From wooden spears to cheap drones, how weapons changed who fights and who rules
The first tools were aimed at animals, not people. Spear-throwers and bows widened the distance to the target, and once farming and settlement created land and food worth defending, organized violence between groups, war, began. So did the contest between attack and defense, spear and shield.
Evidence of group hunting.
Wooden spears found at Schöningen in Germany, hundreds of thousands of years old, show that human ancestors hunted large animals such as horses in groups. Depending on the dating method, they are estimated at 200,000 to 300,000 years old.
Storing muscle power in a bowstring.
Traces of arrowheads tens of thousands of years old have been found in South Africa. The bow stores muscle power slowly and releases it all at once, letting a hunter strike from a distance without closing in.
A lever that extends the arm.
The spear-thrower (atlatl), a stick that holds the spear for throwing, acts as a lever extending the arm and sends the spear much farther and harder. It was the principle of the lever, used by the body long before Archimedes described it.
Skeletons with arrowheads embedded in them.
At the site of Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, dozens of skeletons were found with arrowheads lodged in them. It is one of the oldest pieces of evidence for organized violence between groups: war.
Something to defend, so build a wall.
When farming began and people settled with stored food and land, fighting to seize and defend them intensified. Jericho already had stone walls and a tower.
Bronze weapons were strong, but tin was rare, which made them very expensive. A small elite of nobles and royal troops with costly weapons and chariots dominated war. It was the first instance of a pattern: expensive weapons create a warrior aristocracy.
An expensive metal, a weapon of nobles.
Swords, axes, spearheads and helmets were made of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Tin was a rare metal and hard to obtain, so warriors armed with bronze were a small aristocracy.
The tank of the ancient world.
With the taming of the horse and the invention of light, sturdy spoked wheels, the horse-drawn chariot appeared on the steppes of Central Asia. The composite bow, layering horn and sinew on wood, was short yet powerful, ideal for use from a chariot or horseback, and for more than 2,000 years it was the key weapon of mounted peoples.
Thousands of chariots clash.
In this battle between Egypt and the Hittites, thousands of chariots were deployed on both sides. Keeping chariots, horses, skilled drivers and archers was enormously expensive, so the chariot was a symbol of royal power. The peace treaty that followed is one of the oldest recorded peace treaties.
Civilizations fall almost at once.
The Bronze Age civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed almost simultaneously. Climate change, the breakdown of trade networks and invasions by the mysterious "Sea Peoples" are among the suggested causes, and the loss of the tin trade is counted as one factor.
Iron ore was everywhere, so weapons could be mass-produced far more cheaply than with bronze. Once large numbers of common foot soldiers, not just nobles, could be armed, citizen armies and vast empires appeared. Scientists were drafted into weapons development for the first time, and organization began to decide battles more than weapons did.
An empire of iron weapons and a standing army.
Assyria was the first empire to systematically field a large standing army armed with iron weapons, together with cavalry, siege towers and battering rams for breaking walls.
Your neighbor's shield protects you.
Greek heavy infantry fought in a tight formation with overlapping shields, in which the shield of the man beside you covered half your body. Discipline and cooperation mattered more than individual prowess. A famous interpretation holds that this arrangement, citizens who bought their own equipment fighting together, became the basis for citizens' political participation: Greek democracy.
With a few weeks of training, a farmer becomes an archer.
In China's Warring States period, the crossbow, which held the string with an intricate bronze trigger until aimed and fired, came into wide use. It needed far less training than the bow. The Qin state standardized and mass-produced crossbow parts, and trigger mechanisms found with the Terracotta Army are uniform enough to be interchangeable, anticipating the "interchangeable parts" of the Industrial Revolution by 2,000 years.
Gathering engineers to develop weapons.
Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, brought together engineers to develop a catapult shaped like a giant crossbow. Later came catapults powered by the torsion of twisted animal sinew. It was an early case of a state gathering engineers to develop weapons.
A spear five or six meters long.
