There was a time when having any kind of air capability meant you pretty much had to be a country.
You needed airplanes, pilots, airfields, mechanics, fuel, weapons and a pile of money to keep the whole thing running.
That’s obviously still true if you want an actual air force.
But it isn’t quite as true as it used to be.
Today, an armed group that doesn’t own a single fighter jet can watch something from the air, gather intelligence, attack a target and, under the right circumstances, cause problems far out of proportion to what that little aircraft cost.
We’ve already seen it happen.
And the more I looked into the history of terrorist and other non-state groups using drones, the more I realized this story goes back quite a bit farther than I thought.
This Didn’t Start With ISIS
Hezbollah was experimenting with unmanned aircraft more than twenty years ago.
In 2004, it flew an unmanned aircraft from Lebanon into Israeli airspace and back again. It did it again the following year, and during the 2006 Lebanon War it launched additional unmanned aircraft toward Israel.
Iranian assistance played an important part in developing that capability.
Those early drones weren’t anything like some of the systems we’re seeing today, but that’s really beside the point.
A non-state organization was learning how to operate in a place that had previously belonged almost entirely to conventional militaries - the sky.
Looking back, that probably deserved more attention than most of us gave it.
Then ISIS Took It Somewhere Else
ISIS didn’t invent the drone, and it certainly didn’t invent the commercial quadcopter.
What it did was figure out how to make readily available technology part of its normal battlefield operations.
By 2016 and 2017, ISIS was using commercial drones in Iraq and Syria for surveillance and attacks.
One particularly important incident occurred in October 2016, when an explosive device concealed in a drone killed two Kurdish peshmerga fighters who were examining it. ISIS later publicized attacks involving modified commercial quadcopters.
But what caught my attention wasn’t any one attack.
It was the organization behind them.
ISIS acquired drones and components, modified equipment, trained operators and developed procedures for using drones alongside its other forces.
That’s when the problem became bigger than some terrorist got hold of a drone.
They had developed a drone program.
That distinction matters because once somebody figures out how to turn an occasional trick into a repeatable capability, other people can learn from it.
And they did.
The Rest of the World Kept Improving the Technology
While all this was happening, civilian drones were getting better.
They became cheaper and easier to fly. Cameras improved. Navigation improved. Flight times and ranges increased. Software improved. Parts became readily available.
None of that is sinister.
Drones have legitimate uses in farming, construction, photography, inspections, search and rescue, public safety and plenty of other things.
The problem is that useful technology doesn’t get to choose who uses it.
The same things that make a drone useful to a farmer or photographer - relatively low cost, availability and ease of operation - can make it useful to somebody with very different intentions.
Researchers studying violent non-state actors have recorded more than 1,100 armed-drone incidents between 2006 and 2023, with the overwhelming majority occurring after 2016.
So what ISIS was doing wasn’t an odd little chapter in the war in Iraq and Syria.
It was part of something that was growing.
Then the Houthis Showed Just How Big the Problem Could Become
This is where I think the story gets particularly interesting.
The Houthis in Yemen helped demonstrate that drones in the hands of a non-state armed group didn’t have to be limited to attacking somebody on a battlefield.
Beginning in late 2023, Houthi forces repeatedly used drones and missiles against commercial shipping and naval forces in and around the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
Between late October 2023 and mid-June 2024, U.S. intelligence reported nearly two dozen Houthi missile and drone attacks against Israel and at least 100 attacks against commercial vessels.
Now think about that for a minute.
A non-state armed organization operating from Yemen was able to affect commercial traffic through one of the world’s important shipping corridors.
Ships changed routes. Naval forces were deployed. Air-defense systems were used. Shipping took longer and became more expensive.
That’s an awfully large effect for weapons that can be relatively inexpensive compared with the systems being used to defend against them.
And that’s something I think is easy to miss when we talk about drones.
The damage caused by the drone itself isn’t always the whole story.
Sometimes making everybody react to it is part of the damage.
This Is Happening More Often
The numbers are pretty striking.
Researchers examining non-state drone attacks in the Middle East counted 59 during the year before October 7, 2023.
During the following year, they counted 417.
Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq accounted for most of them.
Those organizations aren’t the same. They have different leadership, different objectives and different capabilities.
But taken together, they tell us something.
Armed drones are no longer an experiment for non-state groups.
They’re part of the landscape now.
“Non-State” Can Be Misleading
There’s another wrinkle here that I think is important.
When somebody says “non-state actor,” it’s easy to picture a ragtag group piecing things together on its own.
Sometimes that might be fairly accurate.
Other times, not even close.
A non-state organization can have a government standing behind it providing weapons, technology, components, training or technical assistance.
Iran’s support for Hezbollah, the Houthis and other armed groups is well documented, including assistance involving drones and missiles.
So we shouldn’t automatically hear “non-state” and think “unsophisticated.”
Some of these organizations have access to capabilities they probably could not have developed nearly as quickly - or perhaps at all - on their own.
