A single shipping container fits a few thousand drones...
And no nation in this world—except maybe North Korea—can control and check every incoming shipping container.
So there is a super easy way to distribute autonomous-capable bombs that start and impact by themselves in the target nation by using the enemies infrastructure.
This is what Ukraine did.
I am convinced that in the future, we will see normal shipping containers waiting months underwater, full of autonomous drones, for their mission.
You do not even have to reinforce the structure of the shipping container because you can just match the water pressure with air pressure from air bottles. These things just have to be airtight and able to shed weight to surface again.
The future of attrition warfare is not a slow, steady one. It is a slow and steady one with single days of tens of thousands of drones that try to destroy production capabilities in the same instant to overwhelm repair forces and disrupt so much infrastructure that repair is not even possible anymore. The targets of these drones will not be just buildings, if the data is present, it will also be individual civilians who repair the production capabilities of the enemy and it would be legal, as Article 51(3) describes.
Autonomous drones are the nuclear bombs of the future, cheaper and far more easily usable than an actual nuclear bomb.
The dreams of "the end of all wars" through the atomic bomb were fantasies, as they ensured mutual destruction. This is not the case with drones. You can absolutely let one million drones destroy the entire military infrastructure of a nation and still use the civilian one afterward, which opens the door to responses that do not trigger a global nuclear war but still destroy significant power.
Drones will bring us a future where war costs so much and moves so fast that nobody will risk it.. unlike nuclear bombs, where you can just assume that nobody will use them regardless of what they say.
#war #ukraine