Drones | The Ants’ New Weapon

In An Instant, Everything Has Changed

TheBurningPlatform.com

Robert Gore | StraightLineLogic.com

For most of history, weapons have been top-down. Rulers tried to monopolize new technologies of violence, giving themselves an advantage over external forces that didn’t have them and their own subjugated populations. Nuclear bombs are emblematic of this historical pattern. Drones are transforming warfare from the bottom up, and will transform the relationship between the rulers and the ruled.

In three years, the Ukraine-Russia war has introduced a dramatic and dynamic new type of war, one that makes much of which has preceded it obsolete.

The numbers are difficult to pin down exactly, but we can make broad guesses based on media reports. Russia and Ukraine each fielded about 100 thousand drones in 2023; ten times that number, or 1 million, in 2024; and intends to field five times that number this year – – 5 million each. Ten million new drones in 2025! ~ “Drones Not Done,” Semper Doctrina, May 23, 2025

An estimated 70 percent of casualties on both sides are now drone-related. A few thousand dollars worth of aerial drones can take out a multi-million dollar tank. Ukrainian drone swarms recently damaged or destroyed Russian aircraft on the ground at five different bases (Ukraine claims 41 total, almost certainly an exaggeration). Drone boats costing $250,0000 can damage or sink a ship worth $100 million or more.

Aerial drone warfare is decentralized warfare, and each new innovation makes it more so. Drone swarms have created a buzzing, shimmering, all-covering “minefield” in the sky. The minefield moves with the exigencies of battle. Drones can drop land-based mines or lie in wait until activated to attack a passing transport or tank. And drones are not just airborne munitions; with cameras they’re also airborne surveillance. The only constraint on drone swarms is the other side’s drone swarms. In the early part of the Ukraine-Russia war, it was thought that electronic warfare would jam drones’ guidance and communications systems, and at first they did. However, the Russians started tethering their drones to fiber optic cables, against which such jamming is useless. From “How Russia Quietly Revolutionized Warfare,” Kit Klarenberg, 5/25/25 

FPV stands for First Person View. The drone operator’s view comes from the FPV camera. There are unconfirmed reports that the Russians have developed drones with embedded artificial intelligence that allow them to operate autonomously and coordinate with each other without a human interface. If that hasn’t already happened, it undoubtedly will.

Drones have kept the Ukrainians in the war. They first used drones in their attacks on Donbas-region insurgents in 2014. The insurgents had no defense against them, and so they were effective in both reconnaissance and attack. The Russian invasion in 2022 spurred Ukraine’s drone development, especially after many of Ukraine’s Western allies’ “wonder weapons” were neutralized by superior Russian weapons.

What worked was Ukrainian drone technology, which was developed in hundreds of small drone production companies. The Ukrainian military leadership quickly realized that centralized, top-down procurement would be mostly irrelevant to what their troops needed on the front lines.

In what is probably a first in warfare, they allowed front line units to handle their own procurement, which spurred competition and innovation among Ukrainian drone companies. Call it responsiveness to the market. Even Russian drone developers admit Ukraine’s drone proficiency. See the 10 minute mark in the video, which is recommended in its entirety (51 minutes). Incidentally, the Russian developer, Sergey Tavkach, dismisses U.S. government drones as expensive junk and Chinese drones as toys (although both sides use Chinese components).

The Russians eventually responded. They realized that big, state-owned factories like the kind that produced their tanks would be woefully inadequate for the demands of fast-moving, constantly evolving, drone warfare. Like Ukraine, they farmed out development and production to small and nimble entrepreneurial companies; Tavkach works for one.

The Russians have now surpassed the Ukrainians, particularly with their fiber-optic guided drones, which have been a key factor in Russia’s accelerating advances. Their drones are penetrating ever deeper behind Ukrainian lines, hindering or stopping Ukraine’s movement of troops and supplies to the front.

“How Russia Quietly Revolutionized Warfare“

“Ants at the Picnic, Part Two” (SLL, Robert Gore, 6/18/ 23) speculated on the ants’ potential guerrilla warfare against the government. That article, only two-years old, focused on firearms and didn’t even mention drones, which demonstrates how quickly things are changing. When insurgent war comes to the U.S., drones will be the ants’ key weapon. For that, they can thank clever Ukrainians and Russians for their development of drone production, tactics, strategy, and warfare. That assumes, of course, that they are smart enough to learn from them.

The ants already have a head start on the government. Americans are developing drone operating expertise for both profit and personal enjoyment. Some of the technically proficient are putting together drones with readily available off-the-shelf components. Individuals’ drone production is probably already greater than the individuals’ production of firearms—ghost guns and the like—that receives so much publicity, and the government hasn’t tried to ban private drone production, yet. If it hasn’t happened already, do-it-yourselfers are going to start putting firepower on their drones.

The U.S. government has drones, which the Ukrainians stopped using after the war began. Yemen’s Houthi’s were shooting the U.S.’s gold-plated bricks out of the sky until Trump, after only a month, terminated his effort to open up the Red Sea. Realization has perhaps dawned among a few people within the government that its drone capabilities are woefully inadequate for modern warfare. That realization is more widespread among military contractors, who are undoubtedly lobbying for big increases in drone spending. They’ll probably get it, but it will be standard procedure military procurement: money spent on “new,” “improved,” and just as expensive flying junk.

