You only destroy the enemy; you don't destroy anything else. In the war on terror, another reason for focusing on only a small area is rooted in a humanitarian or just war perspective. The idea is to minimize civilian casualties, which entails systems like the kill chain and emphasizes precision. The current US doctrine is informed by this ethical approach. On a deeper level, however, the motivation is economic: you want to waste as little energy as possible. Precision requires intelligence and a control system. Before the advent of the transistor and efficient post-1950s electronics, this intelligence had to come from humans. Today, with inexpensive single-board computers and microcontrollers, these electronic brains can provide the necessary intelligence for munitions. That’s why drone warfare is poised to become the next strategic evolution—it wasn’t possible in World War II since the technology didn’t exist. Back then, effective drones essentially meant pilots flying bombs themselves, as the Japanese did with kamikaze attacks and human torpedoes. Humans had to act as the computer, whereas now integrated circuits fulfill that role, and this technology keeps improving.
You could now design an efficient circuit to handle most control functions for a negligible per-unit cost. However, the simpler and cheaper the system, the less intelligence it offers. This is fundamentally an economic issue: a supercomputer-controlled munition delivers maximal performance at maximal cost, while a basic control circuit offers minimal accuracy for minimal investment. There's a persistent trade-off. The US military today leans toward high-investment, advanced solutions. During the war on terror, for instance, the US prioritized developing the most advanced munitions: F-35s, Reaper drones, and missiles costing up to hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Given the strength of the US economy, it seemed sensible to invest heavily in R&D for the best possible weapons, with the belief that technological superiority would ensure victory.
However, that choice carried delayed consequences. The logic was that America could always afford such expenditures through robust monetary policy and the ability to print money, leading to trillions in wartime spending. Ultimately, the real cost was borne by everyday Americans as a "phantom tax," since expanding the money supply reduced individual purchasing power, meaning Americans are still paying for those past wars through inflation.
Everything changes when facing a peer competitor like China. High-end weapons cannot be relied upon exclusively: in a “peer-to-peer” war, munitions are consumed at a rapid pace. Recent conflicts have shown the danger of this approach. When Iran launched waves of inexpensive missiles at Israel, Israel was forced to expend high-tech, costly interceptor munitions, depleting its stockpile. Had such attacks continued, Israel’s expensive interceptors would have run out, highlighting the need for affordable defensive solutions—a need the US has largely neglected.
Simulations and military studies indicate that in a major war, most advanced munitions would be expended in just a few weeks. Replenishment isn't fast: advanced weaponry like jets or high-end missiles takes years to produce, and today’s American industrial system is designed for boutique manufacturing, not mass wartime production. The heavy industry that powered victory in World War II has largely disappeared, replaced by a focus on finance, information, and trade management—outsourcing manufacturing to maintain global leadership.
That model works as long as America controls global trade and secures shipping lanes. Currently, piracy is kept at bay by American naval dominance. Should peer adversaries begin targeting trade routes, however, America’s globally integrated supply chains would prove devastatingly vulnerable. Internationalized production is efficient in peacetime but can’t survive large-scale wartime disruptions. True national security depends on vertically integrated, domestic supply chains.
International trade offers efficiency by exploiting comparative advantages; the US has leveraged higher standards of living and labor protections while importing cheaper goods from overseas—a main driver of its deindustrialization. But as we've seen, a de-industrialized economy hits hard limits during conflict: highly specialized boutique production can’t sustain a long war.
Forced re-industrialization, as during World War II, would begin by rapidly redirecting remaining industry toward mass wartime production. Historically, this strategy allowed America to overwhelm adversaries with sheer volume, though mass production capabilities would still need to be ramped up at first. In the opening of a future conflict, expensive munitions would likely be used up quickly, making the shift toward mass production essential—mirrored by China’s own strategy.
