On the night I spent exploring the town of Elubo for my story “In the Dark: The security risk Ghana is ignoring at Elubo” , what surprised me most was not the complaints from community members about the unseen illegal crossings but rather the dark stretches of frontier that no patrol vehicle, no checkpoint lights, and no border guard could realistically cover. Ghana’s land borders alone stretch for more than 2,090 km, running through forests and waterways that were never designed with modern security in mind. That exposure left me with an uncomfortable question that has only grown louder in the months since: how does a country with limited manpower and an overstretched budget monitor a border it cannot physically patrol?
The answer being adopted from Kyiv to Bamako is the same. You put eyes and firepower in the sky where needed. This is not a hypothetical scenario.
It is already taking place on the continent. Jihadist groups such as Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) have been documented flying kamikaze drones deep within the Sahel, and their reach now extends to the borders of Togo, Ivory Coast, and Benin. In January 2026, an Islamic State affiliate reportedly used kamikaze drones in a single coordinated assault on Niamey’s international airport in Niger.
Benin recorded its deadliest jihadist attack in years, roughly 300 kilometres from Accra. The war Ghanaians regarded as someone else’s, playing out from a distance on screen, is now drawing near with drones. What Ukraine Has Taught the World About Drone Warfare Nowhere has the transformative power of drones been more clearly demonstrated than in the Russia-Ukraine war, now in its fifth year.
Behsat Ekici, and Brock Ruth of Mercyhurst University’s Intelligence Studies Department, published in the Croatian defence journal Strategos, asks a very important question every security agency on the continent should also be asking: does the evolution of drone warfare in Ukraine amount to a mere revolution in military affairs (RMA) or a full military revolution (MR)? The difference is worth making here. A revolution in military affairs (RMA), the authors explain, refers to technological, tactical, doctrinal, or organisational changes confined to the military sphere.
A military revolution goes further: it redefines not just how wars …
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