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“War is not just the shower of bullets and bombs from both sides; it is also the shower of blood and bones on both sides.” Amit Kalantri

Every age dreams of a cleaner war. A war fought with minimal loss of lives, without grief, and without consequence. The ideal war, if such a thing exists, would be swift, contained, and bloodless. This dream echoes through ancient myths of champion warfare, where a single warrior stood in place of thousands. It reappears in the mercenary where violence was outsourced and professionalized. But today, it finds its most compelling incarnation in drones. Drones in the air, drones on land, drones in the sea.

Drone warfare appears to fulfill the long-standing dream of clean conflict. It offers a battlefield where machines clash instead of men, where cities remain intact and soldiers stay distant. Civilians, in theory, are spared. Economic disruption is minimized. The drone becomes not just a weapon, but a promise: that war can be waged without the human cost that has long defined it. This vision reframes war as a technical challenge, solved by algorithms, sensors, and synthetic precision. But beneath the surface lies a deeper truth: war, even mechanized, remains a human enterprise. The machines may fight, but the consequences still fall on people.

War rarely erupts from a single spark. Beyond the clash of weapons and the roar of machines lie deeper fractures, the root causes of war are found in different combinations of economic, political, cultural, and psychological factors. The battlefield is merely the surface expression of unresolved tensions that simmer in the structures of society. War often marches to the rhythm of economics. Most wars are about how value and wealth are created, distributed, and accumulated. At its core, war is often a contest over who creates wealth, who controls wealth, and who feels entitled to more wealth. Resources, trade routes, production chains, and strategic geography become focal points of competition. When diplomacy fails to reconcile these competing claims, violence becomes the language of resolution. But war is not only about material gain. It is also about identity, fear, and perceived injustice. Nations and groups go to war not just to acquire but to assert, to prove strength, to avenge loss, to resist domination. These emotional and symbolic drivers are harder to quantify, yet they shape the logic of conflict as much as any economic calculus. Victory is not always measured in territory or ideology, but in the balance sheet of destruction. If the enemy loses more, in infrastructure, in economic capacity, in future potential, then victory can be claimed, even in retreat. This logic turns war into a ledger of ruin, where the deliberate dismantling of an adversary’s ability to generate wealth becomes a strategic objective. This is what the machines will fight for.

The desire to contain war has long inspired the idea of symbolic combat, duels fought to spare the masses. One of the most enduring legends is the clash between the Horatii and the Curiatii. To avoid full-scale war, Rome and Alba Longa chose three champions each. In the end, a single Horatius survived, prevailing not through brute strength but through cunning. By isolating his wounded opponents and striking them one by one, he turned strategy into survival. Yet his victory was stained by personal tragedy: upon returning, he killed his sister for mourning an enemy. This myth captures the paradox of champion warfare, the hope of resolution without ruin, and the reality that even symbolic battles carry the weight of grief, vengeance, and unintended consequences.

From a narrative perspective, no duel is more iconic than David versus Goliath. More than a tale of warfare, it is a story of belief, in courage, in cunning, and in the power of the underdog. David’s victory was not just a triumph of faith, but a strategic disruption. He did not match Goliath’s brute strength; he bypassed it. In this sense, David was not merely a champion, he was a prototype of maneuver warfare, striking at vulnerability rather than strength. The story endures because it speaks to something deeper than combat: the hope that intelligence and agility can overcome overwhelming force.

The dream of champion warfare, a duel to spare the masses, has rarely survived contact with reality. While stories like Horatii and Curiatii or David and Goliath endure in cultural memory, they are more myth than method, symbolic echoes of a desire to contain violence within ritualized boundaries. History offers only a few documented attempts to realize this dream: the duel between Prince Mstislav and Prince Rededya in 1022, and the Challenge of Barletta in 1503. The former was a brutal contest, the latter, more theatrical than strategic. Yet even these rare examples failed to prevent broader conflict. The duel, however dramatic, could not resolve the deeper fractures that gave rise to war. Champion warfare, elegant in theory, proved insufficient in practice.

