So what does war at a technological inflection point look like? Nearly two centuries ago, peace in Europe was brought to an abrupt end by a strikingly similar moment. Like today’s war on the same peninsula, the Crimean War of 1853-1856 called on the great powers of the West to defend a smaller state against Russian expansionism. Best remembered for “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Florence Nightingale, the Crimean War broke out in 1853 when the Russian Empire occupied the Ottoman Empire’s Danubian Principalities, and, fearing an expansionist Russia, Britain and France allied to defend them. When invading the declining Ottoman Empire, Tsar Nicholas I’s technologically backwards Russia met with the full force of the Industrial Revolution in the form of British and French rail, steam, and shell. The last wars in Europe thirty-eight years earlier were fought with wooden sailing ships, solid shot, and logistics by courier, but the Crimean War saw the ironclad steamer, exploding shell gun, and electric telegraph deployed on the battlefield for the first time. 

Military leaders had to choose between reliable but less effective capabilities and superior ones that could fail unpredictably at critical moments. Technologies that seem obvious in hindsight—as in the case of the steamboat and the electric telegraph—had not only real detractors but real drawbacks in their early stages. It took a truly paradigm-shifting offensive capability in the form of the Paixhans gun, the first naval gun designed to fire exploding shells rather than solid shot, to make the necessity of modernization unambiguous. The war was ultimately won by the powers who invested in, innovated on, and rapidly adopted these innovations. As we stand—on the same peninsula, one hundred and seventy five years later—in the earliest days of a new military paradigm defined by unmanned systems, what lesson should we take from the past?

The Electric Telegraph Upset Military Conventions

In the story of the telegraph, technology outpaces the human ability to adapt. By the 1850s, the predominant telegraph system—used to coordinate 730,000 British, French, and Russian troops across the Crimean Peninsula, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans—was not yet Samuel Morse’s electromagnetic line, but a primitive optical “semaphore.” The semaphore telegraph used a simple series of towers topped with moveable wooden arms that displayed symbols from one tower to the next like the Beacons of Gondor from The Lord of the Rings. By the outbreak of the war, even these semaphore lines were sparse on the Continent. A message from Crimea in 1854 could take anywhere from twelve days to three weeks to reach London; from Crimea to Varna by steamer, from Varna to Bucharest by courier, and from Bucharest to London or Paris by mail. Russia, which had already invested in a more robust telegraph network, could send a message to the front in only two days—a very meaningful advantage. Naturally, the Allies moved quickly to catch up. They connected British and French army headquarters by telegraph, contracted with the British Electric Telegraph Company to set up 21 miles of buried cable within Crimea, contracted R. S. Newall & Co. to connect Balaklava with Varna, and installed a 150 mile line from Varna to Istanbul. By the time they captured Sebastopol, the most serious victory of the Crimean operation, they could circulate the news of their victory across Europe in only two days.

But there is a caveat in this story of progress. While the electric telegraph was faster in theory, it proved more difficult to set up and less reliable in practice. Submarine cables, unarmored and laid with little slack, often suffered outages due to damage by ships, sabotage or otherwise. While a clumsy semaphore tower could be set up and functioning in only four hours, an electric cable could take weeks to bury in hard, cracked winter ground, and could not be easily moved as needed afterwards. War correspondent William Russell noted “it was rather singular that the French preferred the old-fashioned semaphore” throughout the conflict. Though the French had begun a transition to the electric telegraph in the 1840s, they stuck with the semaphore system for the majority of the war effort, sending over 4,500 semaphore telegraphs, only finalizing their transition to electric after the war was over and reliability less critical. 

Worse—the invention of the telegraph was the invention of micromanagement. In past wars, slow communication meant generals were autonomous by necessity; for example, Napoleon’s letters from Italy in 1796 took weeks to reach Paris, and Wellington in Portugal couldn’t expect a response from King George III within two months. In April 1855, when the installation of the first 125-mile overland electric telegraph from Crimea to London allowed messages to pass in only five hours, Emperor Napoleon III and Queen Victoria began to demand daily reports from their commanders in “the Eastern War.” This burden was not received with enthusiasm. On July 7th, 1855, commander-in-chief James Simson complained to British Secretary of State for War Lord Panmure:

The ‘paper-work’ and the correspondence that demand my time and attention here are beyond all belief, and interfere sadly with my military duties. In fact I am at my desk from four in the morning throughout the whole day, while I ought to be outside attending to more important matters. What with the two mails a-week, and the electric telegraph, the writing is incessant, and much interferes with more urgent duties. This I find is my great difficulty.

Across Crimea, Russian officers felt similarly. Administratively bloated and poorly organized under Nicholas I, the Russian military relied on frequent correspondence and required reporting to a disabling degree. Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, responsible for organizing supplies and medical services for Sebastopol, wrote: 

People serving in central administrations, living constantly in the capital and preoccupying themselves with a mass of written affairs do not always have completely sufficient information. For this reason the proposals of ministers, although excellently worked out from a theoretical point of view, rarely satisfy the necessities of real life and do not serve the purpose which the government desires.

