Austin Vernon on drones (from my email)

The offensive vs. defensive framing seems wrong, at least temporarily. It should be motivated vs. unmotivated, with drones favoring the motivated.

A competent drone capability requires building a supply chain, setting up a small manufacturing/assembly operation, and training skilled operators. They need to manage frequencies and adjust to jamming. Tight integration of these functions is a necessity. That favors highly motivated groups with broad popularity (recruiting skilled talent!) even if they are nominally weak.

Conversely, it can be challenging for overly corrupt or complacent organizations to counter. They are also more likely to fracture and lose cohesion when under attack.

We’ve seen HTS, Burmese rebels, and Azerbaijan all have a lot of success with drones. Ukraine went from hopelessly behind in drone tech to leading Russia in innovation in many niches.

It seems reasonable that the barriers to entry for a motivated drone “startup” will go up. The US military has effective, expensive interceptors like Coyote Block II to counter small attacks in locations like Syria. Fighting larger entities requires pretty absurd scaling to match enemy numbers and the low per-flight success rate – Ukraine claims they might produce millions of drones this year. Hamas had initial success attacking Israel on Oct. 7 but didn’t have the magazine depth to defend themselves.

AI targeting, the necessity of specialized components to defeat electronic warfare, and cheaper drone interceptors are all factors that could upset this balance. Entities that have the scale to deploy an AI stack, true factories, and specialized components should gain the advantage if the rate of change slows.