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 cannot hope to regain the military advantage by employing the strategies of a decade ago. Nor can they rely on foreign governments that have other incentives to provide them with the necessary firepower. Instead, they must learn to develop their own drones and integrate them into militaries built specifically for the irregular warfare required to defeat the insurgents that threaten them.

Africa’s drone race began in Libya and Ethiopia. During its second civil war, which officially lasted from 2014 to 2020, Libya became the world’s most active drone battlefield. The country’s relatively open terrain, along with extensive weapons supply lines from external state actors, turned the war into a testing ground for emerging technology. The Tripoli-based Government of National Accord and the Benghazi-based Libyan National Army exchanged thousands of drone strikes, culminating in the 2020 battle for Tripoli. During the battle, Bayraktar TB2 drones supplied to the GNA by Turkey loitered just beyond the range of the LNA’s Russian-supplied air defenses and provided critical air support to GNA forces as they beat back an LNA attack on the capital. The failure of the LNA offensive ultimately led to the 2020 cease-fire that ended hostilities.

Drones played an even more consequential role in Ethiopia’s 2020–22 conflict with the rebel Tigray Defense Forces (TDF). By late 2021, a TDF offensive had advanced to within 65 miles of Addis Ababa, the country’s capital and seat of the African Union. Desperate, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed turned to Iran, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates for drones, which inflicted heavy casualties, targeted the TDF’s vulnerable communications and supply lines, and turned the imminent collapse of the government into a sweeping defeat for the TDF. As a former Tigrayan officer involved in the offensive later told The Economist, “We could have captured Addis easily . . . . It was those fucking drones . . . . We had no way of shooting them down.”

The outcome of the Libyan and Ethiopian conflicts turned on a small number of........

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