What advantages do drones have over warplanes?

Unlike fighter jets, which need to be refueled regularly and have crews that get tired, drones can loiter in the air for up to 24 hours while carrying out surveillance, probing air defenses, or waiting for a suitable target. While drones such as the Predator are armed with missiles, a new generation of low-cost “kamikaze” drones are flown into their targets and then explode. Pentagon officials worry that the spread of these cheap and deadly-effective drones could help shift the global strategic balance away from the U.S. “Our adversaries are already fielding technologies that will hold our legacy platforms at risk,” acting Air Force Secretary John Roth recently told Congress.

China is a top exporter. At least 10 countries—including Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates—have used Chinese-made UAVs to kill adversaries. Turkey has also emerged as a drone powerhouse. Its utilitarian Bayraktar TB2, a 21-foot-long UAV armed with four laser-guided missiles, first grabbed international attention in Syria in February 2020. After 36 Turkish troops were killed in a Syrian government airstrike, Turkey used a fleet of radio-guided TB2s—which are quiet and hard to spot on radar—to destroy Russian-made air defenses and kill hundreds, possibly thousands, of Syrian troops. TB2s also proved crucial in the Libyan civil war last year, helping the central government repel an assault on the capital, Tripoli, by the Russianbacked forces of rebel leader Khalifa Haftar. But the biggest demonstration of how drones are changing the nature of warfare was the 2020 conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno