I'd say the analogous technology is really the musket. On the battlefield it gave an advantage over knights, cavalry, and swordsmen, but it also gave that advantage to unskilled groups of militia rather than organized fiefdoms that could field large numbers of mounted knights and the support staff needed for them. The result was the Renaissance and birth of nationalism, as local, commercial organizations gained power over the feudal empires that had governed them.
It seems relatively straightforward to deliver drones via any kind of existing global scale transit available today (on the one end, C130s, or on the other end, ICBMs?). A predator drone (not the latest tech) weighs ~5000 lbs and the MIRV Mark 5 SLBMs can launch 8x ~800 lb "W88" warheads, for a combined payload weight of around 6400 lbs. (I'm not super familiar with any of this and might be missing something; just skimmed wikipedia to see if I could make the ICBM math work out.)
You mean defensive. Where American firepower at the hands of Saudis completely fucking up your country can be finally challenged with a response that might make them reconsider war. Where it was just a beat down like America is using to doing.
Who knows maybe this thing spirals out of control and destroys all of Saudi Arabia, when you are dealing with these sorts of political realities you reconsider things like destroying the entire country of Yemen because you don't like the politics of its majority or its rebel government.
These changes are always really, really interesting. One of my favorite moments similar to this is the Battle of Nicopolis [1] between the Ottomans led by Bayezid I and a Crusader force which included many Western cavalry forces. The much more mobile and easy-moving Ottomans were no match for the Western (especially French) forces who were accustomed with using their heavy armor during battle:
> The French knights thus continued up the hill, though accounts state that more than half were on foot by this point, either because they had been unhorsed by the lines of sharpened stakes or had dismounted to pull up stakes. Struggling in their heavy armor, they reached the plateau on the top of the slope, where they had expected to find fleeing Turkish forces, but instead found themselves facing a fresh corps of sipahis, whom Bayezid had kept in reserve. As the sipahis surged forward in the counterattack sounding trumpets, banging kettle drums and yelling "God is great!", the desperation of their situation was readily apparent to the French and some knights broke and fled back down the slope.
The battles are an interesting echo through history. Perhaps the lesson is simply "hold the high ground".
One could think so, but then about 150 years later the Hungarian chivalry (and pretty much the Hungarian kingdom itself) was annihilated by the same Ottomans at the battle of Mohacs, where there was no "high ground" involved. From the wiki page [1]:
> Hungary built up an expensive but obsolete army, structured similarly to that of King Francis I at the Battle of Pavia and mostly reliant on old fashioned heavily armoured knights on armoured horses (gendarme knights).
By that time the Ottomans had already started making heavy use of artillery (which is also one of the main reasons they had taken Constantinople back in 1453):
> The Ottoman army was a more modern force built around artillery and the elite, musket-armed Janissaries. The remainder consisted of feudal Timarli cavalry and conscripted levies from Rumelia and the Balkans
If my understanding is correct, the existence of gendarme knights was deeply entwined not only with the concept of nobility in Europe, but with the economic foundations of Feudalism. The structure of which was primarily focused on a how a unit of population could field a single knight into battle. In short, a different army would require more than just additional training or logistics, but an underlying societal shift. Just as Feudalism rose because Martel recognized the effectiveness of armored cavalry, it would take the adoption of gunpowder, which specifically made armored cavalry ineffective, before there was need for another restructuring: one that led to professional armies and eventually nation states.
It would be pure hubris to believe we're done with these sorts of societal shifts. Just as nuclear weapons made large-scale warfare between nation states pointless, we may find that drones, and other weapons that allow cheap, asymmetrical force projection, may make even smaller engagements an exercise in mutually assured destruction. And that could challenge the entire nature of the American military-industrial complex and its global facsimiles.