Event: the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA

On June 22, 2025, fiber-optic first-person-view drones operated by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a Tuareg rebel group, slammed into a convoy of Russian Africa Corps and Malian armed forces vehicles in northern Mali. Footage shows the drones striking two trucks, then cuts to fighters posing beside the wreckage. The significance was unmistakable: a little over a year after fiber-optic drones first appeared in Ukraine, a rebel group with scant resources had deployed the cutting-edge technology to humiliate two comparatively superior state actors.A decade earlier, the use of armed drones in African airspace looked very different. In 2011, the United States conducted the first drone strike on the continent, targeting senior leaders of the Somali Islamist group al-Shabab. At the time, Washington held a near monopoly in drone capability: only the world’s most advanced militaries had the access and technical expertise to employ the $20 million Predator drone used in the attack. That monopoly has since collapsed. Over the past decade, at least 37 African militaries have acquired drones of varying sophistication and cost.Drones have allowed African states’ small, lightly equipped forces to extend their reach across vast territories where state authority is contested. But over the last four years, armed nonstate actors in more than a dozen countries have begun to acquire and experiment with drones of their own, using them to enable ground operations, drop mortars, and conduct suicide attacks. They are now deploying these small uncrewed systems, many of which can be assembled from widely available and inexpensive parts, more effectively than states, who continue to rely on foreign governments for supply. In doing so, they have demonstrated that the gap between less-resourced and better-resourced adversaries has narrowed since the dawn of the drone wars, threatening the air dominance once enjoyed by states across the world.African governments…