Drones and the Changing Character of War

Colonel Erik A. Davis

Cheap drones have transformed the character of war by creating a “mass effect” that challenges traditional principles of force concentration. Drawing on lessons from Ukraine, historical theory, and production trends, Erik A. Davis explains why the production of cheap “precision mass” is expected to accelerate.

Keywords: drone, sense, strike, mass, Jevons

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Stephanie Crider (Host)
Welcome to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I am speaking remotely with Colonel Erik A. Davis, author of “Drones and the Changing Character of War,” which you can find in the Winter 2025–26 issue of Parameters.

Davis has more than 16 years’ experience in US Army special operations. Davis has more than 16 years’ experience in US Army special operations. He is a General Wayne A. Downing scholar, whose assignments have taken him from village stability operations in Afghanistan to preparing for high-end conflict in the first island chain. He is currently in command in Japan, and he writes about data in the Army at https://www.downrange-data.com/.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Colonel Davis.


Colonel Erik A. Davis
Thank you very much, Stephanie. Thank you for having me.


Host
What inspired you to write this article?


Davis
Mostly a debate. A couple years ago, I was a senior service college student in ’24, but [I was] heavily influenced by the debate about were drones impactful or not and, if so, why?


Host
In your article, you note that “you need mass to take and to defend objectives, but on a battlefield littered with cheap drones, that same mass gets you killed.” How should commanders navigate this paradox when trying to capture a heavily fortified position?


Davis
Credit where credit is due, I really borrowed heavily from Dr. Jack Watling on that one. He’s a RUSI researcher from the UK (United Kingdom). I highly recommend anything he’s written, but he said that when I was in senior service college. I was a fellow in Australia, and he said it to the audience there, and it was a really impactful idea because he’s been arguing [this point] for a while.

There’s been a talk about whether this is offense or defense [that] has the advantage right now. And he’s like, it’s not an offense/defense thing. It really comes down to the ability to sense and deliver fires on an offense or a defense. And so, we’ve kind of changed—where we used to have the mass rule, most students I think, are very familiar with the 3 to 1 for an assault.

And, that’s not really the math problem anymore. It is [that] you have a time period that affects how effective that mass is. You need to mass forces. You can’t take an objective without them, but at the same time, then you have to disperse afterwards, and how do you sustain and maintain everything—logistics, the security, all of that.

And so, weirdly enough, it actually brings me a little more to my SOF [special operations forces] roots, where (Admiral William H.) McRaven had what was called “relative superiority,” and the idea was why SOF works. It works because it only works for a short amount of time. I don’t think that the rest of the military has gotten to that short amount of time, but I do think the rest of the military has to start thinking about that relative superiority. If you have a mass, it’s giving you advantage. However, it’s also starting to draw in enemy and resources, and you’ve got to disperse it.


Host
You also discuss in your article how Jevons’ Paradox and the Red Queen Effect are fueling a relentless race in military innovation. For our listeners who might not know, could you explain what are Jevons’ Paradox and the Red Queen Effect and then a follow-on—given how quickly adversarial drone tactics adapt, what specific changes should the US military make to its procurement process to keep pace with competitors?


Davis
Two theories that come from eighteenth-century Englishmen. It’s very old stuff, and yet it’s not very well known. I’d like to start with the Red Queen Effect. I first heard about [the] Red Queen Effect back in grad school in 2013. I was a Downing Scholar at the London School of Economics (and Political Science), and as soon as I heard it, I thought everybody knew it. I thought it was the last guy to the table, and I’ve discovered since then that most of the military is not familiar with the Red Queen Effect, which comes from Lewis Carroll’s story [Through the Looking Glass]. It talks about the Queen having to constantly run as fast as you can just to stay where you’re at, and it really describes military tactics and military weapons development because you don’t just get to sit back and [think to yourself] I have the right tactics. I have all the things.

You’re constantly having to innovate. You’re constantly having to work because the payoffs for finding a gap, finding a seam, finding a newer way to do it is so huge that every military is constantly working towards this. And, I mean, sometimes [people] forget [that] the global superpowers used to be Spain and Portugal. They’re not the global superpowers today.

That is because there’s this constant Red Queen Effect. I had a friend who once described all military strategy as just trying to find a flank, and I think that that’s kind of what the Red Queen Effect is. It’s just constantly trying to find an advantage. Sometimes it’s a bigger and better [advantage], but sometimes the bigger and better actually incentivizes the cheaper and the smaller.

