The intrinsic connection between the increasing use of drones and the erosion of international law has been laid bare once again in the Trump administration’s lethal campaign to destabilize Venezuela, culminating with the shocking attack on the country and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in early January.
Build up
Since early September, US forces have been using armed drones and other systems to strike boats allegedly carrying drugs across the Caribbean sea and the eastern pacific to the US. As we reported at the time of the first strike, multiple legal scholars described the attack as ‘manifestly unlawful’. It later emerged that US special forces had also deliberately killed survivors of that first strike clinging to wreckage. Since then, around 35 individual boats have been bombed with over 100 people killed. According to unnamed US sources most of the strikes have been carried out by US Reaper drones. It should be stressed that despite US officials claiming they are in ‘an armed conflict’ with drug cartels and that therefore such strikes are lawful, no such armed conflict exists. Senior US and international legal experts insist that “the strikes constitute murder under US. domestic law and extrajudicial killings under international human rights law.”
In mid-November 2025, US Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth formally announced Joint Task Force Operation Southern Spear as the name of US military operations ‘to synchronize counter-narcotics efforts across the Western Hemisphere’. The Task Force was given the name previously used by US Navy to emphasis its use of drones and related technology to combat narcotics trafficking. According to a US Navy press release:
“Southern Spear will operationalize a heterogeneous mix of Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) to support the detection and monitoring of illicit trafficking while learning lessons for other theaters ”
As part of the build up of forces in the region, the US opened a previously mothballed base in Puerto Rico and deployed a wide range of aircraft there, including F-35s and Reaper drones. According to specialised press, at least nine Reaper drones were spotted at the base, with some carrying heavy loads of weaponry before personnel restricted plane spotters’ views
In a further significant escalation, in late December Trump revealed that the US had ‘knocked out’ a big facility in the first direct US attack on Venezuelan soil. A short while later, US officials confirmed that a CIA-operated drone had attacked a port facility in the country. While the exact location of the strike has not been released, locals in the north east of the country reported loud explosions and recovered fragments of what appear to be a Hellfire missile
Shocking Attack
On 2 January, US forces invaded Venezuela, bombing a number of facilities in and around the capital, Caracas, and taking Maduro and his wife captive. US officials said that as part of the operation – named Absolute Resolve – at least 150 aircraft including bombers, fighter jets, drones and surveillance aircraft were deployed.
While unconfirmed at the time of writing, The War Zone also suggests that there is strong evidence that the US also used one-way attack drones (often dubbed ‘suicide drones’) during the operation. If so, these are likely to have been the first operational use of the US’ new LUCAS (Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System) drones, said to be modelled on Iran’s Shahed-136 drones.
Following the attack on Caracas, there was also a rare sighting of one of the secret US RQ-170 Sentinel drone apparently returning to the Puerto Rico base from over Venezuela.
VERY RARE: Footage shows a U.S. RQ-170 stealth drone returning to Puerto Rico after reportedly supporting last night’s U.S. strikes on Venezuela.
The RQ-170 Sentinel is a stealthy, high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works. pic.twitter.com/R2qQI3TyvK
— Clash Report (@clashreport) January 3, 2026
This type of drone has reportedly been deployed in numerous covert operations from Pakistan to Iran to North Korea and is unofficially known as the Beast of Kandahar after where it was first publicly sighted. Whilst it is a surveillance rather than attack drone, its presence underscores the crucial role that drones play in such operations.
Drones have made the world more dangerous
Many continue to insist that the advent and increasing use of armed drones is in no way responsible for the unlawful and destabilizing warfare that we have witnessed over the past twenty years. While officials and commentators acknowledge that the world is now a much more dangerous place (often as part of a call for more spending on military drones and related equipment) it is argued that to blame weapons technology itself is simply naïve. Drones, it is insisted, are merely a tool of the policymaker. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand how weapons technology opens up new options for the policymaker.
The reality is that drones have opened a crack through which the darkness has flooded in. Armed Predator drones enabled the US to conduct large-scale so-called ‘targeted killing’ operations in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere from the early 2000s setting a dangerous and terrible precedent. Drones have lowered the threshold for the use of force and enabled policymakers to ignore state sovereignty with impunity. The lesson was quickly learned and copied by others, not least by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Donald Trumps war against Venezuela is prising that crack further open still.
This is not, of course, to lay all the ills of the world at the feet of drones. Fundamental political and economic inequalities underlie the world’s geopolitical problems and many of its armed conflicts. Yet drones have encouraged and enabled some political leaders to gravely undermine fundamental legal structures governing international conduct and that puts us all in danger.