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Dec. 17, 2025

Drones and the Changing Character of War

Erik A. Davis
©2025 Erik A. Davis

ABSTRACT: Cheap drones have transformed the character of war by creating a “mass effect” that challenges traditional principles of force concentration. Unlike commentary focused on offense-defense debates or ethics, this article explains how Jevons’s Paradox, the Red Queen Effect, and models like Lanchester’s Laws and Hughes’s Salvo Equations underpin this shift. Drawing on lessons from Ukraine, historical theory, and production trends, it explains why the production of cheap “precision mass” is expected to accelerate. For military and policy practitioners, the analysis offers urgent guidance for adapting tactics, procurement, and doctrine to a battlefield dominated by ubiquitous, low-cost drones—before adversaries exploit this advantage.

Keywords: drone, sense, strike, mass, Jevons

 

Three years of intense fighting in Ukraine offer plenty of lessons for the US Military—but will we learn them? The spread of cheap drones in the conflict has been unprecedented, yet multiple senior Army leaders have minimized their impact.1 Other skeptics have dismissed cheap drones as just the latest shift in the rhythmic pendulum between offense and defense.2 Over three years of multiple Russian and Ukrainian campaigns, both sides have found proof to bolster their arguments.3

The offense-versus-defense debate misses the true shift in the character of armed conflict cheap drones are driving.4 This turn in warfare is not unique to the fighting in Ukraine and was spotted by researcher Jack Watling during the Armenian and Azerbaijani 2021 conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave:

How do you maneuver into contact with your force at a sufficient level of combat effectiveness to take the objective that is set for you? And then how do you sit on that objective without just being persistently attrited by the range of capabilities that are now available to find you and strike you? I don’t think it’s a defense-offense issue.5

Put plainly, you need mass to take and to defend objectives; but on a battlefield littered with cheap drones, that same mass gets you killed. This diametric “mass effect” is a change to the character of warfare and demands new tactics, equipment, and leadership.

Commanders must account for the “mass effect” of their forces as they adapt to the pervasive spread of cheap drones across all domains of combat. Today’s world of cheap “precision mass” strikes is a result of the plunge in the cost and weight of compute, which drove a rapid spread in low-cost drones and sensors. This rapid expansion, in turn, has created a “mass effect” where forces at range must first disperse, then rapidly condense to take an objective, only to disperse again. This article uses Lanchester’s Laws, Hughes’s Salvo Equations, the Red Queen Effect, and Jevons’s Paradox to explain this shift in the character of war and its implications for the US military.

To fully understand this shift, the article will build on these complementary theories to examine the lessons the Russia-Ukraine War has yielded and the implications for warfare as drone use continues to accelerate. It also addresses both sides of the argument over the impact of drones on the character of war.

Foundational Theories

Several authors have written about the significant effect drones have on warfare. Michael Horowitz’s Foreign Affairs article “Battle of Precise Mass” highlights the proliferation of technology on the battlefield.6 However, his piece does not describe how they impact the role of mass on the battlefield. Other scholarly work tends to focus on the United States’ use of high-end drones and the role of ethics in drone strikes. When cheap drones have been written about, the focus is on their use by non-state actors, such as in Kerry Chávez and Ori Swed’s research or in the work done by Open Briefing in “Hostile Drones: The Hostile Use of Drones by Non-state Actors Against British Targets.”7 Artemii Bernatskyi et al. cited the proliferation of cheap drones in their counter-drone technology study which looks at defending against the threat, but does not expand much on how cheap drones have impacted the way armies fight.8 Sean Harper and Aaron Barlow’s Substack War Quants has done some excellent work on the scale of the cheap drone problem.9 Amongst the current research, Watling’s Arms of the Future has the most comprehensive theory on how drones demand change to our tactics and strategy, though it does not examine the underlying causes driving cheap sense and strike, nor the theories that previously argued for more mass.10 To address this gap, it is necessary to examine the interplay of complementary underlying theories that bear expanding upon up front: The Red Queen Effect, Jevons’s Paradox, Lanchester’s Laws, and Hughes’s Salvo Equations.

The Red Queen Effect draws its name from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. In the book, Alice remarks that running fast for a long time usually gets you somewhere new. The Queen replies that her land works differently: You must run as hard as you can just to stay in the same place—and to get anywhere else, you would need to run twice as fast.11

While the Red Queen Effect has applications to evolution and the physics of light, it also explains the drive for relentless technological innovation in war, ensuring no military advantage lasts forever. The costs of combat drive an unending pursuit of advantage, which undermines current platforms. New platforms and tactics eventually stabilize into doctrine. Once a new tool gets adopted, doctrine can grow entrenched. This fixed mindset creates outsized rewards for adversaries who find new or better ways to fight. When they do, the race inevitably sprints off again. War is a relentless Red Queen’s race where both sides are forever running at full tilt just to cling to any advantages they have.

