Armed teams in Colombia have constructed an air pressure — and it flies on low-cost, store-bought drones.
In late August 2025, the Nationwide Liberation Military claimed duty for an ambush that left 13 law enforcement officials lifeless and 4 wounded. Initially reported as a drone strike, investigators later concluded that planted explosives destroyed the helicopter at a routinely used touchdown website. Two days later, a Colombian Navy ship was struck by a drone carrying improvised explosives, tearing via the crew deck and killing one marine. An identical assault in the identical area in early August killed three soldiers. These weren’t remoted incidents.
These assaults are greater than tactical surprises: they reveal the mixing of drones into mixed arms operations, forcing safety forces into dilemmas the place defending in opposition to one menace opens vulnerabilities to a different. As soon as restricted to ambushes and roadside bombs, prison and rebel teams now use drones for reconnaissance and direct strikes. Police stations, military patrols, and even naval vessels have been focused, with the August helicopter incident underscoring how rapidly suspicion now falls on drones. Colombia now faces a “poor man’s air pressure” — low-cost, expendable techniques that allow insurgent-criminal networks to impose prices on a state already strained to defend outposts and convoys, even in city facilities.
To fight the problem, Colombia ought to pair doctrine with execution by making a unified counter-drone command, consolidating procurement below a single authority, and guaranteeing that each brigade working in high-risk areas fields counter-drone specialists educated in detection, jamming, and digital warfare. Finally, Colombia ought to construct an built-in, self-sustaining counter-drone ecosystem — one which aligns doctrine, acquisition, and coaching with home trade and regional coordination.
An Operational Step Change
The proliferation of drones amongst prison teams carries bigger implications. President Gustavo Petro’s Paz Complete (Complete Peace) initiative, meant to freeze battle and open area for negotiations, has as a substitute created permissive situations for innovation. Ceasefires gave armed teams time to recruit, rearm, and adapt. In southern Colombia, minors have been educated as pisasuaves — stealthy assault models — and as drone operators, with captured fighters describing weeks of instruction in payload meeting, evening operations, and integration of aerial surveillance into floor maneuvers. The shift will not be purely offensive. It has logistical and operational results as properly. Within the Cañón del Micay, a significant cocaine hub, dissident commanders now use drones in each trafficking and fight. In northeastern and south-central Colombia, Nationwide Liberation fronts have woven drone coaching into present guerrilla warfare programs, treating it as an natural a part of their new preventing capabilities.
What has emerged will not be a mere tactical improve however an operational step change. When mixed with long-standing improvised explosive machine know-how, drones allow prison teams to contest Colombia’s skies. This was unthinkable on the peak of Plan Colombia, a decade-long, multi-billion greenback safety cooperation initiative that compelled armed teams to demobilize, and that allowed U.S.-supplied helicopters and gunships to function with out having to consider threats.
The tempo of escalation is staggering. In accordance with the Colombian authorities’s inside safety assessments armed teams have carried out greater than 320 drone assaults since April 2024, utilizing over 700 improvised explosives and grenades. These assaults have precipitated greater than 225 casualties, together with 17 deaths. Strikes have focused police patrols, area hospitals, colleges, and even crowded city squares. Colombia now endures a drone assault each 38 hours, typically delivered in swarms designed to overwhelm defenses. This marks a stark reversal of dominance: The place the state as soon as deployed troops into any ravine, its mobility is now constrained by low-cost, disposable drones purchased on-line or smuggled throughout porous borders.
The enlargement of drone assaults carefully traces essentially the most worthwhile corridors for drug trafficking, illicit gold mining, and different prison economies. Incidents cluster in Cauca, Catatumbo, Arauca, and southern Bolívar, all in enclaves close to the borders with Venezuela or Ecuador. These locations symbolize a prison Goldilocks candy spot: far sufficient away from developed areas to keep away from authorities, however with ample open area and riverine entry to flourish. For only some hundred {dollars} — lower than a contemporary rifle — armed teams can kill, wound, and terrorize with little threat to a drone operator. In El Plateado, drones struck military patrols, a hospital, a college, and a city sq. on consecutive days in February 2025. In Catatumbo, dissidents and Nationwide Liberation fighters now flip drones on one another, utilizing explosive drops and surveillance flights in clashes that displace 1000’s of civilians.
A Weak Response
Up to now, the Colombian authorities’s response has been improvised and insufficient. Present air protection batteries are greater than 80 years outdated, and uneven air defenses are just about nonexistent. Troopers stationed in distant locations away from city facilities admit their most important countermeasure is firing rifles in volleys, hoping to hit drones. Authorities forces have used drones offensively, however with out a doctrine or guidelines of engagement, these efforts are usually ineffective.
Procurement follows the identical troubled sample as previous navy acquisitions: It took 5 administrations to approve the acquisition of recent fighter jets to exchange an out of date 3.5-generation fleet, and counter-drone techniques are unlikely to maneuver sooner. Neither is there a nationwide doctrine for drone warfare or a authorized framework to control its use, leaving navy commanders hesitant, uncovered to accusations of misuse, and weak to authorized motion.
Whereas there may be some progress in Colombia’s counter-drone acquisition effort, packages stay decentralized and incoherent. There isn’t any institutional effort with constant authorities backing, solely bottom-up makes an attempt which can be fragile and topic to the whims of native politics. The techniques now below testing — resembling industrial jammers, direction-finding platforms, and offensive drones — have been acquired in response to the current rise of assaults, quite than as a part of long-term acquisition technique. Since most Colombian techniques are off-the-shelf and imported at excessive costs, they threat turning into quickly outdated. In accordance with authorities officers, armed teams are modifying low-cost multi-rotor or agricultural drones to drop 60mm grenades, shifting frequencies, or flying autonomously to evade jamming.
