Cinematic and literary depictions of future wars tend towards spectacular explosions, flickering lasers, and giant robots.
They do not usually feature a couple of grunts in a dugout using video game controllers to manoeuvre a small drone so they can blow up a couple of enemy grunts in another dugout.
The current wars between Russia and Ukraine, and Iran and the United States and Israel, are showing us the new present state of warfare. Relatively small, weak countries can use disposable drones to halt advances by larger, high-tech forces. It has mostly resulted in a peculiar kind of stalemate, both in Ukraine and Iran. To attack, to be visible at all on the battlefield, is to invite swarming by murderous sky-robots.
This is not the first time we’ve seen technology upend the nature of warfare.
Weapons made of bronze displaced flint, iron displaced bronze, and steel displaced iron.
Gunpowder let cannons shatter medieval castles.
Machine guns first created seeming total dominance for the western powers in their colonial wars, until they turned them on one another in 1914 and discovered the horrors of the trenches.
Now, in an era of smart bombs and hypersonic missiles, the most dangerous thing on the battlefield may be something that looks like a jumped-up remote control airplane and sounds like a lawn mower.
One lesson of technological progress is that better doesn’t always win.
This is the old story of how VHS (the inferior format, if you ask videophiles) defeated Betamax: it was cheaper.
A single drone isn’t “better” than a Tomahawk missile. But a single Tomahawk costs about $2 million. The newest mid-range Ukrainian drone costs about $1,000. Which would you be more frightened of, one Tomahawk, or 2,000 drones?
There’s a saying that quantity has a quality all its own. (It’s often mis-attributed to Joseph Stalin; in reality it was coined by an American defence consultant in the 1970s.) It means that when you have enough of something – money, manufacturing capacity, potential military recruits – it changes the rules of the game. Especially in warfare.
We now live in the age of cheap quantity. The last half century has seen us perfect the manufacturing of small, clever, electronic devices. We can crank them out in almost limitless quantities: ebikes and solar panels, cellphones and robot vacuum cleaners.
Drones are just a new product line.
The point isn’t that we have to re-arm with drones. It’s that we have very little way of predicting which bit of technology is going to alter warfare. Any technology that neutralizes drones will have its own, unknown set of consequences.
What happens next?
No idea. But it looks like most of us are standing around holding flint knives right now.
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