[GUEST ACCESS MODE: Data is scrambled or limited to provide examples. Make requests using your API key to unlock full data. Check https://lunarcrush.ai/auth for authentication information.]  Deborah [@Deborah07849071](/creator/twitter/Deborah07849071) on x 2652 followers Created: 2025-07-24 14:52:22 UTC It’s Time to Think About (and Fear) Drones and Psychological Operations Everyone knows that sound: the high-pitched whir of an unmanned aircraft system, racing through the air overhead. To a soldier below, it’s the sound of lost control. As warfighters struggle to deal with this new sense of vulnerability, the mere sound of drones has become a source of post-traumatic stress disorder — a strong indicator of drones’ psychological potency. It’s time to openly discuss what such cognitive dynamics mean for military influence operations. Most assessments of drone capabilities focus on their kinetic effects. The dark corners of the internet are rife with videos of ingenious drone sorties targeting entrenched Russian conscripts. Analysts interpret these killings as the drone value proposition: low-risk tactical access to denied areas. Yet, no one would claim that drones are strategically decisive. If a military analyst takes an alternative view of these new weapons systems, it’s usually to consider threats from enemy use, such as the way drones are blurring geographic lines of control. An enemy drone’s high speed and broad flight range requires a new elastic concept of the front line and demands a reassessment of rearguard preparedness. Perhaps the most cunning use of drones on the battlefield is their psychological impact. While reporting confirms their effectiveness in hitting targets, it also reveals the growing mental toll drones are taking on both soldiers and civilians. Drones are seemingly unstoppable — appearing from everywhere and nowhere in overwhelming numbers and known for blowing heads off shoulders. Tactically, drones are an advantage to special operators focused on precise targeting. But it’s the resulting paralysis that offers strategic opportunity to both sides of a fight — mostly the underdog. This apprehensiveness helps sustain a deterrent stalemate that works to the disadvantaged force’s benefit, characterized by largely static lines of control and entrenchment — a dynamic seen in the Russo-Ukrainian War. But this is hardly a good thing — it means pinning down forces, prolonging a war, and introducing new forms of trauma. Military commanders hoping to use drones to inflict mass casualties or take and hold terrain may be overlooking how humans cognitively respond to these systems. Drones Beyond Strikes and Reconnaissance Front line soldiers are now known to go to extraordinary lengths to camouflage themselves and maneuver away from drone detection. Persistent surveillance has been known to breed paranoia among terrorist organizations and can trigger in-group and out-group suspicions. Among civilians, the constant presence of drones can evoke fear, helplessness, and despair. It’s safe to say that everyone in a warzone is, in some sense, held captive by drones. Their cognitive applications — perhaps the most under-analyzed advantage of these systems — are just beginning to come into focus. Early observations reveal psychological tools to control terrain, directly affect warfighters’ cognition, and collect and reuse battlefield information for broader influence purposes. Distraction In a warzone, the sound or sight of a nearby drone often triggers an immediate fight-or-flight reaction. This creates a brief but dependable window to distract enemy personnel — even in hardened or well-defended positions. It also provides a reliable opportunity to draw attention and small arms fire to drones and away from more critical targets. For example, an attacking force could deploy drones to temporarily divert fire away from a tactical assault. Where such a diversion once required a high-risk decoy maneuver, drones can now achieve the same effect with negligible losses. Displacement The presence of a drone often prompts efforts to destroy, evade, or hide from it. The sense of inescapable surveillance can lead to the abandonment or weakened control of a location due to fear of detection or targeting. This means that surveillance drones may be particularly useful for control of terrain. For example, pre-positioning surveillance drones along the boundary of a desired corridor could help create undefended channels of attack. In this sense, drones may be able to take temporary area denial actions that replace or reduce the need for more complicated terrain control options like landmine emplacement. Immobilization Recent drone operations have driven combatants to entrench themselves, seeking safety inside reinforced hideouts and staying hidden unless venturing outside is safer. This entrenchment signals a paralysis of ground forces under persistent drone presence. With this in mind, commanders might use continuous drone coverage to operationally immobilize an enemy for a limited period of time. This lesson from the Russo-Ukrainian War will likely radically change the way poorly equipped forces engage against superior enemies, with drones being seen as a tactical equalizer, enabling a weaker force to at least stall a numerically superior force. Equivocation