Philip II combined a phalanx armed with long pikes (sarissas) and cavalry to defeat an alliance of Greek city-states at the Battle of Chaeronea. His son Alexander conquered the Persian Empire with this army.
Lifting Roman ships and capsizing them.
When the Romans besieged Syracuse, Archimedes devised defensive weapons such as catapults and a hooked crane, and the city held out for nearly three years. When it fell he was killed by a Roman soldier. It is the oldest famous case of a scientist mobilized for weapons development. In the same year in China, construction of the Great Wall to keep out mounted steppe archers began in earnest.
The real weapon was organization.
The Roman sword (gladius), throwing javelin (pilum) and large shield were nothing special. The real weapons were the training of professional soldiers, logistics and engineering. Legions built a fortified camp at the end of every day's march and laid roads through conquered lands to move troops quickly. The reforms of Marius are said to have established a professional army armed by the state in place of citizen conscripts.
The stirrup, which steadied the rider on horseback, spread from east to west, and Byzantium defended its capital with a secret incendiary weapon. Then Chinese alchemists discovered a powder that would change world history.
Steadying the body on horseback.
The stirrup, a loop for the foot, appeared in China around the 4th century and reached Europe by around the 8th. It made shock cavalry possible: a rider could brace a lance under his arm and strike with the full momentum of the charging horse. The historian Lynn White argued that the stirrup gave rise to knights and feudalism. Many object that this is too simple, but the debate famously raised the question of whether weapons create social structures.
A fire that burns even on the sea.
The Byzantine Empire defended Constantinople against Arab fleets with a liquid incendiary weapon that burned even on water. A top state secret known to very few, its recipe was eventually lost, and its exact ingredients remain unknown.
Found while searching for an elixir of life.
Tang dynasty alchemists found that a powder of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal burned violently. It was first used in fire arrows and firecrackers, and in the 10th century in the fire lance, which spewed flame.
Knights with costly horses and armor became the stars of the battlefield, and castles grew so strong that much of warfare became siege and starvation. The first international arms control was attempted against a commoner's weapon, and the Mongols built the largest land empire through mobility and borrowed technology.
The first recorded international arms control.
The crossbow could be fired by untrained commoners and could pierce a knight's armor, so it was seen as a threat to the aristocratic order. The Second Lateran Council banned the use of crossbows and bows against Christians. Of course, it was hardly obeyed.
The most powerful siege weapon of the Middle Ages.
A heavy counterweight hung on one end of a lever fell and flung a heavy stone from the other end to smash castle walls. It was a highly efficient device for turning potential energy into kinetic energy.
Walls within walls.
Castles evolved from wooden forts on earthen mounds to stone castles, and then, borrowing Byzantine and Islamic fortification techniques learned on the Crusades, to concentric castles with multiple rings of walls. Krak des Chevaliers is the classic example.
The speed of horse archers, and absorbed technology.
With the mobility of mounted archers and a sophisticated communication system, the Mongols built the largest land empire in history. More important, they absorbed engineers from conquered China and Persia and used them to operate siege engines and gunpowder weapons. Along the way, gunpowder spread west.
Firing a projectile from a metal tube.
In late 13th-century China, primitive guns appeared that fired projectiles from metal tubes. One of the oldest surviving metal guns is Chinese and dates from around this time.
Cheap common archers and pikemen began to defeat expensive noble knights, and cannon brought down walls that had stood for a thousand years.
Gunpowder reaches Europe.
Gunpowder weapons, which had traveled through the Mongol and Islamic worlds, appear for the first time as a drawing of a cannon in an English manuscript.
Common archers bring down knights.
The English longbow, as tall as a man, took years of training from childhood to master, and England required commoners by law to practice archery. At Crécy in the Hundred Years' War, and at Agincourt in 1415, common archers cut down French knights mired in mud with storms of arrows. It foreshadowed the end of the age of knights.
Steel plate from head to toe.
Starting from mail woven of iron rings, armor reached its peak in the 14th and 15th centuries with full plate covering the whole body in steel. It protected against most swords and arrows of the day, but lost its meaning in the face of gunpowder weapons.
