The Drone Age

Michael J. Boyle’s The Drone Age arrived in 2020 at a moment when the debate around unmanned systems had moved past the narrow question of whether armed drones were legal and had begun to grapple with something larger — the possibility that a whole class of technology, cheap and dual-use and proliferating faster than any doctrine could contain it, was quietly reshaping how states projected force, how insurgents fought back, and how ordinary life on the ground was watched. Boyle, a political scientist at La Salle University in Philadelphia, had been writing on targeted killing and the ethics of remote warfare for more than a decade, and his earlier journal work — most notably a 2013 piece in International Affairs on the strategic costs of the Obama-era drone campaign — had established him as one of the sharper academic critics of the American way of remote war. The Drone Age is the book-length synthesis of that thinking, published by Oxford University Press and pitched deliberately outside the counterterrorism silo where drones had lived in the public imagination since the mid-2000s.

The central argument is that a drone is not a weapon so much as a category of technology, and that treating it as merely a new missile-carrying aircraft misses almost everything interesting about it. Boyle argues that the unmanned system — from a hobbyist quadcopter to a Global Hawk — reduces the political and human cost of stepping into contested space, and that this reduction is what changes the strategic calculus for governments, militaries, corporations, aid workers, criminals, and insurgents alike. If it costs less, in political capital, in blood, and in cash, to look at a village from above, to watch a suspect in another country, to strike a convoy on the other side of a border, or to move a package across a city, then the number of actors who will do all of those things goes up, and the threshold for doing them goes down. That, in his telling, is the drone age: a diffusion of aerial reach that used to belong to a handful of great powers into the hands of almost everyone, and the slow adaptation of the international order to a world where the sky is no longer the exclusive commons of states.

The book is organised as a tour through the major domains into which drones have spread, rather than as a chronological history, and each chapter takes a different community of users. Boyle opens with the technology itself, tracing the long lineage from early twentieth-century target drones and the Israeli use of decoys over the Bekaa Valley in 1982 through to the Predator’s improvised armament in the months before September 2001. He then turns to the American targeted-killing programme, which he treats as the case study that defined public perception of the technology and, in his view, distorted it. Subsequent chapters take up the diffusion of armed drones to other states — Israel, the United Kingdom, France, China, Turkey, Iran, Russia — and then the parallel diffusion to non-state actors, from Hezbollah’s early reconnaissance flights to the Islamic State’s weaponised DJI Phantoms in Mosul. Chapters follow on surveillance and policing, on the civilian and commercial uses that dominate the actual global fleet of unmanned systems, on humanitarian and development applications, and on what Boyle calls the peace uses — the drones flown by wildlife rangers, disease surveillance teams, disaster responders, and human rights investigators. The book closes with a chapter on the near future, in which Boyle sketches out how autonomy, swarming, and artificial intelligence are likely to interact with the diffusion already underway.

The concrete heart of the book is the evidence Boyle gathers in these middle chapters. On the American programme he walks through the strike on Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan’s tribal areas in 2009, the September 2011 killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen — the first American citizen deliberately targeted for lethal action by his own government since the Civil War — and the shift under the Obama administration from personality strikes to signature strikes, in which targets were selected on the basis of behavioural patterns rather than confirmed identity. He is careful with the numbers, drawing on the New America Foundation, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the Long War Journal to show how estimates of militant and civilian casualties diverge, and he uses that divergence to argue that the political attractiveness of the drone rests in part on the ability of the striking state to control the epistemic terrain — to be the party that decides who counts as a militant and who counts as a bystander. He tracks the CIA’s role, the shift of much of the programme to the Joint Special Operations Command, the debate over whether the strikes achieved their tactical goals in Waziristan and Yemen, and the strategic costs he had earlier argued for in the journal literature: the radicalising effect of persistent overhead surveillance, the erosion of Pakistani cooperation, the normalisation of a form of warfare that other states would predictably copy.

The proliferation chapters give the book much of its enduring value. Boyle traces Israel’s long lead in the field, from the Scout and Pioneer systems developed by Israel Aircraft Industries in the 1970s and 1980s through to the Heron and Hermes families, and he uses Israel as the case that shows why proliferation was always going to happen — the technology is not that hard, the operational advantages are large, and the export market is lucrative. He follows the Chinese Wing Loong and CH-4, which by the late 2010s had shown up in the arsenals of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, and beyond, filling a gap the United States had left by refusing to sell its own armed systems under the Missile Technology Control Regime. Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2, which the book already recognises as a strategic export — Aselsan’s electronics, a Wescam sensor, a rocket-propelled MAM-L munition from Roketsan — is placed in its Syrian and Libyan context. Iranian drones — the Shahed and Mohajer families, the loitering munitions that would find their way to the Houthis and to Iraqi militias — get a careful treatment, and Boyle traces the January 2020 strike on Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad airport as the moment at which a drone was used to remove a serving general officer of a nation-state, an act of a kind that had few real precedents.

Non-state actors receive their own chapter, and this is one of the more forward-looking parts of the book. Boyle documents Hezbollah’s Iranian-supplied Ababil and Mirsad flights into Israeli airspace, Hamas’s smaller efforts, and the moment in Mosul in 2016 and 2017 when the Islamic State began strapping 40-millimetre grenades to consumer quadcopters and dropping them on Iraqi security forces and civilians. He treats this not as a curiosity but as the arrival of aerial capability in the hands of an insurgent group — the inversion of a century of aerial supremacy belonging to the state. The chapter on drug trafficking organisations covers the Sinaloa cartel’s use of drones to move small payloads across the United States border and to surveil rival groups, and the way Mexican cartels have begun to use armed quadcopters against each other.

