A2 · Elementary
12 min
technologyconflictinternational relationshuman rights
El dron de veinte euros: la guerra que cabe en la mano
The Twenty-Euro Drone: A War That Fits in Your Hand
Fletcher breaks down this story in English. Octavio reacts and expands in Spanish. Follow along with the live transcript, tap any word for its translation. Elementary level — perfect for beginners building confidence.
So here's the thing that got me this week.
A paramilitary group in Sudan flew drones into a hospital.
Ten people killed, seven of them medical staff.
And the drones they used almost certainly cost less than a decent restaurant meal in Madrid.
Sí.
Yes.
Las Fuerzas de Apoyo Rápido atacan el hospital.
The Rapid Support Forces attack the hospital.
Diez personas mueren.
Ten people die.
For listeners who don't know Sudan's war, the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF, are a paramilitary group.
They grew out of the old Janjaweed militias from Darfur.
Been fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces since April 2023.
And they've turned drones into one of their main weapons.
Bueno, las RSF no son un ejército normal.
Well, the RSF are not a normal army.
Son un grupo armado muy grande.
They are a very large armed group.
Right.
And that's exactly the point I want to get into, because fifteen years ago a group like the RSF couldn't hit a hospital from the air.
That required an air force, planes, trained pilots, billions of dollars of infrastructure.
Now, apparently, you need a drone and a few grenades.
Mira, un dron es un avión pequeño.
Look, a drone is a small aircraft.
No tiene piloto.
It has no pilot.
That's the clean definition.
And the military version, the kind the U.S.
used in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Predator and Reaper drones, those cost millions.
The U.S.
spent something like six billion dollars on drone strikes in that era.
So drones were always understood as a superpower tool.
Antes, solo los países ricos tienen drones militares.
Before, only rich countries have military drones.
Exactly.
And then the consumer market happened.
Companies, mainly Chinese companies, started selling commercial drones for photography, for farming, for delivery.
And the price collapsed.
How cheap are we actually talking?
A ver, hay drones por veinte euros.
Well, there are drones for twenty euros.
Muy pequeños, pero funcionan.
Very small, but they work.
Twenty euros.
I mean, that's a round of drinks in Malasaña.
And the extraordinary thing is, you don't even need the twenty-euro version to do serious damage.
A mid-range commercial drone, maybe three hundred dollars, can carry a kilogram of explosives and fly several kilometers.
Es que los soldados ponen una bomba pequeña en el dron.
The thing is, soldiers attach a small bomb to the drone.
Es muy fácil.
It is very easy.
And this is what Sudan revealed, and what Ukraine revealed before Sudan, and what Yemen revealed before Ukraine.
The knowledge of how to modify a cheap commercial drone into a weapon is now completely open.
There are tutorials online.
There are communities sharing technical specs.
The barrier to entry essentially collapsed.
La verdad es que cualquier grupo puede usar un dron ahora.
The truth is that any group can use a drone now.
Let's stay with what happened this week, because the specifics matter.
The RSF hit the Al-Jabalain hospital in White Nile State.
Seven of the ten people killed were medical staff.
And I want to be clear for listeners: under international humanitarian law, attacking a hospital is a war crime.
Full stop.
Sí.
Yes.
Los hospitales tienen protección especial.
Hospitals have special protection.
La ley internacional dice esto.
International law says this.
And yet they keep getting hit.
Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen.
Hospitals have been struck in all of these conflicts.
Part of that is deliberate targeting, but part of it is that drones change the calculus.
You can now attack with relative anonymity, from a distance, without risking your own fighters.
Bueno, el piloto del dron está lejos.
Well, the drone pilot is far away.
No tiene miedo.
He feels no fear.
That's a profound point, actually.
The psychological distance changes everything.
Military psychologists have studied this.
When you press a button miles away from the person you're killing, the inhibition against killing is lower.
It's one of the most disturbing findings in modern combat psychology.
Es como un videojuego.
It is like a video game.
Pero no es un juego.
But it is not a game.
Soldiers who operate drones have actually described exactly that.
That exact sensation.
And many of them develop serious PTSD afterward, because the reality of what they've done catches up with them.
But look, let's talk about who actually builds these things, because that's a huge part of the story.
Mira, DJI es la empresa más grande de drones.
Look, DJI is the largest drone company.
Es de China.
It is from China.
DJI, Da-Jiang Innovations, based in Shenzhen.
They control roughly seventy percent of the global consumer drone market.
Their drones are everywhere.
Photographers use them, farmers use them, and, it turns out, armies and paramilitaries use them.
The company has repeatedly said they don't support military use.
And yet.
La verdad es que DJI vende drones para fotos.
The truth is that DJI sells drones for photos.
No para la guerra.
Not for war.
Sure, but the distinction gets complicated.
Because the technology is dual-use, meaning the same object serves peaceful and military purposes.
A DJI Mavic can film a wedding or it can drop a grenade into a trench.
Same drone, completely different outcome.
And legally, that's an incredibly hard thing to regulate.
A ver, en Ucrania los soldados usan drones DJI todos los días.
Well, in Ukraine soldiers use DJI drones every single day.
Both sides.
Russia and Ukraine.
And Ukraine actually became a kind of global laboratory for cheap drone warfare.
Their drone program, especially the FPV drones, first-person view, where a pilot wears goggles and steers the drone directly into a target at high speed, that changed how everyone thought about this technology.
Ucrania fabrica ahora muchos drones.
Ukraine now manufactures many drones.
Es muy importante para ellos.
It is very important for them.
Ukraine is producing something like two million drones a year now.
And here's what matters for the Sudan story: the tactics and techniques developed in Ukraine are being studied and copied by armed groups everywhere.