And, I think that’s where we’re at today is you just see something where the payoff of finding a cheap way to circumvent some of the amazing military capabilities the US military has—that people could never catch up with, they could never build it [because] it is too expensive, [or] it’s too bespoke—is they found a really cheap way [to do it]. And, there’s a huge payoff if you can do that. So, I hope that helps make the Red Queen make sense. It’s a literature thing.

You go to Jevons, [and] now you’ve got a standard English economist. He’s looking at coal, and everybody’s worried about whether they’re going to run out of coal, and there’s this notice that all of the engines they’re building are getting slowly more and more efficient. And so, there’s this idea of, okay, we’ll be fine. We won’t have to worry about it.

Well, Jevons is the one who notices that not everything, and coal is this input where the more efficient it is, suddenly you start finding uses for it that you didn’t use to use it for. So, there’s actually an increase in demand, even though you’ve managed to make the product more useful. A dumb example I can give you is, like, your water heater. I borrowed this from a guy named Hank Green. He works on Vlog Brothers on YouTube. I’m a nerd. I apologize. But, he talks about water heaters, like, we didn’t used to have water heaters. Hot water used to be only for the richest of the rich. The royalty had hot water, and everybody else didn’t. And then eventually, we invented [the] hot water heater to do a single thing, but then, once everybody started having hot water heaters in the house, now we started making washing machines, clothes washers, all kinds of things. Next, you have electricity going to homes because of this. And so, there’s this feedback.

You look at Uber today as a great example. Uber makes no sense until everybody has a GPS-enabled supercomputer in their pocket and then, Uber becomes obvious. And so, Jevons, when you look at a lot of the military hardware, has been going through that. So, I go back to GPS. If you go [to] 1980, the old GPSes were the same size as the radios we had. They were 20 pounds, they were giant bricks, and they cost as much as a house. So, nobody got them. Only a couple of units got them. They were really expensive, really hard to maintain, and they took up a lot of space. Now, a GPS, it’s less than a pair of cards. It’s less than $50. We put them in everything. We put them in things that don’t really even need them just because they’re so cheap.

That’s not the only technology—cameras. I remember agonizing after my second combat deployment. I was going to buy my first real camera, a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex), and I spent forever reading reviews and all those things. Now, I have a phone that has seven cameras in it, and I don’t even pay attention because they’re so cheap and they’re so light and they’re so small. [It is similar with] thermal imaging, night vision, [and] storage. Data storage used to cost more.

So, for the technology in the military side [and] that Jevons’ thing, what has happened is [that] now, on top of the Red Queen Effect of all of us trying to rapidly innovate, there’s a way to do innovation now that’s so much cheaper that it really upends a lot of it, which, to bring it back to the original point, how do we need to change our acquisitions?

Well, we kind of got to do both. Like, we’re still going to need to build submarines. We’re still going to need to build amazing jets and things that can intercept ballistic missiles and tanks. And, those are hard and complicated and big things, but at the same time, we’re also going to be building these very cheap and simple toys and tools that we’re going to be able to give to everybody. How can we acquire both? Because right now our acquisition process is just built around the decade. It’s built around [the concept that] we’re going to buy a helicopter that we’re going to fly for 30 years. And, we don’t have the idea, not just that we’re going to buy it faster, but we’re going to buy it so fast we’re not going to have the idea, the statement of requirements, all the things, correct before we go into production.

You still hear people talk about, with drones, [that] we need to figure out what the answer is. And, I’m like, no. The answer is constantly moving. You can’t keep up with it anymore. And so, you just have to have this second acquisition process, tactics process, that allows room for people to constantly be innovating and testing. And, I don’t think we have that right now.


Host
Do you think there’s anybody out there who’s got a framework that might work?


Davis
Well, that’s a challenge. I mean, some of the people are doing it better. Candidly, I think Ukraine is doing it better, but I also recognize we can’t just take Ukraine’s model and make it work for us. I did a stint in the G-8 lanes, and I remember asking my boss, like, “Hey, what are we going to start moving in this space?”

And, he pointed out that the existential threat to Ukraine allows them to do things that we just can’t do. There’s rules we still have to worry about. We still have to worry about a lot of the acquisition process and laws that kind of got cleared off the books when, suddenly, you’re just fighting to stay alive. But, it’s not just Ukraine, it’s anybody who’s recognized that there’s a separate channel now for innovations that are constantly working to get new data.

