When a cooler conflict comes around, think whatever the 2020s, 2030s equivalent of the troubles is, drones will certainly rack up a much greater market share of the casualties by virtue of the lower background noise. They just aren't that useful in a "low but still tons of real armaments around for use" intensity conflict.
It just doesn’t work very well.
Drones still require someone to turn them into weapons going after bomb makers is an extremely effective strategy because while there are a million guides on the internet on how to make an IED or a suicide vest the actual amount of people capable of making them is extremely small the world isn’t HN.
These bad guys are groups with caches of weapons and skilled bomb makers in their numbers.
Why in 7 years havent They just put the two together?
What in our arm chair analysis are we overlooking?
Much of the military equipment in circulation is decades old, you have RPGs from the 70’s being in use.
The logistics for drones isn’t there yet, the human capital isn’t there yet either I would give it 5-10 more years till these drones will be prevalent in nearly every conflict.
In each of these theatres we have documented heavy use of drones for recon.
The problem is nothing to do with logistics or skillset.
Hobby grade drones (even the heavy lift types which can manage 20kg payload) are not viable weapons. Their payload is too small, their accuracy too imprecise in practice and the economics of a stolen car’s payload being 1000x that of a medium-large hobby drone renders these a plot line in a movie rather than a real thing.
Age of military equipment has nothing to do with anything.
They’ve been in documented use over 7 years at this point. Why are they less effective than Facebook posts at killing people?