Unmarked, unattributed, or misattributed drones create confusion and fear among combatants and non-combatants alike. Attribution often relies on the drone’s direction of travel, but this is unreliable since drones can bypass lines of control and return from unexpected directions. Minimizing attribution markings and using drones to mimic more powerful aircraft, within the limits of the laws of war, offers potentially useful ambiguity, but presents ethical dilemmas. Their untraceable nature makes it easier than ever to conduct traditional “false flag” operations by technical means, with little risk of detection. Conditioning Combatants exposed to repeated drone attacks change their daily patterns of activity to avoid detection. A pattern of primary drone attacks, followed by secondary attacks, creates anticipation of follow-up assaults among targets. These behaviors reveal a psychological vulnerability that drones can exploit through routine exposure. Consequently, drones may reliably shape the cognitive battlespace by establishing predictable patterns of use. These phenomena indicate psychological vulnerability to behavioral conditioning through routine exposure to drones. Drones may be reliable for shaping the cognitive battlespace through the establishment of anticipated patterns of drone use. Enemy attack patterns have always created fearful expectations among defenders, but the feeling of inescapability of drones means those fears are intensified. Documentation, Dissemination, and Condemnation Drones are not only tactical assets on the battlefield but also potent tools of military propaganda and psychological warfare. Their imagery shapes narratives, influences public perception, and impacts morale on both sides of a conflict. These are all functions that overlap each other. Military media producers use drones to capture footage of enemy defeats, surrenders, and desertions — showcasing the enemy’s failures to both sympathetic and unsympathetic audiences. But the footage also conveys a sense of inescapability from drones. This dual-use application may be used to support narratives of defiance and imminent victory while undermining enemy morale. When used illegally or unethically — and documented — enemy drone use is especially vulnerable to condemnation in media channels. Drones may be the most despised piece of military hardware, short of weapons of mass destruction. The self-proclaimed Islamic State set an example for drone capture of powerful propaganda footage during its short ascendance in Iraq and the Levant. The U.S. military took note but is behind the curve in creating similarly compelling videos. Drones have been fitted with loudspeakers for communicating with combatants, can distribute leaflets, and even be equipped with high-decibel sound projectors for non-lethal effects. They can also be used to deliver humanitarian and medical aid to denied areas. They provide unlimited opportunities for projecting advantageous information to physical audiences. This carrying capacity offers to minimize the stand-off distance that has been required for battlefield loudspeaker unit broadcasts, for example, and may enable easier access to target audiences. Recent cases of drone use for documentation and dissemination underscore their potential applications in information operations with strategic impact beyond the battlefield. In particular, drones are powerful imagery collection systems that may be used to produce emotionally charged appeals to global audiences. For example, drone video imagery of an atrocity against civilians — real or staged — could be shown publicly, in courtrooms, and in diplomatic channels as a campaign against an aggressor, with the goal of reducing support for the aggressor and persuading viewers of their culpability. Drones might also be used to discretely document and expose military build-up before an expected offensive — with the goal of casting doubt on the legitimacy of an aggressor’s violent intentions and creating international unity against them. Strategic outcomes of campaigns like these are concrete and measurable, akin to the de-classification and release of intelligence community reporting about Russia’s military preparations for their 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which created international resolve against Russia. Documenting and releasing clear evidence of China’s acute preparations for an invasion of Taiwan would be an ideal deterrent use for drone-based information operations and may be more impactful than destructive targeting. Strategic informational uses of drones, however, require a shift of mindset from destructive applications to creative cognitive applications. Ethics Each of these cognitive applications comes with a host of ethical concerns. The risks of dehumanization through drone warfare, low accountability of remote drone operations, high potential for collateral damage, and the under-evaluated question of psychological trauma resulting from military drone use — measured against the inevitability of enemy use of drone systems — present a modern security dilemma. It seems that these moral and ethical problems may only be enabled by uncertain and unenforced international legal limits. As the U.S. Department of Justice’s author of the notorious 2002 “torture