The Brooklyn Rail

The Poor Man’s Air Force

In 2007, Mike Davis traced the genealogy of modern urban terror through a single machine. The car bomb, he argued in Buda’s Wagon, was “the poor man’s air force,” a form of insurgent mobility that reconfigured the relationship between city, empire, and war. What began in colonial Jerusalem and Mandate-era Baghdad became, by the late twentieth century, a general technology of asymmetrical power. The car bomb harnessed everyday life as a weapon: the systems of circulation, the street, the market square, turned into a delivery framework for annihilation.

Today, the poor man’s air force has literally taken to the air: the drone as the new car bomb, the latest conduit in capitalist modernity’s self-destructive dialectic. Like the car bomb before it, the drone repeats the pattern Davis traced in Baghdad and Belfast: it collapses the categories of production and extermination, leisure and war, citizen and soldier. What began as an instrument of aerial leisure and precision warfare is mutating into a generalized airborne network of fortification, surveillance, and intimidation, even as it is being converted, in a counterturn, into an insurgent tool aimed upward at the powers that be. Like the car bomb, the drone becomes a weapon of proximity, rendering the city into a volatile frontline. And like the car bomb, it democratizes violence by lowering the cost of entry, exposing how the circuits of daily existence are haunted by the possibilities of their own reversal.

In Buda’s Wagon, the car bomb was the “revenge of the poor,” erupting from the infrastructural underbelly of empire. Today, the drone represents the poor man’s revenge automated, globalized, digitized. As aerial technology edges away from its main role as a state instrument and toward improvised forms, it expands the possibilities for both insurgency and counterinsurgency, generating a new dynamic interplay of fear, control, and makeshift resistance.

 

Skybound Anxiety

In early November, Belgium became a stage on which this shift seemed to unfold in real time. Drones were spotted over the airbases of Kleine-Brogel (home to an estimated 10–15 US B61 nuclear bombs), Leopoldsburg, Elsenborn, Marche-en-Famenne, Florennes, Schaffen, and Heverlee, as well as over the civilian airports of Zaventem, Ostende, Deurne, and Liège, and, not least, over the SCK CEN nuclear research center in Mol and the Doel nuclear power station, both in the province of Antwerp. The images of grounded planes and nervous politicians revealed that critical urban logistics are increasingly exposed as vulnerable targets.

Invoking “espionage” and “state actors” (read: Russians), Defense Minister Theo Francken from the Flemish separatist party N-VA (the same as current Prime Minister Bart De Wever, anti-woke crusader and staunch anti-immigration hardliner), announced a €50-million “counter-drone plan,” which will include jammers, detection systems (radio, infrared, cameras), and drones to shoot down other drones. General Marc Thys demanded in turn new rules of engagement, allowing the army to destroy any remotely piloted aircraft flying anywhere above Belgian territory. Meanwhile, courier giant DHL reported “hundreds of thousands of euros” in damages; Brussels Airlines called the financial impact “significant.” Hundreds of passengers slept on the terminal floor while the country’s media spoke of “chaos” and “terror from above.”

In late September, several UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) of suspected Russian origin were observed over Scandinavian skies—in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—seemingly testing NATO’s nerves. Coupled with the recent episodes in Belgium, this raises a chilling question: is the EU at the threshold of a new phase of hybrid warfare, where disinformation, media-fueled panic, and drones are deployed to sow confusion and justify ever-expanding measures of control? Time will tell. But Belgium is already planning to activate a National Airspace Security Center (NASC) in Beauvechain: all services brought together under a single command, a bureaucratic monument to the very paranoia it seeks to manage.

 

Innovative Insurgency

What strikes northern Europe as a sudden threat or shocking novelty is, in truth, only the belated arrival of a dynamic already manifest at the edges of empire, where aerial power has over the past decade steadily drifted downward—from militaries to militants, from sovereign command to rogue hands—and become a normalized grammar of conflict. From this perspective, the dismay radiating from Brussels is merely the aftershock of a reality first forged in the conflict zones of the Middle East and the Caucasus, and more recently on the informal battlefields of Latin America.

Quadcopters and small multi-rotor drones (rather than large military UAVs) are now easily available almost everywhere, relatively easy to fly, and simple enough to modify. Because they enable cheap asymmetry, tactical bricolage, and systemic weaponization, these devices are increasingly appropriated by non-state actors as homegrown insurgent tools.

“The rise of innovative terrorism”—as a 2017 Turkish analysis report called it—is largely considered to have started with “ISIS’s drone strategy.” In fact, the Salafi jihadist organisation began using commercial drones as early as 2014, then modified them by attaching plastic tubes and simple servo-based release mechanisms, so the drones could drop small explosives or grenades. While the payload capacity was still very limited compared with a military drone—many hobby drones could only carry around 1 kg, enough for small grenades or field-built explosive devices—ISIS made extensive use of modified quadcopters for reconnaissance and surveillance as well as for offensive attacks, carrying and dropping explosives on coalition forces. According to one report, between 2015 and 2017, groups like ISIS in the Middle East used drones at a rate of 60–100 attacks per month.

