In modern wars, drones are quietly turning into the Kalashnikov of the sky: cheap, simple, and available in more configurations than anyone really wants to think about. As long as you can bolt together a motor, some wings and a warhead, you suddenly have a tool that can stress air defense, hit infrastructure, harass logistics and ruin the day of any HQ that believed in “safe rear areas”. Not very pretty, but very businesslike.

And the main selling point is not even range or payload, it is that no one’s son is sitting in the cockpit when things go wrong. For the high command it is an ideal instrument: mobile, scalable, relatively anonymous and not requiring any political explanation about dead pilots. So in the near future drones will be “stopped” only in one place — in press releases, where people will keep promising that any day now they will find a magic way to shoot them down by the dozen.

@rybar