When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Armed groups in Colombia have built an air force — and it flies on cheap, store-bought drones.

In late August 2025, the National Liberation Army claimed responsibility for an ambush that left 13 police officers dead and four wounded. Initially reported as a drone strike, investigators later concluded that planted explosives destroyed the helicopter at a routinely used landing site. Two days later, a Colombian Navy ship was struck by a drone carrying improvised explosives, tearing through the crew deck and killing one marine. A similar attack in the same region in early August killed three infantrymen. These were not isolated incidents.

These attacks are more than tactical surprises: they reveal the integration of drones into combined arms operations, forcing security forces into dilemmas where defending against one threat opens vulnerabilities to another. Once limited to ambushes and roadside bombs, criminal and insurgent groups now use drones for reconnaissance and direct strikes. Police stations, army patrols, and even naval vessels have been targeted, with the August helicopter incident underscoring how quickly suspicion now falls on drones. Colombia now faces a “poor man’s air force” — cheap, expendable systems that enable insurgent-criminal networks to impose costs on a state already strained to defend outposts and convoys, even in urban centers.

To combat the challenge, Colombia should pair doctrine with execution by creating a unified counter-drone command, consolidating procurement under a single authority, and ensuring that every brigade operating in high-risk regions fields counter-drone specialists trained in detection, jamming, and electronic warfare. Ultimately, Colombia should build an integrated, self-sustaining counter-drone ecosystem — one that aligns doctrine, acquisition, and training with domestic industry and regional coordination.

An Operational Step Change

The proliferation of drones among criminal groups carries larger implications. President Gustavo Petro’s Paz Total (Total Peace) initiative, meant to freeze conflict and open space for negotiations, has instead created permissive conditions for innovation. Ceasefires gave armed groups time to recruit, rearm, and adapt. In southern Colombia, minors have been trained as pisasuaves — stealthy assault units — and as drone operators, with captured fighters describing weeks of instruction in payload assembly, night operations, and integration of aerial surveillance into ground maneuvers. The shift is not purely offensive. It has logistical and operational effects as well. In the Cañón del Micay, a major cocaine hub, dissident commanders now use drones in both trafficking and combat. In northeastern and south-central Colombia, National Liberation fronts have woven drone training into existing guerrilla warfare courses, treating it as an organic part of their new fighting capabilities.

What has emerged is not a mere tactical upgrade but an operational step change. When combined with long-standing improvised explosive device know-how, drones enable criminal groups to contest Colombia’s skies. This was unthinkable at the height of Plan Colombia, a decade-long, multi-billion dollar security cooperation initiative that forced armed groups to demobilize, and that allowed U.S.-supplied helicopters and gunships to operate without having to think about threats.

The pace of escalation is staggering. According to the Colombian government’s internal security assessments armed groups have carried out more than 320 drone attacks since April 2024, using over 700 improvised explosives and grenades. These attacks have caused more than 225 casualties, including 17 deaths. Strikes have targeted police patrols, field hospitals, schools, and even crowded town squares. Colombia now endures a drone attack every 38 hours, often delivered in swarms designed to overwhelm defenses. This marks a stark reversal of dominance: Where the state once deployed troops into any ravine, its mobility is now constrained by cheap, disposable drones bought online or smuggled across porous borders.

The expansion of drone attacks closely traces the most profitable corridors for drug trafficking, illicit gold mining, and other criminal economies. Incidents cluster in Cauca, Catatumbo, Arauca, and southern Bolívar, all in enclaves near the borders with Venezuela or Ecuador. These places represent a criminal Goldilocks sweet spot: far enough away from developed areas to avoid authorities, but with ample open space and riverine access to flourish. For only a few hundred dollars — less than a modern rifle — armed groups can kill, wound, and terrorize with little risk to a drone operator. In El Plateado, drones struck army patrols, a hospital, a school, and a town square on consecutive days in February 2025. In Catatumbo, dissidents and National Liberation fighters now turn drones on each other, using explosive drops and surveillance flights in clashes that displace thousands of civilians.

A Weak Response

So far, the Colombian government’s response has been improvised and inadequate. Current air defense batteries are more than 80 years old, and asymmetric air defenses are virtually nonexistent. Soldiers stationed in remote places away from urban centers admit their main countermeasure is firing rifles in volleys, hoping to hit drones. Government forces have used drones offensively, but without a doctrine or rules of engagement, these efforts are typically ineffective.

Procurement follows the same troubled pattern as past military acquisitions: It took five administrations to approve the purchase of new fighter jets to replace an obsolete 3.5-generation fleet, and counter-drone systems are unlikely to move faster. Nor is there a national doctrine for drone warfare or a legal framework to govern its use, leaving military commanders hesitant, exposed to accusations of misuse, and vulnerable to legal action.