Across Syria and Iraq, several other irregular forces fighting ISIS—Kurdish forces, Syrian Democratic Forces units, Yazidi self-defense groups, tribal militias, and factions within the Popular Mobilization Forces—adopted commercial, off-the-shelf drones for reconnaissance, fire correction, or battlefield documentation, each bending hobbyist technology toward their tactical needs.

In many regards, the use by ISIS of small drones presented a novel challenge: cheap to acquire, difficult to detect, and capable of delivering lethal payloads, they lowered the barrier to aerial attack for a non-state actor. A similar strategy would later take place in Yemen. The Houthis rely both on larger, fixed-wing or “military-grade” drones (or drone-like UAVs), but they also make use of low-cost, repurposed commercial drones, especially in earlier phases or for certain types of missions. According to one 2019 analysis, drones have become a key asymmetric tool for Houthis: with limited resources and no traditional air force, UAVs (both low-cost and more advanced) allow them to threaten infrastructure, shipping, and military targets. Since about 2021, the Houthis have started to deploy multi-use drones based on civilian platforms (e.g. modified Chinese civilian hexacopters), which are more cost-effective: they can carry small explosives, drop them, and often return to base for reuse, which makes them more sustainable than one-time “suicide drones.”

Although cheap drones used by insurgents are not on par (by a long shot) with state-grade UAVs or combat drones, the increasing affordability of drone technology means that nearly any sufficiently organized group can field aerial capabilities—surveillance or attack—regardless of their resources. Low cost and accessibility make them useful for insurgents precisely because they are disposable, easily replaceable, and low-risk for the attackers relative to their potential damage. For contested actors, drone technology lowers the barrier for conducting asymmetric attacks, turning what used to require aircraft or missiles into something possible with modified hobbyist gear. It also significantly changes the nature of conflict: drones can be used for intelligence gathering (surveillance, targeting), for propaganda (aerial video footage), for harassment, or precision strikes, blurring the line between conventional and unconventional warfare.

 

Drones Without Borders

As these dynamics of low-cost aerial improvisation spread, drones quickly extend beyond local insurgencies, reshaping conflicts across continents and challenging state power on a global scale. Wherever precarity, weak oversight, or state violence create openings, commercial drones are rapidly appropriated for surveillance, attack, and territorial control.

Beyond Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, the new airborne devices have been rapidly adopted in other international conflicts and by non-state groups worldwide. From Azerbaijan’s beating the odds against Armenia in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, to Israeli genocidal operations in Gaza, to Ukraine—where drones (both military-grade and DIY) now carry out 70–80% of all kinetic attacks, with people (civilians and soldiers alike constantly scanning the sky and accepting the ever-present buzz as part of a grim new normal. This diffusion has also reached Africa: recently, an armed separatist group recently launched a drone attack on a UN facility in conflict-ravaged Sudan, killing six Bangladeshi peacekeepers. In South Asia, Pakistan drew on tactics pioneered by ISIS to deploy drones at scale against India during clashes last May, marking a new chapter in aerial conflict. In Latin America, criminal groups in parts of Colombia have used commercial drones modified with homemade explosives and for surveillance against police and military forces, while in Rio de Janeiro, drug factions patrol and defend their territories with quadcopters, as new police-led massacres are justified by labeling these extra-law groups “terrorist.”

Notwithstanding the obvious differences, Belgium, like many other states, is now grappling with the consequences of this borderless appropriation and détournement of drone technology. Its response is unfolding within NATO coordination, evidence, according to some experts, that even the smallest drones will henceforth likely be absorbed into the circuitry of transnational defense. The new scramble to legislate the sky reveals how, embedded in widespread systems of control and commerce, the drone now forces the state to swell in order to contain the fallout of its own apparatuses of legitimate coercion.

Still, one might wonder whether the Belgian incidents are truly connected to global drone warfare, or if they are mere media simulations of it. For sure a little of both. One could contend these are not isolated incidents but fragments of a new cartography of conflict: wars fought by remote control, in the overlapping space of policing, logistics, and spectacle. If anything, the Belgium events showcase not only how low-cost aerial technology can trigger overreactions, amplified by media-induced histrionics, but also how they may be used to probe air-defense gaps and justify heightened surveillance, tighter control, and COIN-style measures—policies that could increasingly impinge on civil liberties.

 

People’s Drones

In Théorie du drone (2013), Grégoire Chamayou argued that the traditional concept of war itself was unraveling. Drones, he wrote, were not weapons of battle but instruments of a “preventive manhunt,” halfway between war and policing, enabling a regime of extrajudicial killings on a global scale. Today, the democratization of this technology makes it percolate down from the monopoly of the state to the hands of irregulars, militants, and civilians.

