Death From Above
3rd October 2021
Combining elements of the space and arms races of the Cold War, the drone race will be a flurry of innovation and acquisition efforts. Different, however, is the wide array of competitors. Arms transfers from rogue regimes make drone technology accessible to jihadists such as ISIS and Boko Haram, while the shrinking cost of production will catapult China into the lead. While the technology comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes—from the aptly named high-flying “Global Hawk” to compact suicide drones—winning the drone wars will likely come down to finding a common platform versatile enough to carry an array of weapons and surveillance capabilities.
As Frantzman reveals, the use of drones has gone beyond its deployment in the war on terror. A September 2019 attack on a Saudi oil field by Iranian drones revealed the lethal effectiveness of a “drone swarm,” in which hundreds of devices bomb a facility in unison and are difficult to strike down all t once. Future swarm attacks could be even more devastating with the inclusion of artificial intelligence technology, which better allows drones to communicate with each other. In their book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, former NATO supreme allied commander James Stavridis and veteran Elliot Ackerman envision Chinese drones swarming U.S. ships in the South China Sea. That future may be closer than you think.