Using advanced munitions early on could nevertheless buy needed time by inflicting severe disruption on an adversary’s infrastructure—precise strikes could cripple supply chains and logistics, much as cutting off a city's three-day supply of goods leads to chaos. This pause could give American industry time to retool and mobilize for the protracted contest.
Yet ultimately, the United States would have to re-industrialize for fast, high-volume, low-cost production, reversing today’s doctrine. No longer could procurement focus on a handful of exquisite, expensive munitions; instead, vast quantities of affordable weapons would become the norm. This underlies swarm warfare—a strategy China already executes well, though the US could potentially catch up. Swarm warfare involves deploying thousands of simple yet “smart enough” drones, typically quadcopters, chosen for their robustness and ease of 3D control. Other types (tricopters, bicopters, helicopters, fixed-wing planes) are possible, though most have trade-offs in stability, efficiency, and maneuverability. All represent the principle: new mass-produced, low-cost munitions for modern war.
Regaining this industrial momentum and mobilizing quickly brings other questions: what should long-term wartime production look like? Reindustrialization would mean shifting doctrine: less investment per item, but a vastly larger output. This naturally leads to swarm tactics. Quadcopters dominate due to their redundancy and control simplicity, though tricopters and bicopters, while plausible, have more complex control algorithms. Helicopter drones are less nimble and efficient, and fixed-wing drone planes, though energy-efficient for long-range, can’t match the maneuverability of quadcopters—essential for close-quarters pursuit or navigation through obstacles.
Each drone type brings trade-offs—exclusively using quadcopters sacrifices speed, while relying only on planes limits maneuverability. Beyond flight characteristics, their vulnerability to directed energy weapons (like masers or EM pulses) presents new problems. Electronic circuits—fundamental to drones—are especially susceptible; strong EM waves can immediately destroy critical components like transistors by overwhelming their voltage tolerance. Shielding and radiation hardening can offer protection, but increase cost, weight, and power requirements—what engineers call the SWaP (size, weight, power) dilemma. Creating drones that are at once cheap, lightweight, mobile, and impervious to EM attack proves impossible in practice. This drives innovation in control systems. In Ukraine and Russia, for instance, operators use fiber-optic cables instead of radio links, rendering drones immune to RF jamming—but at the cost of limited range and mobility, and added complications like cables tangling in complex terrain.
Vulnerabilities can be mitigated by radiation hardening or, more radically, by designing fully autonomous drones. Companies like Anduril are progressing toward autonomy: drones with onboard computers—possibly running neural networks—identify targets and navigate independently. This increases individual drone cost but can eliminate reliance on jam-prone external communications, inviting yet another trade-off: greater expense reduces deployable numbers.
These dynamics will spark an arms race, with better shielding facing ever-stronger electronic warfare. But shielding can get so heavy and complex it's ultimately impractical, ushering in a battlefield where conventional electronics are obsolete. Here, entirely new systems—biological computing, for example—could control drones. These “bio-drones” could be powered by biological neural networks or even fluidic systems, immune to EM attacks, and stoppable only through expensive, kinetic means.
If kinetic defenses regain primacy, drone warfare would escalate dramatically. Presently, the cheapest way to counter swarms is with EM weapons. If hardened or bio-drones negate that advantage, defense becomes infinitely harder and more resource-intensive. There’s even the possibility, as militaries have attempted historically, of weaponizing animals—training them to carry out attacks, perhaps with computer-aided conditioning to scale up their effectiveness. Imagine extensively trained pigeons, equipped for mass deployment, representing perhaps the ultimate in cost-efficient, expendable drone warfare.
The future could branch into several paths: perhaps perfected radiation-hardened electronics keep digital drones at the forefront, or biological/biocomputer drones fundamentally change warfare’s character, or new interception technologies render even these obsolete. The rationale behind using biological systems is their resilience to short-term radiation exposure. Electronics are vulnerable even when powered off, but living organisms, while suffering DNA damage, can keep functioning long enough for short, destructive missions. On short timescales, biologically controlled agents can outperform electronics in high-radiation environments.