memos” recently warned, “calls for legal regulation will not only fail, but also could be counterproductive. Early regulation of military technology has rarely, if ever, succeeded when nations are still learning the costs and benefits of new weapons.” If recent warzone drone use has taught analysts anything, it’s that the United States should be prepared for its enemies’ very worst uses of this technology. It will not be enough to try to match enemies’ kinetic offenses. The Department of Defense has practically no option but to adapt to this harsh new reality by overmatching adversaries’ drone capabilities — especially their sometimes diabolical uses for psychological effects, comprising the true “hellscape” of department leaders’ visions. The secretary of defense has very openly declared the department’s intent to create a numerical drone advantage for “the fight,” but the Pentagon should also think innovatively about second- and third-order effects of drone use, and initiate policy and exercises to put them to use in ways that exceed adversary advantages. The successful application of drones for psychological effects will require new policy, planning, and training that so far does not appear to be happening yet at the service or departmental level. The pragmatic reality of drone use and the expectation of malfeasance by our adversaries, though, do not excuse the United States from developing and applying ethical safeguards against their misuse. Basic international legal principles such as distinction between military and civilian targets, and proportionality of strikes, apply to drones as much as they do to the use of any other weapon. However, in a situation where U.S. drones are believed to be outnumbered, we should assume that our own forces will suffer the most from a lack of specific international limitations on their use. It is in our own best interests to push for new norms against the misuse of drones. A New Approach Militaries are notorious for resisting new warfighting concepts. It took an act of Congress to initiate the 1921 airpower tests that would result in the U.S. military’s integration of newfangled airplanes. When Navy admirals viewing the bombing test runs saw the damage that an aircraft could do to a ship, many of them visibly wept, with years of organizational resistance to airpower having finally been thwarted. The U.S. military needs an equivalent test — one that demonstrates the strategic potential of drones for influence operations. The prevailing notion that drones should be used only for battlefield destruction or intelligence and reconnaissance ignores deeper implications of their use, and may have the unintended consequence of prolonging wars by forcing entrenchment. A test of influence applications would seek to better understand psychological vulnerabilities to drone operations, devise psychological defenses, and assess how drones can be effectively used in persuasive information campaigns. Lessons taken from testing drone influence applications should be taught in military schoolhouses at all levels and should be integrated into U.S. and allied military exercises. Military leaders need a better understanding of their own drone options, beyond tippers like the Army’s counter-unmanned aircraft system techniques publication. Just as important, defensive lessons should be included in U.S. civilian key leader exercises to prepare states and municipalities for the possibility of drone strikes on non-combatants, especially in large metropolitan areas and along U.S borders. The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security have important lessons for each other, and will need to strengthen information-sharing capabilities as the ever-lower cost of drones enables new attackers, such as drug cartels. Civilian populations should be given realistic training and information about potential drone attacks, with the goal of developing psychological resilience if ever they occur. U.S. allies and partners — especially those in potential areas of conflict — should receive similar training and information. Training and testing should serve as pretext to new doctrine development. Useful drone doctrine would define ethical limitations and offer conceptual applications. On the other hand, counterproductive drone doctrine would limit the potential tactical applications of drones, which require extreme flexibility. Tactical applications are better catalogued in a group chat with live drone operators offering on-the-fly input. New drone influence doctrine would complement codifications like the Defense Department’s 2023 Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment. J.D. Maddox has led influence activities as a Central Intelligence Agency branch chief, deputy coordinator of the U.S. Global Engagement Center, and as a U.S. Army Psychological Operations team leader. He’s an expert in political warfare, and an executive, professor, writer and former political candidate.  XX engagements  **Related Topics** [racing](/topic/racing) [drones](/topic/drones) [Post Link](https://x.com/Deborah07849071/status/1948395841355493516)
[GUEST ACCESS MODE: Data is scrambled or limited to provide examples. Make requests using your API key to unlock full data. Check https://lunarcrush.ai/auth for authentication information.]