The surveillance chapter turns to policing and border control, tracing the use of Predator B airframes on the southern border of the United States by Customs and Border Protection and the drift of similar systems into domestic police departments, from Grand Forks to Los Angeles. Boyle treats the civil liberties question with care, drawing on the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence around aerial observation and asking whether the doctrine developed for manned helicopters holds up when the aircraft is silent, cheap, and can loiter for hours. He follows the European debate around the frontier surveillance programme run by Frontex, and the Chinese use of unmanned systems in Xinjiang as part of the broader surveillance architecture there.

The civilian and humanitarian chapters may be the most surprising for a reader who came in expecting a book about weapons. Boyle spends real time on Zipline’s blood-delivery service in Rwanda, on the mapping of Nepalese villages after the 2015 earthquake, on the use of drones by rangers at Kruger National Park and by anti-poaching operators in Namibia, on the WeRobotics network’s work with farmers, on the Matternet deliveries in Switzerland, and on the corporate ambitions of Amazon Prime Air and Google’s Wing. He treats the civilian sector as the majority of the actual global fleet — a quiet expansion that will, over time, do more to shape norms around unmanned systems than the counterterrorism strikes that get the headlines. Chinese firms — DJI above all — are recognised as the industrial giants of that civilian market, and Boyle notes the strategic implications of a single Shenzhen firm supplying roughly three-quarters of the world’s consumer drones.

Woven through the book is Boyle’s attention to the international-law and normative angle. He engages the arguments of legal scholars like Mary Ellen O’Connell and Kenneth Anderson on the applicability of the law of armed conflict to strikes outside declared war zones, the debate over whether “unable or unwilling” is a legitimate test for entering another sovereign’s airspace, the Special Rapporteur reports of Philip Alston and Ben Emmerson, and the failure of successive American administrations to publish a legal framework for the strikes that would satisfy either allies or critics. He treats the failure of the 2016 export-control initiative and the collapse of the joint declaration on the export of armed drones as a signal that the diffusion cannot be stopped at the state level. He does not pretend that a treaty is imminent, and he is sceptical of proposals that require international agreement to work.

The chapter on the future takes autonomy seriously without falling into science fiction. Boyle walks through the Kalashnikov ZALA loitering munitions, the American Perdix and DARPA’s Gremlins, the Russian S-70 Okhotnik, and the Turkish Kargu — the class of systems in which onboard image recognition is doing the target selection, at least in principle. He engages the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons process at Geneva, and he lays out the case both for and against a treaty ban on lethal autonomous systems. His own instinct, evident throughout the book, is that the meaningful line is not autonomy in isolation but the combination of autonomy with proliferation — that the political consequences of a cheap, ubiquitous, and increasingly self-directing airframe are what require attention, not the technical question of whether a human is in the loop for any given engagement.

The Drone Age has been read alongside a small shelf of books that came out in the same window and that overlap with it. Grégoire Chamayou’s Drone Theory, translated into English in 2015, sits at the philosophical end of the same conversation; Hugh Gusterson’s Drone: Remote Control Warfare is closer in tone and in method; Sarah Kreps’s Drones: What Everyone Needs to Know functions as a more compact reference. Paul Scharre’s Army of None, published in 2018, does for autonomous weapons what Boyle does for drones as a whole. The reception of Boyle’s book in the academic and policy press has been broadly positive, with reviewers praising the breadth of the material and its refusal to stay inside the counterterrorism frame. The more sceptical readers have argued that the book covers so much ground that it treats some of the technical questions — the sensor stack, the communications architecture, the electronic-warfare exchange — more lightly than the political and legal questions, and that the peace-and-development chapters, while important, occasionally shade into optimism about civilian uses that the market has not yet delivered.

For someone reading widely on AI in war today, the book plays a specific role. It is the survey that argues, and argues carefully, that the story of drones is not a story of American strikes on suspected militants in the borderlands of Pakistan and Yemen, but the story of a technology whose defining feature is diffusion. It pairs well with Scharre for the autonomy question, with Kreps and Chamayou for the ethics, with Andrew Cockburn’s Kill Chain for the operational history of the American programme, and with the emerging literature on the Turkish and Iranian export markets that has followed Nagorno-Karabakh and the war in Ukraine. It does not cover the loitering-munition revolution that unfolded after 2020 — the Shahed-136 campaigns against Ukrainian cities, the industrial-scale Ukrainian FPV programme, the Bayraktar TB2’s near-mythic first months in the Donbas — because those events came after the book went to press, and readers should treat it as the last major synthesis before that inflection.

What is likely to age well is the framing. Boyle’s insistence that the drone is a category of technology rather than a single weapon, that the meaningful trend is proliferation rather than autonomy, that the civilian market matters more than the counterterrorism programme in the long run, and that the international-legal architecture is not going to catch up — all of that has held up. What is already dated is the specific technological ceiling the book assumes and the identity of the leading exporters; the Turkish and Iranian rise, the emergence of a Ukrainian domestic industry, and the collapse of the assumption that only advanced militaries could use unmanned systems at operational scale have all outrun the book’s baseline. Read now, The Drone Age is the record of what a careful observer could see from 2020, before the drone-versus-drone war that Boyle predicted arrived, on schedule, and larger than expected.