On 17 and 18 September 2024, thousands of handheld pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies intended for use by Hezbollah exploded simultaneously in two separate events across Lebanon and Syria, in an Israeli attack nicknamed Operation Grim Beeper.

The attack graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.

The targets won’t be just terrorists. Our computers are vulnerable, and increasingly so are our cars, our refrigerators, our home thermostats and many other useful things in our orbits. Targets are everywhere.

Bruce Schneier, Israel’s Pager Attacks and Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy rewrote the rules of warfare. Almost no one had imagined that the Japanese could sneak across an entire ocean to attack an “impregnable fortress,” as U.S. strategists had described Hawaii.

On June 1 2025, the Ukrainians are rewriting the rules of warfare again…

Operation Spider’s Web was a covert drone attack carried out by the Security Service of Ukraine deep inside Russia during the Russo-Ukrainian War. The coordinated strikes targeted the Russian Air Force’s Long-Range Aviation assets at five air bases—Belaya, Dyagilevo, Ivanovo Severny, Olenya, and Ukrainka—using drones concealed in and launched from trucks on Russian territory.

If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases? Militaries that thought they had secured their air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that can be easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s.

Bruce Schneier, The Ramifications of Ukraine’s Drone Attack

The Unmanned Systems Forces is a branch of the Armed Forces of Ukraine that specializes in drone warfare and the use of unmanned military robots on land, sea, and air. It was created in the midst of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, and was formally established on 11 June 2024. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces launched Harpies on April 2 2024, an all-female unit specializing in robotic combat.

The Operation Spider’s Web is a warning to the world’s other military forces, it reinforced principles that have been hiding in plain sight for years…

In fact, if there is a single topic that has been covered in depth by science fiction, that’s warfare and military planning.

But let me go even a bit further and look into one of the most provocative and enlightening exercises in anticipation I have read. In From Literature to Biterature, Peter Swisrky, a Canadian novelist, scholar, and literary critic, and a leading authority on Stanisław Lem, includes a chapter titled: How to Make War and Assassinate People.

Let me cherry-pick a few ideas (my emphasis):

We can look forward to the day when assassination becomes an exact science, thanks to microbotic devolution.

Mechanical soldiers are every general’s wet dream (…) The growing use on today’s battlefields of self-guided missiles, self-propelled vehicles, and pilotless drones (or Unmanned Aerial Systems, as the US Army calls them) is but a first step in this direction.

Would you be surprised to hear that over the next forty years drones are expected to entirely replace Amer-ican piloted war aircraft?

Because humans are the slowest, most vulnerable, and politically costliest element of military ops, future wars will be waged entirely by robots (…) the soldier will become the weapon.

In the first phase of this devolution, weapons systems will be reduced to resemble insects (…) The last phase will see weapons the size of bacteria and with bacteria’s capacity to replicate themselves (…) Ultimately, microbotic weapons systems are destined to completely upturn the nature of combat and render war as we know it obsolete.

War and peace will be replaced by a permanent state of crypto-hostilities conducted by autonomous systems so camouflaged (…) That’s why the next world war will not be televised. It will be eerily silent

Progressive miniaturization coupled with molecular genetics will enable assassination of just the person you want dead.

A virus that will dissolve the cell walls in your body will activate only when it matches the dna of the dictator, or the freedom fighter, or the democratically elected leader, or the dissident stashed away in a not-so-safe house.

Ecologically speaking, bacteria are hands down the fittest organisms on the planet (…) So what that they do not write literature or manufacture computers? Who said that this should be the gauge of adaptive success? (…) [T]heir creative potential is arguably superior to humans’, except that it is expressed chemically and biologically and not aesthetically.

Autonomous microbotic armies are anathema to control freaks in every echelon of every military establishment (…) Floating “smart dust,” the size of sand grains or smaller, is already in Beta development.

Maybe warfare is, after all, the single best competitive advantage of the human species… And there (we?) they are!

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Featured Image: Harpies Unit commander Daria -DSHK- Apr 02, 2025