humans use that information to make their legal assessments without exactly knowing how the biases and the assumptions built into that technology work out,” she says.

Another issue is that while militaries deploying drones have an“understanding” of international humanitarian law, private sector commercial actors making them in places like Silicon Valley typically don't, according to Wille. US President Donald Trump's decision to abolish the Pentagon office responsible for reducing civilian casualties in battle marks a“scary development” in this era of drone proliferation.

Weak controls, patchy regulation

Current international controls-the Missile Technology Control Regime, Arms Trade Treaty, and Wassenaar Arrangement-are flawed, according to Morris of Drone Wars UK. They've failed to curb the global spread and misuse of drones.

“It's clear that there's an urgency in cooperation at the international level to regulate the proliferation and use of drones,” she says.“Present regulatory frameworks have been clearly proven inadequate.”

Discussions at the United Nations General Assembly in New York and in Geneva have focused on autonomous weapons-particularly so-called“killer robots.”

But legal experts argue this isn't enough. They say states must reinforce internal compliance mechanisms, fund civilian harm tracking and compensation and uphold their commitments to international justice bodies like the International Criminal Court. Exporting countries should rigorously investigate how their drones are being used and hold violators accountable.

In March 2024, Portugal led a 21-nation UN coalition calling for more transparency and accountability around armed drones. The UN Secretary-General has urged states to regulate or ban autonomous weapons by 2026.

“We have the issue where drones operating with AI systems might be used not only to identify a target but also to select and apply force without human intervention,” says Greipl.“There we should really have clear limitations and restrictions.”

Graphic illustrations by Kai Reusser

Data research and interactive graphics by Pauline Turuban

Image research by Helen James

Edited by Virginie Mangin/ac

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