Briefcases, Trucks, and Shipping Containers: These were the seemingly banal tools that prepared the ground for Israel’s mid-June attacks on Iran, according to Wall Street Journal journalists who spoke with anonymous Mossad sources.
In recent weeks, the international media’s preferred idea is that the rules of modern warfare have been „rewritten” with the help of drones. The truth is that this technology has played an important role in military conflicts around the globe for some time, sometimes in daring operations against an aggressor state, other times for massacring and terrorizing civilians.
While the international community is raising more and more alarms about nuclear threats from all sides, entire communities are already living the trauma of modern warfare, caused by weapons far more „humble” than nuclear warheads or intercontinental missiles, and which must be addressed as drones become an increasingly important element of military conflagrations and a type of content almost normalized on the internet.
From „Spiderweb” to „Rising Lion”
The first phase of Operation „Rising Lion” relied on weapons introduced into Iran over several months and a drone launch base built by Israeli agents inside Iran itself, used to destroy Iranian air defense capabilities before the Israeli Air Force carried out over 100 strikes with more than 200 aircraft, according to a CNN analysis.
Less than two weeks after Ukraine shocked the world with Operation „Spiderweb,” believed to have incapacitated over a third of Russia’s cruise missile transporters, the first phase of the attack launched by Israel against Iran appears to have followed the same pattern, as highlighted by the Center For European Policy Analysis: they used operators infiltrated over several months into enemy territory to destroy high-value targets with relatively simple and inexpensive weapons.
Naturally, debates surrounding the Israel-Iran conflict focus on the nuclear threat invoked by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Israel justified its attack with the idea that it is fighting for „the entire free world” by attempting to neutralize Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and some experts in the field have already warned that such a conflict could accelerate the global atomic arms race. Meanwhile, social media has been flooded in recent weeks with memes and viral posts about the outbreak of World War III and nuclear annihilation – some humorous, while others lean towards alarmism.
@europa5791 POV: when I woke up #foryou #ww3 #worldwar #nuke #nuclear #USA #russia #world #israel ♬ My Way – 2008 Remastered – Frank Sinatra
@griego what is happening 😭 #ww3 #ww3memes #ww2 #ww1 #viral #fyp #trendy #foryoupage #foryourpage #america🇺🇸 #blowthisup #xyzbca #greece #2rquoise ♬ оригинальный звук – z3nt1xy
@pfpz #fyp ♬ оригинальный звук – орибатида завиральный
But Operation „Rising Lion” is also the latest proof that modern warfare isn’t just about atomic bombs, multi-hundred-million-dollar planes, and hypersonic missiles. The future of military technology also includes cheap, mass-producible, and terrifyingly effective weapons: drones.
New War, New Rules
After the destruction of multi-billion dollar bombers in a single day, military historian Max Boot noted in an op-ed for The Washington Post that Ukraine „rewrote the rules of war”. a phrase that was adopted by most international media. But anyone who has closely followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine likely suspected for some time that the rules had already changed, right before our eyes.
The Shahed drones heavily used by Russia (an Iranian invention, by the way), which occasionally make a brief visit to Romania, are just one aspect of this situation: Before Spiderweb, naval drones were the secret weapon with which Ukraine humiliated the Russian forces in the Black Sea.
In total, Ukraine produced over one million drones in 2024, and by early 2025 they accounted for „60% to 70% of the damage and destruction inflicted on Russian equipment in the war,” according to a Bloomberg analysis. In this context, it’s no wonder that Ukrainian authorities want to produce over 4 million drones by the end of 2025, or that Russia is desperately trying to keep pace.
And in parallel, both sides have flooded the internet with terrifyingly high-quality footage of these drones in action.
From Africa to Myanmar
Currently, most people have probably seen terrifying videos showing how drones are used in the conflict in Ukraine, whether it’s the censored versions presented by the press and official sources or the premium variants circulating on sinister Telegram channels or on Reddit, X, and other social networks. Who needs the dark web in the 21st century anymore?
But the example of Ukraine is not isolated. Most modern military conflicts, though less publicized, include the use of drones, in one way or another:
The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War: After decades of tension, Azerbaijan launched a massive offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region of Azerbaijan that was de facto controlled by Armenian separatists, supported by Armenia and Russia. The 44-day conflict, which resulted in the deaths of over 7,000 military personnel and civilians, ended with a peace brokered by Russia, but not before Azerbaijani forces conquered much of the region. An analysis by Military Strategy Magazine showed that drones, which Azerbaijani forces used extensively, were a significant factor in this victory: Almost half of the Armenian military equipment (tanks, artillery units, etc.) destroyed during the war fell prey to drones.
The Syrian Civil War: Breaking out in 2011 after peaceful protests for democracy were violently suppressed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the conflict was characterized by the use of drones, especially in the last months of the war – on the one hand, in 2024, regime forces allied with Russia and Iran used drones to terrorize civilians in areas controlled by rebel groups, some supported by the United States and Turkey. However, the rebels quickly adapted and began using advanced, locally produced drones, which played an important role in the final offensive that led to the collapse of the Assad regime at the end of 2024, according to the Global Network on Extremism and Technology.
The Government of Ethiopia began using drones in 2020 in a series of bloody internal conflicts in which hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians, lost their lives. Drones purchased from China, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey have devastated entire communities in the Tigray, Oromia, and Amhara regions, recalls the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The Sudanese Civil War, which broke out in 2023, is a power struggle between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group. Both sides of the conflict, which has killed over 150,000 people in two years and is considered by the UN the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, are supplied with drones by Russia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, who are interested in Sudan’s important strategic position, especially access to the Red Sea, shows an analysis by Critical Threats.
Myanmar, on the other hand, is an example where drones are locally produced: the numerous rebel groups fighting since 2021 against the military junta supported by Russia and China attracted the attention of the international community when they began building their own drones, constructed with parts ordered from China and information learned online, which gave them a series of important victories. More recently, however, junta forces have adapted and begun using more advanced drones, imported from Russia and China.
How War Changes Us
What conflicts in recent years have shown (besides the fact that almost all 21st-century humanitarian crises lead back to Russia and Iran) is that not only war changes, but also how we perceive it. Now, you don’t even have to make a considerable effort if you want to see images captured by soldiers and drones on the Ukrainian front – wounded soldiers hunted in trenches by kamikaze drones, groups of civilians obliterated almost without realizing what happened, all are just a few clicks away.
The humanitarian impact of using these weapons has begun to be researched in recent years, as have the horrific effects on the mental health of drone operators and even affected communities: In 2012, Metin Başoğlu, founder and former head of the Trauma Studies Unit at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London, put forward the idea that the use of drones in war theaters can be considered a form of collective torture.
In his view, the use of drones stands out among modern military tactics because it includes „powerful elements of unpredictability and uncontrollability that lead to an environment of ‘inevitable shock’,” and debates about the morality and legality of using drones must take these effects into account.
More recently, in 2024, the Imperial War Museum in London included in one of its exhibitions the film „Beware Blue Skies,” which explores the effects of drone use from both perspectives: that of the pilot and that of a potential victim.
It is, perhaps, an experience that would benefit us all, after years of getting used to witnessing almost unimaginable tragedies from the comfort of our homes with an almost morbid curiosity. Now that drones are becoming an established part of the new „rules of war,” who can say where this curiosity will lead us?
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