Friday, 5 July 2024

By Nick Hubble Editor, Strategic Intelligence Australia

[3 min read]

Dear Reader,

Back in 2019, I helped publish a rather controversial piece of editorial. It was about asymmetric warfare — the strategy of causing a lot of damage with a cheap and simple weapon. Preferably triggering a disproportionately expensive and ineffective response from your enemy.

The aim of asymmetric warfare is to try and bleed your adversary dry financially instead of literally. It’s an economic form of war disguised as a violent one. And that means investors are the collateral damage.

Our analysis compared the consumer drone to the AK-47, the most famous tool of asymmetric warfare. That comparison might seem like a bit of a stretch. At least, it did at the time. Consumer drones had achieved little more than shutting down the UK’s Gatwick airport for a few days before Christmas. And a few papercuts after.

But, in hindsight, our prediction proved accurate. Cheap consumer drones had the same jarring impact on the nature of warfare as the AK-47 did in its day.

Give a boy a gun…

The AK-47 turned anyone, including children, into effective combatants. As the story goes, a child with an AK-47 can stop a platoon of professional soldiers for a surprisingly long time. It takes a lot of time, effort, risk and resources to combat anyone holding that gun.

But the drone has gone one better. It achieved something military strategists have considered impossible for millennia. Drones turned nerds into effective front-line soldiers.

The impact of cheap consumer drones on warfare is in the news every day now. In Israel, Ukraine and the Red Sea, drones are playing a crucial role. There’s even been mentions of ‘The Drone Wars’ — a reference to the Star Wars film.

The battle seems to be between America’s high-tech, highly expensive and heavily armed drones, and the sort you can buy off the shelf, but with a grenade strapped to it. So far, the likes of the Houthis seem to be winning with their Walmart versions.

This analysis, however, completely misses the point. The purpose of drone warfare is not to be found on the battlefield at all. It’s macroeconomic.

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