Giant cannon bring down thousand-year-old walls.
Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II used giant cannon built by the Hungarian engineer Orban to break the Theodosian Walls, impregnable for a thousand years. The era of tall, thin medieval walls was over.
Dense formations stop the knights' charge.
Swiss pikemen in tight formations defeated the knights of Burgundy time after time. On the Continent too, common infantry were beating knights.
Cannon, star forts and large musket units cost enormous sums. Paying for them required tax-collecting bureaucracies, standing armies and centralized states. This was the "military revolution," in which gunpowder toppled feudalism and built the modern state. At the same time, the path of a cannonball became a central problem for mathematics and physics.
A moving fortress on the sea.
Cutting gunports in the sides of ships produced warships with dozens of cannon in a row along their flanks. With this naval power, European states opened the Age of Exploration and founded colonies around the world. The gap in weapons technology became the structure of world domination.
A star-shaped fortress designed with geometry.
In response to cannon, Italy developed forts with low, thick walls and angular bastions projecting in a star shape. Their angles were calculated so that attackers from any direction could be fired on from the flank, and even the painter Dürer wrote a book on fortification.
Arquebusiers crush the knights.
Unlike the longbow, the arquebus, fired by a burning match, needed no years of training: after a few weeks anyone could bring down an armored knight. At Pavia, Spanish arquebusiers crushed the French knights.
How does a cannonball fly?
Tartaglia, the mathematician famous for solving the cubic equation, studied the trajectory of cannonballs in his New Science. In 1638 Galileo proved that the trajectory is a parabola. Much of modern science grew out of the problems of artillery.
A gun arrives on Tanegashima.
The arquebus reached Japan through Portuguese traders, and Japan soon produced it in large numbers. At the Battle of Nagashino in 1575, Oda Nobunaga is said to have defeated cavalry with massed musket units.
Gunnery changes naval warfare.
The Spanish Armada was badly damaged by the English fleet's long-range gunfire and by storms, and retreated. It marked a turning point from naval battles fought by grappling and boarding to battles fought at a distance with cannon.
Fire in ranks, in turn, then reload.
Maurice of Nassau in the Netherlands systematized volley-fire drill, in which soldiers in ranks fired in turn and stepped back to reload. In 1631 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden moved light field guns alongside his infantry and won at Breitenfeld. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires also built vast centralized states with gunpowder weapons and are called the "gunpowder empires."
Musketeers replace pikemen.
The flintlock, ignited by flint, improved reliability and reloading speed, and the socket bayonet, a blade fixed to the muzzle, let musketeers double as pikemen, so pikemen disappeared. The musket and bayonet remained the standard of European infantry for more than 150 years.
Standardized weapon parts became the starting point of modern manufacturing, and the French Revolution made every citizen a soldier. The range of the rifle suddenly multiplied.
Cannon to standard specifications.
France's Gribeauval standardized the calibers and parts of cannon, making them easier to repair and replace in the field. The same idea led to standardized parts for muskets.
Every citizen a soldier.
The French revolutionary government issued the levée en masse, conscripting all adult men. It marked the shift from wars between kings' professional armies to wars that mobilized the whole nation, and it produced Napoleon's grand armies.
Parts that fit any gun.
America's national armories perfected the method of machining identical parts that fit any gun (the "American system"). Instead of a craftsman fitting each gun from start to finish, production moved to factory mass production, and the method went on to sewing machines, bicycles and cars. The arms industry was the starting point of modern manufacturing.
The infantry rifle's range multiplies.
Cutting spiral grooves (rifling) inside the barrel made a bullet spin and fly farther and more accurately, but loading was slow. Minié developed a bullet that loaded easily yet gripped the rifling when fired, suddenly multiplying the effective range of the infantry rifle.
Railways and the telegraph, rifled guns, machine guns and ironclads transformed war. Technology raced ahead while generals' tactics stood still, and mass slaughter began; the technology gap turned directly into colonial conquest. The first international laws of war were written.