The U.S. government’s innovation cycle—if it can be said to have one—will be measured in years. The Ukrainian-Russian cycle—the time they take to render each others’ innovations obsolete—has been shortened to an estimated two months. Specimens of whatever innovation either side has developed crash in enemy territory, where they are recovered, reverse engineered, copied, and turned on their inventors.

The U.S. government’s drift towards totalitarianism continues unabated. Like his predecessors, Trump has little regard for civil liberties. His Palantir buddies are developing new and improved surveillance and control technologies. The Jewish lobby and their Christian-Zionist allies are carving out an “antisemitism” exception to the First Amendment. Due process has been thrown out the window for foreign visa holders who voice support for Palestinians as the “first they came for the . . .” sequence proceeds apace.

The leftist apparatus sponsoring the Los Angeles immigration riots would have loved for Trump to declare martial law as he directed the feds to provide the most fundamental of government functions—protection of life and property—from which Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass had taken a pass. Trump didn’t take the bait, but it’s only a matter of time before such measures will be deemed necessary by Trump or a successor against riotous or insurgent elements the government cannot control.

Drones will kick the decentralization of violence into high gear. A single, do-it-yourself drone can be now be made for far less than the cost of an AR-15. Once Russian/Ukrainian-style production tools up in this country, costs will fall and output will soar. Small Russian and Ukrainian firms produce hundreds of thousands of drones per month. One Ukrainian firm, Skyfall, uses 350 3D printers running around the clock to produce 4,000 drones a day.

What will drone-based guerrilla warfare look like once the insurrection switch is flipped? Drones will incapacitate every means the government currently uses to contain domestic insurgency. Police, National Guard, and military forces will be immobilized.

For the individual soldier, the land is as uninhabitable as the chemical-gassed and aerially-bombarded front lines of World War I. They are afraid to move, afraid to eat, and afraid to sleep. The stress is immense – – this causes them to make mistakes, lethal ones, in an atmosphere of constant surveillance. ~ “Drones Not Done”

The Praetorians will be more vulnerable than the terrified soldiers in the Ukraine-Russia war. What defense will they have against drones that identify, surveil, and fire on their positions? To amass more manpower only increases their vulnerability. Any machinery they employ, including tanks and attack helicopters, will be destroyed. Should they seek refuge—which seems likely—drones can also obliterate buildings.

Government support systems will be attacked. Drone swarms can cut supply lines and render communications, command, and control systems inoperative. Drones could lay siege to cities and their electrical grids, freeways, railways, airports, shipping hubs, ports, factories, and commercial establishments. The government’s entire totalitarian infrastructure is vulnerable. Drones will knock out cameras, facial recognition technology, and the other high-tech gadgetry now being used or under development to monitor and control us. Server farms and data storage complexes may well be targeted.

Where will drone insurgents come from? Drone pilots are the key to operations.

The soldier of the future will rely more on brains than on brawn. It’s been found that musicians and video gamers are the rock stars of the drone world. Their nimble fingers, fast reaction time, high concentration, and rapid thinking ideally suit them to working with drones.~ “Drones Not Done”

Drone design and production will require brainpower and technological proficiency. The insurgency will be drawn from the younger generations. They are routinely disparaged, but there are exceptions to every generalization. They face wars they’ll be expected to fight, ruinous debt they’ll be excepted to pay, and futures where standard features of the American dream—families, home ownership, well-paying jobs, and saving money—are out of reach. Their best and brightest already realize they have little to lose by upending current political arrangements, all of which are trending towards their totalitarian enslavement. Hard times create strong men.

“Best and brightest” does not characterize the robotic pawns and nihilistic thugs who fuel urban mayhem like the George Floyd and immigration riots. Nor does it apply to the leftist ideologues who sponsor them. The insurgents’ ideology will be anti-government. The pawns and thugs will be sitting ducks for their drone swarms. As for the wealthy sponsors, the locations of their mansions and businesses are public knowledge, and transportation in drone-vulnerable armored limousines, helicopters, and private jets will be out of the question.

Of course, the elite, as they like to call themselves, will respond. They’ll try to close the gap between their drone capabilities and those that have evolved in Ukraine and Russia and will evolve in the U.S. Among elite ranks will be collectivist billionaires whose companies have technological proficiency that can be turned to drone production. If the Ukraine-Russia war ever ends—or even before it does—both sides’ drones and drone expertise will probably be available on global black markets. The elite can be expected to be buyers. However, black markets don’t discriminate; insurgents will be buyers as well.

As for hypothetical elite technological advances—say terrifying microdrones like those dramatized in the 2017 viral video “Slaughterbots”—they will remain exclusively with the elite only until one of them crashes and is retrieved, reversed engineered, copied, improved, produced, and turned right back against the elite. A drone-based insurgency will present rulers with an historically unprecedented reality: they will almost instantaneously become targets of any weapons they develop. That reality is already here. A Ukrainian drone swarm attacked Vladimir Putin—one of the most heavily protected men in the world—in his helicopter.

Drones will be the ants’ most powerful weapon, and will probably remain so until someone figures out how to make homemade hypersonic or nuclear bombs. America’s rulers have nuclear bombs (no hypersonics yet), but potentially wiping out the ruled isn’t really much of a defense. That danger can’t be dismissed, though, because the root motivations of so many rulers, American and otherwise, are homicidal and suicidal.

Drones are tolling the bell on the long expansion of government power and the long war on individual liberty.

Source: https://straightlinelogic.com/2025/06/17/the-ants-new-weapon-by-robert-gore/

Original Article: https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/06/17/the-ants-new-weapon/