Amongst the military, Jevons’s Paradox is less well-known. British economist William Stanley Jevons was examining the cost of coal at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century. He identified, counter to expectations, that improved efficiency of coal engines led to an increase rather than a decrease in demand for the fossil fuel.12

This process is not unique to coal but applies to many complementary goods. Cheaper prices enabled more customers to access and explore alternative uses, both of which increased demand. Both also drive greater opportunities for more investment in further efficiency gains. It is the interplay of the Red Queen Effect’s relentless drive for military innovation combined with Jevon’s Paradox that has upended the traditional rules of mass on the battlefield.

Those rules of mass are governed by two mathematical theories: Lanchester’s Laws and Hughes’s Salvo Equations. Lanchester’s Laws were an early attempt to calculate combat and predict outcomes. First articulated in World War I, Frederick Lanchester used a series of differential equations to describe a change in war’s character brought on by advances in machine guns and artillery. Before those innovations, a force twice as large was twice as powerful. New combat capabilities now made that same force four times as deadly.13

Lanchester determined that more soldiers now meant a square in combat power, while more lethality only increased power linearly. The conclusion of his formulas was to mass forces on the objective to maximize chances of success. This conclusion is the origin of the now almost sacrosanct “3:1” ratio for attacking forces.14 Lanchester’s equations generally argue for greater concentration of combat forces, particularly in the offense. This concentration continues to the point where additional forces can no longer fit, when the cost of one more unit is more space to move and fire than is available.15

Lanchester’s equations are based on continuous fire models, whether aimed (for example, tanks) or unaimed (such as artillery).16 He assessed gun battles where thousands of bullets and shells were fired, each doing small amounts of accumulating damage, creating a sort of stream of fire. Identifying what is and is not continuous fire is not always clear-cut. All weapons—rifles, machine guns, tanks, or artillery—must reload, but Lanchester’s equations model in the aggregate where some of the weapons are always firing.

Not all weapons work this way. Indeed, weapons like missiles fire in “salvos,” where the weapons guide themselves after being fired. Meanwhile, the platforms that launched them continue to maneuver. Missiles can move and have a higher probability of hitting their targets, typically doing much more concentrated damage. They can also be intercepted in a way which tank or artillery rounds generally cannot. The drones that infest today’s battlefield are not continuous fire weapons but are, instead, salvos.17

Naval researcher Captain Wayne P. Hughes’s insight was that Lanchester’s Laws depended on that “continuous fire” assumption. He determined salvos needed a different model.18 Having originally set out to argue Navy fleets should concentrate into fewer but more capable platforms, Hughes found the opposite was true.19 An objectively weaker force with sufficient dispersion could destroy a superior fleet of fewer capital ships. Hughes noted that when striking power—numerous well-aimed anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs)—exceeds defensive capabilities, such as surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), an initial, unanswered ASCM salvo from an inferior force can destroy a conventionally superior opponent.20 His conclusion has been summed up in the pithy, “Fire effectively first.”21 Since missiles could maneuver on their own, typically at much greater distances than continuous fire weapons, combat at range became about overwhelming salvos via counter-missile batteries. Salvos were “event stepped phenomena,” not continuous processes like those in Lanchester’s Laws, and they required a different model. In Hughes’s Salvo Equations, he found “classical concepts of force concentration are suspect when a several-for-one situation obtains.”22

Lanchester’s and Hughes’s theories still hold true on today’s battlefield. What has changed is that the spread of cheap sense and strike drones has created different zones where each in turn applies. Before examining this new battlefield geometry, it is important to detail how Jevons’s Paradox drove the change in sense and strike that is fueling this latest dash in the Red Queen Effect. By examining the underlying economics of cheap drones, it is clear that the future will see more cheap drones, not fewer.

How Sense Changed

The word “drones” covers a wide swath of systems and sensors, ranging from a tiny “group 1” 3D printed quadcopter to a high-end, multimillion dollar “group 5” Global Hawk.23 This Group 1-5 paradigm ignores non-flying drones. Today’s battlefield is infested with drones that walk, drive, swim, and fly; some only sense, while others can also strike.24 Although they have differing degrees of autonomy, all these remotely piloted devices are drones.

Drones are not new. The history of drones dates back to World War I, when both sides sought ways to leverage gyroscopes for an advantage. The opportunity for drones grew with a drive for greater precision in the 1970s and 1980s, under the auspices of America’s “Second Offset” strategy.25 Today’s drones do more than strike with greater precision than traditional “continuous fire” weapons. They provide cheap “precision mass.”26 The driving difference is cheap.