Napoleonic charges, rifle-musket range.
Soldiers still charged across open fields in lines and fell in masses before rifled muskets. It was also the first large-scale industrial war, with troops moved by rail and commanded by telegraph. The pattern of mass slaughter when technology outruns tactics began here and peaked in World War I.
Rapid fire with a crank, and shells that bounce off.
Gatling invented a machine gun that fired rapidly as a crank turned multiple barrels. The same year two steam-powered ironclads fought for the first time in the Civil War, and seeing each other's shells bounce off, navies around the world knew the age of wooden warships was over.
Small boats against giant warships, and fast reloading lying down.
With the invention of the self-propelled torpedo, small boats and submarines could sink giant warships. The same year Prussia overwhelmed Austria with breech-loading rifles that could be reloaded quickly even while lying down.
An explosive for mining, and the Nobel Prize.
Nobel invented dynamite, which made unstable nitroglycerin safe to handle. Intended for mines and tunneling, it was also used as a weapon, and Nobel, troubled by this, left his fortune to create the Nobel Prizes. In the 1880s nearly smokeless powder appeared, hiding the shooter's position.
A gun that reloads itself with recoil.
Hiram Maxim invented a true automatic machine gun that used the recoil of each shot to load the next. A few gunners could deliver the firepower of hundreds of infantrymen.
"We have got the Maxim gun, and they have not."
At Omdurman in Sudan, the British lost a few dozen men while more than 10,000 Sudanese were killed. The Maxim gun was decisive in Europe's colonial conquest of Africa.
Even war has rules.
At the Hague Peace Conference, international conventions set rules of war, such as banning bullets that expand inside the body. A second conference followed in 1907.
A ship that made every earlier battleship obsolete.
Britain's Dreadnought was armed only with huge main guns and driven fast by steam turbines. The fierce naval arms race between Britain and Germany that followed became one of the backgrounds to World War I.
Against machine guns, barbed wire and artillery, a charge became suicide, and war turned into four years of static attrition in the trenches. Attempts to break the deadlock produced poison gas, tanks, fighter planes and submarines, and their horror led the next generation to treaties banning weapons.
From Switzerland to the North Sea.
Both sides dug hundreds of kilometers of trenches along the Western Front, and the war became a nearly motionless war of attrition. Most casualties in World War I were caused not by rifles but by artillery.
The chemist who made fertilizer directs gas warfare.
At Ypres in Belgium, the German army released chlorine gas on a large scale for the first time. It was directed by Fritz Haber, the chemist whose ammonia synthesis fed humanity. The same year, a device synchronizing machine-gun fire through the propeller produced true fighter planes, and the liner Lusitania was sunk by a submarine.
57,000 casualties in a single day.
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone, the British army suffered about 57,000 casualties, about 19,000 of them killed. In the same battle, armored vehicles built to cross trenches and barbed wire and withstand machine guns were used for the first time. Called "water tanks" during development to keep them secret, they kept the name "tank."
Sinking merchant ships without warning.
When German U-boats resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, sinking ships bound for Britain without warning, the United States entered the war. The same year, at the Battle of Cambrai, tanks used in large numbers showed their potential.
A ban born of the memory of gas.
Out of the experience of poison gas in World War I came a protocol banning the use of chemical and biological weapons.
Seeing aircraft with radio waves.
Britain's Robert Watson-Watt made a practical system for detecting aircraft by radio waves. Five years later this technology defended Britain.
Air raids aimed at cities and civilians.
During the Spanish Civil War, the German air force bombed the Basque town of Guernica. It became a symbol of aerial bombing aimed at civilians, remembered through Picasso's Guernica.
World War II was a war in which scientists and mathematicians built the weapons themselves. Maneuver warfare linking tanks with radio, aircraft carriers, radar, codebreaking, computers and rockets decided the outcome, and in the end humanity acquired weapons capable of destroying itself.