Our old model is we build the thing, we send it over, [and] maybe the customers finally get to see it after it’s gone through years and years of production. And, the Ukrainian model is no, like, get into somebody’s hands right now. And if it doesn’t work, get rid of it and get me something that does work, and get feedback from the customer immediately and constantly recognize that you have to be configurable. It’s not just that you’re going to build and it’s gonna work. Whatever you’re going to build is gonna be adapted to. So, you’ve got to be able to adjust on the fly. So, there’s a bit of a core process, I think, that we could better work on. I harp on Ukraine a lot because that is where I did most of my research, but Ukraine is not the only country that’s doing this.

Sadly, Iran is doing this pretty well, and they have been for a while. We were getting hit by Shaheds [Shahed-136 drones] when I was in Iraq in ’19, and we haven’t really innovated on protecting ourselves against it.


Host
Unpack it a little bit more. You highlight staggering cost asymmetry and note that the US Navy is in a “losing dollar exchange.” We’re firing multi-million-dollar interceptors at cheap Houthi drones that cost just thousands of dollars. What does a financially sustainable counter-drone strategy look like for the US military?


Davis
I think for me, it heavily goes to, like, we have to have both. We’re still going to need, you know, the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) to take out a ballistic missile or the Patriots. They do that. They do that really well, but they’re not a good way, economics wise, to take out some of these other weapons. And, we were doing it against the Houthis—this is not just Iran, this is the Houthis—for years. We were throwing Ferraris at lawnmowers, multiple Ferraris, because you usually fire more than one interceptor against it, and hit something inbound. You’re losing the dollar cost. It’s being able to find cheaper things to throw at them, which is going to constrain what you can do. You can’t throw a cheap thing as far as you can throw a ballistic missile interceptor. It’s also going to need a more layered defense, which I don’t think we’ve done as well.

Right now, we just kind of have those really bespoke, expensive tools. We don’t have the cheap stuff. Whereas, if you look, they’re constantly innovating in these countries that are being hit with these things, they’re like, “Hey, what’s a cheaper thing I can throw up there in front of this cheap thing?”

It’s still going to probably cost a couple bucks more, but it’s not going to cost multiple millions of dollars more than the missile it’s intercepting. I hate to harp on Ukraine, but they’re not throwing one interceptor out there. They’re throwing lots of different interceptors, and they’re innovating on it. They still want the THAAD. They still want the Patriots. Those are still doing good work, but with the thousands of missiles that are coming into Ukraine every night, they can’t afford to just constantly send those. They’ve got to send other things, they’ve got to adapt other tools. And, the Russians are doing the same thing.

And so, I think we really do need multiple channels to go after. You can’t completely get rid of buying the bespoke thing. But again, I think our entire acquisition process, for years, was built around building these things that we didn’t really use. I remember firing munitions because we were worried they were going to expire, but I used to be in Infantry before I was in Special Forces, and your allocation of (FGM-148) Javelin missiles for a battalion was nowhere near one per soldier to fire in a year. We’ve got to get to an acquisition process where people can fire things more and more.

Now, the challenge is, as I mentioned, the technology is not sitting around. This goes back to that Red Queen Effect. It’s moving. So, where we’re used to stockpiling munitions and keeping them and having them for decades, now, it’s like, no. [If] you buy that stuff, you shoot it because it’s going to be worthless in a couple of years because you’re not going to be able to rely on that technology in a lot of ways.

That’s hard for a lot of people. I know it is. However, we spent a lot of money on GPS-guided artillery rounds that became worthless within about 10 seconds of hitting the Ukrainian front because everybody figured out how to adapt. And, we’ve had them in storage for a long time. We just never tested it. So, I know it’s hard, but it’s also necessary. Like, I don’t know, a way to not have this constant invasion cycle running while you’re also still doing the big, giant, complicated builds.


Host
Drone evangelists point to a transparent battlefield, and you argue that true transparency is really unlikely due to electronic warfare and advanced deception. How can a modern unit effectively use data layering and signatures to achieve strategic surprise?


Davis
[I am a] huge proponent of the drone thing, however, I fall off with the camp who thinks that [the] drone’s going to replace everything. Like, I think it’s a complementary effort. And so, the idea that the drones are going to magically [make] everything transparent, I don’t think is true. We’re still going to have a fog of war. That goes back to Clausewitz, probably goes back before Clausewitz, but he’s the first guy to write it down, so he gets credit.

But, we still had that, and we still do it. I think the layers are coming back down. And, it was interesting. I had a conversation today with a friend who’s an air defender. I thought we’re going to something new. He’s like, “No, we’re just going back to where we used to be.”

