The era of drone swarms has begun

The impact on the battlefield is brutal.

Imagine a dark and silent sky and suddenly it is filled with hundreds of moving points, they are not fireworks, there are no human pilots, well, it is important to clarify that they are not aliens either, they communicate with each other, make second-second decisions and have a single objective, total saturation.

The era of solitary drones is over, welcome to the era of artificial intelligence swarms, for decades, drones were expensive remotely controlled machines, like the famous Predator and Reaper, they depended on satellites, human operators and centralized decisions, they were powerful, but slow, expensive and limited, now everything has changed.

The new drones known as FPV are cheap, agile and often improvised. They cost a few hundred dollars, but they carry a destruction capacity that previously only existed in military equipment worth millions and the most shocking thing, they are no longer alone, a swarm is not just a group of drones, it is an organism, inspired by bees and birds, these systems function as a collective intelligence, where each unit is simple, but the whole is extremely sophisticated and that completely changes the logic of war.

It is no longer about having the best tank, the best fighter or the most advanced technology, now, the advantage is in who manages to produce more, faster and with enough intelligence to coordinate everything. In practice, war stopped being about quality and became about intelligent mass. The numbers show the impact of this change, in a recent report on CBS News' 60 Minutes program, correspondent Holly Williams revealed that nearly 80% of combat casualties in the war between Ukraine and Russia are already caused by drones.

The front line was transformed into an invisible hunting zone with kilometers of extension where any movement can be detected, followed and eliminated and behind all this is the true brain of the swarm, artificial intelligence, it allows the drones to navigate even when the GPS is blocked by electronic warfare, instead of depending on a signal, they see the environment, recognize patterns and orient themselves visually.

Computer vision algorithms can identify a tank camouflaged among trees or a hidden soldier without human intervention and that leads to an inevitable question, if the drone can identify the target alone, it can also decide when to attack, that is the point where technology stops being just a tool and begins to become an agent.

$500 drones are already destroying leopard tanks and abrams cost over 10 million, air defense missiles like the Patriot cost millions per unit, while swarms of drones can be mass produced for a fraction of that value, it's an account that just won't close, it is mathematically impossible to sustain that type of defense in the long term, the examples are already everywhere, naval drones used in the Black Sea, saturation attacks with shahhead drones and increasingly more systems autonomous ones capable of operating even without direct communication.