There is Nothing Really Stopping Modern Warfare from Entering the Age of Drones

When the Russo-Ukrainian War first broke out, the battlefield success of Ukrainian drones in blowing up Russian armored vehicles made me wonder whether columns of armored vehicles still have their place in modern warfare. Three years since then, the power of the drone has proven to be far more potent and game-changing in the blood-soaked fields of Donbas. Ukrainians have managed to smuggle them into Siberia, launching them against Russian strategic bombers located thousands of miles from the frontlines. And in exchange, Russians have pummeled Ukrainian cities, even without established air superiority.

What is scarier is just how drones have created a warfare environment in which having an air force is no longer impossible for scrappy rebel forces with little financial resources. It was only a decade ago when observers marveled at the ability of the separatist Tamil Tigers to deploy light planes against the Sri Lankan military. Since then, militants in Sudan, Congo, and Libya have proven that the lack of money, airfields, and technical expertise no longer stops them from conducting aerial bombardments, turning limited insurgencies closer to total war with devastating consequences for civilians.

It is probably just the beginning. With civilian drones already produced en masse in China, scaling up military-use drones for cheap mass production does not have the technological and logistical hurdles that limit warplane production. And training a novice to steer a drone to its target is certainly much cheaper and quicker than training a pilot sitting inside a plane. Even as military drones become bigger and more sophisticated over time, scaling up on both production and human resources means that operating a drone "air force" will become ever cheaper and accessible.

As militants benefit, civilians will suffer. Their portability means that drones can be easily smuggled long distances, making no place truly safe from war. As militants seek to hide among civilians to escape possible assassinations from the sky, there will doubtless be more collateral damage in the most unexpected places. And as cottage industries away from the frontlines develop to assemble drones, victory in a war becomes increasingly hinged upon being able to take out those supply chains. With drones, all these become much more possible.

Violence beckons more violence. As demand for drones amidst incessant conflicts across and within states, the supply chains will diversify and improve, further making the output cheaper and more accessible to all. As mini-air forces sprout up around the world, it is no longer just the tanks that may become increasingly obsolete. Anything visible above the ground that could possibly be used for military purposes, from soldiers to oil depots to food storage, can become easily targeted and attacked. What stops drones from blowing them up is no longer technology, but moral conscience.

In a zero-sum game, such as winning a war, relying on ethical constraints to prevent opponents from taking their gloves off and doing anything to achieve their goals is simply unrealistic. As the rapid proliferation of cheap military drones shows, when limited financing and infrastructure no longer prevent their adoption, there will simply have to be other means, whether legal, economic, or political, that punish those who use drones to spread violence to populations and places that ought to be left of it. The fog of war should just remain foggy in some cases.

Regulations can be put in place that can trace every component that goes into drones manufactured secretly in remote compounds away from prying eyes. Sure, assembling a drone may be easy, but some parts, such as the camera, the microelectronics, and the engines, are still sophisticated enough to require "proper" manufacturing. Even getting those manufacturers to slap a barcode and a serial number on each component they make helps the world have a bit more visibility on just how these components end up being part of a perpetual cycle of violence.

And with the increased visibility, levers can be pulled. Sanctions against noncooperative actors within the supply chain, selling them to places and people they are not supposed to sell to, may slow down the proliferation, if not reverse it. And international law, however compromised, still helps to shed light on what is publicly acknowledged as legal and who is blatantly doing the illegal. Many are brazen enough to not care, but as Israel's war in Gaza has shown, the powerless can still fight back through protests and public attention.

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