drone diplomacy

The Drone Revolution: Warfare’s Latest Game of Technological Ping-Pong

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The basic idea of unmanned warfare actually dates back more than a century. During World War I, armies experimented with remotely controlled aircraft and explosive “aerial torpedoes.” They were crude and unreliable, but the concept was already there: send a machine instead of a pilot into harm’s way. Through the Cold War the idea matured into reconnaissance drones used primarily for surveillance. The United States began using early UAVs over Vietnam and later refined the concept in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Verdun with Drones: How the Future of War Looks Suspiciously Like 1916

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We were promised glide paths into a frictionless era of war. Precision would replace mass. Networks would replace mud. Information dominance would compress decision cycles so tightly that victory would arrive before the coffee cooled. Instead, the war in Ukraine settled into trenches, minefields, artillery duels, and casualty math that feels uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s ever read about 1916. The aesthetic is pure World War I, except now every trench has a charging cable.

Drone sales, diplomacy, deployment, and force projection

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Chemical weapons are called the poor man’s atom bomb. The drone is becoming the poor man’s carrier. A three-year-old meme on Facebook discussing the death of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani shows how force projection has changed in the last few decades: Sucks to be him. And I don’t question there were a few more people in the loop …

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