Around 1 a.m. on May 24, 2026, Russian forces launched one of the largest aerial assaults on Ukraine of the four-year war. Ukraine's Air Force reported that the strike package included 600 drones and 90 missiles, among them an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile fired from the Kapustin Yar range and aimed at Bila Tserkva in the Kyiv region. NPR, ABC News and the Kyiv Independent reported that sixteen missiles and fifty-one drones impacted across fifty-four locations, killing several civilians and injuring dozens more. Buildings burned in every district of the capital. Ukraine's culture minister, Tetyana Berezhna, said the night damaged the largest number of cultural institutions in Kyiv since 2022, including the museum dedicated to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and one of the city's oldest markets.
What that night revealed is not really about Ukraine. A modern European capital, sheltered for over a year by some of the world's densest layered air defense, spent the night defending against an inventory designed less to penetrate than to exhaust. The drones arrived in waves. The missiles followed on top of them. Defense crews triaged threats in real time. Hospitals filled, power grids re-routed, insurance underwriters re-priced overnight, and in the underlying calculus the cost of one interceptor was weighed against the cost of a Shahed-type drone built from foreign components and assembled at industrial scale in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan, where Ukrainian military intelligence estimates Russia now produces roughly 2,700 such drones per month. The exchange ratio favored the attacker.
This is the condition any state must now defend against: cheap, distributed, increasingly autonomous coercive systems pressing against the political assumption so foundational that we usually forget it is an assumption, namely that the state, and the state alone, holds a workable monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
The classic formulation belongs to Max Weber, who in 1919 described the modern state as the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Charles Tilly, writing later in a more historical register, argued that European states emerged in large part because rulers who could organize violence efficiently could also tax, and the two capacities reinforced one another over centuries. Janice Thomson, in her work on mercenaries and pirates, complicated the picture by showing how messy and partial the monopoly has always been in practice. None of these scholars treated it as absolute. What they identified was an arrangement: a working bargain in which citizens surrender private violence and accept public authority in exchange for order. The bargain has always been imperfect and often unjust. It remains the architecture beneath modern politics.
Arrangements of force change. When they do, political institutions eventually follow. The pattern is recurrent rather than deterministic. For most of premodern history, effective violence was constrained by bodies, animals, terrain, metal, training and time. A medieval knight was an entire economic system on horseback, requiring land, retainers, equipment and a lifetime of training. Feudalism distributed political authority because it distributed coercive capacity. Kings might claim superiority, but lords controlled castles, retainers and armed men.
Gunpowder altered this slowly. Its long-term effect was to change the arithmetic of force. A trained aristocratic warrior could now be killed by a drilled infantryman whose preparation took months rather than decades. The decisive consequence was organizational rather than tactical. To use gunpowder effectively, rulers needed taxes, arsenals, roads, officers, standardized equipment, payrolls, magazines, engineers and permanent institutions capable of feeding, moving and disciplining large forces. The fiscal-military state emerged because the new logic of violence demanded a central authority capable of sustaining it. Over time this produced larger armies, professional officer corps, stronger monarchies and eventually national armies that reached deep into society through conscription, public debt, censuses and military industries.
The second great shift moved in the opposite direction. The Trinity test of July 16, 1945 introduced not merely a more powerful bomb but a new ceiling for organized violence. From that point forward, direct war between great powers became potentially suicidal. Nuclear weapons did not require mass participation in the way industrial armies did; they required scientific infrastructure, industrial depth, command systems and delivery platforms that only a small number of states could sustain. Lawrence Freedman, Thomas Schelling and the wider deterrence literature developed the vocabulary by which the resulting order made sense: deterrence, second-strike capability, escalation control. The post-1945 international system was described in the language of law, sovereignty and human rights, but its deepest military fact was nuclear restraint at the top and proxy violence below. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, the Arab-Israeli wars, dozens of civil wars and insurgencies followed. The great powers became cautious in particular ways, while violence migrated sideways into deniable, indirect and sub-conventional forms.