Europe had the material technology to enable central decision-making, but lacked the experience to apply it wisely. Disgruntled generals suffered a blow to their status from central ministers who believed themselves to be better-informed than they really were. Command suffered and the organizational disaster for which the Crimean War is best-remembered followed suit. As with all technological innovations, their invention is just the first act of innovation, the second are the changes to human social organization needed for adoption.

The Ironclad Wasn’t  Ready For War Until Combined With the Paixhans Gun

The modern naval battleship would come to be defined by the ironclad steamer—the metal-armored, steam-propelled gunship that replaced the wooden, sailing ship-of-the-line. But by the outset of the war, both steam propulsion and iron plating were not considered battle-worthy, or had been all but written off. When one British lord requested a steam packet to the Ionian Islands in 1828, the Colonial office wrote back:

 It is our bounden duty to discourage, to the most of their ability, the employment of steam vessels, as they considered that the introduction of steam was calculated to strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the Empire.

The steamer was simply immature. The original incarnation of steam propulsion—the paddle wheel—designed in 1776 to emulate the paddling of a duck, was vulnerable to attack; one blow to the large target that was the wheel and the ship was dead in the water. Because the paddle wheel occupied such a large surface area along the hull, an early steamer could not be equipped with a full broadside. Worse, in rough seas, the wheel could become submerged or rise out of the water entirely, damaging the engines; if the boat encountered an obstacle like floating debris, the boilers of early engines could build up too much pressure and explode, causing the ship to sink. For these reasons, the steamer was not trusted in combat.

Ironclad hulls, too, had been decried. When the British Captain Henry Ducie Chads tested the resistance of 5 ⁄ 8 ” iron plating against artillery at Portsmouth in 1850, he found that only two or three shots could cause the armor to shatter into shrapnel that would gravely endanger the crew. The cast iron armor was brittle and prone to fracture, and had not yet been replaced by wrought iron, which could withstand more deformation before breaking. General Sir Howard Douglas summarized the results pessimistically, reporting that “the destructive effects of the impacts of shot on iron cannot be prevented.” The iron ships under construction were condemned, and the existing ironclad vessels were relegated to troopships. By the outbreak of the war in 1853, ironclad ships were “never trusted upon open waters out of sight of more orthodox vessels.” The Industrial Era navy seemed to be very far away.

But a new offensive capability, already developed, would force navies to modernize. At the turn of the 19th century, battleships exchanged solid shot, not exploding shells. Traditional solid shot was designed to kill the crew and take down rigging, but it could typically only inflict repairable damage to the thick oak hulls of wooden battleships, not destroy them. In 1821, French artillery officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans proposed in a seminal pamphlet Nouvelle Force Maritime that the future of naval warfare would look dramatically different. Exploding artillery shells, he proposed, which were already in use on land, could be deployed at sea to sink large wooden ships-of-the-line outright. The exploding shell gun posed a danger to the wooden ship so great, he argued in a successive pamphlet the following year, that each battleship of the future must be armored with metal. The exploding shell gun Paixhans developed had a range of up to two miles and exploded upon contact with the target, allowing battleships to pack a more destructive ordinance at a lighter weight. The French Navy began trials with this gun—the Paixhans gun—in 1824, and had adopted it throughout the fleet by 1837. The British Royal Navy followed suit the following year. Soon, in peacetime, the exploding shell spread even to Russia.

The exploding shell was deployed to resounding effect during the war’s first major naval engagement. On November 30th, 1853, Russian Admiral Pavel Nakhimov approached the Turkish fleet at Sinop Bay, hoping to take the Ottomans by surprise during the initial Russian offensive. Nakhimov’s squadron of three ships-of-the-line, three double-deckers, two frigates, and three steamers with 337 68-pounder exploding shell cannon met commander Patrona Osman Pasha’s squadron of seven frigates, three corvettes, two paddle-steamers, and two lighters with a total of 236 solid shot cannon in port, catching them unprepared. The victory was swift and total: Nakhimov destroyed the Turkish fleet in two hours. Of the total 2,989 crew aboard, only 958 Ottoman captains, officers, enlisted, or crew survived, with 125 taken captive. Every Ottoman frigate and corvette was sunk or forced to run aground to avoid destruction, and only one steamer escaped to carry home the devastating news. Nakhimov did not lose a single ship. 

Sinop proved beyond all skepticism that the Paixhans gun had made the wooden battleship obsolete. The Allies immediately took notice. Napoleon II ordered the construction of a flotilla of five armored batteries, with four-inch iron plating that could withstand shelling as well as steam propulsion. Critically, by then, Captain John Ericsson and FP Smith of London had invented the screw propeller, which sat underneath the boat where it was less vulnerable to attack, and where it could be lifted out of the water to allow the vessel to maneuver by sail if necessary. Also critically, these armoring plates could then be constructed out of wrought iron, which could withstand shelling without fragmenting, rather than the brittle cast iron of years past. Three of these batteries, the Devastation, Lave, and Tonnant, with slightly thicker iron plating designed to resist 32-pounder shot at 300 yards, were deployed in Crimea and called the Devastation class. The British followed suit, ordering the construction of the Glatton, Meteor, Thunder and Trusty to similar specifications. 

