Isn’t Turkey the main provider or drones to Ukraine? One thing is building drones, another is building ones that actually work in real world warfare. America obviously has the ability to make children afraid of blue skies, and have had so for decades, but it’s not actually conquered any country and kept it yet. It’s only helped perpetuate a state of eternal warfare in the countries where it was employed. Yes, yes, I know that’s not entirely fair since it’s hard to invade another country and then make them like you, but still, are the American drones sort of similar to the German WW2 ranks that while better lost to mass production of “good enough” easily maintainable swarms of allied tanks?

If you want to look to actual working solutions I think that you need to look to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and to some degree to Israel. Because those are the areas where people are actually using these technologies to take, defend and hold territory. NATO is going to get those lessons while China isn’t, not really, as a lot of the strategic usage of drones isn’t exactly available for us to see.

What I’m personally the most worried about is how easy and effective these cheap drones seem to be. Like the reaper type drones are nationstate weapons. It would be rather “easy” to get your hands on some of the drone types used on Ukraine, and then how would anyone ever really be safe? If the narko cartels get these it’ll, and they will, then how on earth are South American countries supposed to fight them? Hell, how would you stop a set of radicals in the US from using these to assassinate someone like Elon Musk?

I fear it’s going to be a very cyberpunk world.