Terrorist Group Hezbollah Is Reportedly Using Drone Bombers
A video has appeared on social media of the terrorist organization Hezbollah using armed drones against enemy forces on the ground. The video, taken in Syria, shows a quadcopter dropping cluster bomblets on fleeing Syrian rebels.
The video shows drone attacks on three rebel positions. The first video shows an attack on a cluster of buildings. The second shows an attack on a car. The third actually shows a pair of small bombs tumbling away from the drone toward a building, with a man fleeing from the building just in time to avoid the attack.
According to the Times of Israel, the bombs appear to be Chinese-made MZD-2 submunitions. Small bomblets about the size of hand grenades, submunitions are typically packed by the dozen in cluster bombs or rockets and released over the battlefield. Each is designed to explode and spread shrapnel-or in the case of the MZD-2, steel balls-in all directions. A cluster bomb or rocket is therefore lethal over a wider area than a bomb with a single warhead.
The exact type of drone used in the attack is unknown, but it appears to be some kind of quadcopter. Not only can the drone in the video hover in place, the buzzing of rotors can be faintly heard.
The use of drones by so-called non-state actors such as Hezbollah is a disconcerting, but inevitable development of the weaponization of UAVs. By using off-the-shelf drones freely available on the commercial marketplace and easily available submunitions (Hezbollah used the MZD-2 in its 2006 war with Israel), the terrorist organization has created a precision-guided weapon system.
The U.S. military has already taken notice. A DroneDefender anti-drone jammer was spotted at a remote firebase in Iraq manned by U.S. military personnel. The U.S. Marine Corps is also training its forces for what to do if they encounter hostile drones on the battlefield. As the Commandant of the Marine Corps recently told USNI News, small drones could make up the first foreign air force to successfully bomb American troops in recent memory. Or at least try.
Via Times of Israel
You Might Also Like