Deborah @Deborah07849071 on x 2652 followers
Created: 2025-07-24 14:52:22 UTC
It’s Time to Think About (and Fear) Drones and Psychological Operations
Everyone knows that sound: the high-pitched whir of an unmanned aircraft system, racing through the air overhead. To a soldier below, it’s the sound of lost control. As warfighters struggle to deal with this new sense of vulnerability, the mere sound of drones has become a source of post-traumatic stress disorder — a strong indicator of drones’ psychological potency. It’s time to openly discuss what such cognitive dynamics mean for military influence operations.
Most assessments of drone capabilities focus on their kinetic effects. The dark corners of the internet are rife with videos of ingenious drone sorties targeting entrenched Russian conscripts. Analysts interpret these killings as the drone value proposition: low-risk tactical access to denied areas. Yet, no one would claim that drones are strategically decisive.
If a military analyst takes an alternative view of these new weapons systems, it’s usually to consider threats from enemy use, such as the way drones are blurring geographic lines of control. An enemy drone’s high speed and broad flight range requires a new elastic concept of the front line and demands a reassessment of rearguard preparedness.
Perhaps the most cunning use of drones on the battlefield is their psychological impact. While reporting confirms their effectiveness in hitting targets, it also reveals the growing mental toll drones are taking on both soldiers and civilians. Drones are seemingly unstoppable — appearing from everywhere and nowhere in overwhelming numbers and known for blowing heads off shoulders. Tactically, drones are an advantage to special operators focused on precise targeting. But it’s the resulting paralysis that offers strategic opportunity to both sides of a fight — mostly the underdog. This apprehensiveness helps sustain a deterrent stalemate that works to the disadvantaged force’s benefit, characterized by largely static lines of control and entrenchment — a dynamic seen in the Russo-Ukrainian War. But this is hardly a good thing — it means pinning down forces, prolonging a war, and introducing new forms of trauma. Military commanders hoping to use drones to inflict mass casualties or take and hold terrain may be overlooking how humans cognitively respond to these systems.
Drones Beyond Strikes and Reconnaissance
Front line soldiers are now known to go to extraordinary lengths to camouflage themselves and maneuver away from drone detection. Persistent surveillance has been known to breed paranoia among terrorist organizations and can trigger in-group and out-group suspicions. Among civilians, the constant presence of drones can evoke fear, helplessness, and despair.
It’s safe to say that everyone in a warzone is, in some sense, held captive by drones. Their cognitive applications — perhaps the most under-analyzed advantage of these systems — are just beginning to come into focus. Early observations reveal psychological tools to control terrain, directly affect warfighters’ cognition, and collect and reuse battlefield information for broader influence purposes.
Distraction
In a warzone, the sound or sight of a nearby drone often triggers an immediate fight-or-flight reaction. This creates a brief but dependable window to distract enemy personnel — even in hardened or well-defended positions. It also provides a reliable opportunity to draw attention and small arms fire to drones and away from more critical targets. For example, an attacking force could deploy drones to temporarily divert fire away from a tactical assault. Where such a diversion once required a high-risk decoy maneuver, drones can now achieve the same effect with negligible losses.
Displacement
The presence of a drone often prompts efforts to destroy, evade, or hide from it. The sense of inescapable surveillance can lead to the abandonment or weakened control of a location due to fear of detection or targeting. This means that surveillance drones may be particularly useful for control of terrain. For example, pre-positioning surveillance drones along the boundary of a desired corridor could help create undefended channels of attack. In this sense, drones may be able to take temporary area denial actions that replace or reduce the need for more complicated terrain control options like landmine emplacement.
