Do current trends in drone technology favor offense or defense?
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A speculative essay on whether drone technology trends favor offensive or defensive military applications, concluding that drones make mid-valued fixed assets more vulnerable and may advantage nations with higher tolerance for attrition and replacement capacity.
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Do current trends in drone technology favor offense or defense? - Marginal REVOLUTION Thank-you! You've been successfully added to the Marginal Revolution email subscription list. At first people thought that drones favored defense, since Ukraine, in its war against Russia, was defending successfully with drones. But now Ukraine is using drones to attack Russia, and Russian oil refinery assets and warships. It is less obvious that drones are defensive assets on net. Furthermore, Russia is now using more electronic jamming, and more weapons that are drone-avoiding or drone-resistant, thereby limiting the defensive value of drones. Overall, current drones seem to increase the vulnerability of fixed assets such as tanks or troop formations, or for that matter oil refineries or Moscow or Ukraine fixed landmarks. A very large and sophisticated U.S. aircraft carrier might be able to repel the drones (albeit at high dollar cost), but a bunch of tanks in an open field will not have comparable protection. In the abstract, “mid-valued assets become more vulnerable” could favor either offense or defense. The more obvious trend is that it favors nations willing and able to lose lots of mid-sized assets. That is either because a) the nation doesn’t care, because it is evil, or b) because the nation can replace them quickly, for instance by building more tanks or by drafting more soldiers. So could it be that in the long run steady state (albeit not today) drones favor the more evil nations? Factor a) is clearly a marker of evil, whereas factor b) might be modestly correlated with evil. I consider this an unconfirmed hypothesis, but it reflects my thinking at the moment. Marginal Revolution University See Courses Learn more about Mercatus Center Fellowships Learn More Subscribe via Email Enter your email address to subscribe to updates. Email Address Subscribe RSS Feed Contact Us Alex Tabarrok Email Alex Follow @atabarrok Tyler Cowen Email Tyler Follow @tylercowen Webmaster Report an issue Blogs We Like Interesting People & Sites Our Web Pages Alex Tabarrok's Home Page Alex's TED talk, how ideas trump crises Conversations with Tyler FDAReview.org Tyler Cowen's Personal Web Page Tyler's ethnic dining guide Apply to Emergent Ventures Books Modern Principles of Economics Tyler Cowen & Alexander Tabarrok