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Notes -
Second reply to focus on this for a minute. Some light future fantasizing. My general thought is that we are seeing a bifurcation of the profession of arms. Drones deny enough battlespace that the only way to be effective is to have highly trained teams of specialists with heavy tech support, drone and anti-drone capability, stealth tech, armor, night vision, thermal sights, goybeam etc.
Mass armies of armor and infantry may be a thing of the past, and with them the political organization necessary to coordinate such a large, participatory military. Military power may come to rest in a smaller and smaller group of more and more professionalized soldiers with access to the wildly expensive kit necessary. In time, the advancement of military technology may lead us into a re-feudalization of our politics and the fragmenting of the large nation-states of the industrial era.
This is happening anyway, it is a reliable technological cycle. Whether it's drones or AI or something else that finally pushes warfare into that realm, those days are coming. In two hundred years, we may be talking about the People's Republic of Chicago expanding its canadian territories at the expense of the Duchy of Seattle.
Or, it may lead to a consolidation of power in the existing international superstructure and the US and China will be the final balancing empires. Depends on how much social organization the new technologies require for military supremacy.
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