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Attach motors and a tiny shaped-charge explosive to an iPhone - voila, the hardware is done, way below $1000 at scale. For military hardware, that's a cheap drone, and they'll deploy swarms of those for the right objective. This hardware would be capable of flying for many miles, radio extensive intel back home, ignore its burned antennas the moment an EW attack starts and then kamikaze towards the next human the vision model behind its cameras identify. The hardware would be easily fast enough to identify infrastructure and vehicles, or uniforms and weapons, or sex, age, race, ect.
My view is pretty dystopian the moment there will be a hot conflict between near-peers. We'll dump heavy duty cargo pallets worth of drones out the backs of cargo planes (airborne or not), and everybody not under the multi-layered umbrella of a concentrated military presence will have to huddle in their building's basement. But unlike during the air raids of WWII, this time bombed cities/front lines will become mine-fields, since an unexploded kamikaze drone can just turn dormant and wait for something to steer it awake again days later.
The only hint of optimism I have is that this might bring back an age of mutually assured destruction, making near-peer conflicts more rare again. "You can violently disarm Taiwan, you can even land troops, but your people can't ever leave base once they get here." An interesting difference is that iPhone-drones are much, much easier to proliferate than nukes. All the processors, sensors and motors are heavily dual-use items that everybody can buy. In that sense, the number of opponents that are effectively "near-peers" to the west will dramatically increase - unless current smartphone tech (mainly processors and sensors) gets retroactively heavily regulated in the future.
This is fascinating food for thought. I have some minor disagreements—namely, I don’t think a literal iPhone drone would be able to power extended flight (“many miles”), nor that sleep mode with passive sensors would massively increase operational life… (“you can’t ever leave base”).
But, big picture, you paint a convincing view of the future. If we look at the set of “drones under $1000” rather than literal converted iPhones, I think it’s a rather larger space of possibilities. Scary to imagine.
Yeah, that was hyperbole. I was thinking more in terms of the exact processors, cameras, microphones and other sensors, but of course re-arranged for aerodynamics, duplicated (you'd probably want a second/third camera module with significant optical zoom) and hardened against electronic warfare. Extended flight certainly would need more than one pouch cell - but you could use the exact cell from the phone, just duplicate it several times.
Landing and waiting would certainly increase operational life when compared to loitering in the air, or even when compared to traditional cluster munitions (which often had some sub-munitions on delayed timers in order to hit rescue/cleanup operations after the strike). You can even shut down most of the processing power, just wake everything when the microphones pick up voices/steps or the accelerometer picks up the vibrations of a vehicle.
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I can say with a high degree of confidence that the above is significantly underestimating the scope of the problem.
Okay, I’ll bite: I’m obviously less clued in here than you or pbmonster. Where do you disagree with them? What sort of problems are being ignored or minimized?
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