The question for Australia is do we now need Submarines, as a continent we have always felt the need for a maritime presence to defend ourselves, but now rather than a $2 Billion Submarine, doesn't it make more sense to fill our northern coastline with a few million low cost drones instead, I fail to see how a seaborne invasion could make landfall if that was used as our coastal defence
Even a fraction of the 380 billion dollars Australia is spending on these 8 subs (assuming they every get delivered) would pay for a homegrown drone and battery manufacturing industry...
I am too lazy to look for it but I swear to God I posted something so similar a few months ago when I saw this I genuinely thought you had found it and clicked like getting it to show in my notifications.
It would be interesting to also discuss the strategic implications of drone prominence. One thing that seems to have emerged is that drones shift the advantage to defense over attack. You can't occupy a territory with drones, but you can defend one.
I don't think it does one or the other. The ones with the most advanced drones in larger quantities will have an edge (along with all the other equipment).
Attacking with an overwhelming force of guided munitions gives the same edge as defending with them.
It strikes me as imprudent to adopt a blanket black-and-white "it is all obsolete" PoV (after all e.g. battleships in WWII were 'obsolete' for original usage but still retained utility [of course it's completely bonkers to think of building one now...]) - but at same time it is also very clear that drones are indeed fundamentally changing the nature of potential war and the Western countries are way way too complacent on this issue.
On flip side as like Maurizio comment, it does appear that drones at present (at least until real robo soldiers are available) heavily shift advantage to defense.
Places like Taiwan should drop buying huge amounts really expensive American kit and build Ukraine style drone-defense net capacity.
Why isn't Ukraine on the list of top 10 countries that manufacture drones? What are the leading use cases for drones in China and US if they aren't being used for military purposes?
Yes and no. If you’re talking about China taking the Hawaiian islands, of course you’re right. But that’s not really the threat, is it? The threat is China attacking Taiwan or Japan or South Korea, which drags the U.S. into a war in East Asia. That’s not a war in “the Pacific.” That’s a war that looks a lot more like U.S. involvement in Europe in 1943-5 (i.e. trying to take continental territory from nearby island strongholds like Sicily and Britain) than our post-Pearl Harbor naval war against Japan.
Did you not see the part about the ability to do fixed wing drones. The Taiwan strait is well within the 200 to 300 km range.
I could see China making a sort of fixed wing drone carrier aircraft that would get a payload of shorter ranged drones across the strait, before letting them out and returning.
Agreed - and on the flip side the provisional lessons from Ukraine are that at current state, the state of play swings heavily to favor the defender.
However, Taiwan shouldn't waste money on buying huge amounts of super-expensive American military kit - they need to go Full Ukraine on defensive planning.
This. While I have no doubt that long range warfare and anti shipping warfare will also be dominated by drones in the future, those drones will be larger and in fewer number than the massive swarms of anti infantry drones. It would have been helpful if there was more effort put into defining the different categories of drones, their capabilities, ease of manufacture, tech readiness level, countermeasures, etc.
Unrelated, but I highly doubt that it costs 4,000$ to make an artillery shell in say China. It’s kind of absurd that it would cost more than a drone.
The US should be in Ukraine not with troops but with private-public teams of multi-disciplinary technologists trying to figure this next era of warfare out, and throwing some tries up into the sky. As VCs have long ago figured out, the best way to develop technology is with quick iterations tested against real life conditions. We simply can’t do it in splendid isolation.
Another thought: drone warfare may favor the defensive side. Netting is to drones as trenches are to artillery: a high-effort but low-cost and effective mode of defending a small, defined area.
It is difficult to imagine any military conflict where the stakes are sufficiently high for (1) U.S. and China to engage each other directly, but (2) neither party, when losing, would be tempted to escalate to tactical or strategic nuclear weapons. If that is true, then drone dominance is irrelevant to direct great power conflict. The obsession with capability without regard to end-game (and strategy) is precisely what Kissinger diagnosed as an affliction of U.S. military and foreign policy in the 1950s, which, we eventually escaped. At least for a time.
There's the problem that you can't run a fiber optic for 600km above the southern china sea, and of course there's no way a 100 kmh FPV drone runs for 6 hours. And there's no way a 300g explosive can do anything to a destroyer or aircraft carrier.
