Drone terror is latest fear
U.S. AIR STRIKES and local militias in eastern Syria have hobbled the Islamic State’s deadly drone program, U.S. officials say, but counterterrorism experts warn that the terrorist group’s innovative use of the inexpensive technology may spur other aerial attacks around the globe.
A specially trained unit of ISIS pilots flew small quadcopters and model-plane-sized drones, sometimes a dozen or more at a time, to stream live video of U.S.-backed ground forces and to drop crude munitions on them in both Iraq and Syria.
By evading ground defenses with remote-controlled devices purchased on the internet, the militants pioneered an asymmetric, but successful, tactic on the battlefield, much as the growing U.S. fleet of missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones has dramatically changed modern warfare.
During the battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul, which government forces recaptured in July, dozens of Iraqi troops were killed or wounded by 40-mm. grenades and light explosives dropped from buzzing overhead devices so numerous that one U.S. commander likened them to killer bees.
It was, U.S. officials later acknowledged, perhaps the first time since the Vietnam War when the American military was largely powerless against enemy aircraft — in this case aircraft only a tiny fraction the size of U.S. warplanes.
Until now, small drones mostly sparked security alerts in America by flying near the White House, near airports and in other restricted zones. But the growing availability and sophistication of commercial drones now are seen as a threat to the United States, some experts argue.
“We do know that terrorist organizations have an interest in using drones,” newly confirmed FBI Director Christopher Wray told a Senate hearing Wednesday. “We have seen that overseas already with some frequency. I think that the expectation is that it is coming here, imminently.”
ISIS affiliates in the Philippines, Libya and Yemen already have used drones for surveillance. So have the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Gen. Raymond Thomas, head of Special Operations Command, said small drones were the “most daunting” threat his commandos faced in Iraq and Syria last year.
He recalled once during the battle for Mosul when the Iraqi forces’ “effort nearly came to a screeching halt” because the sky was filled with buzzing robotic aircraft.
“At one point there were 12 killer bees, if you will, right overhead,” he said during a conference in Tampa in May.
The Pentagon has rushed electronic jammers and other specialized equipment to help Iraqi security forces shoot down or neutralize Islamic State drones.
The Pentagon has also launched multimillion-dollar programs to improve defenses, including lasers that can disable a drone in the air and guns that fire small nets to nab them midflight.
Few of the gee-whiz measures have produced tactical success on the battlefield. Iraqis and U.S.-backed Syrian forces instead have tried to shoot them down with automatic weapons, with mixed success.
Col. Ryan Dillon, the Baghdad-based spokesman for the campaign against Islamic State, said the U.S. sought to remove the militants’ “tactical ability to get their systems airborne.”
“We achieved the greatest effect against their program by simply killing the people that have weaponized it,” he said.