Every single unit in the same way we camouflage now, we have to understand deception and fight deception at that level. So, it’s a tactical, level-one skill now to be able to deceive the enemy on where your launcher is. We used to do that, I guess, during the Cold War. We used to, you know, really be worried about the Russians being able to do that, but over the years, we pulled that up and up and up and, you know, deception became a strategic-level thing that was being done by wizards in a room with air conditioning. And now, it’s like, no, if you own a launcher, you need to own two to three mock-up deception tools that you can emplace that’ll temporarily, at least, convince the enemy you are not where you’re at.

You look at where the launching tubes are there in eastern Ukraine, like, there’s multiple tubes for every tube that are out there. There’s multiple positions. They’re moving it around constantly. Deception is at a very level-one skill task, where I think we’ve kind of lost touch with that.

So, I think that would be my biggest thing is understanding [that] you have a lot of power in that space. It’s time. Everything is time. You can fool the enemy for a bit. You can misdirect the enemy for a bit. You’re never going to be [able] to rely on it forever. However, the alternative is the stuff that’s fixed is, it’s going to die.

If it was anywhere in the world today or any day before today, there is a map somewhere that someone can buy for relatively little money that’s got imagery of that location that they can tell you where that thing is, and if it can’t move, it’s going to get hit. We’ve seen that in the Middle East, where fixed position things get killed because the alternative is you have to defend them and defending them as a nightmare. So, everything’s got to be able to move. And then, you see a lot of it now in Russia.

I’m a Special Forces guy. We love to blow things up. We love to blow things up that already blow up because they do the blowing up for you. You just make them blow up when you didn’t want to. That’s gas and ammo all day long. Well, if you want to do an offense, if you want to fight a defense, if you want to transition from a defense to an offense, you have to stockpile those things. Where are you stockpiling them, and how long are you stockpiling them for? Because there’s all these sensing tools out there now that can help people like me find them.


Host
Line platoons in Ukraine, Russia, and North Korea have more experience with cheap precision mass than any unit in the US Army. So, beyond incorporating more drones, how must US training change to prepare soldiers for this reality?


Davis
We’re making some progress. My paper was written before we were doing anything. I think we squandered several years where we could have been doing more. I think you’re starting to see stuff. Not to harp another podcast, but Modern War Institute did a podcast interview with the Marine Corps. They’ve got some stuff they’re doing. It’s super exciting to hear about.

In particular, they’re looking at the training side of it. What do the ranges need? What kind of nonexplosive capabilities can we get somebody to train with so it’s like the explosives one, so that when they get the explosive ones (because we get fewer of those, they cost money) we can still get them the reps and sets? And, where can we get the training that doesn’t sell virtual, but they’re getting the simulations? People are moving on it. It’s just slow. I still see people talk about [how] we’re going to only have drones at a single-level echelon, maybe even an entire drone service. And, I just think that that’s a little naive because we have done that to ourselves. We convince ourselves that drones are a thing.

They’re just a technological tool. Drones are not the thing. They’re not the problem. They’re a symptom of the problem, but they are a problem, especially if you’re on the receiving end of one. And so, how do we put the right effect [into the equation]? It’s not a drone. It’s an effect. What effect am I putting in an infantryman’s hand or a field artillery man’s hand and getting them the reps and sets?

And, then [as an] alternative, I think we need to change a lot of our rules. We have for years had rules where we wouldn’t allow people to use these small tools because we were concerned about the threat, in particular, to blue aircraft. Well, the problem is we just exacerbated the threat of red to those aircraft by not letting people work with these tools but, also, the people who fly those aircraft have to live in a world where this is normal now because it’s not gonna go away.

A big state can do amazing things with this, but a small state like the Houthi rebels can come in and they can play in this space for a cost that never used to be viable before. And so, everybody’s going to have to adapt, I think. It’s gonna be expensive. I’m not one of those people who is gonna say it’s gonna get cheap. It’s gonna be a lot of cheap things, but that adds up. It’s gonna be expensive. It’s still going to kill a lot of people. Anyone who thinks this is gonna be a bloodless thing is wrong, in my opinion, but it’s not going to be drones replacing people. It’s going to be drones and people. It’s going to be messy. War always has been. I think war [always] will be messy and expensive, but we have to start getting the reps and sets so we understand the fundamentals.

Now, for my community, we’re a little easier. We already make explosives. We have 18 Charlies who—that’s one of the things they learn how to do is improvise explosives. That’s not something that’s common across the United States military. Look at some of the stuff Ukraine’s doing with theirs, there’s a lot of handling and making of explosives that’s just not down at the ground level. And I don’t know where our threat tolerance is on that right now. I know where our education is, and it’s not there.


