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In many ways I am more pessimistic about the international environment than most people, and while I am optimistic in some respects (particularly on Western versus PRC/RUS/IRN axis competition) my position could boil down to 'I don't think anyone can be expected to do 'good' on foreign policy over the next years/decades,' because drones.
What many posters in this forum think AI may imply in the medium to long term in terms of major upheaval and disruption, I view drones implying in the short and medium term. I believe that drone warfare has hit a tipping point where we are already seeing a transition in the balance of power between offensive and defense in favor of the strategic defense, and that this has major implications for all forms of expeditionary and aggressive warfare, i.e. what the US is already built to do, and what revaunchist powers like Russia and China have aspired to be able to do. Drone technology is emerging in a way that is providing a historically unparalleled ability to debilitate state resources, and that is going to fundamentally change how nations approach military defense (and offense) in the next 30 years compared to the last 300.
This is a bit conceptual, so I am going to try and break it down a bit.
In the field of military history, there's two related and distinct concepts you may or may not have heard of: a military revolution, and a revolution of military affairs.
Military revolutions are major changes in tactics and strategies that are driven by emerging technologies. This is things like how guns changed reliance on bows and arrows and melee, how rapid reload / sustained fire weapons changed Napoleonic armies to trench warfare, how tanks and motorized vehicles changed trench warfare to maneuver warfare, and so on.
Military revolutions are, by their nature, often very bloody because they represent periods where new optimizations can have disproportionate effect, and rebalance the balance of offense vs defense in ways that make previous strategies or paradigms unworkable. For example- the AK-47 represented a modest military revolution because the ability to mass produce cheap, reliable, and effective light infantry weapons that could be distributed to guerilla groups made colonial empires fundamentally unviable. Empires could not justify the cost-benefit of maintaining colonial holding by force, and so the strategy of the post-WW2 era gradually became to disengage from colonial empires.
A Revolution in Military Affairs is worse / bloodier / more significant.
A Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is not just a change in tactics, but when technological or organizational changes irrevocably change how warfare itself is pursued- particularly by changing the relationship between the populace and how war is conducted. These can be technological changes, but they can also be organizational or social changes.
The exact criteria and lists may differ, but five examples include rise of the seventeenth-century state system (where permanent standing armies were maintained by the state rather than reliance on ad-hoc raisings of mass armies or fuedal forces), the French revolution (where nationalism changed the relationship that the populace had with the state and the execution of warfare), the industrial revolution (where military-industrial capacity not only became critical for arming mass armies with advanced capabilities but could be used to bolster other forces by sparing surplus capacity at a scale never previously done), World War I (where machine guns, trench warfare, and special weapons like gas led to historically unprecedented killing potential with demographic-levels of impact), and superpower nuclear competition (where the conduct and selection of wars to fight over sharply veered away from ever-larger conflicts to avoiding total wars of annihalation between not only nuclear states, but other states in general).
RMAs are rarer but more significant than MRs because of the social change dynamic at play. Going beyond changes in tactics, the changes in how organizations or polities pursue these new paradigms often lead to disproportionate, and thus self-feeding, effects where actors pursue not just the technology to use in the old way, but pursue the new social and institutional evolutions that further propel the technology. For example, the rise of precision bombing from the US gulf war has changed how countriess across the globe approach airpower- no one builds for carpet bombing fleets anymore, and instead precision fires or precision-missiles in lieu of precision-bombers dominate.
My view is that weaponized drones represent both a military revolution (they are effective weapons changing tactics and strategies, as seen with how the Russia-Ukraine War has adopted to both sides using them and trying to counter their use), and a revolution in military affairs.
The Ukraine War in particular, but also the Iranian use of drones in their proxy conflicts, have demonstrated how societies themselves can basically grass-roots up militarily significant contributions from common commercial product. Weaponing small commercial-off-the-shelf drones with what amounts to hobby-shop equipment is what allows a 1,000 dollar drone project to destroy a 100,000,000 dollar piece of military equipment at a 100,000-to-1 cost ratio.
