An unjammable fiber-optic kamikaze drone—a drone you fly directly into a target to kill it—was recently discovered in a cartel compound, 500 miles from the U.S. border. You probably won’t have heard about this, but it’s big news. Or it should be.
It’s yet another indication of how closely drug gangs are coming to resemble state or quasi-state actors, not just in the territories they control and administer but also in the threat they pose to real states, including the United States. The classic definition of the state, derived from sociologist Max Weber, is an entity that monopolizes violence within a set of given borders. And while the cartels have been using military-grade equipment like .50-caliber machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades for some time, their determined attempts to acquire the latest drone capabilities reveal a greater ambition: to achieve technological and tactical parity with second- and maybe even first-tier nations.
