Nate Ranson
SECR-6914
Response 1

“Do Emerging Military Technologies Matter for International Politics?”

Betteridge's law says that any headline that poses a question can be answered with “no.” Recent conflicts and their reliance on gaining every technological edge possible, however, are beginning to demonstrate an unambiguous “yes.” Horowitz explains that emerging technology might not only be changing the battlefield, but also the general population’s opinion on warfare and conflict. The author accurately predicts the disruptive power these technologies can have, but the rapid democratization of battlefield drones and the blending of state and non-state cyber capabilities have fundamentally altered international politics by lowering the bar to lethal and cross-domain strategies. This outcome has direct implications not only for warfare tactics but also for public opinion.

Drone warfare, as described in this article, was still seen as a tool reserved for the most technologically advanced armies. The MQ-9 Reaper could be operated from across the globe and, using air-to-surface munitions, eliminate a target. This example, as Horowitz points out, keeps these heavy payload drones in the hands of those willing to invest, namely large, modern armies. They offer operational safety for the pilot and reduce the need for sending in manpower in the form of covert, special operations teams to perform targeted killings; however, the role of drones in conflicts like the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and the Myanmar civil war is evolving beyond an armed panopticon.

At the time of its writing in 2020, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict had not started in earnest, much less ground to the brutal stalemate of 2025 onward (BBC, 2026). In the time since this article, drone-based warfare has seen a dramatic shift from loitering munitions to battlefield-built, just-in-time drones. Ukraine is currently burning through upwards of 10,000 drones per day (Fried, 2025). These drones are not the lumbering, over-the-horizon munitions-machines that allow their operator a direct and uninterrupted line-of-sight to the target. Instead, these are purpose built, localized drones delivering supplies, reconnaissance, and munitions to teams in a battlefield littered with RF noise and countermeasures. These drones now serve both short-range reconnaissance and anti-personnel support and medium-range, intercountry threats to infrastructure.

Ukraine, backed by a tranche of Western and European donors, and Russia, a weapons manufacturing power in their own right, do not tell the entire story, either. The Myanmar civil war that has boiled for the last 5 years has seen an explosion in the use of drone forces across both sides of the battle lines (Mon, 2025). Drone warfare, in regional or local contexts, has leveled the playing field between state and non-state actors. As circulated on social media, internationalist brigades and militant groups have been able to utilize drones as a means of offense even in the mountainous, rural landscape of the Chin state in Myanmar (Witch Team FPV, 2026), democratizing modern -- if not simple -- weaponry.

One event that had a souring effect on the American public was the Obama-era admission of using drones to kill Americans abroad (Ackerman, Shachtman, 2013). When scaling back the context of drones from targeted assassination machines to localized battlefield application, the general public might view these tools akin to an M-16, Kalashnikov, or other conventional small arms as necessary materiel. Whether battlefield drones will be seen as equivalent to an assault rifle remains to be seen, but largely the public does not hang the moral judgement or burden of proof on an individual soldier the way it does on a nation conducting targeted assassinations.

The other piece of Horowitz’s predictions centers around the cyberwar/netwar front, where public opinion around cyberwarfare is similarly muted. To this point, cyber operations have not been directly attributable to deaths (Cruickshank, 2024). Blowback calculations and public opinion would almost certainly change if human beings were directly and provably killed as acts of cyber sabotage, especially at the hands of a nation-state actor.

As Horowitz rightly points out, the school of thought that anyone with a laptop could be a hacker is no more rational than the idea that anyone who owns a pistol could be a militia. Until extremely recently, Stuxnet was widely considered to be the first large-scale cyberweapon (Alvarez, 2013). Cyber operations are largely characterized by their limited scope of blowback. This prediction or paradigm was largely borne out to be correct with Stuxnet, despite the kinetic, physical damage it caused to centrifuges.

