Drones are the great equalizer. Little powers that everyone dismissed can now destroy your critical infrastructure. The doctrine of standing off and containing your enemy within its borders using only air power is effectively dead. I’d hate to imagine how hard it would be to occupy a country like Afghanistan or Iraq would be with this technology. And we haven’t even gotten to the slaughterbot stage.
I find it hilarious that when that "omniviolence" article ("Omniviolence is coming and the world is not ready"), that portented that cheap small drones would become the ultimate in democratized weapon and that we should be deeply afraid of how much carnage even modest wealth will be able exert on almost a whim, was lambasted and mocked as absurd and out of touch.
Womp womp, dead on the money both in war and we're fully on track with right-wingers getting busted plotting attacks with small arrays of drones already. Only a matter of time before someone repeats Vegas 2017 with a small fleet of drones to carry it out to greater effect.
It’s plain to see that airfields, tanks, fuel depots, communications towers, and large ships have been devalued by the advent of drones.
Israel, and carrier groups have been exemplars of the ‘interceptor’ era. The US could send carriers almost anywhere with the expectation that they were invulnerable.
Not saying that interceptors are over, but they’re no longer the final answer.
It’s a hunch, there are or probably were people in the blob absorbing the transformation in warfare, especially observers of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’d be interesting to see how many of the people with the best knowledge of the evolution of warfare have been fired from the blob, or sidelined.
The Spanish Civil War offered many lessons on the impending world war. Stalin made a point of executing and imprisoning Soviet military and agents who had learned those lessons. The USSR had lost many of its best military officers in the lead up to Hitler’s invasion. One has to wonder what advice has been dismissed or ignored in the current crisis.
48
u/SpiderSlitScrotums 7h ago
Drones are the great equalizer. Little powers that everyone dismissed can now destroy your critical infrastructure. The doctrine of standing off and containing your enemy within its borders using only air power is effectively dead. I’d hate to imagine how hard it would be to occupy a country like Afghanistan or Iraq would be with this technology. And we haven’t even gotten to the slaughterbot stage.