The drone era introduces a third kind of disruption, with a different structural shape from the first two. Where gunpowder centralized authority upward into the state, and nuclear weapons concentrated ultimate destructive capacity in the hands of a few governments, what is happening now is the diffusion of effective coercive reach: the cost of observing and striking targets at distance with precision is falling, fast. The asymmetry between attacker and defender is the operative point. A defender must protect every refinery, every transformer, every airfield, every bridge, every parked aircraft, every public ceremony. An attacker needs only one route through.
Audrey Kurth Cronin, in her 2020 Oxford University Press study Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation Is Arming Tomorrow's Terrorists, gave this pattern a name: "lethal empowerment." Her argument, built on cases from dynamite to the AK-47 to commercial drones, is that periods in which accessible, modifiable, off-the-shelf technologies fall into wide use have historically driven new patterns of political violence by shifting power away from states and toward smaller actors. T.X. Hammes, in a July 2014 War on the Rocks essay and a wider body of work since at the U.S. National Defense University, formulated the same pressure as the rise of "small, smart and many" weapons against "few and exquisite" platforms. The proliferation of cheap, sensor-equipped, networked systems, Hammes argues, may overwhelm the small numbers of exceptionally capable platforms on which advanced militaries have spent decades and trillions? The intellectual conversation has been running for over a decade. Ukraine has now provided the empirical evidence.
What Ukraine teaches is how rapidly drone-centric warfare scales when production, tactics, software and battlefield feedback are linked into a single adaptive system. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at the NATO Defense Industry Forum in The Hague in June 2025 that Ukraine had the capacity to produce over 8 million drones a year, constrained chiefly by financing. Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal reported in December 2025 that Ukraine had supplied approximately 3 million first-person-view drones to its armed forces over the course of the year, against a procurement target of 4.5 million. Production has moved from garages to industrial facilities to a distributed network of more than 150 manufacturers, many of them small. The workshop-to-front feedback loop runs faster than any NATO procurement cycle. A new countermeasure can be modeled in days and fielded in weeks.
The clearest demonstration of what this enables came on June 1, 2025. In an operation that the Security Service of Ukraine codenamed Spider's Web, 117 FPV drones, smuggled into Russia over roughly eighteen months and concealed in wooden containers on commercial trucks with remotely opened roofs, struck five Russian air bases from Murmansk in the Arctic to Irkutsk in Siberia. Ukrainian officials reported around 40 aircraft destroyed or damaged, including Tu-95, Tu-22M3 and Tu-160 strategic bombers and at least one A-50 airborne early-warning aircraft, with damage estimated at roughly $7 billion. The Financial Times reported the strikes accounted for around a fifth of Russia's operational long-range aviation. The operation cost a tiny fraction of the assets it destroyed.
The same pattern appears at sea. Ukraine's Magura V5 unmanned surface vessels, each costing between $250,000 and $300,000 according to U.S. Naval Institute reporting, became in February 2024 the first naval drones to sink an enemy warship in combat. The missile corvette Ivanovets went down first; the landing ship Tsezar Kunikov followed days later; the patrol ship Sergei Kotov, valued at around $65 million, was destroyed in March of that year. The Royal United Services Institute and other analysts argue that uncrewed surface vessels effectively forced the Russian Black Sea Fleet to relocate its main forces from Sevastopol toward Novorossiysk. A country with no conventional navy neutralized a major fleet using platforms that cost less than a typical luxury apartment.
On land, the same adaptive cycle is reshaping tactics in real time. Both Russian and Ukrainian forces now operate fiber-optic FPV drones that trail thin spools of optical cable up to ten kilometers long. The drones are physically immune to the electronic warfare that has defined the contested airspace of the war, because they transmit no radio signal. They are slower, harder to maneuver, and the cable itself can betray the operator's position, but they restored to attackers a capability that jamming had taken away. The Center for European Policy Analysis, in an April 2025 report, documented their growing use by Russian elite units such as the Rubicon detachment against high-value Ukrainian targets including HIMARS launchers. By October 2025, The War Zone reported, fiber-optic drones had reached as far as the city of Kramatorsk. The pattern is recursive. Every defense generates a countermeasure, every countermeasure a counter-countermeasure, faster than doctrine or procurement can absorb.
