As we've seen—most recently with Israel's Mossad in Iran and Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb in Russia—tractor-trailers and shipping containers make dandy places to hide your weapons of war. Also handy for transporting same. More after the jump....
—December 10, 2025 - "How China Built a Network of Ports Encircling the Globe"
From the New Atlantis, Spring 2026:
Essay
For centuries, holding vast territory has been the basis of state security. Drones and AI are about to make it a vulnerability.
On June 13, 2025, Iran’s air defense network was largely silent in the face of an intense Israeli bombing campaign. Just before the attack, swarms of explosive quadcopter drones, launched by Israel from inside Iranian territory and acting on vast troves of intelligence sifted with the use of AI to select targets, had taken out Iran’s radar systems and numerous missile sites. Israel’s one-two punch made Iran an object lesson in how a combination of AI and drones is blazing a new trajectory for international politics.
Not long before, on June 1, Ukraine had employed a strikingly similar tactic, using cargo trucks with false inventories to smuggle drones deep into Russian territory. The drones had been trained using AI to recognize Tu-95 “Bear” bombers based on photographs taken of a decommissioned version in a Ukrainian air museum and to recognize the weakest point of the bombers, often the fuel tanks in the wings. This allowed the drones, flying first autonomously and then with human pilots, to strike Russian bombers with high precision as far away as Siberia.
In the grand scheme of geopolitics, these events were small. The conflict between Iran and Israel ended up being more like glorified shadowboxing than real war, and the Ukrainian strike on Russia did nothing to change the relentless, grinding attrition of the front line. These events are not obvious ruptures in international politics, as when nuclear fire consumed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. That moment announced with dreadful clarity that the future of war and strategy would never be the same. The use of AI coupled with drones, however, is more like Sputnik in 1957, a seemingly small event that nevertheless drastically altered the human relationship to technology.
Heidegger once remarked that the first images of Earth from the Moon shocked him because they revealed a new way of grasping the human condition, drained of direct human experience. AI-enabled drone strikes carry a similar symbolic charge: they represent war drained of direct human contact.
What does it mean for this relatively cheap and widely available technology to exist in the hands not only of sovereign states but of non-state actors, rebel groups, terrorists, and even ordinary people? It means that in fragile or conflict-prone regions such as parts of Yemen and Pakistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa, small groups of motivated individuals will be able to destabilize political authority through attacks on infrastructure that is far from where those groups are operating, threatening at a whole new level the state’s capacity to control its territory and population. AI-plus-drone technology thus accelerates the fragmentation of international order by weakening the sovereign state’s grip on territory and empowering local groups as well as opaque, transnational networks capable of organized violence.
The diffusion of cheap AI drones — and thus of a relatively easy and far-reaching means of violence — will likely evince a response from sovereign states. The great powers may expand their capacities for surveillance and security and reemphasize the importance of borders. The global cosmopolitan fluidity of recent decades may yield to a renewed focus on territory and control. What emerges would not be the end of the current order but its contraction and reinvention. In this scenario, states will reassert their sovereignty not out of a sense of revanchist nostalgia but of state survival.
Perhaps none of this will occur. But machine learning software and drone hardware are powerful, and now both easily accessible. The confluence of the two, and their likely increasing deployment to inflict violence, demands a thought experiment about the future we may face.
The Rise of the Nation-State
The ultimate, if déclassé, question in political thought is: Who rules, and how is that rule justified? Various justifications have been offered, such as faith, reason, or the will of the people, but for its implementation each ultimately relies on force. Legitimacy requires the capacity for violence. In the age of Enlightenment, the sovereign state emerged as the sole entity authorized to use violence within a defined territory. Sovereignty meant nothing without territory, just as the “rights of man” meant little without property. Hence the modern state became defined by its monopoly on legitimate force.The origin of this concept helps to clarify AI’s potential effect on international order. In the 1500s, Europe’s religious unity under the Catholic Church collapsed from the pressures of the Protestant Reformation and rising nationalism. These in turn were enabled by a profound transformation: the spread of literacy through the printing press. Rising literacy fostered the prestige of vernacular languages, national literatures, and new interpretations of Scripture. Political identity — Italian, Spanish, English — was shaped as much by Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare as by any prince.
When the Thirty Years’ War, largely between Catholic and Protestant territories, ended in 1648, the new political order came to be known as “Westphalian,” named after the peace treaty. Westphalian politics was governed by the sovereign state, its political authority bounded by its territory, and its relations with other states governed by treaties backed by a balance of military and economic strength.
But Europe’s political transformation did not destroy the Catholic Church. The Church responded to the twin challenges of Protestantism and nationalism with reform and consolidation, becoming more centralized, more professionalized, and more capable of global expansion. Even as Christendom fragmented, the Church grew more coherent and purposeful.