There are also plenty of cheaper ways to destroy these drones, like lasers (they will work, I mean, they work right now), EMP (see Leonidas), other cheaper drones (a drone that just needs to run for a few km to destroy a drone that has to run for 100km will be cheaper), and so on.
An artillery shell has the penetration power and the speed (like 10x) a drone will never have, unless you put a jet engine or a rocket engine and a data-link/seeker, at which point you have a... missile.
Drones are anyway super-useful, and there will be much more of them, along with much cheaper classical munitions, like super-cheap missiles, etc.
This doesn't mean they're the right tool for everything or that there's no way to counter-them and shift the cost equation again.
"An artillery shell has the penetration power and the speed (like 10x) a drone will never have"
A sword in the guts is every bit as lethal as it was in 1000 AD; the problem is getting close enough to the enemy to land a hit.
Compared to 2022, classic artillery has been reduced to a sideshow in Ukraine. Even the most modern guns cannot efficiently fire from outside the range of drones, and moreover, the incessant drone warfare led to such a spreading of forces that there is a shortage of valuable targets. There used to be concentrations of manpower and supplies in the reachable rear; nowadays, everything is spread thin on the ground.
Because Ukraine doesn't produce modern artillery, and I'd say they don't produce artillery at all, mostly (unless something has changed in the last 1/1.5 years that I'm not aware of). And Russia doesn't do much better.
Modern artillery batteries can/will fire 60-100+ km away and the shells will be mostly guided (guided ones have been available for 15 years). The trend is also to just moving towards mobile artillery, not fixed tube artillery positions.
For rocket artillery the range is/will be in the 80-150km range.
These kind of guns cannot be replaced with cheap drones for a variety of reasons: range, speed (and this is huge for mobile or time-sensitive targets), warhead size and type, penetration if the target is protected.
Nobody is ditching fighters and bombers and ballistic missiles because they're not obsolete. Certainly they're not being rendered obsolete by 2k $ drones. It's like saying the RPG rendered aerial bombs obsolete but the RPG can hit ground targets at vastly lower costs. Yes, an aerial bomb is vastly more capable than an RPG.
Noah Smith, how could you post something so hurtful to the god fearing, salt of the earth, working class, majority stakeholders of US defense contractors?
Don't you know how we fight?
I remember during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US was spending cool 100+ million per f 22 fighter jet. Now, taking that same 100 million and making several thousand scholarships with generous jobs attached to learn Arabic and Pashto would have probably saved a lot of US lives... But that wouldn't have funneled millions of dollars into the pockets Lockheed Martin... And then the terrorists would truly win.
Everybody knows that only communists, socialists, and hippies want to deprive our brave soldiers of the most expensive (and therefore the best) weapons. You know who else likes cheap, easy to make weaponry? Hamas! Are we Hamas? Are you an anti Semite? How dare you, sir!
The fact that Ukrainians, Russians, and Chinese have figured out how to make an effective weapon for 500$ just proves that they are in on the vicious bluesky leftist plot.
You know the saying, "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."
Now, you're suggesting that the future of warfare is to make individual drones cheap enough to be bought by the proceeds of a bake sale.
Without sarcasm, US schools are very well financed, and any extra money will likely only end in the pockets of the education-textbook complex.
It is a similar story to the military one. Other countries get comparable or better results in schooling while spending less money per unit than the US.
In both cases, special interests hijacked the entire sector and created lucrative niches for themselves.
It is a sobering thought to recognize that drone technology has made surface navies obsolescent. If the US navy encountered a Chinese drone swarm in a war to defend Taiwan, it is likely that the aircraft carriers, destroyers and even submarines could be wiped out.
The question for Australia is do we now need Submarines, as a continent we have always felt the need for a maritime presence to defend ourselves, but now rather than a $2 Billion Submarine, doesn't it make more sense to fill our northern coastline with a few million low cost drones instead, I fail to see how a seaborne invasion could make landfall if that was used as our coastal defence
Even a fraction of the 380 billion dollars Australia is spending on these 8 subs (assuming they every get delivered) would pay for a homegrown drone and battery manufacturing industry...
I am too lazy to look for it but I swear to God I posted something so similar a few months ago when I saw this I genuinely thought you had found it and clicked like getting it to show in my notifications.
So obviously I agree
It would be interesting to also discuss the strategic implications of drone prominence. One thing that seems to have emerged is that drones shift the advantage to defense over attack. You can't occupy a territory with drones, but you can defend one.