Authorized and institutional shortcomings are one other drawback. Colombian navy attorneys interpret present regulation of armed battle provisions narrowly, searching for to guard models from judicial threat quite than prioritizing their mission. This limits effectiveness and generates hesitation in operational use. Along with unclear doctrine, this authorized ambiguity reduces confidence and slows deployment. Though some doctrine is being generated in some models, notably inside elite military, air pressure, and nationwide police models, it stays tactical in nature, a product of necessity, and never an all-encompassing normal directive. Present air protection protection stays minimal — present techniques defend solely key bases and airports — whereas funding for upkeep and updates is unsure. With out contractual ensures for software program updates, modular architectures, or home technical capability, Colombia dangers deploying techniques that might be out of date by the point they’re extensively applied. Addressing these weaknesses requires mixing speedy acquisition with sustained functionality, which includes investing in modular, upgradable architectures, embedding authorized readability and operational doctrine, and integrating detection, attribution, and digital defeat inside a unified nationwide counter-drone framework.
Regional enablers compound this adaptation hole, as is the case with a lot of the availability of weaponry to prison actors in Colombia. Nowhere is the convergence of insurgency, crime, and know-how extra evident than in the Catatumbo battle, fought on the Colombia-Venezuela border. The Nationwide Liberation Military has waged an aggressive marketing campaign to wrest management of the area from a splintered faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, following the 2016 peace accord. Though each teams coexisted for years, that steadiness collapsed in early 2025, igniting preventing that displaced greater than 56,000 civilians and exposing Venezuelan complicity in Colombia’s inside violence. The Nationwide Liberation Military and former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia fighters transfer freely throughout the border, sourcing weapons and counter-drone techniques from Venezuelan suppliers to maintain their offensive. In the meantime, Ecuador has emerged as an essential transit hub of client drones and elements, enabling the opportunity of coaching hyperlinks with Mexican cartel operators and advisors, skilled in adapting explosives for aerial supply. The result’s a permissive regional setting the place Colombian armed actors will probably have the ability to maintain drone operations even when they had been to face elevated home stress.
Developments elsewhere place Colombia’s present problem inside a broader context. The Islamic State has used armed drones in Mosul, the Houthis have carried out long-range drone strikes in opposition to Saudi oil infrastructure in Yemen, and Mexican cartels have adopted utilizing first-person view drones. Colombia is now a part of a seamless international pattern of non-state actors incorporating technological advances to outpace authorities responses.
What Can Be Completed?
Colombia ought to transfer from improvisation to doctrine — recognizing that criminal-insurgent drones are not an rising menace however a each day nationwide safety problem. Any critical effort to handle the difficulty ought to embrace a complete counter-drone technique that clarifies the principles of engagement, streamlines acquisition, and prioritizes coaching as a lot as {hardware}.
Establishing a unified counter-drone command would consolidate fragmented obligations throughout the military, air pressure, and nationwide police, making a single operational framework to coordinate intelligence, digital warfare, and procurement. Such a command ought to search to enhance interoperability, speed up response occasions, and make sure that intelligence, coaching, and know-how circulate throughout providers — forming a coherent nationwide protection posture.
Colombia might study priceless classes from Ukraine’s speedy area improvements, demonstrating that scrappy and lean innovation is feasible, that layered defenses will be constructed at scale if procurement is reformed and trade partnerships are expanded, and all backed by a nationwide sense of urgency.
Nevertheless, the response to the drone problem needn’t be solely Colombia’s duty. It must also contain worldwide companions. American help ought to transfer past counter-narcotics to counter-drone capability constructing, together with know-how transfers, embedded advising, financing for doctrine improvement, and entry to classes realized from Ukraine and throughout the NATO nations.
Furthermore, using criminal-insurgent drones ought to be handled as a regional problem. Ideally, Colombia ought to work with Ecuador and Venezuela to develop a collective response. Cooperation with Ecuador is believable, given shared safety considerations and up to date cross-border coordination, however real cooperation with Venezuela is very unlikely. The Maduro regime has persistently harbored and sponsored armed teams such because the Nationwide Liberation and dissident Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia factions, each of which keep bases of operation inside Venezuelan territory. On this context, Colombia ought to put together for the absence of good-faith collaboration by pursuing unilateral motion to strengthen border defenses, interdicting drone shipments, and dealing with keen companions resembling Brazil and america to include or mitigate the menace.
The incorporation of drones into criminal-insurgent operations could result in different improvements. Know-how and classes realized might be transferable to different kinds of autonomous capabilities, together with unmanned underwater automobiles, which drug traffickers have already began utilizing. As U.S. strikes on “go-fast” boats proceed to extend, traffickers may even see submersibles in its place supply technique to U.S. and European markets. The problem now’s to acknowledge that the battle has taken flight, and to reply earlier than the ability steadiness ideas irreversibly in opposition to the Colombian authorities.
Alfonso Camacho-Martinez is a Nationwide Safety Fellow on the Middlebury Institute for Worldwide Research. His work focuses on geopolitical threat, menace evaluation, and satellite tv for pc imagery evaluation.
Picture: Midjourney