Moore’s original chart is on the left side. The chart on the right side shows the reduction in mass and cost for GPS using Jevons's Paradox.
Figure 1. Moore’s original chart is on the left side. The chart on the right side shows the reduction in mass and cost for GPS using Jevons's Paradox.
(Source: Created by author)

Much has been made of Moore’s Law’s incessant “line goes up” prediction that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every year, and with them computing power.27 The real story, however, is the decline in cost and weight of computing over time (figure 1). Efficiency gains in the production and manufacture of a myriad of sensors led to a freefall in price, which in keeping with Jevons’s Paradox, drove a greater demand and an expansion in novel uses.28

Global positioning services (GPS) provide an illustrative example of how Jevons’s Paradox gave rise to cheap drones. A GPS receiver today costs 0.13 percent of what it did in 1980, when the Army’s man-portable GPS device was the PSN-8. The cost of a single PSN-8 in today’s dollars is the same as the median house in Mississippi. Meanwhile, today’s GPS chips are as cheap as a toaster.29 The mass of GPS technology plummeted, as well, to .029 percent of the PSN-8. Precise global position equipment went from the weight of a sledgehammer to less than a pocket pair of aces.30 The limit of these functions is zero, which has reduced the costs and weights for production to little more than rounding errors.

GPS is just one of a myriad of sensors that have plunged in size, weight, and cost. As many different sensors and computers became smaller, they converged into single devices. Perhaps no technology better demonstrates this than the common smartphone. Smartphones today can have more than 25 different sensors on them, each a marginal price of the phone.31 It is normal for a phone to have six different cameras, where one used to be a significant purchase.32 Even gadgets like night vision and thermal cameras, once regarded as military technologies only, are available at local hardware stores for the cost of a couple of toasters. Data storage now fits 400x the data it did in 1996 on a .25 gram wafer smaller than a fingernail for less than 10 percent of the cost.33

This change in drone production did not start in Ukraine in 2022, nor in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2021. Over a decade ago, manufacturers were heralding a “4th Industrial Revolution.”34 Technology has continued to progress faster and faster. Coupled with cheaper data and compute, it shows no signs of slowing. Adoption rates that once took decades started to take years, and then months.35

This speed of change has amplified the relentless pressure for innovation, exemplified by the Red Queen Effect. As cheap and light sensors migrated into every person’s pocket, they inevitably found their way onto every corner of the battlefield.36 While there are still high-cost, high-end systems, today’s battlefield is littered with commercial hardware. These sensors can detect visible light, sound, movement, and activity across a myriad of spectrums undetectable to humans as well.37

Cheaper sensors mean cheaper information and intelligence, compounded by two additional factors, further increasing demand and usage: open-source intelligence and artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML). Historically, intelligence has been an expensive endeavor. As sensors became cheaper, the application of Jevons’s Paradox led to a rise in open-source intelligence firms, such as Bellingcat.38 The interplay of these firms and the exponential growth of information from ubiquitous sensors serves as a flywheel, spurring the diffusion of more sensors while further driving down costs.

Artificial intelligence has a similar flywheel effect. Programmers use the same video the pilots use to fly the drones to further train and refine their AI/ML models. Ukrainian developer Oleksandr Dmitriev highlights the impact, “This is food for the AI: If you want to teach an AI, you give it 2 million hours (of video), it will become something supernatural.”39 As AI/ML algorithms fit onto smaller chipsets closer to the edge of battle, a greater amount of data can be processed. This data spurs the use of drones but also drives down their cost. It also incentivizes further improvement.40 These forces all feedback upon one another.

Innovation in AI/ML has followed a similar downward-sloping cost trend to computing. The new Chinese model DeepSeekv3 was trained for 1/10th the cost of the best models US firms released last year. While its 700 GB size is orders of magnitude larger, it would still fit on a single fingernail-sized SD card.41 This AI/ML technology is already being employed in Ukraine, where low-cost drones have been using it to aid in the spotting and tracking of enemy vehicles, and even terminal guidance.42

Most of the computing is not currently being done on the drone, but this design choice is mostly a problem of energy. Finding a way to add roughly 1.5 kilograms mass for a NVIDIA H100 and a spare battery to a drone is not terribly hard, but the onboard power will only provide roughly 10 seconds of compute.43 Most drones, instead, currently offload the ML analysis to a ground station. However, improvements in battery technology will allow more computation closer to the edge.44 Also, novel guidance approaches like fiber optic cables can bring the processor to the drone.45 Regardless, cloud computing has pushed the ability to process further forward, even reaching beyond the forward line of troops (FLOT).

The explosion of sensors has led to theories of a “transparent battlefield.”46 Such a feat is, in fact, unlikely to be realized. Natural challenges, such as poor weather, will continue to converge with expanded use of electronic warfare and deception. The trend line of more and cheaper sensors shows no sign of reversing. The battlefield of today, and every foreseeable day after, is one littered with cheap sensors. In this world, amassing force undetected, for offense or defense, is going to be incredibly challenging.47

How Strike Changed

The plunging cost and weight of sensors and compute devices matched a similar trend in production costs.48 As General James E. Rainey put it, when serving as commander of the now deactivated Army Futures Command, “My whole career I had to choose between mass and precision. Now you won’t have to.”49 Also christened the “4th Industrial Revolution,” manufacturing today is characterized by “blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres” where technology is “evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace.”50

The mass of a drone is often less than a kilogram, which helps give them their unmatched scalability. Cheap drone innovation is what happens when so many of the world’s tech trends—3D printing, AI, autonomy, compute, and energy storage—all meet up and compound under Jevons’s Paradox.

