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
Patrick Senft Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, munitions containing chemical payloads have frequently been documented on the battlefields of that country. Most of these weapons are hand-grenade-type munitions delivering an irritant agent—i.e., a payload generally regarded as less-lethal. Such munitions have generally been used to dislodge enemy forces from entrenched fighting positions,
Mick F. Editor’s Note: This article has an information cut-off date of 9 March 2022. On the morning of 24 February 2022, the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine. The opening strikes were made with air-delivered and surface-to-surface guided and unguided munitions, with the ground invasion commencing immediately after the first attacks. The invasion was focused on