From Printing Press to AI Drone Strikes
A similar transformation now confronts the modern nation-state. Like the Catholic Church in the 1500s, the nation-state has long struggled against forces of dissolution. But a technological and political upheaval may now be triggering its reassertion.The story of the nation-state’s decline goes roughly like this. Globalized economies favor the unrestricted movement of goods, capital, and labor. The institutions and practices required for this movement conflict with national cohesion. International governance regimes — think of the United Nations and the European Union — undermine the state’s capacity to define and defend its own laws and customs. These pressures converge in the question of how to think about immigration: popular discourse may focus on borders, on the state’s sovereignty, and on individual rights, but the deeper challenge is to the legitimacy of the distinction between citizen and noncitizen. That distinction — the political distinction par excellence because of its close association with the question of who rules over whom — is now blurred by a cosmopolitan global order that prizes universality over cultural and territorial particularity.
Not only does cosmopolitanism call citizenship into question; it also gives rise to new forms of violence that challenge the territorial logic of the state. The global diffusion of media in the twentieth century made human suffering visible in unprecedented ways, creating a moral imperative to act, often without regard for the sovereignty of other states. Humanitarian intervention — often a euphemism for military invasion — became a new instrument of policy for major powers. The disjunction between state sovereignty and cosmopolitanism has reached its most radical expression in international terrorism. Transnational groups, bound not by nationality but by ideology, target civilians in pursuit of political aims.
The story has an important technological component. As we’ve seen, the Westphalian system was formed partly as a response to the effects of the printing press; now the system finds itself reshaped by the cumulative impact of nuclear weapons, mass mobility, and instantaneous communication. Nuclear arms make direct conflict between great powers intolerably dangerous, replacing conventional warfare with long strategic stalemates and seemingly irrational proxy conflicts. Air travel allows individuals to think of themselves less as nationals and more as citizens of the world. Global supply chains bind the economic life of one nation to the productive capacity of far-flung others. And the spread of telecommunications, particularly the Internet, has created a global information market, where ideas flow without much regard for borders....
....MUCH MORE
Asymmetric cost-benefit terror:
"Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready"
A repost from 2019 that seems to have come true.
From Nautil.us:
In The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum discuss a disturbing hypothetical scenario. A lone actor in Nigeria, “home to a great deal of spamming and online fraud activity,” tricks women and teenage girls into downloading malware that enables him to monitor and record their activity, for the purposes of blackmail. The real story involved a California man who the FBI eventually caught and sent to prison for six years, but if he had been elsewhere in the world he might have gotten away with it. Many countries, as Wittes and Blum note, “have neither the will nor the means to monitor cybercrime, prosecute offenders, or extradite suspects to the United States.”
Technology is, in other words, enabling criminals to target anyone anywhere and, due to democratization, increasingly at scale. Emerging bio-, nano-, and cyber-technologies are becoming more and more accessible. The political scientist Daniel Deudney has a word for what can result: “omniviolence.” The ratio of killers to killed, or “K/K ratio,” is falling. For example, computer scientist Stuart Russell has vividly described how a small group of malicious agents might engage in omniviolence: “A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one-or two-gram shaped charge,” he says.
“You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: ‘Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.’ A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.” Manufacturers will be producing millions of these drones, available for purchase just as with guns now, Russell points out, “except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch.” In this scenario, the K/K ratio could be perhaps 3/1,000,000, assuming a 10-percent accuracy and only a single one-gram shaped charge per drone.
Will emerging technologies make the state system obsolete? It’s hard to see why not.That’s completely—and horrifyingly—unprecedented. The terrorist or psychopath of the future, however, will have not just the Internet or drones—called “slaughterbots” in this video from the Future of Life Institute—but also synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and advanced AI systems at their disposal. These tools make wreaking havoc across international borders trivial, which raises the question: Will emerging technologies make the state system obsolete? It’s hard to see why not. What justifies the existence of the state, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued, is a “social contract.” People give up certain freedoms in exchange for state-provided security, whereby the state acts as a neutral “referee” that can intervene when people get into disputes, punish people who steal and murder, and enforce contracts signed by parties with competing interests....MORE
It gets worse.
If interested see also 2022's "The US Navy wants swarms of thousands of small drones" and two from 2021:
"Meet the future weapon of mass destruction, the drone swarm"
From The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists....
"Autonomous 'Slaughterbot' Drones Reportedly Attack Libyans Using Facial Recognition Tech"
Also:
Islamic Terrorists Are Now Attacking With Drones In Nigeria
"Ukraine Is the First 'Hackers’ War'”
Coming to a country near you.
The author, "Juan Chulilla, is a cofounder of Red Team Shield S.L., a company dedicated to developing defense solutions against weaponized commercial drones."