When war becomes too costly at home, or when the preferred social groups lack soldiers, societies often outsource violence. This outsourcing usually takes two forms: proxy warfare or mercenary forces. The principle is simple: someone else fights the war on your behalf. Proxy warfare delegates combat to another actor, reducing political risk and domestic costs while pursuing strategic goals. Yet proxies bring uncertainty, as their agendas often diverge from those of their sponsors. Mercenaries, on the other hand, turned war into transactions, fighters bound by contract, not patriotism. Their allegiance shifted with the highest bidder, fueling prolonged, low-intensity conflicts and exposing the paradox of outsourced warfare: strategic precision paired with unpredictable loyalty. Drone warfare promises a solution to the paradox of outsourced warfare, precision and control paired with digital loyalty, at least until hacked.

Drone warfare is not a new idea; it’s a modern remix of old strategies. It draws from the myths of champion duels and the pragmatism of outsourced warfare, all within a sense of full control. When populations are unwilling to bleed, and proxies prove unreliable, drones offer a solution. They have shattered the monopoly on aerial power. No longer confined to rich nation-states, drones now serve militias, insurgents, terrorist networks, and criminal organizations. In places like Syria, Yemen, and the Sahel, they act as both scouts and strike platforms. Drones seem to fulfill the ancient dream of minimizing bloodshed, not by avoiding war, but by mechanizing it.

The democratization of drone technology has created a new possibility for weak economic groups in the world. With access to commercial platforms, open-source software, and improvised payloads, non-state actors have transformed drones into weapons of asymmetric warfare. This means that more people and more groups in society have access to their own proxy champion warriors. In the shadow of global conflict, criminal organizations have quietly adopted drones as tools of protection, surveillance, and if law enforcement or other criminal competitors shows up, to disruption. These machines, once symbols of military precision, now serve cartels and gangs, not to wage war in the traditional sense, but to defend illicit economies and evade law enforcement. This unmasks a new dimension of drone warfare, were profit and survival trumps national interest as more groups can join the fight.

Drones are modular, built from off-the-shelf parts, 3D-printed components, and open-source code. Their rapid evolution makes the battlefield a laboratory, where every drone is a prototype. Machine learning and automatic updates replace costly human training, but old questions persist: do drones escape the flaws of mercenaries and champions, or replicate them digitally? As access spreads, power becomes distributed, volatile, and anonymous, eroding the state’s monopoly on violence, a cornerstone of nationhood. High-end drones are fragile and expensive, while low-cost swarms overwhelm defenses. The battlefield is no longer distant; it is a network stretching from war zones to urban skies, blurring the line between conflict and daily life. Security is no longer about borders but about controlling the air above every street.

Drones redefine champion warfare, shifting focus from soldiers and weapons to economic endurance. Each drone carries a cost, making war a contest of production capacity rather than manpower. Victory now depends on crippling the enemy’s economic base, destroying factories, workers, and revenue streams that fund their drones. The promise of clean, mechanized war, a battlefield of machines sparing cities and civilians, collapses under reality. Drone wars begin as contests of technology but end with shattered cities and broken lives. Donbas today echoes Berlin 1945 and Grozny 1999: technology does not erase destruction; it only rewrites its method. When drones fail to deliver decisive victory, war reverts to its oldest formula; kill the people, destroy the infrastructure, cripple the economy.

The dream of bloodless conflict was always an illusion. Drones do not bleed, but humans still do, and in greater numbers as access to these machines’ spreads. What began as a promise of precision and restraint has become a contest without boundaries. We imagined drones as instruments of control, a way to contain war, to make them cleaner, safer, almost surgical. Instead, they have multiplied actors, accelerated escalation, and blurred the line between war and crime. Violence is no longer anchored to territory; it is tethered to economics and innovation, driven by groups fighting for survival in the shadows. The cost of war remains measured in grief, vengeance, and unintended consequences. Perhaps the real question is not how drones change war, but whether they make peace even harder to achieve.

Daniel Ekwall is professor at University of Borås and Swedish Defence University. Per Skoglund, Lieutenant Colonel and senior lecturer at Swedish Defense University and Per Ödling, is professor at Lund University