Which is another way of saying, for the cost of one modern fighter jet, you could conceivably invest in more drones-that-can-kill-parked-fighter jets than there are fighter jets in the world. That is something that no state in the modern world can afford to brute-force through, and in the current era counter-UAS is hard but drone warfare is easy. Typically far less cost-effective than the drone-to-aircraft example, but still easy and still cost effective.
What makes it a RMA and not just a MR, however, is the accessibility to non-advanced economies and non-state actors.
The Ukraine War has demonstrated how you can have a distributed practically grass-roots drone warfare program put together in a matter of months across a coherent society even when being directly attacked by an existential invasion threat. The Iranians and IRGC have demonstrated how proxy drone warfare can be deliberately proliferated across sectarian group alliances to have impacts across entire geopolitical regions, to a point where quasi-stat / substate actors like the Houthis can produce their own drones despite being under regional blockades and air power. Terrorist groups like ISIS and criminal groups around the world have demonstrated how even non-state actors can access and utilize customized drones for operations.
What this means is that drones represent one of the biggest challenges to state military capacity in history. What the AK-47 did to the viability of colonial empires, drones may do to the entire concept of expeditionary organized armies, where any state that tries to organize a military to take unwilling territory by force will face cost-disproportionate losses that wreck the cost-benefit justifications for going to war in the first place.
This also means that states will have exceptional incentives to develop security states able to detect, trace, and go after drone use. Partly for normal law enforcement, but partly to mitigate the risks of asymetric wariors / insurgents moving in to start attacking high-cost targets in core regions. This will likely lead to vastly expanded / normalized security state technologies to track people and computers and drones, far beyond the sort of counter-terrorism authorities introduced in 9-11. These means to mitigate UAS threats can, in turn, counter the ability of other states to penetrate protected population centers that would normally be done for prepatory operations.
This, in turn, means that various forms of military conquest / forced entry into unwelcome areas is going to be less possible than ever. No one looks at the Russian experience in Ukraine and thinks 'I want to win like that,' and drone proxy warfare will likely make that increasingly a norm rather than exception. Any state that tries to force itself into another state is risking itself to proxy support for the invaded by any number of states with their own attack UAS capability, quite possibly AI-trained to recognize the military equipment being used to invade. There are some contexts where proxy resupply may be impossible- I think Taiwan is credibly screwed due to blockade vulnerabilities- but in general I am not concerned about China invading or establishing puppet states from asia to africa.
The flip side, though, is that I am concerned on the ability of the US to maintain air bases or war stocks in foreign countries where the local government/people don't want it to be there. I don't think the US could have maintained the Iraq or Afghan occupations for as long as it did if the US had invaded in 2023 rather than 2003. Not unless it was willing to make some significantly different decisions regarding partition or siding with ethnic majorities. This will credibly not only apply to the specific territories where a small state might welcome a US presence, but also to the neighbors who might host / turn a blind eye to anti-US militant activity crossing borders. (An example here would be how the Houthis in western Yemen were able to use UAVs against the UAE all the way across eastern Yemen.)
In other words, the drone revolution- both as a military revolution and revolution in military affairs- cuts both ways. It will drastically increase the cost of American adversaries trying to pursue revanchist invasions. It will also drastically increase the cost of American expeditionary adventures abroad, or even to US opponents in any given conflict who can send asymmetric forces to attack distant airbases elsewhere. It is going to lead to a lot of blood in parts of the world where things aren't so clear cut, whether it's already ongoing conflicts, sectarian divisions where both sides can credibly reach drone capabilities, and/or efforts by geopolitical actors to create drone-empowered insurgencies where they don't already exist. Costs and casualties will climb.
If you noticed that there was no reference to political candidates in this, that was the point- this is a foreign policy problem driven by dynamics beyond any candidate's ability to prevent. No matter what a candidate does, great harm and damages will occur around the world regardless- and thus everyone will 'fail.' Anyone with an interest in saying 'they didn't succeed' will have more than enough to fill the confirmation bias regardless of how well they do relatively, and there is unlikely to be any credible or plausible metric of what 'success' looks like going forward.
