I’m sure the Ukrainian war has enlightened us on a bunch of new ways to use them and more R&D will flow as a result.

They could be a real game changer in urban warfare. We haven’t seen heavy urban warfare in Ukraine but that’s something I’m curious to see develop. Imagine a swarm of 100-500 small drones all armed with a munition of some sort controlled by AI specifically designed to strike clearly uniformed soldiers. Now, I’m sure it’d brake all the laws of war; but we all know those end up getting thrown out the window.

And for every 20 munition drones you send out a recon drone. Perhaps with thermal imaging. Now the networks mesh together and the drones feed each other intelligence. The intelligence is also simultaneously fed back to intelligence and ground level. Friendly soldiers wear an identifying tag of some sort like tanks have for javelins.

Now imagine these drones getting packaged into a modified himars missile, something capable of delivering a huge cluster at range.

I’m completely spitballing but I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg for how devastating drones in war will be.

Edit: spelling