Drones Take Over The Battlefield

Ah, the humble quadcopter: breaker of parkland reveries, disturber of neighborhood peace, deliverer of Amazon sundries… and destroyer of Russian invaders in eastern Ukraine.

In a development absolutely nobody saw coming, Ukraine is now producing 2.5 million cheap, disposable drones a year to sub in for its dwindling manpower and beat back the Russians — who, for their own part, are ramping up their own assembly lines to pummel Ukrainian cities with wave after wave of suicide drones.

Both sides are rapidly innovating countermeasures and counter-countermeasures, too, ranging from fiberoptic tethers to laser turrets to fully autonomous hunter-killer machines. And the whole world is watching, because this technical and operational revolution has implications from Iran and Israel to the Taiwan Strait to the Baltic Sea.