Two years into the war, the screw steamer saw its first decisive victory. On October 17th, 1855, a squadron of British and French vessels, mostly wooden sailing ships-of-the-line approached the harbor at the mouth of the River Bug, hoping to attack a Russian fort at Kinburn which protected their Black Sea Fleet’s access to ships and munitions. However, due to southerly winds, they were forced to halt their journey north to their target for a long seven days. Fortunately, the French squadron also included the three experimental ironclad screw steamers. The formidable Devastation class ironclads had a 1,600-ton displacement and were equipped with sixteen 50-pounder smooth-bore guns. When the fleet was able to make its way to the Kinburn fort, the screw steamers carried out the bulk of the attack, and easily captured the fort from negligible Russian resistance. 

The Devastation alone was hit 31 times on the side and 44 times on the deck, but received no more than superficial dents. All three floating batteries sustained only two dead and fifteen injured crew after being struck by fifteen shells in total, whereas the Russians lost forty-five dead and 130 wounded, as well as possession of the fort. While this battle had minimal strategic significance, it incontrovertibly proved the value of the steamer in battle. “Everything may be expected from these formidable engines of war,” wrote an incredulous Admiral in his official report. It also proved for the first time in a major live battle that wrought-iron ironclad plating could withstand shot and shell without splintering and injuring its own crew. In response, the formerly skeptical French navies laid down their first armored steam warship, the La Goire, launched in 1859, followed by six more. The British government quickly ordered the construction of four more armored screw steamers, the Etna, Erebus, Terror and Thunderbolt. 

A Failure to Modernize

While Russia had begun the war with a naval victory, the conflict quickly revealed that Russia’s naval administration, strategy, and equipment were incompetent in the face of steam and iron. In 1854, seeking to create a “new screw fleet,” the brother of Tsar Alexander II, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, implemented a crash construction program for screw-propelled cannon craft to defend the Finnish Gulf and replace oared galleys, building 40 such boats from 1854 to 1855, and another 35 in 1856. But the effort fell short—the Black Sea Fleet had spent nearly two years of 1854 and 1855 immobilized, largely due to its failure to adopt screw steamers and ironclads in time. After the Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War in favor of the Allies, Konstantin enacted sweeping reforms to modernize the navy. 

The Grand Duke felt the national shame of their obsolete military acutely. He wrote that “we cannot deceive ourselves but admit that we are poorer and weaker than the great powers and that it is poorer not only in material things but also in intellect.” Konstantin reorganized the naval curriculum to emphasize a more technical skill set required to maintain a modern fleet, and stressed the need for screw steamers to a reluctant administration, emphasizing that “owing to the transformation taking place in the fleets of all nations . . . all our old sailing ships must be replaced by steamships.” He did not anticipate the technological arms race to stop there, writing that “the naval sciences go unhesitatingly forward with various innovations and improvements relating one to another … and ships appear which were unknown, for example, the forged ships-of-the-line and frigates.”

Accordingly, he implemented a twenty-year plan for modernization, including the development of naval resources around steam fleet construction and maintenance that would liberate Russia from its dependence on English or French shipyards, and reorientation of training consistent with the demands of an Industrial Era navy. But Nikolayevich was too late. Russia had already been defeated. The Western powers recognized the paradigm shift, pushed through the unpredictable growing pains of emerging technologies, and adopted proactively to win. In an age of unprecedented transformation and speed at every domain, history teaches us that to slow down change is to accept defeat.

While the Industrial Revolution is long in the past, we are undeniably in our own era of rapid military transformation. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the nature of war seems to change every few months, as 20th century assumptions fall to the wayside and the 21st century way of war is discovered on the battlefield, rather than in pitch decks. In eight prolific decades of Pax Americana, military technology has developed to the point of being unrecognizable from WWII. Military organization, however, remains the same, and the imaginations of procurement offices haven’t moved far either. In an escalating great power competition with China—an adversary who has invested much more seriously into unmanned systems and domestic manufacturing than the United States—we might find ourselves in a conflict that will test a nation’s willingness to adapt to the future of war. 

The ultimate lesson of the Crimean War is this: war is a contest between technologies. The global arms race is never-ending—a single offensive capability can quickly make many defensive ones obsolete. Today, on the same Crimean peninsula, quadcopters are eliminating tanks. A new paradigm is already in its earliest days. Today’s Paixhans gun—the offensive capability that will force our military to modernize into a new generation—is the drone. Unmanned systems have revolutionized what is possible on the battlefield, and what manned systems remain must, much like sailing ships giving way to ironclads, completely change their doctrine and armaments to remain viable. The history of the Crimean War reminds us that adopting new technologies is not without challenges, but the failure to do so can be far more consequential. As we look ahead to the next great power conflict, we can only be certain that it will look entirely different. If we are not careful, we might find ourselves echoing Grand Duke Konstantin—lamenting that our adversary has out-modernized us.

Such a brazen incursion into Soviet airspace threatened to turn the Cold War hot. The United States had attempted to prepare for such a disaster, crafting a cover story about a wayward weather plane and instructing Powers to commit suicide if he was shot down. However, this plan was for naught: upon crash landing, the American pilot did not commit suicide and was instead immediately detained by the KGB. Unaware of Powers’ capture and believing he had followed protocol, NASA issued the weather plane story. It was not until days later that Premier Khrushchev announced that Powers had actually been taken alive: “I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and well … and now just look how many silly things the Americans have said.”