Tanks, dive bombers and radio.
Germany used blitzkrieg doctrine, linking tanks and dive bombers by radio to break through weak points rapidly, to crush Poland, and the next year France in six weeks, though France had not been outmatched in the number or quality of its tanks. The same year the émigré physicist Leo Szilard, fearing the Nazis would build an atomic bomb first, got Einstein to sign a letter to Roosevelt.
Radar defends an island.
Thanks to radar, the outnumbered Royal Air Force could intercept German bombers in advance. The same year British physicists developed the cavity magnetron, which made radar compact, and the technology later became the microwave oven.
Fleets that never saw each other.
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor with carrier aircraft in 1941, the fleets at Midway fought entirely with aircraft, never sighting each other. The age of giant battleships, kings of the sea since the Dreadnought, ended, and the age of the aircraft carrier began.
Mathematicians break the codes.
At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and other mathematicians broke Germany's Enigma code, locating U-boats in the Atlantic and protecting convoys. Colossus, built to break another cipher used by the German High Command, was one of the first programmable electronic computers.
The starting point of the rocket that went to the moon.
Germany developed the V-2 ballistic missile and the first operational jet fighter. Wernher von Braun, who led V-2 development, went to the United States after the war and built the rockets of the Apollo program. The technology that sent people to the moon came from a missile.
100,000 dead in a night, and a computer to calculate firing tables.
Both sides bombed the enemy's factories and cities to break their ability and will to fight, and in the American firebombing of Tokyo in March, about 100,000 people died in a single night. The line between front and home front, soldier and civilian, disappeared. The same year the US Army completed ENIAC, built to calculate artillery firing tables. The ballistics problem of Tartaglia and Galileo gave birth to the computer 400 years later.
A weapon that could destroy humanity.
The Manhattan Project committed hundreds of thousands of people and vast sums, designing the bomb at Oppenheimer's Los Alamos laboratory. The first nuclear test succeeded in July, and atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. By the end of the year an estimated 140,000 people had died in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
The end of the nuclear monopoly, and the most-produced gun.
The Soviet Union's successful atomic bomb ended the American nuclear monopoly. The same year the Soviet army adopted Kalashnikov's AK-47, simple, rugged and cheap, which kept working in mud and sand. Estimates put the number spread around the world at tens of millions to 100 million, making it the most-produced gun in history.
Ever bigger bombs and missiles that could reach the other side of the world were built, but since each side could destroy the other, the great powers never fought directly. War moved into proxy wars, and technology built for weapons became the infrastructure of everyday life.
Hundreds or thousands of times an atomic bomb.
The United States tested the hydrogen bomb, far more powerful than the atomic bomb, and the Soviet Union soon followed. The Soviet "Tsar Bomba" of 1961, about 3,000 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb, was the most powerful explosion in history.
If you can launch a satellite, you can deliver a warhead.
The Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite on an intercontinental ballistic missile. It meant a nuclear warhead could land anywhere on the other side of the world within 30 minutes. The shock in the United States led to the space race, investment in science education and the founding of NASA.
A retaliatory force that cannot be found.
After the nuclear-powered submarine (1954) came ballistic missiles launched from submarines. Submarines hidden deep at sea were almost impossible to find and destroy, guaranteeing the ability to retaliate even after a surprise attack. Once both sides had it, a balance of "mutually assured destruction" arose, in which whoever struck first would also be destroyed. Von Neumann's game theory was used as a tool for analyzing such nuclear strategy.
Thirteen days on the brink of nuclear war.
When the Soviet Union tried to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, the United States answered with a naval blockade, and the world came to the brink of nuclear war. The following year the Partial Test Ban Treaty banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere.
Air-mobile war.
When the great powers could not fight each other directly, war moved to proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and across Africa and Latin America. In the Vietnam War the helicopter became central to moving troops and attacking, while on the other side the AK-47 became the weapon of guerrillas and insurgents.
Holding the nuclear powers to five.
