The irresistible attraction
The dream of defeating costly weapons with cheap ones returns in every generation — from the torpedo boat to the combat drone
A single idea has captured the defence imagination on both sides of the world: that a new generation of cheap, rapidly producible, seemingly revolutionary systems — drones, autonomous craft, loitering and coastal missiles — has overturned the old economy of force. In Europe the conviction was forged in Ukraine, where uncrewed surface vessels drove a far larger Russian fleet from the western Black Sea, and where first-person-view drones turned a few hundred dollars into a destroyed armoured vehicle; it is now capitalised by a defence-technology boom that has minted billion-dollar start-ups on the promise of software-defined, attritable mass. In Asia the same turn is driven by fiscal strain and by doubt about a distant guarantor, channelling constrained budgets toward the cheapest available path to a credible threat. The enthusiasm is understandable, because the cheap weapon delivers something real. The question this article poses is whether it is the right path — and the answer, drawn from a pattern that recurs across more than a century of military history, is that low-cost innovation is a first step that is rarely the best one. It can buy interdiction, denial, and the power to make an adversary’s intrusion ruinous. What it cannot buy is the achievement of a strategic objective: the control of territory, the patrolling of seas and routes, the command of a contested space. For that, a state still needs the large and expensive systems the cheap weapon was supposed to render obsolete.