how to get rid of these pesky drones
war has changed a bit since we last left off.
the way that ukraine and iran have both prosecuted and are in fact are currently prosecuting wars with drones--both fixed- and rotary-winged--has introduced a lot of asymmetry. drones are cheap. legacy systems used to counter them are expensive and not a good fit to the job.
this was something i'd speculated about years ago while watching star wars; it always seemed strange to me that you would ever have mothership or a death star when a billion tie fighters would do an infinitely better job. that was assuming no remote control. you'd want small tie fighter rack ships.
it seemed to me that the future of war (if we must have war) would be small.
the question now is how to we develop counters for these things? this is a genuine problem for a lot of conventional and legacy armies that are trying to target much larger and much less agile craft. how do you combat a swarm?
it's an interesting question that russia in particular is currently failing to answer. the problem is the counter needs to be as cheap as the drones. easy to produce. nearly disposable. if possible remote controlled.
if you develop something a more conventional deterrent you may get something effective but economically infeasible. you can have the largest war machine in the history of the world and be able to swat flies with a hammer but someone still needs to actually pay for all that shit. and if you don't have the luxury of cordoning your production facilities off in a continent all your own (looking at you united states of america) starting a war with your neighbours becomes extremely punishing extremely quickly. not only do you have to come up with some kind of counterswarm tech but you have to protect the places where you produce those things from the swarm itself. and if you lose those facilities to the swarm you stand to lose the war itself.
this leads me to think that the future of war is extremely mobile and extremely fluid. and also extremely difficult.
smart money would have mexico and cuba and canada and frankly any south american nation with oil adopting this tech immediately. like now.