The cyberwar/netwar distinction Horowitz mentions has become much greyer in today’s landscape. Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) was the alleged brainchild of Yevgeny Prigozhin, restaurateur turned founder of the infamous Wagner PMC (Swaine, Bennetts, 2018). The IRA's facade as a private company demonstrates how state-sponsored cyber operations now intentionally masquerade as non-state “netwar” to maintain deniability. The ability for states to use coercion, subterfuge, or the force of law to compel companies to install backdoors could make embedded systems and microcontroller manufacturers a grey zone. The distinction of state versus non-state actors becomes a tool of the state itself.

The trajectory from Stuxnet to modern supply-chain vulnerabilities suggests a clear next step in state and non-state sabotage. It was only very recently discovered that Stuxnet was mutated from a parent malware chain, FAST16 (Security.com, 2026). FAST16 was targeted at specific hardware doing precise, scientific measurements (Kamluk, Guerrero-Saade, 2026). The malware manipulated output and disrupted the accuracy of those measurements. Deploying this type of silent and precise attack could introduce unwanted entropy into something like an AI model running on a specific hardware chip. If a state like China or the US could infiltrate the embedded systems running and training AI models, they could accelerate their own entry into the AI arms race by degrading the other’s models with false positives or hallucinations.

State actors could have some level of cover, so long as nations’ involvement remains plausibly deniable or they have buy-in from the vendor, directly. As a potential result, the balance of power in the AI race could dramatically shift, giving one country or another a definitive advantage economically as well as on the battlefield in the coming age of autonomous weapons. It’s fair to say that the cyber battlefield, alone, can’t win a war in today’s world. But as part of a broader, cross-domain initiative, it could be as lethal as a bomb dropped from a physical drone.

Ultimately, Horowitz was more correct than he could have known in 2020 regarding these emergent technologies. As the world becomes increasingly networked and interconnected, these technologies gain strategic reach far beyond their immediate kinetic damage by accelerating the democratization of force. This leveling of the playing field has potential to upend the existing world order in short, acute bursts of technology-enabled asymmetric violence, even if the large players still maintain hegemony in a protracted conventional war.

Bibliography

  • Ackerman, S. Shachtman, N. The Brookings Institution. Holder: We've Droned 4 Americans, 3 By Accident. Oops. May, 2013. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/holder-weve-droned-4-americans-3-by-accident-oops/
  • Alvarez, J. Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. Stuxnet: The world's first cyber weapon. February, 2013. https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/news/stuxnet
  • BBC. Ukraine in Maps: Tracking the war with Russia. February 2026. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0l0k4389g2o
  • Fried, T. Hudson. The Impact of Drones on the Battlefield: Lessons of the Russia-Ukraine War from a French Perspective. November, 2025. https://www.hudson.org/missile-defense/impact-drones-battlefield-lessons-russian-ukraine-war-french-perspective-tsiporah-fried
  • Horowitz, M. C. 2020. Do emerging military technologies matter for international politics?. Annual Review of Political Science, 23(1), 385-400.
  • Kamluk, V. Guerrero-Saade, J. Sentinel-One. fast16 | Mystery Shadow Brokers Reference Reveals High-Precision Software Sabotage 5 Years Before Stuxnet. May 2026. https://www.sentinelone.com/labs/fast16-mystery-shadowbrokers-reference-reveals-high-precision-software-sabotage-5-years-before-stuxnet/
  • Mon, S. ACLED. The war from the sky: How drone warfare is shaping the conflict in Myanmar. July 2025. https://acleddata.com/report/war-sky-how-drone-warfare-shaping-conflict-myanmar
  • Cruickshank, M. Plan B Consulting. Have Cyber Attacks Killed People? June 2024. https://planbconsulting.co.uk/knowledge-zone/have-cyber-attacks-killed-people-updated-june-2024/
  • Swaine, J. Bennetts, M. The Guardian. Mueller charges 13 Russians with interfering in US election to help Trump. February, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/16/robert-mueller-russians-charged-election
  • Threathunter Team. Security.com. Fast16: Pre-Stuxnet Sabotage Tool Was Built to Subvert Nuclear Weapons Simulations. May, 2026. https://www.security.com/threat-intelligence/fast16-nuclear-sabotage
  • Witch Team FPV. Instagram. May 2026. https://www.instagram.com/witchteamfpv/reel/DXy08VpK7X4/

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