How drone warfare is rewriting the economics of infrastructure

Todd J. Stein is a principal of Braeside Capital, L.P., a Dallas-based private investment partnership.

The companies behind America’s power plants, oil refineries, and data centers have spent decades developing the most efficient infrastructure systems in human history.

They’ve achieved that efficiency, in large part, by prioritizing scale and concentration. A massive refinery can produce more barrels at a lower cost than a network of smaller ones. A centralized data center complex can be simpler to maintain and cheaper to power. These economies of scale have reduced waste and improved margins.

Yet now, that painstaking optimization is becoming a potentially catastrophic vulnerability.

Just as countries around the world have come to rely on fewer, larger facilities to support their critical infrastructure, cheap drones and increasingly precise weapons systems are making those facilities easier than ever to attack. And that’s rapidly turning concentrated infrastructure from an advantage into a liability—not only for America’s national security, but also for the businesses that own and operate these assets.

Infrastructure operators around the world are already learning this lesson the hard way. In August, Ukrainian drones struck refineries and other energy facilities across Russia, including a major petrochemical complex roughly 800 miles from Ukraine. According........

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