So maybe that discourages aggression wars ?
Absolutely my thought and in a conversation elsewhere re Taiwan yesterday same thought.
At least until there are robot soldiers - androids. Which maybe isn't quite so SciFi as it was a mere 5 years ago...
I don't think it does one or the other. The ones with the most advanced drones in larger quantities will have an edge (along with all the other equipment).
Attacking with an overwhelming force of guided munitions gives the same edge as defending with them.
It strikes me as imprudent to adopt a blanket black-and-white "it is all obsolete" PoV (after all e.g. battleships in WWII were 'obsolete' for original usage but still retained utility [of course it's completely bonkers to think of building one now...]) - but at same time it is also very clear that drones are indeed fundamentally changing the nature of potential war and the Western countries are way way too complacent on this issue.
On flip side as like Maurizio comment, it does appear that drones at present (at least until real robo soldiers are available) heavily shift advantage to defense.
Places like Taiwan should drop buying huge amounts really expensive American kit and build Ukraine style drone-defense net capacity.
Why isn't Ukraine on the list of top 10 countries that manufacture drones? What are the leading use cases for drones in China and US if they aren't being used for military purposes?
As World War II showed, war in the Pacific and war in Europe are very different prospects.
Most of the plausible combatants are separated by oceans too large to cross by small drones.
Yes and no. If you’re talking about China taking the Hawaiian islands, of course you’re right. But that’s not really the threat, is it? The threat is China attacking Taiwan or Japan or South Korea, which drags the U.S. into a war in East Asia. That’s not a war in “the Pacific.” That’s a war that looks a lot more like U.S. involvement in Europe in 1943-5 (i.e. trying to take continental territory from nearby island strongholds like Sicily and Britain) than our post-Pearl Harbor naval war against Japan.
And the idea that the US would try and fight on PRC mainland territory is implausible in the extreme.
I agree. Totally implausible. But if we’re making WWII comparisons, the better comparison vis a vis China is Germany not Japan.
Taiwan and Japan are separated from the PRC by sufficiently wide bodies of water that put both out of the range of short-range electric drones.
Did you not see the part about the ability to do fixed wing drones. The Taiwan strait is well within the 200 to 300 km range.
I could see China making a sort of fixed wing drone carrier aircraft that would get a payload of shorter ranged drones across the strait, before letting them out and returning.
Sure, but such drones are larger, costlier, fewer in number and likely easier targets than the swarms of tiny drones in Ukraine.
Also worth pointing out that to *invade*, China ultimately has to get ships with soldiers in them across the Taiwan strait.
Agreed - and on the flip side the provisional lessons from Ukraine are that at current state, the state of play swings heavily to favor the defender.
However, Taiwan shouldn't waste money on buying huge amounts of super-expensive American military kit - they need to go Full Ukraine on defensive planning.
Why would the “cost” of an unmanned drone matter to China?
People don’t riot on the street for the deaths of 8,000 drones the way they would for actual dead pilots.
Destoryed kit is destroyed kit.
rioting in the streets is an american way to look at things.
Limited resources means replacement costs will escalate. Matters less than dead pilots but certainly cost isn't irrelevant either
This. While I have no doubt that long range warfare and anti shipping warfare will also be dominated by drones in the future, those drones will be larger and in fewer number than the massive swarms of anti infantry drones. It would have been helpful if there was more effort put into defining the different categories of drones, their capabilities, ease of manufacture, tech readiness level, countermeasures, etc.
Unrelated, but I highly doubt that it costs 4,000$ to make an artillery shell in say China. It’s kind of absurd that it would cost more than a drone.
Great piece Noah. I love this beat of yours. Well worth the subscription!
The US should be in Ukraine not with troops but with private-public teams of multi-disciplinary technologists trying to figure this next era of warfare out, and throwing some tries up into the sky. As VCs have long ago figured out, the best way to develop technology is with quick iterations tested against real life conditions. We simply can’t do it in splendid isolation.
Another thought: drone warfare may favor the defensive side. Netting is to drones as trenches are to artillery: a high-effort but low-cost and effective mode of defending a small, defined area.