And that brings me to the question I suspect most Americans eventually ask.
Could This Happen Here?
Could a terrorist or other violent extremist use a drone in an attack inside the United States?
Yes, it’s possible.
That doesn’t mean I know one is coming. I don’t.
It also doesn’t mean we should shrug our shoulders because it hasn’t happened yet.
The FBI has been warning about this possibility for years.
In 2018, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that terrorist organizations overseas were already using drones and warned that the experience they were gaining on foreign battlefields could eventually migrate outside those conflict zones. The FBI’s assessment at the time was that drones would eventually be used to facilitate an attack against a vulnerable target in the United States.
More recent Department of Homeland Security assessments have also discussed concerning drone activity around sensitive American infrastructure and the interest violent extremists and foreign terrorist organizations have shown in the technology.
DHS also said it did not have information at the time of its assessment indicating that violent extremists were using drones in attack planning here.
I think we can hold both of those thoughts in our heads at the same time.
There is no reason to claim we know a terrorist drone attack in America is coming.
There is also no good reason to stick our heads in the sand and say it can’t happen here.
We’ve watched the capability develop for more than twenty years. We’ve watched it spread. We’ve watched organizations learn from previous uses and take the technology farther.
Pretending there is some invisible line around the United States that this technology can’t cross doesn’t make much sense to me.
That’s not fear.
That’s just paying attention to what has already happened elsewhere.
And Stopping One Isn’t As Easy As It Sounds
When people talk about defending against drones, the obvious reaction is something along the lines of, “Well, just shoot it down.”
It’s considerably more complicated than that.
First somebody has to detect it. Then they have to figure out what it is and whether it actually represents a threat.
A drone near a stadium, electrical facility or public gathering could belong to a photographer, a hobbyist, a news organization, law enforcement - or somebody with bad intentions.
And in the United States there are legal and safety issues surrounding who can interfere with an aircraft and under what circumstances.
Then there is the sheer number of places somebody might want to protect.
Military installations can field sophisticated defenses.
Doing the same thing for every electrical substation, refinery, chemical plant, bridge, port, stadium, airport and large public gathering is another matter altogether.
That’s part of what makes the problem difficult.
So What Are We Supposed to Do With This?
For the average person, probably nothing dramatic.
I’m certainly not suggesting we all start walking around staring suspiciously at every drone that flies overhead.
But I do think this belongs in our general understanding of preparedness.
Preparedness isn’t just collecting stuff for problems we’re already familiar with. Part of it is paying attention to how the world is changing.
Twenty-five years ago, the idea of a terrorist organization having anything resembling its own air capability would have sounded pretty far-fetched to most people.
Then Hezbollah demonstrated unmanned reconnaissance.
ISIS turned commercial drones into an organized battlefield capability.
The Houthis and other armed groups helped take things farther, demonstrating that unmanned weapons in non-state hands could contribute to disruption well beyond a local battlefield.
None of that tells us exactly what happens next.
But it does tell us that the technology isn’t standing still.
Neither are the people figuring out ways to use it.
One Thing Led to Another
If you’ve noticed the name at the top of this Substack, this is a pretty good example of why I chose it. I have a habit of starting out looking into one thing, finding something else that catches my attention, and before long one thing has led to another.
That’s pretty much what happened here.
Nobody we’re talking about invented the drone.
They watched what the technology could do, figured out how it might help them, adapted it and kept pushing it a little farther.
One thing led to another.
Reconnaissance became attack.
Experiments became organized programs.
Battlefield weapons became tools capable of affecting international shipping and forcing responses from much more powerful militaries.
And technology that once belonged almost exclusively to governments became available, in one form or another, to organizations that don’t have governments, airfields or conventional air forces at all.
Where it goes from here, I don’t know.
But after looking at where it has already been, I don’t think ignoring the possibility is a very good preparedness strategy either.
Sometimes paying attention is the first step.
Sources & Further Reading
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. On the Horizon: The Ukraine War and the Evolving Threat of Drone Terrorism. Hezbollah’s early UAV experimentation, 2004 and 2005 incursions, 2006 wartime launches, and Iranian assistance.
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. The Islamic State and Drones: Supply, Scale, and Future Threats. ISIS drone acquisition, modification, weaponization, organization, and rapid scaling in Iraq and Syria.
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Regional Terrorism Trends Before and After October 7. GRID data on the increase from 59 to 417 non-state UAS incidents and the principal groups involved.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Unclassified Assessment Regarding the Regional and Global Terrorism of the Islamic Republic of Iran (2024). Houthi missile and UAV attacks against Israel and commercial shipping, and Iran’s support to regional partners and proxies.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Threats to the Homeland - Statement Before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, October 10, 2018. FBI assessment of overseas terrorist UAS use and the potential for those tactics to be used against vulnerable targets in the United States.
Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Threat Assessment 2025. DHS assessment of concerning UAS activity near sensitive critical infrastructure and its statement that it had no information then indicating violent extremists were using drones in U.S. attack planning.