Why isn’t drone striking more common for terrorism surely much more damage could be done just strapping bombs or grenades to fpv drones and flying them into people or buildings, why has it not happened yet?
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They are.
It’s just that small drones are too small and unreliable, and large ones too legally restricted to use covertly.
0. Easy there, Satan.
1. Most drones aren’t designed or capable of carrying a payload. They can’t lift the extra weight nor compensate for the unbalance.
2. Drones are loud, not at all subtle.
3. Drone operators are easier to locate than you might think.
Terrorists use low tech: easy to get firearm and explosive. Car bombs, hijacks, surprise attacks.
Military grade drones are difficult to get and difficult to control. Those are high tech things sometimes almost as sophisticated as an actual aircraft.
Civilian drones are tiny and powerless. Maybe they will find their ways to terrorist warfare as surveillance or some smart application but they cannot carry too much explosive or cannot do big harm. At least not yet.
Payload capacity. That’s the biggest thing. Aerial drones would not be able to deliver the same amount of explosive as a car bomb. Terrorists want to get as many people as possible whereas in a war you’re usually trying to whack like 5-10 people at most.
Iirc ISIS uses drone strikes all the time in the middle east. If you mean in the west, there really aren’t that many attacks in the west in general.
Fpv drones are EXTREMELY easy to trace, as well as trace back to the controller, it’s like making a big fire in the dead of night, everyone with the ability to track signals knows exactly where you and where that drone is. Interrupting the signal with a jammer makes the drone useless (or return home, which is worse…)
So the preference is to use drones that pilot themselves or have some sort of directional communication (light/laser), these are considerably more expensive and not many places make them, which allows intelligence agencies (like mossad, cia) to link the seller and buyer.
But also worth noting, drones have been in military use for decades, my country made their first military drones in 1986 – so using them isn’t really “news”…
It happens, but they’re pretty localized and mostly lie on that rough border between war and terrorism (not talking Ukraine). Lebanon and Yemen have seen a lot of drone attacks as part of ongoing conflicts, including what some considered terrorist strikes into other nations as an explicit attempt to convince others to stay out of their conflict or strike infrastructure their enemies use.
The issue is mostly one of attack scale. Most of the drones are off-the-shelf models that are repurposed for something they’re not intended to do. So their reliability isn’t really good. A single drone is both easy to deal with and relatively easy to stop. Not only that but people have been creating drone defenses for entirely not-terrorism-related reasons for over a decade now. So instead they use dozens or hundreds of drones at a time working in tandem, and that take it from a one-person operation to a whole team.
Most terrorists cell-based organizations don’t have the kind of large scale infrastructure to pull off that kind of thing, which is why it’s mostly groups with large support structures.
Someone carrying a large bomb into an area actually takes a lot less manpower and infrastructure than sending a dozen drones.
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