The U-2 incident dealt a severe blow to President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, tarnishing America’s reputation on the global stage. What’s more, this event pushed Soviet-American relations to the brink, sparking a diplomatic mess that boiled for two years until Gary Powers was finally repatriated. But although the immediate crisis subsided, the incident left deep geopolitical scars.

The United States found itself in a precarious position. While the need for surveillance remained critical, the risk of another pilot capture was untenable. The solution that emerged was elegantly straightforward: eliminate the need for a human pilot altogether. This realization laid the groundwork for a new era of unmanned systems, reshaping global conflicts and modern military strategy.

The U-2 incident was not surprising to everyone. A year earlier, U.S. Air Force Colonel Lloyd Ryan noticed that Soviet S-75 rockets were rapidly approaching the technical performance needed to reach a U-2 spy plane at cruising altitude. Before satellites, intelligence officials relied heavily on manned aircraft like the U-2 for crucial photographic reconnaissance. To Colonel Ryan, this was a recipe for disaster; the capture of a downed U-2 pilot was inevitable. He preemptively flew to Pasadena to meet with Hycon, the developers of the U-2’s high-altitude cameras. They suggested, for the first time, to attach them to a drone.

Since World War II, San Diego-based Ryan Aeronautical (no relation to Colonel Ryan) had been producing radio-controlled drones for use in weapons testing. Interestingly, it was actually at one of their Radioplane Factories that Marilyn Monroe was “discovered,” featuring her assembling a Ryan Aeronautical drone. Called “Firebees,” these drones were remote-controlled and equipped with a turbojet engine capable of nearly Mach 1.

Alongside Colonel Ryan and Hycon, Ryan Aeronautical developed a new version of the Firebee with a high-altitude camera and a more radar-absorbent airframe, and pitched to the Pentagon as “the least detectable existing aircraft,” as an unmanned photographic reconnaissance system that would allow the Air Force to gather intelligence without any possibility of a captured pilot. Soon, the system—dubbed the “Lightning Bug”—had the green light.

However, the Lightning Bug project would face internal resistance. Despite initial agreement, Assistant Secretary Dr. Courtland Perkins abruptly ordered Colonel Ryan to halt the program, deeming it as wasteful. Edward Teller, of hydrogen bomb fame, later explained that “the Air Force is built around fliers—and unmanned vehicles put fliers out of business.” Some in the Air Force felt threatened by drones, jeopardizing the Lightning Bug’s future.

It was at this time that Colonel Ryan was tragically and suddenly provided evidence for his program’s necessity. Just as he had anticipated, a U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was shot down over the Soviet Union. Sentiment quickly shifted. “Within a fortnight [of Perkins’ attempt to cancel the program] Francis Gary Powers was in the news,” Ryan recalled. “To us it was sort of an ‘I-told-you-so deal’ because we had started the drone studies in anticipation of just such an event.” Just weeks later, the Air Force officially moved forward with the Lightning Bug program.

The First Drones Flew Over Vietnam

In August 1964, just four years into its development, the Lightning Bug would be put to the test. The USS Maddox had clashed with three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking a flash deployment order for Ryan Aeronautical. The Pentagon knew reconnaissance would be critical in Vietnam, but thick fog that hung low over the jungle made high-altitude surveillance impossible, and low-flying planes extremely susceptible to anti-aircraft fire. Unmanned systems were the only solution. It was up to the Lightning Bug.

Over the next fifteen years of the war, Ryan Aeronautical would iterate on over twenty aircraft designs over the skies of Southeast Asia in the world’s first combat deployment of drone technology. In total, they flew over 1,000 aircraft across 3,435 missions—nearly half of all missions flown during the conflict. Critically, these drones carried cameras and sensors instead of munitions, focusing on intelligence gathering instead of destruction. Lightning Bugs would conduct targeting campaigns, damage assessments, locate prisoners of war, and gather crucial enemy signal intelligence. For nearly four years after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s halt to bombing campaigns in October 1968, Ryan Aeronautical’s drones were the only aircraft flying over North Vietnam.

But this was not an overnight success. When it comes to military hardware, the relationship between cost and survivability is paramount. At $200,000 per unit, the Lightning Bug demanded a high “life expectancy” to justify the program. This was not the case, at first. The drone was initially air-launched from a “mother-plane,” flew a pre-programmed route, then deployed a parachute over a landing zone for recovery. However, these parachutes were routinely blown off course, forcing helicopter crews into hostile jungles for drone collection. This was unacceptable and risked the program’s future. To address this, a cargo plane was employed using a hook to snag the drone’s parachute and carry it to a safe landing location. With this mid-air retrieval system, or MARS, the Lightning Bug’s survivability increased from three missions to nine.

