All non-drone militaries are obsolete
AI Analysis
The article asserts that drone warfare has fundamentally altered the battlefield, rendering traditional military forces increasingly obsolete. Ukraine's experience demonstrates the devastating effectiveness of drones, inflicting disproportionately high casualties on the Russian army. Advances in battery technology and AI are rapidly accelerating the development of autonomous drone swarms.
Key Takeaways
- Drones are now causing an estimated 96% of casualties in recent conflicts, particularly in Ukraine.
- Ukraine's daily drone usage has increased dramatically, from a few thousand to approximately 60,000 per day.
- FPV (First-Person View) drones are proving exceptionally effective against infantry, making surface combat extremely dangerous.
- The development of ground robots suggests a future where assaults can be conducted with minimal human exposure.
- Autonomous AI-directed drone swarms are considered the next major evolution in drone warfare.
Why It Matters
This shift necessitates a rapid re-evaluation of military doctrine, training, and procurement strategies globally. Investment in counter-UAS technologies and the development of drone-resistant tactics are now critical for maintaining a credible defense. The increasing affordability and accessibility of drone technology democratizes warfare, potentially empowering non-state actors.
All non-drone militaries are obsolete
Noahpinion
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All non-drone militaries are obsolete
All warfare is drone warfare now.
Noah Smith and Latent.Space
May 19, 2026
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Drone warfare has been a fascination of mine for a very long time. When I read Daphne du Maurier’s “ The Birds” as a kid, I imagined what would happen if the attacking swarms were mechanical birds, controlled with AI. When I read about Japanese kamikazes in WW2, I reasoned that someday we’d have drones do the same. In 2013, I wrote a post about the advent of drone warfare that’s still probably the most prophetic thing I’ve ever written. It simply made sense that if we could create AI-controlled swarms of exploding artificial insects, then as long as they had enough battery power to sustain themselves over long flights, they’d be an unstoppable weapon.
Thirteen years later, my imagination has mostly become reality. Batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to sustain long drone flights, and AI has gotten good enough to guide drones to their targets (and, often, to select the targets in the first place). All we need now to fulfill my vision is for AI to start autonomously directing large numbers of drones in concert. That’s coming very soon.
The Ukraine War isn’t the first war in which drones are proving decisive — that would be the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020— but it’s the war in which drones have truly come into their own. Ukraine’s intensive use of drones has allowed them to inflict casualty rates as high as 5 to 1 on the Russian army in recent months, while giving up little or no territory. Around 96% of those casualties are estimated to be caused by drones. In just the past year, Ukraine went from using just a few thousand FPV drones per day to using around 60,000.
You can read lots of stories about how drones represent a revolution in military affairs; the recent Carnegie Endowment piece is a good one, as is the slightly older one by the Army University Press. But to really viscerally understand how deeply things have changed, you have to watch videos from the war. Here is a montage of drone strikes in Ukraine, including a terrifying final sequence where a drone flies into a Russian barracks and destroys it. It’s difficult stuff to watch, but if you want to understand the changes that have come to modern warfare, you have to see it.
The age of the human infantryman is rapidly drawing to a close. Simply surviving an FPV drone attack has become an almost impossible task for soldiers on the battlefield. The drone cordon has not yet become so airtight that territory can be held without humans, but these humans’ job is to hide out in dugouts for months at a time alone or in tiny groups, terrified of emerging above ground lest they be instantly droned. And ground robots are developing very quickly, to the point where assaults can sometimes be conducted without humans on the front line at all.
Drones are also slowly replaci