Under the New Logic of Drone Warfare, Is Unmanned No Longer a Key Capability?

Abstract: Reports of increasing use of light, manned aircraft in Myanmar help shed light on how strategic logics and context are important to understanding the spread of drone warfare. The military government’s turn toward manned technologies shows how the very logic that is driving drone adoption can also lead to the abandonment of the unmanned character as an essential capability of aerial platforms.

On September 27, 2026, the New York Times published a report on how Myanmar’s military rulers are using new tools and techniques to conduct war from the sky. However, notably, the report was not about drones, a technology that has already reshaped war in the country with extensive use by both the military government and rebels. Instead, the tools in question in this report are “light, recreational aircraft, or paramotors,” and importantly, unlike drones, they are manned.

The Times cites the rebel National Unity Government as saying that since 2025, there have been more than 1,600 strikes carried out using these light, manned aircraft. In contrast, the same data source cites 1,459 drone strikes and more than 7,500 air strikes.

The turn to manned but light and somewhat improvised aircraft points to how the latest logics that have helped drive the adoption of drone warfare in some cases may even push towards the abandonment of the most central defining feature of drones: that they are unmanned.

Modern Drone Warfare and Its Changing Strategic Logic

The modern era of drone warfare can be understood to have begun in earnest in October 2001 when the United States conducted its first drone strike in Afghanistan. As New America Vice President Peter Bergen and I have previously written, the United States’ initial use of drone strikes was deeply informed by its desire to “conduct targeted operations against terrorists while limiting the risk of American casualties and political fallout that could come from deploying large numbers of ground forces.” This logic of casualty aversion and limited commitment would largely shape America’s use of drone strikes as they spread to Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and beyond.

However, in Ukraine as well as in Ethiopia, Sudan, and, yes, Myanmar, a new logic emerged in which drones promised states a cheap way to mass firepower in wars that were already costly in both human and financial terms.

As Peter Bergen and I have argued, drawing in part on Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia Macdonald’s book The Hand Behind Unmanned: Origins of the US Autonomous Military Arsenal, “This new strategic logic led to the development of different kinds of drones, often sacrificing capabilities such as navigation and survivability to minimize costs.” In Ukraine, the need to keep costs low means that many of the drones now being used lack various navigational and other capabilities that were part of the combination that made drones so desirable to the U.S. in its counterterrorism wars. As actors in various conflicts see less importance in the survivability of their drones, turning to so-called One Way Attack drones, it has raised questions of whether these are usefully considered drones rather than simply cheap cruise missiles.

The use of light, manned, recreational aircraft in Myanmar takes this a step further. It now appears that the logic that has helped spread the use of weaponized drones around the world may in some cases drive an abandonment of the unmanned capability, the core defining feature of drones.

Constraints and Limits to Light Aircraft

As with any technique, there are constraints and limits to the adoption of light, manned aircraft. The New York Times reports, “These lightweight aircraft have proved most effective where the terrain is flat and there is relatively little air turbulence, particularly in the low-lying central plains that include the Sagaing and Mandalay Regions, said Naung Yoe, a former major in the Myanmar military who defected soon after the 2021 coup.” Such conditions are not reflective of other areas where there are initial signs of interest in drones. For example, in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, mountainous terrain may have limited the uptake so far of quadcopters (especially compared to their widespread use in urban areas of Iraq and Syria by ISIS). Given these conditions, a turn to manned lightweight aircraft in Afghanistan and Pakistan is even less likely.

Another factor is that the military government’s ability to use such lightweight, manned air platforms is also the product of the targets. According to the Times, the targets are often civilians, who at most can call upon “lightly armed guerrilla forces” who lack the ability to down the light aircraft. As a result, one should not expect the unmanned capability to be one that will soon be dispensed with amid Ukraine’s entrenched battlefields.  This is especially the case, as both Ukraine and Russia – though showing levels of political commitment inconsistent with the casualty aversion and political cost minimization logic that defined early American use of drones –wrestle with severe manpower challenges though in different ways.

Conclusion

The use of manned light, recreational aircraft in Myanmar emphasizes that when analyzing drone warfare, it is important to keep an eye on the strategic logic underlying the use of drones and the context within which they are used. In at least some cases, the very logic driving the turn to drones may end up leading back to cheap manned platforms. Failure to keep an eye on the specific strategic logics at play and how they interact with the platforms that states and non-state groups turn to opens the United States up to strategic surprise about where and when drone threats may suddenly emerge, shift into something else, or even diminish.