It is difficult to imagine any military conflict where the stakes are sufficiently high for (1) U.S. and China to engage each other directly, but (2) neither party, when losing, would be tempted to escalate to tactical or strategic nuclear weapons. If that is true, then drone dominance is irrelevant to direct great power conflict. The obsession with capability without regard to end-game (and strategy) is precisely what Kissinger diagnosed as an affliction of U.S. military and foreign policy in the 1950s, which, we eventually escaped. At least for a time.
There's the problem that you can't run a fiber optic for 600km above the southern china sea, and of course there's no way a 100 kmh FPV drone runs for 6 hours. And there's no way a 300g explosive can do anything to a destroyer or aircraft carrier.
There are also plenty of cheaper ways to destroy these drones, like lasers (they will work, I mean, they work right now), EMP (see Leonidas), other cheaper drones (a drone that just needs to run for a few km to destroy a drone that has to run for 100km will be cheaper), and so on.
An artillery shell has the penetration power and the speed (like 10x) a drone will never have, unless you put a jet engine or a rocket engine and a data-link/seeker, at which point you have a... missile.
Drones are anyway super-useful, and there will be much more of them, along with much cheaper classical munitions, like super-cheap missiles, etc.
This doesn't mean they're the right tool for everything or that there's no way to counter-them and shift the cost equation again.
"An artillery shell has the penetration power and the speed (like 10x) a drone will never have"
A sword in the guts is every bit as lethal as it was in 1000 AD; the problem is getting close enough to the enemy to land a hit.
Compared to 2022, classic artillery has been reduced to a sideshow in Ukraine. Even the most modern guns cannot efficiently fire from outside the range of drones, and moreover, the incessant drone warfare led to such a spreading of forces that there is a shortage of valuable targets. There used to be concentrations of manpower and supplies in the reachable rear; nowadays, everything is spread thin on the ground.
Because Ukraine doesn't produce modern artillery, and I'd say they don't produce artillery at all, mostly (unless something has changed in the last 1/1.5 years that I'm not aware of). And Russia doesn't do much better.
Modern artillery batteries can/will fire 60-100+ km away and the shells will be mostly guided (guided ones have been available for 15 years). The trend is also to just moving towards mobile artillery, not fixed tube artillery positions.
For rocket artillery the range is/will be in the 80-150km range.
These kind of guns cannot be replaced with cheap drones for a variety of reasons: range, speed (and this is huge for mobile or time-sensitive targets), warhead size and type, penetration if the target is protected.
Nobody is ditching fighters and bombers and ballistic missiles because they're not obsolete. Certainly they're not being rendered obsolete by 2k $ drones. It's like saying the RPG rendered aerial bombs obsolete but the RPG can hit ground targets at vastly lower costs. Yes, an aerial bomb is vastly more capable than an RPG.
Noah Smith, how could you post something so hurtful to the god fearing, salt of the earth, working class, majority stakeholders of US defense contractors?
Don't you know how we fight?
I remember during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US was spending cool 100+ million per f 22 fighter jet. Now, taking that same 100 million and making several thousand scholarships with generous jobs attached to learn Arabic and Pashto would have probably saved a lot of US lives... But that wouldn't have funneled millions of dollars into the pockets Lockheed Martin... And then the terrorists would truly win.
Everybody knows that only communists, socialists, and hippies want to deprive our brave soldiers of the most expensive (and therefore the best) weapons. You know who else likes cheap, easy to make weaponry? Hamas! Are we Hamas? Are you an anti Semite? How dare you, sir!
The fact that Ukrainians, Russians, and Chinese have figured out how to make an effective weapon for 500$ just proves that they are in on the vicious bluesky leftist plot.
You know the saying, "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."
Now, you're suggesting that the future of warfare is to make individual drones cheap enough to be bought by the proceeds of a bake sale.
(/Sarcasm)
Without sarcasm, US schools are very well financed, and any extra money will likely only end in the pockets of the education-textbook complex.
It is a similar story to the military one. Other countries get comparable or better results in schooling while spending less money per unit than the US.
In both cases, special interests hijacked the entire sector and created lucrative niches for themselves.
It is a sobering thought to recognize that drone technology has made surface navies obsolescent. If the US navy encountered a Chinese drone swarm in a war to defend Taiwan, it is likely that the aircraft carriers, destroyers and even submarines could be wiped out.
Lol this is just a moronic take.
Just because a counter to a technology exists, doesn’t mean that it’s obsolete.