A friend points out that the success of the #Ukrainian #drone #attack on #Russian #airfields has to have the US and other large #defense #industries rather jittery. All those big high-tech megabucks systems ... something something ten-rupee jezail.

My suspicion is that the age of drone supremacy will be short-lived: as long as they rely on human #pilots on the ground, their #signals can be jammed, traced, or hacked. Best-case scenario, the drones become flying bricks. Middle-case, the ground control facilities become #artillery targets. Worst-case, the drones are turned against their erstwhile controllers.

Those systems already exist in embryonic form—note that #Ukraine had to rely on old-fashioned #infiltration to get close enough for the strikes to work. You can bet every major #military power on the planet is already putting a lot of money into R&D for much more sophisticated approaches. Of course the alternative is autonomous drones, taking off with a set of mission parameters and the same decision-making authority as pilots in crewed #aircraft. That, uh, presents its own set of problems.

With all this said, drones are going to be a big *part* of everyone's arsenal going forward, and yeah, it's going to disrupt current #doctrine considerably. Assuming Ukraine survives the war, which I'm increasingly confident it will, veterans will be in great demand as consultants—at least in smart countries. I wonder if the US will be one of those.