Editor’s letter

Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s best-equipped militaries.

The kingdom spends a whopping $68 billion a year on its armed forces—only the U.S. and China have bigger defense budgets— and has splashed some $6 billion on U.S.-made Patriot missile defense systems in recent years. But all that expensive hardware failed to stop a devastating blitz on the country’s oil infrastructure last week. (See Main Stories.) Suspected Iranian attackers were able to knock out half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production capacity using cruise missiles and drones that may have cost $15,000 or less apiece. The missiles and drones flew close to the ground, eluding radar and warning systems that were designed primarily to spot high-flying enemy warplanes and ballistic missiles. Low-altitude drones “won’t be detected until they come close enough to the radar to cross its horizon,” missile expert Joshua Pollack told Insider.com, “by which time it’s probably too late to do much.” The U.S. pioneered the art of drone warfare in Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan after 9/11, using multimillion-dollar unmanned Reapers and Predators to take out suspected terrorists without putting the lives of American personnel at risk. But as the cost of this technology has plummeted, drones have found their way into the arsenals of less powerful militaries, militias, and terrorist groups. ISIS used off-the-shelf quadcopter drones to drop grenades on U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Syria, and Russian separatists blew up a $1 billion arms depot in Ukraine in 2017 with a similar device. Last year, unknown assailants tried but failed to kill Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro by detonating small drones above a Caracas rally. Security experts worry that it’s only a matter of time before terrorists stage a drone attack in the West, perhaps by flying an explosives-bearing quadcopter into a power plant or packed stadium. In the age of the drone, we’re all air-raid targets.

Managing editor