The pattern does not require a full-scale war. On September 14, 2019, drones and cruise missiles struck the Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais. The attack cut Saudi production by approximately half for several days and removed around 5 percent of global oil supply, producing the largest single-day spike in oil prices ever recorded. Analysts later estimated the drones used may have cost as little as $15,000 each. The facilities were defended by billions of dollars of layered air defense, including Patriot batteries. The attackers, whether Houthi or Iranian or both, found a path through anyway. The Houthi campaign in the Red Sea since November 2023 has reinforced the lesson at strategic scale. According to PBS, citing U.S. and U.N. data, the Houthis attacked more than 100 merchant vessels between November 2023 and January 2025, sinking two and killing four sailors. The campaign forced major shipping firms to reroute traffic around the Cape of Good Hope, lengthening voyages by weeks and adding substantial cost to global trade. A small non-state actor partially closed one of the world's most important shipping corridors against the combined naval power of the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and several regional partners, by demonstrating that the corridor was contested.
The dominant analytical reading of all this, from Cronin and Hammes onward, holds that the diffusion of cheap precision weakens the state's monopoly on force. The European policy conversation has largely accepted that reading. The argument advanced here is that this reading is half right, and that the more important half is the opposite one. The drone era will, on present trajectory, leave the state stronger than it found it, not weaker.
The mechanism is the asymmetry of regulatory durability against offensive diffusion. Offensive capability spreads quickly, then plateaus against physical and economic limits: payload, range, electronic vulnerability, component supply chains, training, and the simple fact that destroying a target is easier than achieving a political objective. Regulatory and surveillance capability moves more slowly, but it ratchets. Once installed, it is rarely removed. Every major incident is metabolized into permanent infrastructure: registration regimes, remote identification, restricted zones, sensor networks, automated detection, hardened perimeters, integrated AI analysis. The Houthi campaign did not dissolve maritime sovereignty; it produced Operation Prosperity Guardian, the U.S.-led multinational coalition announced by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in December 2023, and accelerated naval counter-drone investment across multiple NATO members. The September 2025 Polish drone incursion did not weaken NATO; it triggered Article 4 consultations and the launch of Operation Eastern Sentry. The Copenhagen and Oslo airport closures did not delegitimize the Danish state; they produced an emergency civilian drone ban and, within weeks, a coordinated EU-level airspace security review. The pattern is consistent. Distributed offense produces incidents; the political effect of incidents is to legitimize further centralization of defense.
Two structural features sustain this asymmetry. The first is that cheap offensive systems remain dependent on inputs that the state can in principle observe and shape: semiconductors, satellite positioning, batteries with energy density only a few firms can produce, communications spectrum, export-controlled components, and physical points of assembly. The state does not need to win every engagement to control the upstream conditions of the engagement. The second is that demand for protection is more politically durable than demand for any specific freedom that protection constrains. Citizens who have experienced an incident, or watched one on a screen, will accept measures they would have rejected in calmer periods, and those measures persist long after the immediate fear recedes. The ratchet is not technological. It is psychological and institutional.
The European Union's drone framework, built around Regulation (EU) 2019/947 and the related delegated Regulation 2019/945, brought all drone operators under registration requirements through their national aviation authorities and, from January 2024, required Remote ID broadcasting for drones in the Specific category and for those carrying CE class marks C1, C2, C3, C5 and C6 in the Open category. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency in Cologne coordinates the framework. Member states retain the right to designate geographical zones in which flight is restricted or banned. These rules, designed primarily for civil aviation safety, are now load-bearing elements of a broader security architecture. A counter-drone industry has grown around them, including firms such as DroneShield, Dedrone, Anduril and Epirus, marketing radar, radio-frequency detection, optical tracking, acoustic sensors and directed-energy systems. The market did not exist in this form a decade ago. None of these regulatory and industrial structures will be dismantled when the immediate threat recedes. They will stay. They will deepen. And each future incident, however minor, will justify their further extension.
