Trevor Ball For more than a decade, Mexican drug cartels have used commercially available (COTS; commercial off-the-shelf), small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs; also called ‘drones’) to smuggle drugs across the U.S.–Mexico border and to conduct intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance (ISTAR) tasks. Increasingly, cartels are also using small UAVs to employ lethal munitions, mirroring
Trevor Ball & N.R. Jenzen-Jones Editor’s Note: This blog post is linked to entries in the Open-source Munitions Portal (OSMP), a joint project between ARES and Airwars, available at https://osmp.ngo/. OSMP Entry Nos. 456, 496, 497, 498, 618, 619, 620, 623, 625, 688, 689, 690, 695, 723, 728, 735, 751, etc. An Introduction to the MK 80
N.R. Jenzen-Jones & Trevor Ball Editor’s Note: This blog post is linked to entries in the Open-source Munitions Portal (OSMP), a joint project between ARES and Airwars, available at https://osmp.ngo/. The use of the Small Diameter Bomb (known in U.S. service and elsewhere as the GBU-39) is increasingly being reported upon in the context of
