Morning, I hope everyone had a nice weekend, it was actually rather pleasant my end. Let’s take a look and see what’s been happening.
I’d argue this is accurate and we as a nation certainly haven’t realised yet, despite obvious current real world examples. Let’s look at this in practical terms. Nuclear weapons are immensely expensive to develop, maintain and secure. We know that the likelihood of them ever being used - despite how sketchy things seem sometimes - is incredibly small. No wants the end result of the chain of events that using them sets off, no one wins. What they are is a status symbol that raise your clout on the world stage and act as a major deterrent against regime change. Hence why although nations are happy to discuss mutually minimizing them, no one would actually give them up, it relegates your voice on the international stage to Sunday league. Drones are very different, they’re usable weapon able to destroy people, property, infrastructure and military hardware at scale - though we haven’t seen the type of swarm attacks that are possible. Drones vary in expense, but are incredibly cheap in comparison to what it takes to be a Nuclear power. Let’s look at a few simple methods of using them. Firstly what you see currently in Ukraine, small man packable drones, many just civilian off the shelf models, modified to carry explosives. These are a terrifying mortal and psychological threat to the soldiers they’re targeting. There is no extensive infrastructure required to facilitate any of this at a basic level, though many methods have been developed to increase range and resistance to Electronic Warfare, it’s still just a few guys working at reasonable reach. While on the subject of EW, this is not the cure all. It does not work consistently, requires constant updating, often impairs friendly abilities also - or at least degrades and limits effectiveness - and at a man packable level is bulky, heavy and requires fallible human administration. The small scale Ukraine/Russia example is the least scary version and least relevant to the original point.
When produced at scale by a competent state in various forms and levels of technological capability you can get incredibly creative with methods of attack. I’ll engage supervillain mode and chuck out a couple of examples - obviously countermeasures apply to all of what I pull out of my evil arse, but they’re not invincible and failure at the drone level is materially cheap.
Assassin drones - Tiny drones that are manually controlled or autonomous carrying just enough explosive charge to kill. Easily made in a target country by terrorists and with the right target, almost impossible to predict and prevent - so obvious and simple in fact it’s quite odd we haven’t see this really isn’t it? The high tech version traces your phone location, recognises your face and just flies into your head, the charge pops your head open and most people around you don’t even realise what happened.
Missile deployed swarms - Fire a hoard of missiles over a target, easily over the horizon, these then slow and release multiple swarms of drones equipped in a multitude of ways. Some drones will be decoy, some will be part of swarms, some will be individual, some will be redundancies for others. All will have various targets and mission priorities. For example, a drone that’s part of a swarm that realises the swarm integrity has broken, perhaps from others being destroyed, will switch to another individual mission. All will work on a multitude of frequencies to minimise EW countermeasures.
I could go on, but the point remains the same, these are weapons capable of ensuring death, destruction and psychological degradation at huge scale. They’re incredibly difficult to stop and they are USEABLE. There’s no fall out, nothing environmentally damaging downstream and no mutually assured destruction. Nations who prioritise this capability will win future conflicts and dominate those who don’t.