Unironically, if he does 'nothing'- does not start a conflict, does not join a conflict, does not participate in a conflict- that could be a better action (or inaction) than doing anything 'about' them.
Americans often have a bias for action- 'don't just stand there, do something'- that would typically be associated with being proactive and more impactful policies, but in the context of the drone RMA represents a major risk. If you forward deploy extremely expensive forces, you are putting them in range of drone users, and if you actually commit those forces to a conflict then you are giving those opponents the reason / basis to actually act against them. This would be the case if, say, the US joined Israeli airstrikes on Iran- Iran would seek to retaliate with its drones, and there are American logistic bases in Kuwait right across the water.
In this sort of context, the better posture / strategy is to not be participating, but being ready to, to establish a deterrence factor that allows you more limited but below-threshold actions. Those American bases in Kuwait may not be able to support attacks against Iran, but maybe they can shoot down Iranian drones sent against Israel, which is a desirable effect in and of itself. In the meantime Iran knows that if they tried to attack those Kuwaiti bases, then while they might do damage they would receive far more damage than they currently are as the US would enter its own 'use it or lose it' dynamic and would utililze what it could as much as it could before drones rendered it unable to. In this way, the US preserves its ability to maintain a beneficial effect (mitigating Iranian attacks on Israel) for a longer period, and at a lower cost (which is what allows it to persist for longer).
This is where a non-interventionist instinct is a directionally correct strategic bias vis-a-vis a more interventionist impulse. Instinct alone is not sufficient- there are going to be costs and risk taking regardless, there is more to a neutral jing strategy than doing literally nothing, and there are contexts where the general trends would not apply. I am not making a general claim that any war the US enters in will lead to it being dogpiled across the world and all bases destroyed by drone swarms. But erring on the side of caution by expecting clear interests and clear partner buy-in is going to be an increasing positive as potential costs raise.
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To return to your question, you ask 'what would trump do about -topics-', but my response is that it's more important what he is NOT likely to do- try to get directly involved.
Unlike the foreign policy establishment opponents broadly aligned against him, Trump is not likely to embrace an R2P intervention (which would expose a US presence to proxy militants supported by hostile competitors), or maintain an indefinite exposure to asymmetric drone attacks (the Iraq/Syria presence, which he was thwarted in his withdrawal from in his first term), or stay to assume the costs of fighting for a country that doesn't want to fight for itself (the Afghanistan context). He is unlikely to prioritize the harmony and good regard of host partners over systemic cost trends and risks. He is unlikely to expand US commitments or exposures to new areas or partners without clear interests and gains for doing so. He is likely to engage in limited tit-for-tat strikes or counterstrikes that will lead people to accuse him of failing or falling into that escalation spiral, but tit for tat is probably the best response possible and a more stable strategic equilibrium than outright ignorring proxy attacks.
This will almost certainly come at the opportunity cost of things he could do more of but isn't inclined towards. People who think the US should intervene for the right thing are probably going to be disappointed by a lack of interventions in general. Anyone whose self-image of what it means to be an American on the world stage may cringe at the missed opportunities, the tolerance for the intolerable foreign leaders, and so on.
But- per my thoughts on drones- this is a feature, not a bug. The expectations Americans have of relatively low-cost/low-casualty wars are not keeping up with technological reality. The Gulf War standard of conflict success is gone and is not coming back any time soon. The best bet the US has for maximizing effects and minimizing costs is to help those who are willing to fight (and pay) for themselves, rather than assuming the burdens of fighting (and paying the costs) for them.
This, however, is not going to come easy, and it's certainly not going to be held in high regard by partners who prefer the US operate under a different paradigm (and assume the costs of doing so).
This might also have to include that Iraq population grows faster than USA and USA continuing waging culture war on its men, rather than technology. Gulf War was unique in that pretty much everyone was against Iraq
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