Host
We have a few minutes. Is there something that we should have covered, something that’s changed since you wrote your article that you feel like we should squeeze in?


Davis
There’s been a lot of stuff. We saw the US Navy getting after it with a cheap interceptor to take out Iranian ships right there in the port. That is exactly the kind of stuff I’d like to see. I want to make sure people understand that doesn’t magically make the Navy no longer need to have ships.

It doesn’t magically mean we don’t need submarines. We still need those things. But, this is a tool. This is a resource. The Army is coming around. It’s saying, “hey, let’s try to make it so that human being is not the first point of contact,” which is good to hear because I have spent too much time where, like, we used to have guys all by themselves out in the woods trying to see the enemy.

Now, we have those guys out of the woods, but now they have all these extra assets and availability. So, there’s a lot of interesting stuff. There’s a lot of people [who] highly recommended Jack Watling’s book, Arms of the Future: Technology and Close Combat in the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). And, what he really kind of talks about in there is this idea that there is a space where we are constantly fighting with all of these sensors and all these capabilities to strike stuff, and if you want to have a headquarters like we’re used to having, it’s got to be outside that space. Well, what the definition [of] that space is, it’s huge. It used to be, you know, we used to think of this in terms of a few kilometers. Now we’re talking well over 70 kilometers, well over 100 kilometers squared. What used to be, you know, a division is now a battalion at best because of everything [that] happened to disperse.

So, to bring it kind of back to what we talked about earlier, I would just say, if you’re planning an offense, if you’re planning a defense, the logistics associated with that are not an afterthought. They absolutely have to be a front end. Where am I going to be stockpiling what? How am I going to get the gas to the troops? Because we’re going to run into problems where the logistics convoys themselves can’t get the fuel to the location it needs to be used securely, never mind at the distances they have to travel. And, that’s going to constrain our operations. I was a product of the GWOT (global war on terrorism) where, I mean, yes, we had logistical challenges, but nothing that was like this, nothing that was going to really tax us. By and large, we got what we needed, and I think those days are, unfortunately, very hard in the future.


Host
On that note, let’s wrap it up. Do you have any concluding thoughts that you would like to share?


Davis
More than anything, I think the Army used to be really good at trying, and we kind of lost it. We kind of went back to, let’s just solve the math problem, and I think we got to go back to nobody knows the answer [and] is like, “Hey, let’s go innovate. Let’s go try some stuff.”

I would say again, the drone is not the thing. It is a symptom of the thing. So, when people say the drones are going to fight everything in the future, I think they’re naive. But, I also recognize that, like, you have to look at how we can [incorporate] this technology into the existing formations and leverage it. The drone will not replace a tank because a drone can’t do a tank’s job, in my opinion, like a tank does things you just can’t get without that kind of stuff. But, it’s hard to keep it on the battlefield. So, how do you complement the two?

I think field artillery and drones are like the best friends ever. If you take a forward observer and you give them a bunch of these capabilities. And again, when we say drones, we a lot of times we think just, like, the flying quadcopters. There’s so many different tools out there that can sit and wait. And, they are acoustic sensors, they’re visual sensors, they’re heat sensors, they’re electromagnetic.

If there’s definitely one thing I would say, everybody needs to get a lot smarter on what the electromagnetic footprint of their organization looks like. I had my team in JRTC (Joint Readiness Training Center) years ago. They showed us what we’d look like on the EM (electromagnetic) spectrum, and it was daunting. And that was an SF company, which is very small and very tiny. We looked like a brigade when you turned on all of our radios. Anybody who’s looking can see that.

We have a lot of forces who think, oh, the lasers are going to save us, or jamming is going to save us, and I think they’re just very naive because I haven’t met anybody who does lasers or does jamming for a living who thinks that.


Host
Thank you for making time to speak with me today. This was very interesting. I always love to get to talk to our authors who are as passionate as you are about their topics. Thank you.


Davis
Thank you for inviting me. Again, this has been a lot of fun. [We have a] new Chief of Staff of the Army coming, but the old Chief of Staff of the Army’s Harding Project is kind of what got me writing. I do owe it a plug where if you guys have not pushed it there, that is getting soldiers to write about our experiences and write about our thoughts because nobody knows us better than us.

It’s not being encouraged enough, so I’m gonna encourage as well. Join the Harding Project. Check it out.


Host
Listeners, you can read the genesis article at https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 55, issue 4. For more Army War College podcasts, check out Conversations on Strategy, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.