War's New Arithmetic: How Cheap Drones Beat Expensive Arsenals
For a century, the way to measure a military was to count. Count the tanks, the hulls, the airframes, the warheads; add up the budgets; weigh the tonnage; and from that arithmetic of mass deduce who would win. The bigger arsenal beat the smaller one. The richer state, able to buy more and heavier machines, dictated terms to the poorer. It was a comfortable assumption, because it was simple, and because for a long time it was roughly true. It is now false. A revolution in the character of war has already happened — not on a drawing board, but in the field, in front of everyone — and most of the world’s arsenals have not yet understood that they are obsolete. The cheap, mass-produced drone has quietly dethroned the expensive legacy platform. A machine that costs a few hundred dollars now routinely destroys a machine that costs millions, and the side that can out-produce and out-think its enemy in cheap precision is the side that wins. War has stopped being a contest of brute mass. It has become a contest of technologies and of production arithmetic — and a great many generals, ministries and states are still preparing, at enormous expense, for the last war. ...