In early October, the terrorist group ISIS killed two Kurdish fighters in the explosion, which was a first for the group. The Taliban was soon to follow up with a propaganda video, filmed with a drone, of a car bomb destroying an Afghan police base in Helmand.
These incidents, and others, have shown a unique shift in the nature of modern war. In today’s battlefields, consumer products are providing low-tech adversaries with high-tech tools for combat.
The shift is that off-the-shelf products “can be readily weaponized against national forces,” according to Dr. Robert J. Bunker, adjunct research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College.
In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the outgunned insurgent forces often turned to remote-detonated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) as their main weapons.
According to USA Today in 2013, these devices were the cause of between half and two-thirds of American combat deaths and injuries.
“We are starting to go down the path of having IEDs no longer sitting around as static threats,” Bunker said. “Instead, they are slowly evolving into autonomous weapons that will actually seek out and try to kill troops.
“That is going to become a significant game changer on the battlefield.”
For troops on the ground, this also means that new countermeasures that can knock commercial drones out of the sky could soon become a basic necessity.
