De Gruyter Handbook of Drone Warfare

When James Patton Rogers brought together the contributors to the De Gruyter Handbook of Drone Warfare, the subject he wanted to map had already outrun the literature meant to describe it. Most of the serious academic writing on armed drones had been published between roughly 2010 and 2018, when the conversation was dominated by the American targeted-killing programme in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, by debates over the legality of strikes against United States citizens, and by ethical arguments about remote killing. By the time Rogers, then moving between the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Institute at Cornell’s Brooks School of Public Policy and earlier roles advising the United Kingdom Parliament and United Nations panels on uncrewed systems, set the table for this volume, Azerbaijan had routed Armenia with Turkish Bayraktars and Israeli loitering munitions in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, the Houthis had hit Saudi oil infrastructure with Iranian-derived drones, and Russia was about to invade Ukraine in a campaign that would put hundreds of thousands of small uncrewed aircraft into the air over a single theatre. The handbook, published in 2024, is a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what scholars had been writing about and what soldiers, defence ministries, and arms exporters were actually doing.

Rogers and his contributors are clear from the opening pages about what the volume is not. It is not another book about the moral standing of the CIA’s Predator and Reaper strikes, although that history is treated in its proper place. It is not a polemic for or against autonomous weapons. It is an attempt to treat drone warfare as a single, sprawling, fast-moving system — strategic, legal, industrial, technological, and cultural — and to assemble in one place the chapters a serious reader would otherwise have to chase across two decades of journal articles, government reports, and grey literature. The contributor list reflects that ambition: serving and retired military officers, international lawyers, ethicists, historians of technology, regional specialists on the Middle East and the Caucasus, and political scientists who work on proliferation. Many of them have testified before parliaments or sat on multilateral panels; several have flown the systems they write about. The editorial line is journalistic and analytical rather than advocacy-driven, which fits a reference work intended for graduate students, policy staff, and planners.

The central argument that runs through the handbook is that the drone, as a concept in policy and law, has stopped meaning one thing. In 2012 it was reasonable to assume that “drone strike” referred to a precision-guided missile launched from a satellite-linked uncrewed aircraft operated by an American crew sitting outside Las Vegas. By 2024, the same word can mean a one-million-dollar MQ-9 Reaper on a counter-terrorism mission over the Sahel; a Turkish Bayraktar TB2 cratering a Russian air-defence battery in Kherson Oblast; a four-hundred-dollar Chinese-built quadcopter that a Ukrainian infantry squad has wired with a hand grenade and a fibre-optic spool; a Shahed-136 loitering munition fired in waves at Kyiv’s power grid; or a small uncrewed surface vessel packed with explosives and steered into a Russian warship in Sevastopol harbour. Rogers argues, and the volume insists, that any framework — legal, ethical, doctrinal — built around the first of these examples is an inadequate guide to the others. The proliferation pattern is no longer hub-and-spoke from a few advanced producers; it is a mesh, with Turkey, Iran, China, Israel, and increasingly Ukraine and Russia themselves exporting designs, components, and tactical know-how.

The book is built in thematic blocks. The opening sections cover the strategic and historical arc: the maturation of the Predator and Reaper programmes after 2001, the Obama-era expansion and codification of targeted killing, the Trump-era loosening of the rules of engagement, and the gradual diffusion of armed-drone capability beyond the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom. Subsequent chapters move into international law and ethics, treating the application of international humanitarian law and international human-rights law to drone operations, the much-stretched doctrine of imminence as it was used to justify strikes outside declared theatres of conflict, and the increasingly urgent question of meaningful human control over targeting decisions as machine-learning components creep into the kill chain. A further block of chapters takes up proliferation and counter-proliferation, including export-control regimes such as the Missile Technology Control Regime and their failure to constrain the spread of armed uncrewed aircraft. There are dedicated treatments of counter-drone defence — radar, radio-frequency jamming, directed-energy weapons, kinetic interceptors, and the question of how to defend a city or a power station against swarms costing a few thousand dollars apiece. And there are chapters on the human side: the psychological burden on remote operators, civilian harm and its accounting, the often-invisible labour of imagery analysts and sensor operators, and what several contributors describe as the gendered and racialised framing of drone violence in Western media coverage.

It is in the case material that the handbook does its heaviest lifting. Contributors walk through the CIA campaign in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the Joint Special Operations Command campaign in Yemen, with attention to the strikes on Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, the 2020 killing of Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, and the long American practice of “signature strikes” that hit patterns of behaviour rather than identified individuals. The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war is treated as a hinge moment: Azerbaijan’s combination of Turkish Bayraktar TB2s for persistent surveillance and strike, Israeli Harop loitering munitions for the suppression of enemy air defences, and converted An-2 biplanes as decoys, broke Armenian armour and artillery and forced European and American general staffs to reconsider what a middle-power air arm could now do. Libya gets its own treatment as the first conflict in which both sides flew armed drones — Turkish Bayraktars on one side, Chinese Wing Loongs supplied through the United Arab Emirates on the other — and as the place where a United Nations panel of experts first reported, in a Kargu-2 incident in 2020, what it described as an autonomous lethal engagement.