With survivability came expanded use cases. In 1966, the Air Force sought a solution to the Soviet S-75 surface-to-air missiles used by the North Vietnamese (the same system that brought down Gary Powers). With no defense, the Air Force’s only option was to fly at lower altitudes invisible to the S-75 platform’s radar, yet in doing so were now susceptible to standard anti-aircraft fire. Worse, directly targeting these missile sites risked killing Soviet personnel that often assisted in their operation, escalating conflict. Over the course of the war, the U.S. Air Force would lose 110 fighters to such systems. This was a massive problem. Ryan Aeronautical was called into action, and Operation Buffalo Hunter began.

Ryan Aeronautical’s solution was the Model 147D, a Lightning Bug variant specially designed for electronic warfare. When a Soviet S-75 reached its target, a small radar proximity fuse would detect the enemy aircraft and detonate. This was the key to this system’s success; there was no need for the ground radar to precisely track the target, it only needed to get close enough. The Model 147D turned this strength into a weakness.

Notably, the drone’s radar signature was designed to appear much larger than it was, justifying the use of a missile. As it approached the aircraft, the Model 147D would collect the fuse signal, instantly process it, then downlink this data back to a ground receiver stationed far away. Effectively, the drone would fly around until it was targeted, then engage in this suicide mission to collect the valuable data necessary to develop missile warning systems for fighter jets. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Dr. Eugene Fubini—who originally advocated shutting the program down—called the Model 147D “the most significant contribution to electronic reconnaissance in the last twenty years.”

The Lost Decade and Recovery

Though Buffalo Hunter proved successful, in 1979, the Air Force deactivated the program. Despite making critical contributions to reconnaissance, military officials believed Lightning Bugs to be overpriced and the technology still relatively premature. In addition to the annual $100 million in procurement and $250 million in operational costs, each mission required protection by F-4 Phantoms and courier jets for film transport, leading to astronomical hidden costs. Consequently, the Lightning Bug was abandoned.

Nevertheless, the concept of unmanned systems would persist. But, after Vietnam, drone programs were routinely delayed and often obsolete against Soviet equipment by the time they were ready for deployment. In 1962, Lockheed’s Skunk Works was contracted to build an unmanned variant of the SR-71 Blackbird, but, after numerous accidents, the program was canceled. In June 1966, Ryan Aeronautical would build a more sophisticated high-altitude surveillance drone, but ran three years over its projected timeline, making it quickly obsolete against advancing Soviet technology. In 1971, the D-21 was raised from the ashes and flew four missions over China—all of which ended in failures and the ultimate cancellation of the program. Boeing, too, would build an unmanned system that would never fly. The American defense industry understood the advantages of drones, but were unable to effectively deploy them for nearly a decade. These were dark days for drones.

Things began to change in 1988. While the defense “primes” struggled, Abraham Karem—an Israeli engineer that had built target drones for the Yom Kippur War—diligently worked in his garage in Los Angeles. With DARPA funding, Karem and his team aimed to build a long-duration “unmanned aerial vehicle,” or UAV, soon constructing and flying the “Albatross” with fiberglass and carbon epoxy. In 1985, DARPA contracted Karem to develop a larger version, the Amber, which flew reliably for 38 hours at 5,500 feet. However, in 1988, Congress cut UAV funding and canceled the Amber, a move Karem later said was to protect incumbents. Karem’s company was then acquired by General Atomics, where he shifted focus to exporting the runway-launched Gnat 750, a modified Amber.

By then, the U.S. had largely abandoned reconnaissance drones. However, the introduction of the Soviet SS-25 road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile renewed interest in long-duration high-altitude surveillance. In the 1990s, civil unrest in Yugoslavia escalated into war, capturing U.S. attention. It wouldn’t be Congress or the Department of Defense that changed focus. Karem was approached by the CIA, and the Gnat 750 was deployed over Bosnia within months. By July 1994, Karem had upgraded the design with satellite links, rebranding it as the Predator.

Buffalo Hunter had growing pains. But the flagship deployment of the Predator was a mature and permanent success. From 1994 to 1997, the RQ-1 Predator was used in Bosnia and Herzegovina to support NATO operations in the Bosnian War. Contemporary reports on the program are glowing. Congress drastically increased its investment, dedicating a full 30% of DARPA investment in 1997 for unmanned reconnaissance, with 46% of that budget going towards long-duration surveillance systems, and 29% to the Predator program alone.

Congress declared that UAVs had finally moved “from words to deeds.” A report by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense credits the first Predator deployment in Gjader, Albania, from July to November of 1995, with influencing the overall outcome of the conflict. By using persistent video surveillance of roads for treaty verification, NATO found that opposing forces had not removed field weapons from a contested area as they had promised to do, and was able to confirm a bombing campaign that led to the Dayton Peace Accords of December 1995. Critically, the Predator also provided evidence of civilian massacres by monitoring fields that became mass grave sites outside Sarajevo in 1996.

The Predator’s successful deployment in Bosnia marked the end of decades of clandestine drone reconnaissance without which this generation of the technology couldn’t have matured and the first moment that drone technology was integrated into joint operations in the Department of Defense, with the full and lasting support of Congress.