A treaty was signed to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading beyond the existing five nuclear powers. The next year ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet built by a Pentagon research agency, sent its first message.
A few bombs for a bridge that survived hundreds of raids.
Late in the Vietnam War, the US used laser-guided bombs to destroy with a handful of strikes a bridge that had survived hundreds of air raids. The same year the US and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), and the Biological Weapons Convention was concluded.
A military satellite system becomes everyday maps.
After a civilian airliner that strayed off course was shot down over Soviet airspace, the United States announced it would allow civilian use of GPS, its military satellite positioning system. When accuracy restrictions were lifted in 2000, GPS became the foundation of today's smartphone maps.
Eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons.
The United States and the Soviet Union agreed to scrap all ground-launched missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 km. It was the first treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.
Smart bombs, live on TV.
Footage of "smart bombs" hitting their targets precisely was broadcast live on television, and stealth bombers that are hard to detect on radar went into combat. The same year the US and Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), and with the Soviet Union's dissolution the Cold War ended.
After the Cold War, America's overwhelming precision-strike capability changed the face of war. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, cheap improvised explosives and guerrillas tormented the strongest military in the world, and the shields against weapons, missile defense treaties and arms control frameworks, began to wobble.
A treaty made by civil society.
The Ottawa Treaty banned antipersonnel landmines, which keep killing and maiming civilians long after wars end. Led by an international civil campaign, it won the Nobel Peace Prize. Earlier, in 1993, the Chemical Weapons Convention had been concluded.
Air power alone, without ground troops.
NATO forced the Yugoslav army out of Kosovo with 78 days of air strikes alone. Bombs fitted with cheap GPS guidance kits (JDAM), which find their targets by satellite signal, and the B-2 stealth bomber saw combat for the first time in this war. An era opened of precision bombs used in large numbers regardless of weather.
Watching a screen from the other side of the world.
The United States began targeted strikes with armed drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Pilots attack while watching screens at bases at home, thousands of kilometers away. The distance first opened by the bow reached its extreme.
The treaty that restrained missile defense disappears.
During the Cold War the US and Soviet Union signed a treaty (1972) limiting missile defenses themselves, so that defenses would not upset the balance of mutually assured destruction. In 2002 the United States withdrew and began building missile defenses, and Russia responded by developing new missiles to penetrate them.
Cheap bombs that tormented the strongest army.
With precision strikes and rapid maneuver, the United States took Baghdad in three weeks. But the insurgency that followed made roadside bombs, improvised explosive devices, the biggest cause of American casualties, and the US rushed out large numbers of mine-resistant vehicles (MRAPs) with V-shaped hulls that deflect blasts. A war won with advanced weapons turned into a war of attrition against cheap ones.
Space can become a battlefield.
China destroyed one of its own satellites with a missile, and Russia followed in 2021. Thousands of fragments were scattered in orbit. Satellite communications and GPS were already essential infrastructure for modern war.
A whole country paralyzed.
Amid a dispute over relocating a Soviet-era war memorial, Estonia's government, bank and media websites were paralyzed for weeks by massive cyberattacks. It is considered the first cyberattack aimed at an entire country, and NATO afterward set up a cyber defense center in Estonia.
Attacks without gunfire multiplied. Code destroyed facilities, hybrid war mixing information operations, cyberattacks and troops in disguise emerged, and missile defense began to work in combat. One by one, the arms control treaties of the Cold War fell apart.
Destroying a facility with code alone.
Malware was discovered that had physically wrecked centrifuges at Iran's nuclear facilities. It is considered the first cyberweapon to destroy a real facility with computer code alone, without a shot fired.
Shooting down rockets in midair.
Israel's Iron Dome intercepted a rocket fired from Gaza for the first time. A short-range air defense system that intercepts only rockets heading for populated areas, it went on to intercept thousands. But it also exposed the asymmetry of cost: one interceptor costs far more than one rocket.
Soldiers without insignia, and information war.
