The image has gone around the world: on the Ukrainian front, a drone carrying explosives silently slides towards a trench, locates a Russian soldier, and kills him. According to several Western military reports, drones are now responsible for at least 70% of human losses on the battlefield – unprecedented in the history of modern warfare. Behind these images, an elite drone unit composed of gamers, hackers, and engineers retrained as remote warfare operators. In hidden workshops or makeshift factories, they build their machines and send them into battle. On the front lines, their drones kill, but they also guide a wounded woman out of a firing zone, or track a wild boar in the dead of night. Some imagine repurposing all of this to pick apples. In the meantime, they are laying the groundwork for a new way of killing: colder, more distant, controlled from a smartphone. And for this very reason, more worrying than anything we have known before.
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Credits photo/illustration at the top of the page: Morgane Sabouret
:fill(black)/2026/05/01/69f4644375d4c524823671.jpg "The storm is coming: new verbal escalation between the United States and Iran")
