Image by DigitalMuses
So, the new paradigm for war is: if you can see it, you can kill it.
And drones all over the battlefield mean you can see it.
This has lead to a strategy of dispersal. Until the artillery, air and attack drones are neutralized troops need to avoid massing, because masses get taken out fast. The use of motorcycle infantry is one example of this: move fast, stay dispersed, and swarm.
This has particularly been the case in the Ukrainian war, but it’s also made Hezbollah’s guerilla tactics less effective and forced them to use their tunnels far more.
But forget all that. What happens in war, comes home. Combined with modern surveillance tech, by which I mean various recognition systems, including facial, gait, body and IR, not to mention the tracking devices known as phones everyone insists on carrying, this means that governments which are willing to invest in the necessary hardware and software (AI seems to be good for this), can easily track individuals.
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And once they’ve tracked you, they don’t need to send cops: they can just send drones.
What I expect, and not too far in the future, is for this paradigm to spread to domestic law enforcement. Lots of drones keeping an eye on everything, and drones being used to take out whomever they want. I’d also expect ground drones to be used far more for crowd control and suppression.
The great thing, if you weren’t a government, about pre-internet/cell-phone tech combined with huge cities was genuine anonymity most of the time. People could fade in the masses, and if they were able to break contact with internal security forces (that’s what cops are), you stood a good chance of not being identified, and even if identified, finding you wasn’t easy.
That era has been passing for some time: the ubiquitous security cameras, often with listening devices attached were the first step.
But what’s coming down the line is going to allow for some truly dystopian levels of control and scary levels of individual targeting.
And remember, drones can be very cheap.
We’ll talk a little about the weaknesses of current internal security regimes, and how to stay ahead. But for now, to start, if you’re doing something the government doesn’t like (perhaps demonstrating against a certain genocide) don’t carry a phone, even one that’s “turned off” and wear a mask. If you need to break contact, get inside a building and merge with a crowd, then find some simple way to change your clothing profile and ideally your IR profile.
Don’t, at least, make it easy for them.