A drone attack on a US base in Jordan shows that the US no longer has a monopoly on unmanned airstrikes.
The US military has gotten used to owning the skies. American air superiority in recent conflicts has been so complete that no US ground troops have been killed by an enemy aircraft since the Korean War, which ended more than 70 years ago.
Depending on your definition of “aircraft,” however, that may have changed on Sunday, when three US troops were killed in a drone strike on a US base in Jordan near the Syrian border. More than 40 service members were injured in the strike, according to the Pentagon. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of militias backed by the government of Iran that oppose both the US’s presence in the region and its support for Israel, took responsibility for the attack. Tehran has denied involvement, but Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters on Monday that “we know that Iran is behind it.” President Joe Biden vowed to “hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing,” and a number of GOP lawmakers have called for direct strikes against Iran in retaliation.
Singh did not specify the exact weapon used but described it as a “one-way-attack unmanned aerial system,” meaning it was designed to crash into its target and explode. This indicates it may be similar to the so-called “kamikaze drones” that Iran has supplied in large numbers to the Russian military for use in Ukraine. The drone reportedly struck near the troops’ sleeping quarters, accounting for the high number of casualties. A report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that the militia drone may have evaded air defense systems because it was mistaken for a US drone that was due to return to base at the same time.
The attack is far from the first of its kind — since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, Iran-backed groups have targeted US troops more than 150 times with drones, rockets, and missiles, causing dozens of injuries, most of them traumatic brain injuries.
But Sunday’s attack marked the first fatalities among US troops in the burgeoning regional conflict. And at least according to publicly available information, the three troops who died also appear to be the first US service members ever killed by an enemy drone. (Two US troops were killed by friendly fire in a Predator drone strike in Afghanistan in 2011; a US contractor in Syria was killed in a drone strike in March 2023.)
The Jordan attack is one of the most dramatic signs yet of a shift in the role drones are playing on battlefields around the world, and a sign of their impact on the global balance of power. The second drone age
In the decade or so following its first combat drone strike of the war on terror in Afghanistan in 2001, the US enjoyed a near monopoly on this technology.
