Officials say the small commercially available drone looked like all the other drones ISIS fighters have been using to conduct aerial surveillance. After the drone was shot down in the north of Iraq, it was brought back to an outpost for examination.
The two Kurdish fighters were attempting to take it apart when a bomb hidden inside the drone exploded, killing them and injuring two members of the French special forces, according to the Verge.
Le Monde is reporting that this recent account of the exploding drone leaves us to wonder if ISIS is now ramping up its battlefield tactics in an unexpected way.
While there have been isolated reports of drones being used as a weapon of war, this incident is actually the first by the Islamic State. The New York Times is reporting that there have been at least two other incidents where ISIS has tried to use exploding drones in the past month.
According to the NY Times, the two previous incidents resulted in American commanders in Iraq issuing warnings to forces fighting the terror group to treat all small model or drone aircraft as potential exploding devices. Unfortunately, it appears all the forces in the field did not get the message.
One thing this latest incident shows is that ISIS is very capable of adapting the latest technologies and use them to their advantage. Now, American advisors are worried that the exploding drones could be used in the battle for Mosul.
The Pentagon now says it is devoting resources to stopping the potential drone attacks, but the Pentagon has been slow to come up with a plan to bring the aerial weapons down, and this is something that should have been anticipated way before now.
“We should have been ready for this, and we weren’t,” said P. W. Singer, a specialist on robotic weaponry at New America, a think tank in Washington.
One big problem is the sophisticated equipment needed to bring the drones down. U.S. troops have them, but very few Iraqi or Kurdish units have them. Pentagon officials have ordered the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization, an agency of the pentagon in charge of explosive devices, to come up with some ways to defeat the new battlefield weapons.
They have also asked Congress for an additional $20 million to study the problem. Don’t think or say anything about this revelation, just read it and go on. And the really stupid thing about all this is that the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency have been rushing to complete assessments of the Islamic State’s drone usage on the battlefield.
We have been well aware of the Islamic State’s capabilities in using drone technology for months, but we are no closer to getting the upper hand on the problem. Instead, the war on the battlefield is turning into a battle of wits guided by who can make the most of the latest in technological innovations.
