A Revolution in Military Affairs is the rare combination of technology, doctrine and organisation that resets the rules. The machine gun did it in 1914. Combined arms did it in 1940. Precision strike did it in 1991. And now — or so it appears.
Carnegie's April 2026 paper, "The New Revolution in Military Affairs," argues that drone warfare meets the criterion: not because of the drones themselves, but because the operational concepts, force structures, and industrial models have all reset around them.
Michael Kofman is more cautious. The deeper advantages — force generation, mobilisation, reconstitution, integration with conventional fires — "are likely to prove much more significant than being second- or third-mover in the drone fight." Justin Bronk and Stacie Pettyjohn echo the qualification: drones cannot, by themselves, substitute for mass.
The honest synthesis: yes, a real RMA is underway, but it is one in which drones are necessary, not sufficient. The winner will be the side that integrates drones, AI, fires, and human formations fastest — not the side that has the most drones.
Four points across a hundred and twenty-six years. The fourth is the one in which this volume reads.
Admiral Sam Paparo, the U.S. INDOPACOM commander, coined the term "Hellscape" in 2024 to describe an intent to turn the Taiwan Strait into "an unmanned hellscape" with drones. A February 2026 CNAS report argues Taiwan should adopt a Ukrainian-style asymmetric drone defence — layered, mass-produced, short-range, with maritime, surface, and air drones plus mines targeting Chinese amphibious craft from eighty kilometres out to the beach. The catch is the industrial gap: Taiwan aims at one hundred and eighty thousand drones a year by 2028 — roughly four per cent of Ukraine's 2025 output.
The September 2025 Russian drone incursion into Poland — nineteen-plus Geran and decoy drones penetrating NATO airspace, with up to four shot down by Polish F-16s and Dutch F-35s — was the first time a NATO member engaged Russian assets over its own territory since 2022. Within forty-eight hours NATO responded with Operation Eastern Sentry, a multi-domain mission running from the Baltic to the Black Sea. European leaders agreed to a continent-wide "drone wall." The honest assessment from Carnegie's April 2026 paper: NATO has "no clear answer" yet to a Russian doctrine pairing small-group infiltration with massed FPV and Shahed strikes.
The June 2025 Israel-Iran twelve-day war and the subsequent U.S.-Iran "Operation Epic Fury" demonstrated the cost-asymmetry endgame on a strategic scale. Iran launched over two thousand Shahed drones and a thousand-plus ballistic missiles. Gulf air defence interceptor stocks have been visibly stressed. Ukrainian companies — Wild Hornets, Fire Point, Swift Beat — are now exporting interceptor drones and counter-Shahed expertise to Gulf states.
Autonomy and ethics — Ukraine maintains a "human in the loop" for strike authorisation, but the line is blurring. Proliferation — Iran is exporting Shahed designs; Russia is offering to manufacture Orlans and Lancets abroad; North Korea is acquiring localised Shahed production. The barrier to entry for a state or non-state actor to field meaningful drone warfare capability is now in the single-digit-million-dollar range. Western defence procurement — the five-to-fifteen-year acquisition cycle is incompatible with a six-week tech generation. Whether NATO bureaucracies can adopt Ukraine's Brave1 model remains to be seen. Industrial base — NATO's interceptor production is a fraction of what saturation drone warfare requires. Stockpile depletion is the strategic risk of the decade.
If you read past this sheet only once a quarter, watch these. (i) Autonomous swarm scale: if either side fields a hundred-plus drone fully autonomous swarm in combat — the Zaluzhnyi 2027 horizon — the calculus tips sharply. (ii) Chinese component embargo: any restriction by Beijing on motors, batteries, or fibre spools is the biggest single risk to either combatant's industrial base. (iii) Western interceptor inventory: if PAC-3 production crosses twelve hundred per year and US interceptor-drone production hits Ukrainian-scale volumes, NATO's structural disadvantage closes.