The Commercial Roots of the Modern Drone

A decade ago, drones were still the exclusive domain of great power militaries. Behemoth fifty-foot-wingspan systems like Karem’s, costing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. But in 2010, the first consumer drone came out. Suddenly, anyone with an iPhone and $299.99 could easily fly a simple camera drone. The first consumer drone, from French electronics manufacturer Parrot, was essentially a toy, little different than a model airplane. But as hardware reliability and camera quality improved, off-the-shelf drones evolved from toys, to “selfie cameras,” to simple commercial tools for things like roof inspection.

By the end of the decade, every major outdoor industry—agriculture, mining, public safety, construction, energy, and utilities—was deploying off-the-shelf drones for more sophisticated commercial uses. Today, drones flying LiDAR sensors conduct land surveys, and drones equipped with optical gas imaging sensors detect methane leaks on offshore oil rigs. If you happen to be robbed in Santa Monica, where this author lives, a $13,000 drone will take off from the roof of the police department, fly within three minutes to the scene of the crime, and help responding officers on the ground chase down the fleeing perpetrator.

But the significance of the off-the-shelf drone was more than commercial. In the 1970s, when computers went from six-figure mammoths whose servers took up entire rooms of universities to $700 desktops, the invention of “personal computing” was also the invention of the “computer nerd.” Drones were no different. The 2013 release of the Chinese DJI Phantom, the first truly airworthy consumer camera drone, created a Cambrian explosion of drone tinkerers, drone racing pilots, and hobbyists. An incredibly generative ecosystem of skilled drone pilots, cheap drone component suppliers, and open-source drone software platforms quickly emerged to serve them.

Just over twelve months after the DJI Phantom hit the market, in February 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula. Ukraine still relied on Soviet-era drones, like the Tupolev Tu-143, for aerial reconnaissance (think Lightning Bugs—they had to be launched from another vehicle, shot stills on physical film, and deployed a parachute to land). These were woefully inadequate—but foreign-made military drones were prohibitively expensive at over $500,000 in unit cost, heavily restricted to import, and could not be purchased from governments wary of provoking Russia.

The Ukrainian military had few resources. But, with four aerospace universities which graduated 10,000 IT specialists per year, Ukraine was rich in technical talent, which, by this time, included drone pilots and hobbyists. The “nerd ecosystem” of component supply chains, skilled pilots, and tinkerers which sprang up around the off-the-shelf drone allowed Ukraine to leverage its technical talent to create an entirely new domestic weapons capability despite having little capital. The Ukrainian government took full advantage, even modifying its commercial code to facilitate the import of drone sensors and components.

That spring, Ukrainian volunteers founded the People’s Project to raise funds to supply the Ukrainian army, and sourced two Phantom 2s (~$600), one Skywalker X8 (~$300), and one octocopter, all commercial off-the-shelf drones. Ukrainian battalion commander Natan Chazin founded the Aerorozvidka Project, which by 2015 grew to a twenty-man tactical unit of repurposed vans launching modified hobby drones. In June of 2014, Artem Vyunnik, who had been founding a consumer drone company before the invasion, modified his consumer drone prototype into the A1-CM “Fury.” With a seven-foot wingspan, two-hour flight time, and high-resolution zoom camera, the Fury series cost between $10,000 and $22,000.

By 2016, Vyunnik supplied over forty aircraft to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, National Guard, and volunteer organizations, which were used to discover hundreds of enemy targets for artillery reconnaissance. Companies rapidly iterated on combat drone models in conjunction with the armed forces, and produced around thirty different models of drone that were officially used by the Ukrainian army in the first three years of the war. In 2018, a U.S. Army National Guardsman advising the Ukrainian Delta Center, told The Smithsonian that “In the last two years . . [The Ukrainians] have rapidly advanced from using dirigibles or balloons to do reconnaissance to building their own UAV systems . . . from zero.”

Reaping the much-needed rewards of its investment circa 2014, Ukraine entered the present conflict with a three-to-one advantage over Moscow in small tactical drones. The deployment of drones in Ukraine is widely considered to have tipped the balance in the successful resistance to the initial Russian offensive, and broadly defined the battlefield of the future. This is due not to multimillion dollar military-grade systems like the Predator, but to a consistent bend towards smaller, more attritable systems. Ukraine has only increased its investment in unmanned systems.

The country invested over $1 billion in drone technology in 2023. In February 2024, President Zelensky established the Unmanned Systems Forces as a separate branch of the armed forces, and set a target of producing one million drones domestically this year. There are now around 200 companies producing drones in Ukraine, and in 2023, the Ukrainian government increased its drone purchases from domestic companies by over 100 times the previous year. The acute need for unmanned systems, combined with enthusiastic support from the government of Ukraine, has given rise to a dense startup ecosystem, in which novel drone technologies receive tight feedback from the battlefield and are able to rapidly iterate.

The drone war in Ukraine rages on two fronts. The first is a strategic war, in which adversaries exchange “deep strikes” hundreds of miles into enemy territory at targets designed to impede the enemy’s ability to supply the front, like munitions factories, military bases, or energy infrastructure. Strategic drones, like Russia’s Shaheds, typically cost $20-30,000 and are able to fly 600-1,500 miles to crash and explode “kamikaze”-style, into a target. In this war, strategic strikes have been especially focused on drawing limited air defenses away from an increasingly deadlocked front across a geographically vast rear.