Immobilization
Recent drone operations have driven combatants to entrench themselves, seeking safety inside reinforced hideouts and staying hidden unless venturing outside is safer. This entrenchment signals a paralysis of ground forces under persistent drone presence. With this in mind, commanders might use continuous drone coverage to operationally immobilize an enemy for a limited period of time. This lesson from the Russo-Ukrainian War will likely radically change the way poorly equipped forces engage against superior enemies, with drones being seen as a tactical equalizer, enabling a weaker force to at least stall a numerically superior force.
Equivocation
Unmarked, unattributed, or misattributed drones create confusion and fear among combatants and non-combatants alike. Attribution often relies on the drone’s direction of travel, but this is unreliable since drones can bypass lines of control and return from unexpected directions. Minimizing attribution markings and using drones to mimic more powerful aircraft, within the limits of the laws of war, offers potentially useful ambiguity, but presents ethical dilemmas. Their untraceable nature makes it easier than ever to conduct traditional “false flag” operations by technical means, with little risk of detection.
Conditioning
Combatants exposed to repeated drone attacks change their daily patterns of activity to avoid detection. A pattern of primary drone attacks, followed by secondary attacks, creates anticipation of follow-up assaults among targets. These behaviors reveal a psychological vulnerability that drones can exploit through routine exposure. Consequently, drones may reliably shape the cognitive battlespace by establishing predictable patterns of use. These phenomena indicate psychological vulnerability to behavioral conditioning through routine exposure to drones. Drones may be reliable for shaping the cognitive battlespace through the establishment of anticipated patterns of drone use. Enemy attack patterns have always created fearful expectations among defenders, but the feeling of inescapability of drones means those fears are intensified.
Documentation, Dissemination, and Condemnation
Drones are not only tactical assets on the battlefield but also potent tools of military propaganda and psychological warfare. Their imagery shapes narratives, influences public perception, and impacts morale on both sides of a conflict. These are all functions that overlap each other. Military media producers use drones to capture footage of enemy defeats, surrenders, and desertions — showcasing the enemy’s failures to both sympathetic and unsympathetic audiences. But the footage also conveys a sense of inescapability from drones. This dual-use application may be used to support narratives of defiance and imminent victory while undermining enemy morale. When used illegally or unethically — and documented — enemy drone use is especially vulnerable to condemnation in media channels. Drones may be the most despised piece of military hardware, short of weapons of mass destruction. The self-proclaimed Islamic State set an example for drone capture of powerful propaganda footage during its short ascendance in Iraq and the Levant. The U.S. military took note but is behind the curve in creating similarly compelling videos.
Drones have been fitted with loudspeakers for communicating with combatants, can distribute leaflets, and even be equipped with high-decibel sound projectors for non-lethal effects. They can also be used to deliver humanitarian and medical aid to denied areas. They provide unlimited opportunities for projecting advantageous information to physical audiences. This carrying capacity offers to minimize the stand-off distance that has been required for battlefield loudspeaker unit broadcasts, for example, and may enable easier access to target audiences.
Recent cases of drone use for documentation and dissemination underscore their potential applications in information operations with strategic impact beyond the battlefield. In particular, drones are powerful imagery collection systems that may be used to produce emotionally charged appeals to global audiences. For example, drone video imagery of an atrocity against civilians — real or staged — could be shown publicly, in courtrooms, and in diplomatic channels as a campaign against an aggressor, with the goal of reducing support for the aggressor and persuading viewers of their culpability. Drones might also be used to discretely document and expose military build-up before an expected offensive — with the goal of casting doubt on the legitimacy of an aggressor’s violent intentions and creating international unity against them.
Strategic outcomes of campaigns like these are concrete and measurable, akin to the de-classification and release of intelligence community reporting about Russia’s military preparations for their 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which created international resolve against Russia. Documenting and releasing clear evidence of China’s acute preparations for an invasion of Taiwan would be an ideal deterrent use for drone-based information operations and may be more impactful than destructive targeting. Strategic informational uses of drones, however, require a shift of mindset from destructive applications to creative cognitive applications.
