Over at Defense One there’s a story about how even a more plentiful use of drones and special ops can defeat ISIS.

They’re wrong.

It’s exhausting to hear the same promises airpower enthusiasts have been making since Douhet. It reminds me of the Spanish Conquistadors search for the fountain of youth.

In short the enemy gets a vote. The enemy is going to spoof sensors or develop ways to avoid surveillance.  Identifying targets from the air isn’t as easy as it drone proponents believe or make it sound.  Drones can be flown 24/7 but they can’t see and more importantly identify/analyze everything going on under them in real time.  Even a cop on an intersection can only look down one street at a time.  Granted, drones can look down several streets simultaneously but not all of them and the more places you “stare” at the more analysts you need watching.  If drones were as effective as their proponents would like us to believe we’d have destroyed AQ long ago in Afghanistan.  We haven’t.

Further, drones only carry a fraction of the ordnance fixed wing can and do.  They also aren’t very good at determining an individual’s intentions especially important when the enemy uses the civilian populace to hide.

Putting SOF on the ground to identify targets but they better have a whole heck of a lot of conventional forces around to protect them like they did in early Afghanistan because when they are close enough to identify targets they are also close enough for the enemy to kill them e.g./ Robert’s Ridge.

Drones are a great tool and should be employed but these over enthusiastic predictions of what they can do are over the top.