ISIS May Not Need Manned Jets to Have Air Power

Fox News is reporting that former Iraqi air force pilots who have defected to the Islamic State are training the latter’s fighters to pilot three captured jets, according to some sources:

ISIS could be soon taking its terror fight to the sky, after a report that former Iraqi pilots are training Islamic militants to fly captured Syrian war planes.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights group says some ex-Iraqi air force pilots are training members of ISIS to fly three warplanes—believed to be MiG-21 and MiG-23 jets– captured from air bases in Syria.

U.S. Central Command, though, has indicated that it cannot confirm such reports:

“We don’t have any operational reporting of (ISIS) flying jets in support of ISIS activity on the ground and so I cannot confirm that. And to the degree that pilots may have defected and joined the ranks of ISIS, I don’t have any information on that either,” General Lloyd Austin, head of the U.S. military’s Central Command told a Pentagon news briefing Friday.

As concerning as this report may be if it turns out to be true, groups like the Islamic State are increasingly on their way to being able to attack targets by air, even without the use of manned jets. Dr. Daniel Gouré of the Lexington Institute observes in a recent must-read piece:

In the next insurgency, U.S. and coalition forces could find themselves facing a new equally dangerous and disruptive threat [similar to that of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs]: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), often called drones. I am not referring to the large, high-flying, long-range and sophisticated unpiloted aerial vehicles such as the U.S. Reaper or Global Hawk or the Israeli Heron. Rather, I am speaking of relatively small and very simple drones that would fly low, have limited range and carry a payload measured in pounds.

In its recent conflicts, the U.S. military deployed several highly effective small UAVs that were built out of plastic parts, employed commercially available sensor systems and avionics and whose launch and recovery systems were constructed from parts available at Home Depot.

To date, there have been relatively few cases of other countries and, more importantly, non-state actors, employing drones. But they are coming. All the relevant technologies are proliferated around the world. The airframe can be made from cheap materials. They can be powered by battery-driven electric motors found in gardening implements. They need no better guidance system than the GPS that can be found in the average cell phone. But if you want command guidance you can get a small video camera almost anywhere and route the feed through that same cell phone connected to the local communications network. They can be built in a garage and launched from the driveway.

Gouré concludes ominously:

Make no mistake, this threat is coming. The recent conflict in Gaza taught the world’s terrorists and insurgents about the limited utility of even massive arsenals of unguided rockets and missiles. They will be looking for an alternative weapon. All the components needed to build a small, precision-guided, weaponized drone are available at ISIS’s equivalent of Radio Shack.