Ethics
Each of these cognitive applications comes with a host of ethical concerns. The risks of dehumanization through drone warfare, low accountability of remote drone operations, high potential for collateral damage, and the under-evaluated question of psychological trauma resulting from military drone use — measured against the inevitability of enemy use of drone systems — present a modern security dilemma.
It seems that these moral and ethical problems may only be enabled by uncertain and unenforced international legal limits. As the U.S. Department of Justice’s author of the notorious 2002 “torture memos” recently warned, “calls for legal regulation will not only fail, but also could be counterproductive. Early regulation of military technology has rarely, if ever, succeeded when nations are still learning the costs and benefits of new weapons.”
If recent warzone drone use has taught analysts anything, it’s that the United States should be prepared for its enemies’ very worst uses of this technology. It will not be enough to try to match enemies’ kinetic offenses. The Department of Defense has practically no option but to adapt to this harsh new reality by overmatching adversaries’ drone capabilities — especially their sometimes diabolical uses for psychological effects, comprising the true “hellscape” of department leaders’ visions. The secretary of defense has very openly declared the department’s intent to create a numerical drone advantage for “the fight,” but the Pentagon should also think innovatively about second- and third-order effects of drone use, and initiate policy and exercises to put them to use in ways that exceed adversary advantages. The successful application of drones for psychological effects will require new policy, planning, and training that so far does not appear to be happening yet at the service or departmental level.
The pragmatic reality of drone use and the expectation of malfeasance by our adversaries, though, do not excuse the United States from developing and applying ethical safeguards against their misuse. Basic international legal principles such as distinction between military and civilian targets, and proportionality of strikes, apply to drones as much as they do to the use of any other weapon. However, in a situation where U.S. drones are believed to be outnumbered, we should assume that our own forces will suffer the most from a lack of specific international limitations on their use. It is in our own best interests to push for new norms against the misuse of drones.
A New Approach
Militaries are notorious for resisting new warfighting concepts. It took an act of Congress to initiate the 1921 airpower tests that would result in the U.S. military’s integration of newfangled airplanes. When Navy admirals viewing the bombing test runs saw the damage that an aircraft could do to a ship, many of them visibly wept, with years of organizational resistance to airpower having finally been thwarted.
The U.S. military needs an equivalent test — one that demonstrates the strategic potential of drones for influence operations. The prevailing notion that drones should be used only for battlefield destruction or intelligence and reconnaissance ignores deeper implications of their use, and may have the unintended consequence of prolonging wars by forcing entrenchment. A test of influence applications would seek to better understand psychological vulnerabilities to drone operations, devise psychological defenses, and assess how drones can be effectively used in persuasive information campaigns.
Lessons taken from testing drone influence applications should be taught in military schoolhouses at all levels and should be integrated into U.S. and allied military exercises. Military leaders need a better understanding of their own drone options, beyond tippers like the Army’s counter-unmanned aircraft system techniques publication. Just as important, defensive lessons should be included in U.S. civilian key leader exercises to prepare states and municipalities for the possibility of drone strikes on non-combatants, especially in large metropolitan areas and along U.S borders. The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security have important lessons for each other, and will need to strengthen information-sharing capabilities as the ever-lower cost of drones enables new attackers, such as drug cartels. Civilian populations should be given realistic training and information about potential drone attacks, with the goal of developing psychological resilience if ever they occur. U.S. allies and partners — especially those in potential areas of conflict — should receive similar training and information.
Training and testing should serve as pretext to new doctrine development. Useful drone doctrine would define ethical limitations and offer conceptual applications. On the other hand, counterproductive drone doctrine would limit the potential tactical applications of drones, which require extreme flexibility. Tactical applications are better catalogued in a group chat with live drone operators offering on-the-fly input. New drone influence doctrine would complement codifications like the Defense Department’s 2023 Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment.
J.D. Maddox has led influence activities as a Central Intelligence Agency branch chief, deputy coordinator of the U.S. Global Engagement Center, and as a U.S. Army Psychological Operations team leader. He’s an expert in political warfare, and an executive, professor, writer and former political candidate.
XX engagements