The second drone war takes place across its 600-odd-mile front line. Here, most famously, first-person view racing drones equipped with a few pounds of munitions fly suicide missions into targets, and “Baba Yaga” bomber hexacopters drop larger payloads on targets below. But reconnaissance drones play a critical role. Small, commercial quadcopters equipped with high-resolution visual or infrared cameras fly across the contact line to locate enemy targets a mile away or more, then relay the locations to brigade headquarters who may call in a strike from heavier-duty ground artillery like mortars. Commercial drones have become so ubiquitous and so effective at locating targets across the front lines that the war has been called a “transparent battlefield” in which it is impossible to achieve the element of surprise. Both Ukrainian and Russian militaries find that they cannot mass forces or conduct offensive operations without creating a target.

AI at the Edge

UAVs had lost decades where little development occurred, and it took individual technologists as well as functional institutions such as DARPA to see the potential that larger military bureaucracy and elected government neglected. In the history of military technology there are often decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. In that sense, decades have passed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 began. That the tactical quadcopter has transformed the modern battlefield over the last 24 months is consensus. But even these cutting-edge systems are flown predominantly by hand. The AI revolution of the same period has yet to make its impact on rapidly changing warfare. What does unmanned reconnaissance look like in the age of AI?

Recall the Lightning Bugs. In deploying a drone, the most important calculation one makes is cost per mission. A $2,000 drone which flies one kamikaze mission essentially costs the same as a $20,000 drone which can be expected to survive 10 missions. Artificial intelligence changes this cost calculation. Put a GPU on a drone, you add a few hundred dollars to the cost, but suddenly, you can expect it to come back on its own.

The drone operates on an electronic battlefield. To defend against a reconnaissance drone, the adversary must jam the radio frequency connecting the aircraft to its ground station controller, so it can no longer receive manual commands, or jam the frequency connecting the drone to GPS satellites, so it can no longer navigate. Introducing AI to the drone allows it to use computer vision to navigate like a human would by looking at a map, without the need for any satellites, and make decisions about where to fly without constant input from a human operator. “You cannot jam such a drone, because there is nothing to jam,” one Ukrainian drone pilot from the 92nd Brigade told Reuters in March.

Electronic warfare and counter-drone systems are rapidly growing more sophisticated. To achieve decisive superiority on the battlefield of the future, drones will need to be capable of operating, processing data, and making decisions independently of a human operator. Against a technologically capable adversary such as the U.S. might face in China, new capabilities such as recognizing objects and obstacles and autonomous action will very quickly become necessary. The next generation of unmanned aerial systems will not be achieved with attritable systems alone. The winner of the next great power conflict will be the one that invests in intelligence at the edge.

History can take the same lesson from the successes of Ryan Aeronautical in Vietnam, of Abraham Karem in his garage, and of the grassroots drone industry in Ukraine. Key breakthroughs in unmanned systems are made when startups are able to receive tight feedback from performance on the battlefield, rapidly iterating in conjunction with the warfighter. As the Department of Defense seeks to reshore America’s drone fleet, it should prioritize the startup companies that create war-winning innovations.

In 2000, the percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 and 50 who had never married was just 21%. By 2018, the share of never-married adults climbed to 35%. The median age at first marriage was 25 for women and 27 for men in 2000; by 2022, it was 28 and 30. Today, 41% of Americans ages 18-29 are single, and about a third of never-married single adults say they have never been in a committed romantic relationship. Much ink has been spilled over this fact. Some blame Instagram and TikTok for obliterating our social skills, some blame Tinder, video games, pornography, or feminism. The list goes on. There’s a consensus that something has dramatically changed the way people treat each other over the last ten-odd years, and that something has made it much more difficult to form lasting romantic connection. 

We’ve changed the rules of engagement in relationships—the question of what, in the popular imagination, do we owe to the people in our lives? I think the best way to characterize that shift in the social landscape is towards what I would call the contractual moral framework.

Traditional societies held that we are born into our roles and responsibilities. You owed certain social and practical tributes to your neighbors, siblings, and countrymen, even though you didn’t sign up for them. Confucianism and stoicism made these systems of reciprocal obligations explicit in “role ethics.” Abrahamic religions treated one’s responsibility to the community as part of their obligation to God. Hinduism and the related traditions of the Indian subcontinent contain injunctions from dharma, the personal and social moral duties expected of every spiritually upright individual. While the roles and responsibilities differed greatly across time and place, all of these societies agreed on the necessity and even nobility of fulfilling unchosen roles and responsibilities.

As a consequence, doctrines of how to be a good person centered on the idea that we hold a positive duty of care to others, be it through tithing, caring for sick family members, or raising our neighbor’s barns on the frontier. As Robert Putnam finds in Bowling Alone, an analysis of over 500,000 interviews from the end of the 20th century, even a few decades ago supporting one’s friends and neighbors (lending a proverbial “cup of sugar”) was a far more pervasive and accepted part of American life than it is today. The recent past is a foreign country. The America of even the 1990s was a more communal and less individualist society than the modern United States, perhaps even less individualist than any developed country today.

