We Brought Tanks; They Brought Drones

How drones are gutting superpower arsenals and rewriting the rules of war.

$300 drones are bankrupting billion-dollar war machines and the myth of military dominance with them. Author Created.

We once coveted the sky with billion‑dollar contraptions whose brochures promised invincibility and cinematic thunder. Now a few hundred bucks of molded plastic and lithium‑ion batteries can turn those silvered leviathans into smoking yard art. Earlier today, the U.S. Army secretary all but admitted the emperor’s tuxedo is actually a souvenir T‑shirt, confessing that an $800 Russian quadcopter can barbecue a tank whose price tag reads like the GDP of a small archipelago. (Army secretary says US can’t keep pumping money into expensive weapons that can be taken out by an $800 Russian drone)

Pause and savor that arithmetic. In no other marketplace would we accept a 5,000,000% price imbalance between maker and breaker. If Starbucks charged that margin, a latte would cost a Tesla. Yet in defense budgets the math sails through Congress faster than a drone crosses a trenchline. Every time a palm‑sized whirligig dive‑bombs a Western‑made Abrams, accountants in Detroit imagine a moment of silence — followed by the cash register’s cha‑ching they have come to call “patriotic duty.”

The Ukraine war gave us front‑row seats to this slapstick spectacle: YouTube videos of DJI knock‑offs humming like metallic bumblebees…