In the past, only major powers with billion-dollar budgets could strike a target with precision from a distance. Today, commercial technology has democratized precision strikes. A soldier can hunker down in a trench with a simple controller and, streaming video through a pair of goggles, steer a commercial drone with a $500 payload to disable or destroy a $5 million tank.
Such technology has reshaped modern warfare in recent years, making it easier and cheaper to attack and more difficult and expensive to defend. Soldiers now drop grenades from store-bought drones, commercial satellites sustain military communications, and radios popular with hobbyists can be used for drone detection and even signal jamming.
Innovative, low-cost weapons have destroyed sophisticated military systems that can be dramatically costlier to build and operate. Russian warships costing tens of millions of dollars have succumbed to semi-autonomous Ukrainian sea drones costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even cheaper commercial drones have not only destroyed million-dollar tanks but have also performed missions that were once only possible with advanced military helicopters.
Countering these drones can drain the defender’s coffers. An undisclosed U.S. ally reportedly used a $3 million Patriot missile to shoot down a $200 drone in 2017, and half a decade later, the problem persists. In recent campaigns in the Red Sea, the U.S. Navy used million-dollar missiles against Houthi drones disrupting global maritime traffic. When Russian Gerbera drones violated Polish airspace last September, NATO scrambled fighter jets that fired AIM-120 missiles, costing more than $1 million per unit.
This economic inversion enables a new battlefield doctrine: swarming, in which an attacker overwhelms a sophisticated defense system with a mass of coordinated and relatively disposable drones, making it incredibly difficult to thwart every attack. It can become economically unsustainable to defend high-value assets against such cheap and persistent threats—something that the U.S. Defense Department’s previous undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment acknowledged.
Along similar lines, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently outlined a goal of “drone dominance,” planning to deploying “hundreds of thousands” of drones by 2027, as the Pentagon seeks to gauge the industry’s capacity to quickly and cheaply produce some 300,000.
Drones are not the only commercial technology that asymmetrically benefits attackers. HackRF radio devices, reportedly used by Ukrainian soldiers in combat and by the U.S. Army in training, have lowered the barrier of entry to electronic warfare—in which forces seek to disrupt an enemy’s ability to communicate, navigate, and target. On the other side, Russian GPS jamming significantly reduced the accuracy of expensive, U.S.-made Excalibur artillery shells, which were once deemed the U.S. Army’s “most accurate artillery shell supporting the Ukraine fight.”
Commercial space companies also amplify strategic asymmetry. High-resolution, near real-time battlefield intelligence was once the exclusive privilege of superpowers with spy satellites. Imagery from companies such as Planet Labs and Maxar now give analysts, journalists, and amateur researchers a clear view of the battlefield. The commercial satellite internet system Starlink, owned by SpaceX, famously sustained Ukraine’s military communications after a Russian cyberattack on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Forces that embrace commercial technology can also build their arsenal with a speed and agility that traditional defense production and procurement cannot match. Sophisticated drones and electronic warfare devices can be constructed with components sourced from online retailers; 3D printing means that production facilities can be quickly rebuilt and relocated. Drone manufacturers can iterate designs within short time frames based on direct feedback from the front lines, unlike traditional defense programs that take decades to develop.
That has troubling implications for defense. In military strategy, the OODA loop refers to the decision-making cycle of “observe, orient, decide, and act.” The side that can cycle through this loop faster gains a tactical advantage. Legacy military forces with centralized, expensive systems—such as an aircraft carrier group or an armored division—often have slower OODA loops. In contrast, a distributed network of cheap sensors combined with cheap shooters, such as loitering munitions, can cycle through far more quickly.
The barrier to entry for sophisticated, high-impact warfare is collapsing with the global availability of cheap, powerful, and adaptable commercial technology. This new reality leaves policymakers and citizens grappling with a set of profound challenges. Countries are confronting central issues around these novel strategic asymmetries and how to control the proliferation of advanced weapons when they are built from commercial components.
To address the cost imbalances of drone warfare, countries are investing in technologies such as lasers and high-power microwaves, which could be effective in countering drones at a lower cost. Israel recently achieved operational readiness on its Iron Beam platform, a system of solid-state lasers to counter drone swarms. U.S. Customs and Border Protection fired a laser weapon near the border with Mexico this month, which the White House said targeted drones flown by cartels.
These technologies may one day help correct the cost imbalances created by low-cost attack drones. But recent wars have also shown that the pace of war has changed, and rapid adaptation on both offense and defense is a critical source of innovation.
The United States’ 2026 National Defense Strategy emphasizes a layered approach, rather than relying solely on purpose-built and expensive systems like the Patriot missile. This includes low-end interceptors—short-range kinetic drones—to match the price point of the attacker. Such defenses must also adapt to match the pace of battlefield innovations. To this end, modular and software-first designs, which allow parts to be swapped out or their software updated, are changing the game. U.S. defense firm Saronic’s autonomous ships, for example, are built from seven parts, allowing for rapid adjustments in manufacturing and repair in response to evolving threats.
In the arena of electronic warfare, software adaptability in the field will be critical in response to quick shifts in adversary platforms’ signatures, communications, and artificial intelligence-driven targeting. Invisible signals flood the modern battlefield, making it incredibly difficult to discern in real time which belongs to a friend and which belongs to a foe. U.S. electronic warfare capabilities require rapid and significant modernization in technology, processes, and policy to equip soldiers with the ability to rapidly detect, classify, and adapt to changing signals used by adversaries.
Dual-use commercial technologies that have military applications are inherently more accessible than explicitly military technologies, from both cost and sourcing perspectives. This also makes controlling the proliferation of weapons incredibly challenging.
The traditional method of controlling the spread of technology to adversaries revolved around export controls, as the United States has implemented with advanced chips, and government reviews of foreign acquisitions of companies with advanced technologies, an interagency process known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. As the number of technologies covered by export controls expanded during the last five years, practitioners questioned whether the controls could be meaningfully enforced.
New tracing approaches are taking root, shifting from export controls by geography to intelligence-driven tracking. Recognizing that it has become impossible to stop the sale of dual-use microchips or GPS modules found in household devices, countries are shifting to AI-driven supply chain auditing to monitor global shipping manifests and money trails and to spot anomalies—such as a toy company suddenly buying thousands of industrial-grade flight controllers.
The challenge not only includes controlling the export of military technologies but also having visibility into the technologies that the United States uses in its own systems. For example, counterfeit components have slipped into military technologies for years through the U.S. Defense Department’s supply chains. The Defense Logistics Agency has already begun using AI to approach the problem, using models to help identify suppliers who provide counterfeit items. Geofencing technologies can also be applied to critical components to track and remotely disable a device if its GPS coordinates indicate that it has been illicitly moved outside its approved area.
These supply chain risks speak to how rapid defense innovation introduces vulnerabilities. New governance approaches are needed across the private and public sectors to ensure that so-called know-your-customer rules are enforced globally, leveraging data for joint accountability. Innovative approaches to digital identity, including AI-driven continuous risk scoring and blockchain-based systems that create tamper-resistant audit trails, can help evolve know-your-customer to a more dynamic approach.
Warfare has evolved into a battle of algorithms, where the side that can iterate its software—whether updating drone guidance or jamming frequencies overnight based on front-line feedback—gains the decisive edge. The traditional military procurement cycle has been upended by weapons composed from consumer electronics that are cheap, replaceable, and constantly evolving.
We have entered an era where the battlefield is constantly observed, with implications for attacker and defender alike. In this new world, security is no longer found just in the thickness of armor, but in the speed of the network and the resilience of the supply chain.