Combining troops with their insignia removed, information warfare, cyberattacks and support for local militias, Russia annexed Crimea almost without firing a shot. This way of fighting in the gray zone between a declaration of war and conventional warfare came to be called "hybrid warfare."
An attempt to outlaw nuclear weapons themselves.
The UN adopted a treaty banning the development, possession and use of nuclear weapons outright, which entered into force in 2021. Not one nuclear power joined. The civil society group that led the campaign received the Nobel Peace Prize.
The most damaging cyberattack ever.
Malware reportedly aimed at Ukraine spread around the world and paralyzed the systems of shipping, pharmaceutical and logistics companies. The damage is estimated at around $10 billion, and it showed that once released, a cyberweapon cannot be controlled.
The nuclear control regime weakens.
When the United States withdrew from the 1987 INF Treaty, the treaty ended. In 2023 Russia suspended its participation in New START, the last remaining nuclear arms reduction treaty between the US and Russia, which was set to expire in February 2026.
The reach of the battlefield stretched to thousands of kilometers, and drones costing hundreds of dollars defeated tanks costing millions, pushing the asymmetry of cost to the extreme. Hypersonic missiles and commercial satellites entered the battlefield, and how to control weapons in which AI chooses targets became a new question. The nuclear control regime of the Cold War is weakening.
Drones decide a war.
In the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Turkish-made drones destroyed tank after tank and air defense after air defense, playing a decisive role. It showed that cheap drones could overwhelm a conventional army.
A trajectory that is hard to intercept.
The race for hypersonic weapons, which fly at more than five times the speed of sound and can change course in flight, began in earnest. In 2021 China startled the West by testing a hypersonic glide vehicle that circled the globe on a near-orbital path before approaching its target, and the following year Russia used hypersonic missiles in combat in Ukraine.
Trenches and shells, with thousands of drones overhead.
The war that began with Russia's invasion mixed 21st-century technology with trenches and massive shell consumption reminiscent of World War I. Small drones costing hundreds of dollars destroyed tanks costing millions, and reconnaissance drones left almost nowhere to hide near the front. Ukraine, with almost no navy, struck heavy blows at the Black Sea Fleet with uncrewed surface vessels, and hypersonic missiles were used in combat. With electronic warfare jamming drone signals, and drones that fly while unspooling fiber-optic cable to evade it, the contest of spear and shield now repeats every few weeks.
Private satellites become a war's communications network.
When Ukraine's communications came under attack right after the invasion, tens of thousands of terminals for a private company's low-orbit satellite internet kept front-line communications and drone operations running. The technology and decisions of a private company now directly shape the course of a war.
What if AI chooses targets without human judgment?
The UN General Assembly adopted its first resolution on autonomous weapon systems, which select and attack targets on their own without final human judgment. Like the crossbow ban of 1139, it is a question that returns with every new weapon.
More than 300 drones and missiles.
In April Iran launched more than 300 drones and cruise and ballistic missiles at Israel at once. Layered air defenses of Israel, the United States, Britain and others intercepted most of them, but at a cost far above that of the attack. The cost race between masses of cheap attack weapons and expensive defensive ones became a central problem of war between states.
The machine recommends, the human approves.
Reports that in the Gaza war AI systems recommended large numbers of strike targets from vast surveillance data, with humans approving them after brief review, caused major controversy. Earlier, a UN report suggested that in Libya in 2020 an autonomous drone may have attacked without a human command. How much human judgment must remain became a question on real battlefields.
Striking bombers thousands of kilometers away.
In June, Ukraine smuggled small drones deep into Russia hidden in cargo trucks and used them to attack strategic bombers at several distant air bases. Cheap weapons targeting a nation's most expensive strategic assets: the asymmetry of cost at its extreme.
Bunker busters aimed at deeply buried facilities.
In June, during armed conflict between Israel and Iran, the United States used B-2 stealth bombers to drop massive penetrating bombs on Iran's deeply buried nuclear facilities. It was the first combat use of these bombs, and it reignited debate over using force to stop nuclear proliferation.