The numerous illegal US drone strikes on “drug boats” in the Caribbean and the Pacific under the Trump administration seem to confirm Chamayou’s thesis of the drone as a tool of globalized policing. Yet the proliferation of commercial drones introduces a new dialectical twist: what begins as a mechanism of domination returns as a dispersed and unpredictable weapon, effectively “emancipated” from the very structures of control that produced it.

Every incident, every headline about “mysterious drones,” feeds the cycle of security accumulation. Australian firm DroneShield, whose share price has risen 454% in 2025, now supplies weapons to militaries worldwide. Its “science-fiction rifles,” capable of downing drones with electromagnetic pulses, have become the most coveted defense product of the moment.

This economy of counterinsurgency mirrors the dynamic diagnosed in Buda’s Wagon: each innovation of control summons its equal and opposite reaction, feeding the same thanatological machine. Security is evolving into a major market. Airports, soccer stadiums, communication networks, and power grids—in a more apocalyptic scenario, even nuclear power plants—are reimagined as targets to be defended, expanding the perimeter of militarization until it merges with the immediate life-world. This dynamic, as authors such as Mark Neocleous (Pacification, 2025) and Deborah Cowen (The Deadly Life of Logistics, 2014) have shown, is part of the “war-security-capital” nexus, in which nearly every new threat expands markets for protection. In other words, pacification, logistics, and militarized security reproduce capitalist power relations, extending the logic of war to all aspects of daily life, both in the periphery and, increasingly, in central societies.

 

Fear Markets

Flipping the argument, it would be tempting to romanticize the disruptive potential of drone technology—to see in every grounded plane or jammed signal a form of revolt from below, a fleeting challenge to current austerity and exception policies. Resistance, however, has no predefined political color. Drones may be used to document state crimes, protect vulnerable populations from police repression or occupying forces, deliver medicine in remote zones, and disrupt the circuits of capital accumulation, infrastructures of genocide, or those fuelling climate collapse (blowing-up pipelines, as Andreas Malm would have it); they may also be used, on the other hand, to terrorize, constantly surveil, track migrants or political dissidents, murder with impunity, and enforce new forms of reactionary power.

In Belgium, the drone fright quickly found its geopolitical script: speculation about “state actors,” the frozen billions of Euroclear, and an online spat between Theo Francken and Dmitry Medvedev turned atmospheric anxiety into Cold War-style melodrama—or comedy. (At this point, it is hard to distinguish tragedy from farce.).

At the same time, media coverage of the new “drone menace” performs its own ideological work. It reifies the potential violence of non-military drones—the abstract horror of red lights in the night sky—while silencing on the structural violence of propertied classes and state power: the poverty, exclusion, racism, and exploitation that constitute the daily war of capital. In this discourse, the drone becomes a floating signifier of threat, detached from the social conditions that produce it. Newspaper liveblogs now chronicle in real time every sighting, every meeting or official statement, turning rumor into governance. Security is no longer just a policy issue; it has become part of the media rhythm of the social-media era.

The other side of the coin is that the fear will almost certainly boomerang, as it usually does, against progressive movements (be they radical or not) and the most vulnerable. Just as counter-terrorism measures and immigration enforcement in many countries gradually became indistinguishable from routine policing, the state’s new powers of surveillance and repression, justified by fear of what might rise from below, will target not only designated foreign enemies (such as Russia today) but also domestic political opposition and, predictably, the poor.

 

Diffuse Battlefield

The issue, of course, is not the technology itself, but the social form that produces it and defines its uses. In the world capitalism has built, every new instrument of security generates its own insecurity; every tool of the reigning (dis)order invites its sabotage. The car bomb and the drone are mirror-images in this feedback loop: each in its own way turns the networks of capital—arterial routes, transport corridors, batteries, GPS, lithium, satellites—into vectors of insurgency.

Postmodern Cassandras of the managerial class are already warning that the future of urban warfare is being shaped less by generals than by systems analysts, hackers, coders, gamers, precarious workers, and AI—accidental strategists of a world automating its own precariousness. As deeply ingrained presentism meets elite blindness to the social reorganization brewing within new technologies, the multi-sited labor behind them, and the emergent subjectivities they set loose, an operational vacuum opens.

The mortal fear in corporate boardrooms and ministries is that strategic imagination, fused with radical ideas, might leak downward and outward into gig platforms, modding scenes, and cloud stacks, where technical workers, anonymous collectives, and machine-learning systems begin co-writing the next playbook of contestation, reshaping society—though in what ways remain uncertain—through dual-use tools and skill spillovers.

The next battlefield of the late neoliberal nightmare will no longer be territorialized but diffuse, its logic already embedded in the social fabric. One can only wonder what forms of political life and alternative imaginaries—condensing a possible “counter-emergency,” as Brazilian philosopher Paulo Arantes would say—remain possible in this diffuse terrain. But one thing seems clear: the people’s drone, like the car bomb before it, reveals the old secret of capitalist modernity—that its true war, the war of class, is never elsewhere: it is everywhere.