Now the Pentagon wants to buy its Yemeni ally small, piloted spy planes. It’s a sign that the U.S. is upgrading the hardware it gives the Yemeni military, and digging in for a long shadow war.

That’s the upshot of a recent U.S. military message to the aviation industry. The Navy asked earlier this month for 25 “Light Observation Aircraft” — small, two-seater Cessna-style planes, good for short-range reconnaissance over, say, a patch of land that an al-Qaida affiliate is trying to overrun. That’s in addition to all of the American remotely piloted aircraft that already fly over Yemen, which has become the hottest undeclared battlefield in the global U.S. drone campaign.