The last decade is defined by a shift away from a role ethic and towards a contractualist one. In a contractual moral framework, you have obligations only within relationships that you chose to participate in—meaning, to the children you chose to have and the person you chose to marry—and these can be revoked at any time. You owe nothing to the people in your life that you did not choose: nothing to your parents, your siblings, your extended family or friends, certainly nothing to your neighbors, schoolmates, or countrymen; at least nothing beyond the level of civility that you owe to a stranger on the street. 

A great portion of the last decade’s trends in interpersonal discourse boil down to this idea. There is a wealth of literature dedicated to rejecting the idea that we owe any duty of care at all to our family members and neighbors. Consider the “no-contact” movement: social media is ridden with listicles and advice columns endorsing “11 Steps for Going No Contact with Your Toxic Parents,” and an entire subcultural meme dedicated to skewering Baby Boomers whose children stopped speaking to them after increasingly trivial missteps. How dare they feel entitled to their children’s attention? We didn’t ask to be born. 

There are very vocal conversations about a “child-free” lifestyle, which assert that you should never be asked to accommodate children in public spaces or children in your extended family, because you didn’t choose to have them. Two million Redditors on r/entitledparents and r/childfree exchange daily complaints, aggrieved by siblings who nicely ask them to babysit, or cousins who have the audacity to bring their children to weddings. Parents are made to feel like burdens just for existing in public spaces, let alone asking for help. Of course, it’s true that much of online discourse is written by poorly-adjusted personalities who make for unreliable narrators, and many of these anecdotes are essentially works of fiction. But online discourse creates a very real lens through which young people gauge, from the privacy of their iPhones, what they should or should not expect from the people in their lives.

Therapy culture, both a social media zeitgeist and a real-world medical practice, increasingly frames leaning on the people in your life as a form of emotional abuse. There is a very real conversation about “trauma dumping” that teaches young people that telling your friends about your problems is an unacceptable imposition and provides helpful scripts for “setting boundaries” by refusing to listen or help. Therapy culture teaches us that we’ve been “conditioned” or “parentified” into toxic self-abnegation, and celebrates “putting yourself first” and “self-care” by refusing to be there for others. 

Here is a thriving genre of literature dedicated to the contractual framework, in the same way that the fables are dedicated to Abrahamic religions. We used to see supportiveness as a virtue; today, it’s a kind of victimhood. The cardinal sin in the contractual fable is asking of someone: being entitled. The cardinal virtue is refusing to give; having boundaries.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2022 greatly accelerated an already ongoing shift from social structure to individual choice. During lockdowns, we realized we could opt out of social participation entirely—work remotely, eat DoorDash, simply stay home. Not only did the pandemic make “touching grass” for the first time truly optional, it explicitly made anti-social life a virtue and social participation a vice. Much has been written about how this dynamic affects couples’ willingness to have children. When you can’t expect family and friends to pitch in, you strip away the proverbial village. The burden of childrearing grows much heavier, in both money and time. 

But what about our willingness to embark on the project of marriage at all? The natural corollary to the contractual framework is that the only person you can feel entitled to support from is the person who signed up to be in your life: your romantic partner. When you can’t expect anything from the relationships you didn’t choose, the pressure on the one relationship you did choose becomes impossible to shoulder. The same advice columnists who clutch their pearls at the idea of asking your friends to babysit will tell you to drop your spouse for even needing to be asked to help. 

When your spouse is the only person in your life you are supposed to be able to depend on, natural points of friction in a relationship go from mildly annoying to terrifying. When a fight with your spouse is a threat to your entire support system, it’s so existentially stressful that it becomes impossible to confront. 

In imagining that one person can fulfill essentially our every, financial, logistical and spiritual need, in a moral world without friends, parents, or community, we have drawn up a job description for an impossible task. I suspect “polyamory,” the practice of maintaining committed relationships with multiple partners, increasingly common in the San Francisco Bay Area, is pointing at this same truth—one person can’t do everything. Many young people bounce from one ambiguous relationship to another and find it impossible to commit to a partner because they have a yawning void in their social lives that no one person could ever fill.

One happy counterexample: I have close family friends in Houston with a six-year-old daughter and both sets of grandparents within a short drive. They have a close “aunt” who moved next door and installed a gate between the backyard fences so her niece can come over and play at will. They seem to be two of the most thriving people I know.

It is cognitively tempting to see the notice of a consent-only framework as requiring a totalizing indictment of all the ends of individualism, from sexual liberation to free-trade consumer choice. That’s not so. Modernity, techno-capital, the arc of progress, does simply bend towards contractualism. As more abundant and better organized societies improve in the ability to meet more finely grained needs, fulfilling our own individual preferences naturally float towards the top of our priorities. But that doesn’t mean we need to abandon our duties to our family and friends. Instead, it calls on us to affirmatively value showing up for the people in our lives. 

Your family and friends are entitled to your love, attention, and support. You owe the people who love you help with moving, help with kids, and help when they’re sick. You owe your aging relatives phone calls and visits. To the terminally online: if you’re concerned about the marriage crisis, the answer isn’t to ban divorce or scold women about “the wall.” The way to restore the birth rate is to be an enthusiastic, supportive, and reliable participant in your friends’ and families’ lives.