Cheap drones are already being produced by the millions. The entirety of US 155mm artillery production is 50,000 rounds per month. Meanwhile, a single Ukrainian firm churns out more than 30,000 drones in that same time.51 Despite having the 57th largest economy in the world, Ukraine can afford to produce four million drones a year.52 This dichotomy begs the question: What happens when a country like the PRC decides to start mass producing drones “with Chinese characteristics?”53

Cheap drones are not just more plentiful on the battlefield; they are also bringing new ways to strike. Charting the history of strike trends is not as clear-cut as those for sensors, since tanks have run their own race with the Red Queen. Today’s Javelin missiles and Gustav anti-tank rounds are not being fired at Shermans or Panzers.

From the 1942 Bazooka through the 1963 light anti-tank weapons (LAWs) and the 1987 introduction of the AT4, the foot soldier’s anti-tank weapons underwent minimal changes. They remained roughly the same in weight and range, though they did grow modestly more expensive. When we compare drones to the two primary dismount anti-armor weapons for the US Army today, the results are stark.

First-person view (FPV) drones can far outstrip even the vaunted St. Javelin in range. The launchers for the Gustav and the Javelin are almost half of the weapon’s overall mass. With FPVs, the drone itself is typically less than 10 percent of its overall mass, reducing the drone to yet another rounding error. Individual FPVs can weigh slightly less than a Gustav round without the launcher, and roughly one-third the weight of a Javelin missile. This reduced weight enables soldiers to carry at least twice as many.54

The starkest difference is how cheap these drones are. FPV drones that take out armor can cost less than 15 percent of a high-end Gustav round. For the cost of one Javelin missile, we can build more than 130 FPVs (figure 2).55 Even with a 1-in-10 success rate, you can field 13 times the effect for the same cost. All at over four times the range.

Computing weight and cost of anti-armor weapons
Figure 2. Computing weight and cost of anti-armor weapons
(Source: Created by author)

Beyond increased range, lighter weight, and cheaper cost, a drone’s true advantage might be its lack of a warning signature. A Javelin or Gustav operator must fire from the open, exposing themselves to enemy fire, “because when you launch that missile, it has a huge dust cloud, a huge heat signature . . . So, while you might destroy the first tank, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th tank now know exactly where you are.”56 Drone operators, while unable to secure themselves, do not have to expose themselves to fire, typically controlling their drones from trenches or deep inside urban terrain.57

Drones also get more shots on target. If we take a M1A2 tank and set it against an FPV drone operator, a single drone operator controlling just one drone at a time can fire six unanswered salvos on the tank before the tank can reach its maximum engagement distance.58 If the tank manages to defeat or avoid these multiple salvos until it can close within 2.5 kilometers, it still must find and engage the operator with direct fire. This asymmetry is why 50 percent of Russian T-90 tank losses are reported to come from FPV drones.59 Cheap drones can afford to miss when another one is already on the way.

The “Mass Effect”

This space outside the tank’s weapons range is what researcher Watling describes as the “zone of contestation.”60 Here is where mass gets you killed.61 In this space, a large formation of troops will alert more sensors and draw in even more cheap precision mass and conventional fires. To mass forces, militaries must first create a “zone of opportunity.”

The change has been brought about by both the spread of cheap drones and the limits of our survivability. In his paper, Hughes predicted “Unstable circumstances arise as the combat power of the forces grows relative to their survivability.” Watling identified a similar trend, with today’s weapons increasing in lethality exponentially while protection improvements have shrunk, with “smaller gains requiring ever-greater resources to achieve.”62 He argues for greater dispersion in his zone of contestation, which helps describe the new battlefield geometry in a world of cheap “precision mass”: While armor and protection are as critical as ever, they simply cannot keep up with hordes of cheap sense and strike.63

Under the old 3:1 paradigm, military forces would build up their forces and then launch an assault. Today, forces must traverse a zone of contestation before massing. Only once an adversary’s cheap sense and strike assets are suppressed or defeated do Lanchester’s Laws apply. Then, “Seizing an objective needs to be achieved quickly and requires concentration of forces.”64 This rule for concentration still holds in the narrow moment of either attacking or defending against an immediate one.

Outside that time and space window is when Hughes’s Salvo Equations counsel dispersion.65 This zone of contestation is when “neither side has a weapon range and scouting advantage such that it can detect, track, and target the other while standing safely outside the range of the enemy’s weapons.” Here the “mass effect” double-edged sword cuts offensively and defensively. Successful assaults must be prepared to disperse rapidly. The “mass effect” means “An infantry company will be successful in the attack and then catastrophically unsuccessful as they are defeated in detail after.”66 The advantage of mass is dependent on surprising and suppressing the adversary sensors and strike assets. As both recede, the “mass effect” compels a commander to disperse or withdraw.