Yemen and the wider Red Sea theatre run as a thread through several chapters. The Houthi movement’s appropriation of Iranian designs, the strikes on Aramco facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in September 2019, and the more recent campaign against commercial shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb are used to make a recurring point: small, cheap, long-range one-way attack drones have inverted the cost curve of air defence. A non-state actor can fire a fifty-thousand-dollar Shahed variant at a target whose defenders must use a two-million-dollar interceptor to stop it, and can repeat the exercise nightly. The same logic, contributors note, is being industrialised by Russia in its strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, using Iranian designs licence-built at a plant in Alabuga in Tatarstan.

Ukraine receives the most extended and most current treatment, and it is here that the volume most clearly distinguishes itself from earlier drone-war literature. Contributors document the use of Turkish Bayraktar TB2s in the opening weeks of the 2022 invasion, the rise of small commercial quadcopters — most often DJI Mavics — as the eyes of artillery batteries on both sides, the explosion of first-person-view racing-drone designs turned into kamikaze munitions by volunteer workshops, the appearance of fibre-optic-controlled drones that defeat electronic warfare, the maritime drone campaign that has pushed the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of Sevastopol, and the slow industrialisation of Ukrainian drone production under the Brave1 cluster and successive procurement reforms. The handbook treats Ukraine as the first true mass-drone war and as a live laboratory for tactics, counter-tactics, and the electronic-warfare arms race between jammers and frequency-agile control links. Several chapters draw the obvious comparison to the role of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s as a proving ground for armoured and air doctrines that would define the next decade of conventional war.

The volume also reaches into areas that the earlier wave of drone scholarship tended to leave alone. There are chapters on the civilian drone industry as the upstream of the military drone industry — Shenzhen as the source not just of DJI but of motors, flight controllers, and cameras that end up in weapons on every side of every current war. There are chapters on the maritime domain, where Ukrainian Magura and Sea Baby uncrewed surface vessels have demonstrated that an unmanned speedboat with a warhead can threaten a frigate. There are chapters on the regulatory landscape: the work of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons Group of Governmental Experts in Geneva on lethal autonomous weapons systems, the slow grinding of European Union dual-use export controls, and the question of whether any of these forums can keep pace with a technology generation that turns over in months.

Reception of the handbook within the field has tracked the conversation it is trying to open. Reviewers in defence and security journals have welcomed the deliberate move outward from the American-centric frame that dominated the previous decade, and have singled out the Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, and proliferation chapters as the most current treatments available in a single bound volume. Some reviewers, particularly those associated with the earlier ethics-of-targeted-killing literature, have pushed back on the volume’s relatively brisk handling of the moral questions that animated authors such as Hugh Gusterson, Grégoire Chamayou, and Christian Enemark; the handbook reads those debates as largely settled in the abstract and is more interested in the new questions thrown up by autonomy, swarming, and mass. Other reviewers have noted that, as is almost inevitable in a reference work commissioned and edited over several years, some of the empirical material on Ukraine was already overtaken by events on the day of publication — fibre-optic drones, for instance, were a niche curiosity when the chapters were drafted and a defining feature of the front by the time the book reached shelves. Contributors and editor have been candid about this, treating the volume as a snapshot rather than a final word and pointing readers toward the journal literature and the open-source intelligence community for what has happened since.

For a reader assembling a shelf on AI and uncrewed systems in war, the handbook sits in a specific place. It is the broad survey to read alongside narrower books: Andrew Cockburn’s Kill Chain on the American programme, Chamayou’s Drone Theory for the philosophical critique, Paul Scharre’s Army of None and Four Battlegrounds on autonomy and the United States–China technology competition, Kerry Chávez and Ori Swed’s recent work on non-state drone use, and Seth Frantzman’s reporting on the Middle Eastern theatre. It is not a book about machine learning as such — readers who want a deep treatment of computer vision and target recognition will find the handbook gestures at the topic rather than dissecting it — and it does not try to compete with the granular open-source-intelligence tracking that has flourished on Twitter, Substack, and Telegram over the war in Ukraine. Its value is precisely that it is a reference: a single volume in which a graduate student, a parliamentary researcher, or a planner at a defence ministry can find a serious chapter on almost every aspect of contemporary drone warfare and a footnote trail into the rest of the literature.

The parts of the handbook most likely to age well are the framing arguments — the insistence that drone warfare is a global, multi-actor, multi-tier system, the careful unpicking of legal categories that no longer fit, the structural treatment of proliferation as a mesh rather than a hierarchy. The empirical chapters on individual conflicts will date faster, and the editor seems to know it; the volume is best read as the field’s current consensus on where the conversation stands, against which the next decade of writing on autonomous weapons, mass strike, and counter-drone defence will measure itself.