The historical parallel is dynamite. When Alfred Nobel commercialized it in 1867, anarchist movements adopted it as the weapon of the century, and a wave of bombings across Europe and North America in the 1880s and 1890s produced widespread fear that the state had lost its grip on violence. What followed was not the collapse of state authority. What followed was the modern security state: dedicated political police, expanded surveillance, international intelligence cooperation, passport and border controls, fingerprinting, the systematic monitoring of suspect populations. The dynamite panic provided the political justification for instruments that long outlived it. The same pattern recurred with the AK-47, with hijacking, with September 11, and with each successive cycle of distributed violence. The state has consistently emerged from these moments not weaker but more capable of seeing into the lives of its citizens.
This produces a testable prediction. Over the next ten years, the dominant political effect of cheap drones in Europe will be the entrenchment of low-altitude airspace surveillance, the integration of civilian aviation regulation with national security architecture, and the normalization of permanent counter-drone infrastructure around critical sites and public events. The proportion of European GDP devoted to internal security functions will rise. The fraction of public space within passive sensor coverage will rise. The legal scope of emergency powers around drone incidents will expand and not contract. If, by 2036, these indicators have not moved in this direction, the thesis is wrong. If they have, the central effect of the drone age will have been not the weakening of the state but its quiet reconstitution along more intrusive lines, justified by a threat the state itself could only partially contain.
The strategic instability of the transition is real and worth naming carefully, because it cuts against the prediction. Nuclear deterrence depended on attribution. A state that suffered an attack could identify the source, calibrate a response and rely on the rational calculations of an identifiable opponent. Drones complicate all three. The September 2025 Polish incursion came from Belarus and was attributed to Russia, but Russia denied intent and described the drones as having strayed under jamming. The Copenhagen sightings were never publicly attributed. Operation Spider's Web was executed from within Russian territory by drones smuggled inside ordinary commercial trucks; the operators were already out of the country when the strikes began. As cheap, deniable, long-range systems proliferate, the line between sabotage, terrorism, hybrid operations and conventional military action becomes harder to draw. The lower cost of attack increases the number of incidents, and the number of incidents increases the probability of miscalculation. The same uncertainty that empowers small actors also empowers states to attribute ambiguously, retaliate selectively and expand authority based on threats the public cannot independently assess.
The likely shape of the next decade is not chaos. It will look quite organized: more checkpoints, more sensors, more restricted zones, more automated monitoring, more hardened buildings, more invisible security systems woven into ordinary public life. It will also include more deniable attacks, more infrastructure incidents, more private security and more difficulty distinguishing crime from sabotage from war. Wealthy institutions will buy private counter-drone protection. Less wealthy communities will live with more exposure and more policing. The sky above ordinary life will become an arena where inequality is visible. None of this constitutes a weakening of the state. It constitutes the state expanding into a new domain, paid for by a public that has come to expect protection from a class of threats it did not previously know to fear.
The drone age, on this reading, is misnamed when it is described as an era of state retreat. It is an era of state mutation. The monopoly on legitimate force is being neither preserved in its current form nor abolished. It is being reorganized around a wider perimeter, defended by a denser web of sensors and rules, and legitimated by a steady stream of incidents that the public will encounter primarily through screens. The political question is not whether the state will survive the transition. The political question is what kind of state will emerge from it, and whether the bargain by which citizens accept public authority will hold once that authority has visibly extended into the airspace above their homes, the metadata of their devices, the sensor coverage of their public squares and the predictive systems trained on the patterns of their daily lives.
The technologies will keep changing. The historical lesson is that institutions reshape themselves to absorb new categories of threat, and that the reshaping is rarely undone. Gunpowder produced the modern state. Nuclear weapons produced the deterrence order. Cheap precision, if the pattern of past technological diffusion holds, will produce a state that knows more, sees more and intervenes earlier than the one we inherited, in the name of protecting a public that has learned to want exactly that. Whether this outcome is desirable is a separate question. That it is the most probable outcome, on the evidence presently available, is the argument of this essay.