This time window can be modeled much like the one McCraven described as the “area of vulnerability” in his theory of special operations forces (SOF). McCraven used “relative superiority” models to depict how SOF units successfully skirt the 3:1 axiom. The longer a force masses on an objective, the greater the risk of losing its temporary superiority.67 Relative superiority is no longer just a SOF problem. On today’s battlefield, extending the time window for mass requires an assaulting force to push back enemy sensors and strike platforms if they wish to establish a new “zone of opportunity.”68

Navigating between the two zones requires commanders to traverse the two rules of mass. General Valery Zaluzhny described this challenge in 2023 when he called for a new breakthrough paradigm:

The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing. In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new, like the gunpowder which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each other.69

Counterstrike

Countering drones is not optional. Early reports have suggested the lack of counter-drone forces was a contributing factor in the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.70 Ukrainian troops who have been brought off the line to receive North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) training have been caught off guard by how little Western forces know about fighting with and against drones.71

Using electronic warfare (EW) tools to jam drones has achieved mixed results. While EW is essential and can be effective, both sides of the Ukraine conflict have found ways to adapt to each other’s innovations, often in less than 12 weeks.72 The frequencies used to guide and jam are constantly changing; both drones and counter-drones must be rapidly configurable to adapt and capitalize on brief gaps in the spectrum. Innovations have included using cheap spools of fiber optic cables to wire guide drones or placing heavier “repeater” style drones in the strike area. These have reduced EW’s impact.73

Lasers and other alternative directed energy weapons have been promised for decades, with little to show for it.74 Currently, directed energy tools still require significant power, leaving them moored to either fixed sites or sizable naval ships. It is also not clear whether drones can mitigate some effects with novel coatings.75

Physical intercept—hitting them with other things—remains the principal way to counter drones, via direct fire weapons or air defense missiles. The latter has proven incredibly costly.76 At one point in last year’s Red Sea operations, the US Navy expended “a year’s production of SM3s in an hour.”77 This Raytheon interceptor “hits threats with the force of a 10-ton truck traveling 600 mph” at a cost of more than $15 million a round.78 Meanwhile, the Houthi drones, most Iranian made, cost between $2,000 and $20,000 each.79 That is, in the best case, 1/750th the cost of the SM3.

The US Navy is currently in a losing dollar exchange with Houthi rebels, spending billions to combat the Houthis’ strike budget, which, in total, is likely no more than the cost of two interceptors.80 The UN estimates the Houthis are taking in $180 million a month in “protection fees.” At this rate, they can sustain their operations forever. Meanwhile, the US military spent $5 billion last year to make no measurable dent in the additional $200 billion cost to global shipping that the Houthi attacks have incurred.81

The US defense industry historically spends twice as much on a defensive interceptor than on an offensive missile; but that is to intercept major missiles, not cheap drones.82 Our defense industry development and production pathways are designed to build military technologies that most governments never actually use. In the fight against cheap salvos, these interceptors are like capital ships falling to Hughes’s equations.83 Faced with mass-produced low-cost drones, the economics are not sustainable.84

In the gap, the plunge in costs for sense and strike has led to drones fighting drones.85 The past year has seen a variety of counter-drones on the Ukrainian battlefield, each a fraction of the cost of “high end” systems.86 Some simply crash into the other drones, occasionally attacking from above where drones typically lack cameras. There are examples of drones armed with small caliber munitions, though with limited ammunition. AI/ML systems are also driving small-caliber direct fire weapons at a lower level than the older fixed site counter rocket, artillery, and mortar (CRAM) systems.87 Autonomy is poised to move closer to the FLOT as drones and armor continue their Red Queen races.

Cheap drone sensors have also made their way into the pockets of foot soldiers. One such device Ukrainian soldiers now have is a pocketable drone detector named “Tsukorok” or “sugar.” The tiny sensors beep loudly when a drone enters their detection range. While they do not stop the drones, they provide critical moments of early warning so soldiers can find cover, fire up counter-drone systems, or ready a shotgun as a last line of defense.88

Rebutting the Drone Skeptics and Evangelists

Despite the indisputable proliferation of cheap drones, there are still pundits who claim they have not changed the character of war.89 The waters have been further muddied by those who claim drones have fundamentally changed conflict but have not provided an underlying theory for why. Before concluding, this article will address both misunderstandings. Four of the most used arguments against the impact of cheap drones are:

  • Drones have or have not rendered traditional platforms obsolete.

  • Drones have or have not replaced humans.

  • The battlefield is either transparent, or it has been rendered opaque by a deluge of overwhelming data.

  • EW or directed energy will solve the cheap drone problem.

Drones Have or Have Not Rendered Traditional Platforms Obsolete

The first of these is the easiest to rebut. After all, combining different combat units into a multiplier effect was a well-established military strategy even before Alexander the Great’s time.90 Drones do not undermine combined arms strategy; they expand it. We do not stop using a platform just because it can be killed. We replace platforms because we find better ones.

