Anti-Gang Drone Attacks Won't Put Haiti Back Together Again

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3 hours ago

In the first five months of 2025, a special police task force in Haiti, reportedly aided by private military contractors, has used small commercial drones armed with improvised explosives in dozens of attacks targeting the gangs that threaten to take over the country. Several hundred people have reportedly been killed in the drone strikes, though the police have yet to assassinate any of the top gang leaders, which is one of their stated intentions.
Haitian gangs now control a large majority of the country, and a few weeks ago I wrote that absent a significant increase in material support for the country's government, they will win the battle against government forces 'within months if not weeks.' Can these explosive drone attacks change the course of the conflict enough to upend that analysis?
Given how important drone warfare has become to military strategy, and how rapidly military strategists are adapting to those changes, the results in Haiti matter—not only for Haiti, but for every weak state struggling to fend off organized criminal groups and insurgencies that often outgun them.
Throughout the 2010s, the U.S. government used armed drones to hit high-value terrorist targets throughout the Middle East and North Africa, writing the playbook for how great powers can use drone warfare to target small cells of enemies. The effort was disruptive to the leadership of terrorist organizations, but it required significant intelligence and expensive technology. It also came with high costs, causing high levels of civilian casualties and collateral damage that often undermined the broader effort.
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In the past two years, Yemen's Houthis have used much cheaper armed drones to disrupt global shipping lanes in the Red Sea, a demonstration of terrorist groups using these new weapons platforms for global economic impact. Countering these attacks has proven difficult for the U.S. and its allies, as the weapons needed to stop the drones cost far more than the drones themselves.
Last week, Ukraine's incredibly innovative armed drone attack took out numerous Russian aircraft that could be used to deliver nuclear weapons. Though the results of that attack are still inconclusive, Ukraine's effort suggests that drones can provide an asymmetric advantage for a small country invaded by a much larger rival, even one that is a nuclear power. Ukraine's ability to inflict serious tactical damage on Russia has helped keep Kyiv in the fight and affected Moscow's strategic capabilities, but has yet to bring the war in Ukraine closer to its end.
These examples show how drones have altered the balance of military power in conflicts involving a strong government targeting terrorists, terrorists targeting global shipping lanes and a weak state targeting a strong state. Haiti is now testing whether drones can be effective when a very weak state fights organized criminal groups that have morphed into an insurgency.
In the best-case scenario that Haitian officials have used in trying to sell the strategy through the media, the drones will manage to kill some gang leaders and force the other gangs to slow their offensive due to fear of future attacks. The theory is that the time it takes gang leaders to update their calculus of the conflict and devise a counterstrategy will give the government breathing room to regroup its forces. It will then mount a larger offensive to retake territory from the gangs, which reportedly control 85 percent of the country, including most of the capital, Port-au-Prince. At that point, the government can begin to restore its sovereign authority across Haiti.
That seems overly ambitious for several reasons. First, the drone strikes have been tactically imprecise. It's unclear how many gang members have been killed compared to civilians, but what's certain is that the drones have yet to hit any of the high-value targets, or HVTs, that they are purportedly aiming for. Doing so requires a level of intelligence that Haiti's security forces, as well as the limited multinational mission and private contractors supporting them, lack. In one instance, a gang leader posted a video on social media immediately following a strike mocking the government for missing him.
Second, strategies focused on eliminating HVTs are far from guaranteed to work and can even backfire in some cases. When Mexico has targeted cartel leaders in recent years, the result has been an atomization of criminal groups that leads to further violence. While the Haitian gang leaders are central to the gangs' push for political control of the country, removing a few of them will not prevent the rise of others. Splitting the gang alliances apart by killing leaders may slow their final takeover of the country, but it could also lead to internecine warfare among the gangs that increases the threat they pose to the government and to Haitian civilians.
Third, the country must be concerned with potential retribution by the gangs. At least one gang leader has suggested that the gangs would now attempt to acquire off-the-shelf drone technology and explosives themselves to counter the new government offensive, which would escalate the conflict and lead to greater civilian suffering. The gangs have demonstrated an ability to import plenty of weapons into Haiti despite an arms embargo meant to limit their ability to do so, and it's unlikely the embargo would be any more effective with regard to drone technology. Haitian government forces would be even more vulnerable to this type of drone warfare than the gangs, given their fixed assets in the form of government buildings and the paucity of anti-drone options available to them.
Fourth, and most importantly, killing the gang leadership means little if there is not a capable state that can fill the gap left behind if and when those gangs are defeated. Haiti needs a government and rule of law, and no drone program can provide that. The Kenyan-led multinational force that is supposed to help secure Haiti remains underfunded and understaffed. And the government has no resources to provide the Haitian population with food or housing, let alone education and health care.
In light of this, we should see this last-ditch effort to use drones against the gangs as a sign of the Haitian government's weakness, not strength. It is an inexpensive and asymmetric option that can perhaps disrupt the gangs' command and control for a few extra weeks. But drones are not a replacement for the personnel needed to provide governance and stability. Choosing to bomb targets with drones because it's cheaper than funding the state capacity needed to put Haiti back on its feet is a dystopian version of 21st-century counterinsurgency warfare that is doomed to fail.
James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis and bespoke research in emerging and frontier markets, as well as a global fellow at the Wilson Center's Latin America Program. He has two decades of experience analyzing politics, economics and security in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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