JAYVEE: ISIS Is Dropping Bombs with Drones in Iraq.

“It’s not as if it is a large, armed UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] that is dropping munitions from the wings—but literally, a very small quadcopter that drops a small munition in a somewhat imprecise manner,” [Col. Brett] Sylvia, commander of an American military advising mission in Iraq, told Military Times. “They are very short-range, targeting those front-line troops from the Iraqis.”

Because the drones used are commercial models, it likely means that anti-drone weapons already on hand with the American advisors are sufficient to stop them. The Battelle Drone Defender, spotted in Iraq last summer, is a gun-shaped jamming tool that can send some models of drone crashing to the ground. It’s part of a growing field of anti-drone countermeasures, many of which focus on radio-frequency jamming to disable the flying machines.

It’s worth noting that the bomb-dropping drones are just a small part of how ISIS uses the cheap, unmanned flying machines. Other applications include scouts and explosive decoys, as well as one-use weapons. ISIS is also likely not the first group to figure out how to drop grenades from small drones; it’s a growing field of research and development among many violent, nonstate actors and insurgent groups. Despite the relative novelty, it’s also likely not the deadliest thing insurgents can do with drones.

Techniques like these aren’t very effective against soldiers, but they’re cheap, easy to “export,” and perhaps deadlier against softer targets.