The tank offers an illustrative example. The US Army did not ditch horses as cavalry because machine guns could kill them. We still have horses in the Army today, but tanks took on the heavy cavalry job because they were better heavy shock troops. Drones do a lot of things, but they are not doing the heavy cavalry’s job. Drones are complementing the light cavalry job, but tanks were never great at that job anyway. Light scouts are using drones, but there are still light scouts—as in the soldiers—out there.

Large caliber artillery and high-end strike platforms still have their unique roles.91 A drone cannot move at the speed of a hypersonic missile, nor reach out to its ranges.92 Cheap drones are also unable to deliver the destructive force of tube and rocket-launched artillery. In an instant, a 155mm round can strike a very narrow spot with the net force of 100 Volkswagen Beetles crashing at highway speed. Few drones could even lift a single 155mm round. Instead, drones and artillery pair very nicely.93

Drones have demonstrated scouting abilities, but also other uses. The boom in diverse designs on today’s battlefields has led to comparisons with the Cambrian Explosion.94 While large drones that can reach hundreds of kilometers are not new, cheap small ones today consistently reach beyond 30 kilometers.95 This real-time video from the edge increases awareness and has dramatically reduced time to fire. Howitzer batteries have cut the time to execute unplanned fire missions in half and counter-battery responses to just 30 seconds.96

Drones also have a precision ability not unlike that of a sniper, except at more than 20 times the range.97 Precision at range enables them to target the specific vulnerabilities of vehicles and to hit the same spot consistently, reducing the effectiveness of active protection systems.98 If a single strike is ineffective, the cost of another drone and another is vanishingly cheap, especially compared to the platform destroyed or disabled. While a drone may not have the explosive force of artillery, when they combine into a canalizing effect, the two can quickly annihilate a column of vehicles.

Destruction is also not the only measure of effectiveness. Mobility kills have long been the primary way dismounted troops have disrupted armor assaults.99 Drones can bring even greater precision in effect. A drone developer in Ukraine reported how they used drones almost like mosquitoes, using explosively formed penetrators to strike the barrels of Russian tanks and artillery after they discovered the barrels were one of the hardest repair parts for Russia to source.100 Drones can even provide remote mining at a precision unmatched by traditional artillery deliverable systems.101

Drones Have or Have Not Replaced Humans

Just as drones have not replaced platforms like tanks or artillery, they have not replaced humans either. Like tanks and artillery, it is not “either / or.” It is “yes, and.” Humans and cheap drones pair well together, too. “Unmanned” is also currently a misnomer, one this article deliberately eschews. More drones currently mean a need for more people. Watling found “automation does not lead to leaner land forces.”102 Instead, drones need handlers and maintainers. Heavy ground drones cannot be moved by light forces when they break down, so we still need recovery teams. Drones still require human intervention to update the code, adjust the settings, and load the munitions. While humans might not always be required to do these things, we currently live in a world where it is easier to replace a lawyer with AI than a mechanic.

The Battlefield Is Either Transparent or It Has Been Rendered Opaque by a Deluge of Overwhelming Data

Drones have not brought about the “transparent battlefield.” These days, cheap sensors are everywhere, even in space. High-end spy satellites were once the only way to get high-definition imagery. Today, near-real-time satellite imagery is just a credit card purchase away. Regardless of how many sensors there are, whether cheap ones as discussed or the high-end ones like ground movement target indicator (GMTI), we will never be able to see and sense everything.

It is undeniable that the spread of sensors has dramatically increased the volume of data to sift and sort through. Data overload was raised as a concern in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. Parsing over 168 hours of video per target was crushing the available analysts and prompted the first application of AI augmentation tools, like Maven.

While it is indisputable that there is more data today than yesterday and there will be even more tomorrow, not all data is the same. Some data are the sort of data those analysts in Iraq and Afghanistan were struggling to parse out from background noise, what we can call “quiet” data. This “quiet” data blends in, like a single cell phone’s electromagnetic signature in downtown San Francisco.

Not all data is quiet though. Tanks are not just loud in person; they are “loud” in the data. When different sensors start layering over top of one another, many of the major military platforms start to stand out just as plainly as they would sitting in rush hour traffic. The Ghost Army was able to fool the Germans in World War II with something as simple as an inflatable tank. Today, that balloon also needs to have a way to disturb the ground around it and a way to give off the right thermal signature and EM footprint.103

Surprise is still possible. Deception is essential. In offense or defense, combating enemy sensors is a critical part of a commander’s plan. Traditional approaches are becoming increasingly less effective in fooling the disparate sensors we encounter. Militaries cannot know all of today’s battlefield, but this does not mean cheap drones haven’t changed its character irrevocably.

