Comment by kragen

I don't think any of tensions, classical conflicts, asymmetric conflicts, the amount of people with nothing left to "loose", or all of these together, are at particularly unusual levels compared to the previous 6000 years, though they're higher than they were 20 years ago. But, for most of that time, warfare was geographically localized; you could avoid directly experiencing warfare by not being a soldier and living inside a country that wasn't being actively invaded, or on the national border between two countries that weren't at war with each other or being actively invaded. Sometimes that was easier said than done, but most people managed it most of the time.

In the Drone Age, though, you can remotely pilot a quadcopter 4300 km away to blow up airplanes on the airstrip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb — or to blow up your political opposition, if you can guess where they are or will be. The US has been doing this for 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/former-drone-operators-s... (use Readability mode to bypass "this is not a paywall") but a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper costs on the order of US$100 million, so there are less than 400 of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper#In... while Ukraine's most popular drones cost on the order of US$300, can be 3-D printed in a basement, already cause 70% of casualties on the battlefield, and are produced in volumes approaching 10 million per year https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/.... Many experts believe drones have made tanks obsolete on the battlefield https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJRqXBhnvCs.

Even without autonomous weapons, we're rapidly moving toward the future of borderless war without end so vividly envisioned in Slaughterbots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA. Ukraine is already an order of magnitude past the headline number it opens with, "Customer pilots directed almost 3,000 precision strikes last year."

If you want to see what precision strikes on the Ukrainian battlefield look like, plenty of Ukrainian military units have posted fundraising videos, so you can watch terrified conscripts dying all day long if you want to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIgTJ-73v4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhQBf4VFMwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A64TmBvbn1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXUqJAnAP9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCoCxARDEio.

Those videos are a preview of what life will be like for you and your family in the years to come as war becomes borderless.