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Combatants are hunting civilians from the sky with small drones more than ever before - and the international community isn’t doing enough to stop it. My latest on the ways we can protect civilians from drones, written with Nathaniel Raymond of @hrl-yalesph.bsky.social :

In places like Sudan and Ukraine, we’re now seeing layered drone warfare - where combatants use both small cheap consumer and DIY FPV drones in conjunction with much more expensive long-range drones. Both types of drone are killing far too many civilians.

The War on Terror 2000s style of drone warfare - when only the U.S. and a few chosen allies could access drones - is dead. Now, armed groups of all sizes and capacities are using small cheap drones and (when they can) larger long-range drones to hammer their enemies and terrorize civilians.

Civilians now also have more agency in drone warfare than they did 20 years ago, when there was little realistic way for civilians to shoot down, jam, or otherwise affect the activities of a U.S. government MQ-9 Reaper drone.

Yes, AI-powered drones are scary, but focusing too much on AI drones risks missing the actual source of the problem. The vast majority of targeted drone attacks on civilians today are still carried out entirely manually by human pilots—humans who are knowingly choosing to kill and stalk civilians.

Some people argue that AI powered drones might help reduce civilian casualties - but this argument fails to grapple with the equally realistic prospect that combatants might use AI tools to even more efficiently hunt and kill civilians.

That is one of those arguments that simultaneously mis-understands the technology *and* more importantly assumes some kind of good faith motivation where none may exist.

The current crisis of attacks on civilians with drones is a grim mirror of the global rise of disregard for IHL and human life itself We believe that by taking up the drone attack issue directly, the global community can help legal authority fight back against this wave of impunity and cruelty.