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
ARES is proud to announce the release of the second in our Special Report series, entitled Emerging Unmanned Threats: The use of commercially-available UAVs by armed non-state actors, presented in conjunction with PAX. Armed non-state actors are increasingly employing ‘commercial off-the-shelf’ (COTS) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to support combat operations. A wide range of these