The RSF almost certainly learned from what they saw documented online from the Ukrainian conflict.
Es que la información viaja muy rápido.
The thing is, information travels very fast.
Internet es el problema.
The internet is the problem.
Or the tool.
Depending on how you look at it.
And this gets to something that I think is the deepest issue here.
We've had thousands of years developing laws and norms around warfare.
The Geneva Conventions, the rules about protecting civilians, protecting hospitals.
All of that was built around certain assumptions about who can wage war.
And those assumptions are now obsolete.
Bueno, antes la guerra necesita mucho dinero.
Well, war used to need a lot of money.
Ahora no.
Now it does not.
That's the whole thing in one sentence.
You need a state, you need a budget, you need an army with equipment and training to project aerial power.
That was true from the Wright Brothers to the F-35.
And now a paramilitary group in Sudan with a phone signal and a few hundred dollars can hit a hospital from the air.
Los civiles no pueden escapar de los drones.
Civilians cannot escape from drones.
Es imposible.
It is impossible.
Because you can't hear them coming.
That's the thing.
A tank you can hear a mile away.
A plane you can hear.
A small commercial drone is nearly silent until it's directly overhead.
And they can loiter, meaning they circle and wait, sometimes for hours, for the right moment.
It's a completely different kind of terror.
Mira, en Sudán los médicos trabajan en el hospital.
Look, in Sudan the doctors are working at the hospital.
El dron llega.
The drone arrives.
Es terrible.
It is terrible.
Seven of the ten killed were medical staff.
People who specifically went to one of the most dangerous places in the world to save lives.
And here's the historical context that really gets me: this is not new behavior from the RSF.
Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, documented RSF attacks on health facilities going back to 2023.
But the drone capability makes it more precise and more deniable.
Es que el RSF dice siempre: no somos nosotros.
The thing is, the RSF always says: it was not us.
No atacamos el hospital.
We did not attack the hospital.
Deniability.
And that's a technology problem as much as a political one.
Because when a small unmarked drone hits a building, proving who launched it requires sophisticated forensics, radar tracking data, signals intelligence.
Most conflict zones don't have that infrastructure.
So the attacker can just shrug.
La verdad es que hay máquinas para detectar drones.
The truth is that there are machines to detect drones.
Pero son caras.
But they are expensive.
And that asymmetry is exactly the problem.
Counter-drone technology, jamming systems, detection radar, interception systems, those can cost tens of thousands to millions of dollars per installation.
A hospital in White Nile State doesn't have that.
So the attacker spends two hundred dollars.
The defense would cost two hundred thousand.
The math is brutal.
A ver, el dron barato gana contra la defensa cara.
Well, the cheap drone wins against the expensive defense.
No es justo.
It is not fair.
It's almost a perfect inversion of how military technology usually works.
Normally, the richer side has the better weapons.
Here, the cheap weapon defeats the expensive one.
And the international community's response has been, frankly, inadequate.
There's no global treaty specifically governing armed drone use by non-state actors.
Nothing.
Bueno, las leyes internacionales son viejas.
Well, international laws are old.
No hablan de drones.
They do not talk about drones.
The Geneva Conventions were written in 1949.
The protocols were updated in 1977.
Nobody was thinking about a two-hundred-dollar quadcopter with a grenade taped to it.
The legal frameworks apply in principle, but enforcing them in practice against a paramilitary group that doesn't recognize international law is a completely different challenge.
Mira, el RSF no escucha las reglas internacionales.
Look, the RSF does not listen to international rules.
No le importa.
It does not care.
And Sudan is in some ways a preview.
If you look at where conflicts are going globally, the proliferation of cheap drone technology to non-state actors, to militias, to criminal organizations, this is one of the defining security challenges of the next twenty years.
What happened at that hospital this week will happen again.
Many times.
Es que el dron es una herramienta.
The thing is, the drone is a tool.
Puede ser buena o mala.
It can be good or bad.
That's the honest truth.
The same technology delivers medicine to remote villages in Rwanda, helps farmers in Spain monitor their olive crops, and kills doctors in Sudan.
The technology is neutral.
The humans using it are not.
And that gap, between what a tool can do and what people actually do with it, that's where all the hard questions live.
La verdad es que el mundo necesita nuevas reglas para los drones.
The truth is that the world needs new rules for drones.
Muy urgente.
Very urgently.
Urgently, yes.
And those rules need to grapple with the civilian companies making the technology, the states supplying the parts, the online platforms hosting the modification tutorials, and the armed groups actually pulling the trigger.
It's a chain of responsibility and right now nobody in that chain is being held accountable.
What happened in that hospital in Sudan is a war crime.
And the world is mostly looking away.
Bueno.
Well.
Diez personas mueren.
Ten people die.
Siete son médicos.
Seven are doctors.
El mundo no habla de esto.
The world does not talk about this.
No, it doesn't.
And maybe that's where we should leave it, actually.
Not with a solution, because I don't have a clean one to offer.
But with that fact sitting in the room.
Ten people.
Seven of them medical workers.
Killed by a device you can order online and have delivered to your door.
That's where we are.
Sí.
Yes.
A ver, la tecnología avanza.
Well, technology advances.
Las reglas no avanzan.
The rules do not advance.
Esto es el problema.
That is the problem.
Technology advances, rules don't.
I'm going to steal that for a headline someday, Octavio.
Gracias, as always, for speaking actual Spanish while I struggle from the sidelines.
And thank you to everyone listening on Twilingua.
We'll be back soon.
Gracias.
Thank you.
Y Fletcher, un dron no habla español.
And Fletcher, a drone does not speak Spanish.
Tú tampoco.
Neither do you.