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
The ARES Team Editor’s Note: Readers should be aware that an unusually large number of false posts have been associated with the incident in Culiacán. These include images and video from movies, TV shows, and various other incidents in Mexico and elsewhere around the world, presented as being from this incident. Numerous sources have also presented images
