Do-it-yourself warfare

Are drones the new IEDs?

For the past 14 years the best trained, best equipped, most technologically-advanced armies the world has ever known, including those from America, Australia, the UK and Canada, have been fighting in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of February 2015, those armies had suffered approximately 8,000 casualties.

It might seem remarkable that the single greatest cause of allied casualties has been the improvised explosive device (IED), a cheap, crude bomb used by technologically ‘backward’ fighters with limited resources. Western armies have spent billions of dollars trying (unsuccessfully) to counter these ‘homemade’ weapons.