The United States has had a box-seat view of drone warfare for years.
Not a distant rumor. Not a classified footnote. Not “some strange thing happening far away.”
They have been able to watch, in real time, how cheap drones changed the battlefield: reconnaissance, artillery correction, loitering munitions, swarms, improvisation, attrition, industrial-scale adaptation. They were there when most electronic warfare defenses were invalidated by by fibre-controlled drones.
The whole ugly PowerPoint deck of the future was playing live on every available screen.
And yet, somehow, the military posture still manages to look like "being surprised".
Not completely uninformed, perhaps. More like professionally unprepared. The kind of unprepared where everyone had a task force, a strategy paper, a conference panel, six pilot programs but absolutely no warehouse full of the thing actually needed.
Personally, I had not expected the incompetence of the administration to seep through the military apparatus quite that quickly. But apparently, institutional rot also comes with impressive deployment velocity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35Ev4rjnVi4
Not a distant rumor. Not a classified footnote. Not “some strange thing happening far away.”
They have been able to watch, in real time, how cheap drones changed the battlefield: reconnaissance, artillery correction, loitering munitions, swarms, improvisation, attrition, industrial-scale adaptation. They were there when most electronic warfare defenses were invalidated by by fibre-controlled drones.
The whole ugly PowerPoint deck of the future was playing live on every available screen.
And yet, somehow, the military posture still manages to look like "being surprised".
Not completely uninformed, perhaps. More like professionally unprepared. The kind of unprepared where everyone had a task force, a strategy paper, a conference panel, six pilot programs but absolutely no warehouse full of the thing actually needed.
Personally, I had not expected the incompetence of the administration to seep through the military apparatus quite that quickly. But apparently, institutional rot also comes with impressive deployment velocity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35Ev4rjnVi4