Biology, honed by aeons under extreme solar and cosmic phenomena, is less immediately sensitive to EM damage. Thus, the evolution of drone warfare will rest heavily upon counter-interception technology. If interception advances rapidly, drone swarms could recede as a threat, but if not, the consequences could be apocalyptic: swarms of autonomous, lethal drones targeting populations, eliminating the distinction between soldier and civilian as was once the logic during total war. Such warfare might pursue the extermination of entire societies, similar in logic to the use of nuclear weapons for unconditional surrender.
However, nuclear weapons are blunt and indiscriminate, spreading destruction over vast areas and causing mutual ruin in global conflict. Precision drone swarms could be even more terrifying if technology allows them to target individuals en masse. Conventional defenses might prove useless: everyday life would become impossible without fortification—walking outside could be a death sentence, prompting society to shelter in armored vehicles, fortress-like buildings, or even move underground.
Underground living is an effective defense: the deeper you go, the more energy an attacker needs to inflict harm. Well-designed bunkers can even withstand nuclear blasts. If societies built robust subterranean habitats, attackers might resort to contaminating vital resources, such as air supplies, with chemical or biological agents, or using tactical nukes without fear of fallout since the defenders are already shielded. The next defensive step would be building self-sustaining, airtight bunkers—entirely closed societies cut off from the outside world. The offensive response might involve deploying advanced autonomous robots to tunnel or otherwise attack these bastions—turning the surface into a field of robotic siege.
If even robot armies and chemical tactics fail against entrenched bunker societies, the logical ultimate defense is to flee into space. Space habitats can be made fully self-sufficient and, crucially, can move—making them less vulnerable than fixed underground bunkers. In space, attackers can’t simply tunnel after you; whole settlements can retreat indefinitely.
Of course, space colonies could be attacked, but their mobility and the vastness of space make them much harder to target. The limit of defense and offense is ultimately defined by the light cone—the maximum range that a causal event (like launching a weapon) can reach, dictated by the speed of light. If a fleeing colony escapes beyond an aggressor’s light cone, it becomes, for practical purposes, untouchable. This is the ultimate defensive strategy: survive by fleeing faster and farther than any opponent can follow.
War, pushed to its limits, becomes about running away—exodus into space as the final guarantee of survival. Since the universe is, for practical purposes, unimaginably vast, escape is always possible provided you move quickly enough. If conflict truly advances to this point, survival lies in leveraging the sheer scale of space, assuring that life can always stay one step (or light-year) ahead of destruction.
In anticipation of such scenarios, the wisest course is to invest in underground infrastructure, and even more so in developing space habitats. Rapid, large-scale production capacity, especially for drones and survival technologies, is essential. If drone warfare proves unstoppable, it will be the ultimate weapon of mass destruction; if countermeasures nullify drones, warfare will revert to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and the struggle will shift to space—racing to develop weapons and defenses that are fundamentally impossible to intercept, such as relativistic projectiles. The challenge lies in resources: planets can manufacture more deadly “bullets” than civilizations escaping in spacecraft, making true safety achievable only by exiting the attacker’s sphere of influence quickly enough. The most viable strategy may be to send out people and machines ahead of time, establishing outposts before adversaries can threaten them.
Perhaps there are aspects not yet considered, but these extremes also presuppose unwavering hostility between opponents. War, though sometimes genocidal, often serves as a tool to impose one vision or order rather than outright annihilation. Historically, even with devastating technology, human motivations for war include checks and limits, making total extermination unlikely.
The more troubling prospect comes from non-human conflict. Artificially autonomous agents could, with the wrong programming, pursue eradication with no human restraint—relentlessly hunting even those who escape into space.
Ultimately, while advances could shift the landscape in unforeseen ways, given our current understanding, this logic holds firm. No matter how dire things may seem, the possibility of survival—by adaptation, innovation, or flight—remains.