While there is some progress in Colombia’s counter-drone acquisition effort, programs remain decentralized and incoherent. There is no institutional effort with consistent government backing, only bottom-up attempts that are fragile and subject to the whims of local politics. The systems now under testing — such as commercial jammers, direction-finding platforms, and offensive drones — have been acquired in response to the recent rise of attacks, rather than as part of long-term acquisition strategy. Since most Colombian systems are off-the-shelf and imported at high prices, they risk becoming rapidly outdated. According to government officials, armed groups are modifying cheap multi-rotor or agricultural drones to drop 60mm grenades, shifting frequencies, or flying autonomously to evade jamming.

Legal and institutional shortcomings are another problem. Colombian military lawyers interpret existing law of armed conflict provisions narrowly, seeking to protect units from judicial risk rather than prioritizing their mission. This limits effectiveness and generates hesitation in operational use. Together with unclear doctrine, this legal ambiguity reduces confidence and slows deployment. Although some doctrine is being generated in some units, particularly within elite army, air force, and national police units, it remains tactical in nature, a product of necessity, and not an all-encompassing general directive. Current air defense coverage remains minimal — current systems protect only key bases and airports — while funding for maintenance and updates is uncertain. Without contractual guarantees for software updates, modular architectures, or domestic technical capacity, Colombia risks deploying systems that will be obsolete by the time they are widely implemented. Addressing these weaknesses requires mixing rapid acquisition with sustained capability, which involves investing in modular, upgradable architectures, embedding legal clarity and operational doctrine, and integrating detection, attribution, and electronic defeat within a unified national counter-drone framework.

Regional enablers compound this adaptation gap, as is the case with much of the supply of weaponry to criminal actors in Colombia. Nowhere is the convergence of insurgency, crime, and technology more evident than in the Catatumbo conflict, fought on the Colombia-Venezuela border. The National Liberation Army has waged an aggressive campaign to wrest control of the region from a splintered faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, following the 2016 peace accord. Although both groups coexisted for years, that balance collapsed in early 2025, igniting fighting that displaced more than 56,000 civilians and exposing Venezuelan complicity in Colombia’s internal violence. The National Liberation Army and former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia fighters move freely across the border, sourcing weapons and counter-drone systems from Venezuelan suppliers to sustain their offensive. Meanwhile, Ecuador has emerged as an important transit hub of consumer drones and components, enabling the possibility of training links with Mexican cartel operators and advisors, experienced in adapting explosives for aerial delivery. The result is a permissive regional environment where Colombian armed actors will likely be able to sustain drone operations even if they were to face increased domestic pressure.

Developments elsewhere place Colombia’s current challenge within a broader context. The Islamic State has used armed drones in Mosul, the Houthis have conducted long-range drone strikes against Saudi oil infrastructure in Yemen, and  Mexican cartels have adopted using first-person view drones. Colombia is now part of a continuing global trend of non-state actors incorporating technological advances to outpace government responses.

What Can Be Done?

Colombia should move from improvisation to doctrine — recognizing that criminal-insurgent drones are no longer an emerging threat but a daily national security challenge. Any serious effort to address the issue should include a comprehensive counter-drone strategy that clarifies the rules of engagement, streamlines acquisition, and prioritizes training as much as hardware.

Establishing a unified counter-drone command would consolidate fragmented responsibilities across the army, air force, and national police, creating a single operational framework to coordinate intelligence, electronic warfare, and procurement. Such a command should seek to improve interoperability, accelerate response times, and ensure that intelligence, training, and technology flow across services — forming a coherent national defense posture.

Colombia could learn valuable lessons from Ukraine’s rapid field innovations, demonstrating that scrappy and lean innovation is possible, that layered defenses can be built at scale if procurement is reformed and industry partnerships are expanded, and all backed by a national sense of urgency.

However, the response to the drone challenge need not be solely Colombia’s responsibility. It should also involve international partners. American support should move beyond counter-narcotics to counter-drone capacity building, including technology transfers, embedded advising, financing for doctrine development, and access to lessons learned from Ukraine and across the NATO nations.

Moreover, the use of criminal-insurgent drones should be treated as a regional challenge. Ideally, Colombia should work with Ecuador and Venezuela to develop a collective response. Cooperation with Ecuador is plausible, given shared security concerns and recent cross-border coordination, but genuine cooperation with Venezuela is highly unlikely. The Maduro regime has consistently harbored and sponsored armed groups such as the National Liberation and dissident Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia factions, both of which maintain bases of operation inside Venezuelan territory. In this context, Colombia should prepare for the absence of good-faith collaboration by pursuing unilateral action to strengthen border defenses, interdicting drone shipments, and working with willing partners such as Brazil and the United States to contain or mitigate the threat.

The incorporation of drones into criminal-insurgent operations may lead to other innovations. Know-how and lessons learned could be transferable to other types of autonomous capabilities, including unmanned underwater vehicles,  which drug traffickers have already started using. As U.S. strikes on “go-fast” boats continue to increase, traffickers may see submersibles as an alternative delivery method to U.S. and European markets. The challenge now is to recognize that the war has taken flight, and to respond before the power balance tips irreversibly against the Colombian government.

Alfonso Camacho-Martinez is a National Security Fellow at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies. His work focuses on geopolitical risk, threat assessment, and satellite imagery analysis.

Image: Midjourney