How to stop drones

Drones have come of age in the war on terror. When the United States and Britain invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the technology was barely out of the lab. Today, these flying machines represent a huge security threat. If reports are to be believed, a Houthi rebel-launched drone attack in Saudi Arabia last weekend shut down 5 per cent of the world’s global oil supply and caused the largest spike in the price of oil since the first Gulf War in 1990. This is what the future of warfare looks like.

So far, drones have been mostly on our side: used, very effectively, to disrupt and damage terrorist networks. The campaign against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan that started in 2004 has been dubbed the Drone War. It’s estimated drones killed some 2,000 militants. But the technology moves on: drones are now accessible to anyone, from the Pentagon to rogue individuals. Wars in the 21st century will involve not just aircraft-sized drones built by defence manufacturers but smaller, cheaper devices operated remotely by a handful of attackers which can cause profound and significant disruption.

Britain got a taste last December, when reported drone sightings at Gatwick Airport caused chaos. It isn’t even clear whether the sightings were actually real. But the mere threat posed by a cheap consumer device, let alone one that was armed, was enough to paralyse one of the world’s busiest airports at the most critical time of year. The potential for greater disruption is pretty obvious: it just hasn’t happened yet.

Drones are essentially just flying computer systems, so they can be hacked using standard techniques

Terrorists have been using drones for some time. Isis has specialised in fitting 40mm grenades on to the underside of Chinese-made consumer drones, which can be flown in swarms against an enemy. An analysis by the Royal United Services Institute suggests that in 2017 Isis carried out 208 such strikes across Syria and Iraq, killing at least 130 Iraqi personnel.