To reiterate my point here, since I guess I wasn’t quite clear enough, I wasn’t trying to argue that infantrymen with rifles are now totally obsolete in 2026. We’re not there yet, what I am trying to say is that the trend is clearly moving in that direction, just give it a hundred years. People will look back at what the Ukrainians have accomplished and invented—an entirely new technological paradigm—as a turning point in how wars will be fought going forward into the future. The Ukrainians are certainly not the first to literally use drones in a war, but they are the first to use them at scale, in a way that is affordable enough to be a numerous, common, up-close threat prevalent throughout every battle. In other words, drones are no longer just some big, expensive specialized alternative to bombers. And now Ukraine successfully used a bunch of ground drones; or what I was calling ground robots, but basically just drones with wheels. We’re only going to see stuff like this increase in scale as the technology gets even more advanced and more affordable, more mass produced. The scale is going to increase exponentially from here on out.

After the war in Ukraine, wars in the future will involve many more drones, both flying and ground drones, fulfilling most of the roles that infantry, tanks and aircraft traditionally occupied. This doesn’t mean that infantrymen with rifles will disappear overnight, but in the next big wars to come, riflemen will become increasingly less prominent, fulfilling more support or specialized roles rather than being the meat and bones of frontline combat.

Technology moved us away from large masses of thousands of soldiers firing volleys in line formations to small unit tactics with squads of 4 to 14 men, and that trend will continue as warfighting technology advances, now with drones.