Electronic Warfare or Directed Energy Will Solve the Cheap Drone Problem

As addressed above, EW jamming is not going to eliminate cheap drones magically. It is absolutely a critical component, and something the US Army desperately needs to increase training on dramatically. Electronic warfare is not a cure-all. EW jamming requires pushing out a signal. That same signal can be used to bring fire on one’s own position. Lasers may be hugely impactful in combating cheap drones. Thus far, though, the technology has been “a couple years away” for more than a decade. In the meantime, directed energy, which includes microwaves, will likely be restricted to defending fixed sites. Mounting these tools onto a small mobile platform that can significantly impact the mass effect across the battlefield is going to require novel power generation technologies.

Drones are unlikely to replace most major military platforms, but they will likely render many of them obsolete. Drones will not take human’s place on the fields of battle, but they are going to kill a lot of people. They are not going to eliminate the “fog of war,” but they are going to challenge it. Finding ways to combat them is essential, even if those will not magically solve the problem.

Conclusion: Brace for Impact

Adversaries have stolen a march on the US military. Armies by tradition are slow to change, and the United States will struggle to catch up. Critically, it must start moving. Part of the resistance to change stems from sunk cost biases in favor of old platforms. Additionally, doctrine only updates sporadically, and the convoluted acquisition process drags even slower than doctrine. The US defense industrial base is structured around designing and selling “high-end” weapons that are seldom-to-never used; effectively the antithesis of “fast fashion” low-cost drone technology. The high replacement cost of exquisite munitions made “their allocation a key prioritisation decision in operation design” and stands in stark contrast to a battlefield which enables “the most basic infantry-level unit of 12 people—to have their own organic air power.”104

Instead of recognizing the fundamental change to the character of warfare, the US military has ignored cheap drones, seeing them as just a new technology in an age-old debate. Only in the last year has there been any movement in this field, with the introduction of the Transforming in Contact and the Army’s Transformation Initiative. These efforts are necessary, but tepid at best.

Focusing the discussion on drones to the offense versus defense debate has allowed pundits and practitioners to minimize how cheap drones are changing the way we fight. Biddle suggests those looking at the fighting in Ukraine “should not expect their findings to produce transformational change in U.S. military strategy.”105

War’s character has always been in flux.106 Over a century ago, machine guns forced a comparable change to cheap drones today. They helped compel Lanchester to develop his theorems. Today’s battlefield is seeing a similar change, as millions of drones proliferate. Data processing, made cheaper, lighter, and ubiquitous by Jevons’s Paradox, spurred this rapid spread of low-cost drones. This trend shows no signs of reversing. Tomorrow’s combat can expect even more sensors and plagues of cheap “precision mass.”107 The average line platoons in Ukraine today have vastly more experience with cheap “precision mass” than any unit in the US Army (not just the Ukrainian ones, but perilously, the Russian and North Korean ones as well).108

Mass remains critical to both offense and defense. However, unless the US Army can disrupt or destroy an adversary’s sensor-strike networks, our own concentration is our primary threat. Adapting to this new character of war will require new tactics and entire defense industries to adjust their requirements and procurement processes. It will impact how the United States deploys its forces strategically. Failing to adapt will leave the United States sustaining an expensive force that cannot expect to fight and win.109

Cheap drones have changed the character of war. They are ubiquitous, they are lethal, and they are not going away. Jevons’s Paradox tells us that we will see even more on tomorrow’s battlefield. There are already more cheap drones on the battlefield than soldiers. The US military must figure out how to adapt now. For a department that tends to obsess about “centers of gravity,” the US military needs to start examining how to exploit this “mass effect.”

 
 

Erik A. Davis
Colonel Erik A. Davis has more than 16 years of experience in US Army special operations. He is a General Wayne A. Downing Scholar whose assignments have taken him from village stability operations in rural villages in Afghanistan to preparing for high-end conflict in the First Island Chain. He is currently in command in Japan, and he writes about data and the Army at https://downrangedata.substack.com/.

 
 

