“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” J Robert Oppenheimer’s reflections on watching the Trinity nuclear test in 1945 marked a sea change in global conflict: weapons so overwhelming that serious conflict between two nuclear powers meant risking the very existence of both. Nothing came close.

Drones – so effective in Ukraine – may soon become a new kind of strategic global deterrent. In an optimistic scenario, they will dissuade not just nuclear powers from attacking each other but smaller ones too.

The UK-Ukraine deal announced this week offers a glimpse of what this could look like. It is not simply an agreement to buy or build more drones. Britain is gaining access to Ukraine’s battlefield data and AI expertise, while bringing its own technological and research capabilities to the partnership. In miniature, it is the kind of exchange that a future drone security architecture could be built around.

Such alliances will require enormous resources to both wage and defend against networked unmanned warfare. Only a handful of states will be able to do this at overwhelming scale, combining three elements essential to drone dominance: mass, networking and constant iteration.

First, mass. Huge numbers of drones are required to cover the battlespace – watching and quickly reacting along a border which may be thousands of kilometres long and tens of kilometres wide. Harder still, rapid attrition requires rapid replacement. Ukraine shows the evolution: in........

© iNews