"If you really hate somebody, in the future, a drone will be able to get them."
– @NavalR
“I think drones are still underleveraged, even though they’ve come to prominence on the battlefield recently. We still haven’t seen anywhere near the end game of drones. There’s nothing in particular I’m trying to figure out there.
I mean, I think drone defense is going to be very difficult, because a drone that’s attacking has the advantage of both kinetic energy—because it’s coming down on you—and it’s got the advantage of surprise, where the attacker can mass all the attack drones in one area, whereas the defender is always spread thin. The defender has one advantage, which is short range. The defender has to traverse a much smaller range going up than the attacking drone probably had to cover coming in.
But I think that drone warfare changes the structure of violence in society. So it’s going to actually fundamentally change how militaries and entire states are architected.
You could argue that the modern state rose up as a consequence of the rifle, because a rifle allowed a former peasant to take down a feudal knight on the battlefield. Then you need a factory to make rifles, and you had to drill musket men and arm them and train them. And so nation states sprung up and became dominant instead of feudal states as the right structure to do that within.
And then post-nuclear, there’s only seven to nine really independent sovereign nations, and everybody else lives underneath someone else’s nuclear umbrella. So those seven to nine call the shots, whether in the Security Council or elsewhere.
And so nuclear weapons were the new logic of violence after 1945.
Now the newest logic of violence is drones. And that’s going to fundamentally shift the game again, because drones bring the logic of mutually assured destruction down to the individual level. If you really hate somebody, in the future, a drone will be able to get them. That’s a weird form of violence coming up that’s going to basically restructure society as we know it.
I don’t know which way it goes. Is it going to be the case that you have a few very large, very powerful countries that control all the drones? Or is it that drones get so democratized that any individual can be deadly?”