Endnotes

  1. 1. The author attended three pre-command courses in 2023 where these talks were given under Chatham House rules.
  2. 2. The debate on the “superiority” of offense or defense goes back at least to Carl and Marie von Clausewitz, “Book 6, Chapter 5,” On War, (Project Gutenberg, 2006), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1946/1946-h/1946-h.htm. For more on the debate, see Ferdinand Foch and Hilaire Belloc, The Principles of War (Holt and Company, 1920); and Richard D. Challener, The French Theory of the Nation in Arms 1866–1939 (Columbia University Press, 1955).
  3. 3. For more examples of the “offense v. defense” debate, see James Rainey, “Army Futures Command” (lecture, Command & General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS, March 13, 2024); Franz-Stefan Gady and Michael Kofman, “Making Attrition Work: A Viable Theory of Victory for Ukraine,” Survival Online, February 9, 2024, https://www.iiss.org/en/online-analysis/survival-online/2024/01/making-attrition-work-a-viable-theory-of-victory-for-ukraine; Mike Knickerbocker, “Written in Black and Red: Asymmetric Threats and Affordable Unmanned Surface Vessels,” War on the Rocks, January 2, 2024, https://warontherocks.com/2024/01/written-in-black-and-red-asymmetric-threats-and-affordable-unmanned-surface-vessels/; Stephen Biddle, “Back in the Trenches,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2023), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/back-trenches-technology-warfare; Stacie Pettyjohn, “Drones Are Transforming the Battlefield in Ukraine but in an Evolutionary Fashion,” War on the Rocks, March 5, 2024, https://warontherocks.com/2024/03/drones-are-transforming-the-battlefield-in-ukraine-but-in-an-evolutionary-fashion/; Jacob R. Bright, “Theory to Reality: Defensive Operations Confirm Clausewitz’s Theory,” Military Strategy Magazine, January 13, 2025, https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/theory-to-reality-defensive-operations-confirm-clausewitzs-theory/; Jack Watling et al., Preliminary Lessons from Ukraine’s Offensive Operations, 2022–23 (RUSI, July 18, 2024), https://my.rusi.org/resource/preliminary-lessons-from-ukraines-offensive-operations-202223.html; Mick Ryan, “Surprise Attack in Kursk,” Futura Doctrina, Substack, August 9, 2024, https://mickryan.substack.com/p/surprise-attack-in-kursk; and Lawrence Freedman, “Ukraine’s Invasion of Kursk,” Comment Is Freed, Substack, August 21, 2024, https://samf.substack.com/p/ukraines-invasion-of-kursk. Defense also requires mass, as argued by Franz-Stefan Gady and Michael Kofman, “Making Attrition Work: A Viable Theory of Victory for Ukraine,” Survival Online, February 9, 2024, https://www.iiss.org/en/online-analysis/survival-online/2024/01/making-attrition-work-a-viable-theory-of-victory-for-ukraine.
  4. 4. The nature of war has been described as immutable, a “brutal, uncontrollable contest of wills, fought by humans for political ends and with devastating effect.” War’s character, heavily defined by the means with which it is fought, is much more transitory. Erik Davis, “Responding to the Chief’s Challenge: Reflecting on the Nature and Character of War,” The Cove, October 30, 2024, https://cove.army.gov.au/article/responding-chiefs-challenge-reflecting-nature-and-character-war.
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  89. 89. Stephen Biddle, “Back in the Trenches,” Foreign Affairs, February 27, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/back-trenches-technology-warfare; and Amos Fox, host, Revolution in Military Affairs, podcast, season 3, episode 5, “Precisioning Our Way Out of the Close Fight,” with John Nimmons, April 11, 2024, https://shows.acast.com/revolution-in-military-affairs/episodes/precisioning-our-way-out-of-the-close-fight-with-john-nimmon.
  90. 90. Lucius Flavius Arrianus, The Campaigns of Alexander, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt (Penguin Books, 1971).
  91. 91. Watling, Arms of the Future, 12.
  92. 92. A hypersonic missile is not not a drone, but for the purpose of this article we are regarding them as different tools.
  93. 93. “Cheap Drones Are Transforming.”
  94. 94. Mick Ryan, “Ukraine Drives Next Gen Robotic Warfare,” Futura Doctrina, January 22, 2025, https://mickryan.substack.com/p/ukraine-drives-next-gen-robotic-warfare. For origin of Cambrian Explosion, see Hank Green, “When Did Life on Earth Really Take Off? | The History of Life Pt. 2,” SciShow, July 21, 2016,
    ; and Molloy, Drones in Modern Warfare.
  95. 95. Kofman and Lee, “Technology, the Battlefield;” and Bronk and Watling, Mass Precision Strike.
  96. 96. Molloy, Drones in Modern Warfare.
  97. 97. Watling, “Human Face of Battle.”
  98. 98. Watling, Arms of the Future, 87.
  99. 99. Watling, Arms of the Future, 88–89.
  100. 100. Frolov, “ASPI Drone, Informal Roundtable”; and Kofman and Lee, “Technology, the Battlefield.”
  101. 101. Kofman and Lee, “Technology, the Battlefield.”
  102. 102. Jack Watling, “Automation Does Not Lead to Leaner Land Forces,” War on the Rocks, February 7, 2024, https://warontherocks.com/2024/02/automation-does-not-lead-to-leaner-land-forces/.
  103. 103. Watling, Arms of the Future, 221–22.
  104. 104. Bronk and Watling, Mass Precision Strike; and Molloy, Drones in Modern Warfare.
  105. 105. Biddle, “Back in the Trenches.”
  106. 106. Hew Strachan, “The Changing Character of War in a Multi-Polar World,” New Zealand International Review 35, no. 1 (2010): 2–7, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45236000.
  107. 107. Kofman and Lee, “Technology, the Battlefield”; and Harper, “FPV Math.”
  108. 108. “The Battle Between Drones and Helicopters in Ukraine,” The Economist, September 4, 2024, https:// www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/09/04/the-battle-between-drones-and-helicopters-in-ukraine; and Kofman and Lee, “Technology, the Battlefield.”
  109. 109. Watling, “Land Forces.”
 
 

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