Thank you - this is important. Slight disagreement that "Modern drone warfare means one should have dozens of drones for every human soldier."

The SOTA in drone technology changes so quickly (eg radio to fibre to AI) that any inventory of drones becomes obsolete. This is why the industrial base you mention elsewhere is so critical. Maybe "Modern drone warfare means one should have production capacity to produce dozens of drones per month for every human soldier."

One thing that NATO has that Russia and Ukraine both don't is a really good air force. If the US Air Force had been fighting in Ukraine, it would have quickly established air superiority over Russian forces and be able to bomb them at will, making it impossible to hold territory any more than Saddam Hussein's army could. (Of course, Putin could have retaliated with nuclear weapons...)

I do not know how good China's air force is.

Nuclear weapons still beat drones.

Penetrating NATO airspace with small Shahed style drones is easy and can cause a lot of damage.

Sufficient damage would lead to massive NATO retaliation though. Russian air defense systems are stretched thin as is. NATO air forces could suppress what's left and bomb with impunity. Plausibly NATO just bombs the drone factories and some other military targets.

Building enough air defenses to stop massed drone attacks is very costly. Deterrence through retaliation is cheaper than building lots of hard kill and jamming systems.

Russia is poking NATO in various ways but a shooting war would go very badly for them.

Regarding nukes, yes, they're scary but if Russia starts bombing NATO cities or military targets on a large scale NATO will retaliate regardless of nuclear brinksmanship.

China

The China Taiwan thing depends on China's goals. They're not getting TSMC. Taiwan will go scorched earth on that to say nothing of ASML remote killswitches on production equipment. If the goal is to destroy the semiconductor supply chain, why bother? Blockade accomplishes the same thing with slightly less political fallout.

Whether China has an easier or harder time with a land war to take and hold the Island has little to do with the things western powers care about (semiconductor supply chain). Yes, drones help with taking and holding Taiwan and china can make a lot of them.

Aside from Taiwan, I just don't see China as wanting to start a land war to take a neighboring country.

Longer term

TLDR:Modern cheap drones are not stealthy in audio, thermal or radar so systems already developed by western military suppliers can take down cheap drones at low cost and in large numbers.

Hard kill anti drone systems seem likely to work. Infantry in Ukraine are using shotguns currently but automated gun turrets with fast tracking and full auto cannons firing rimless shotguns rounds should work. Air-burst electronically fused shells also exist and are cheap to produce in quantity for longer range. Working systems exist and can be purchased from western suppliers.

Ukraine is getting some Rheinmetall Skyranger 35s soon

That's in addition to all the Gun turret + sensors + software solutions like the EOS slinger also being sent to Ukraine.

Tactical rock paper scissors still applies. The anti drone system can't stop incoming artillery rounds(though with enough range, the spotting UAVs die), direct fire from an enemy tanks or certain kinds of fast missiles. Drones aren't the only threat on the battlefield.

Limited supply of effective hard kill systems is the issue right now. A good hard kill system will eat drone swarms all day (assuming ammo supply holds out and reloading is fast)

Much longer term

Active protection systems and counter UAS converges to use fast tracking gun mounts and airburst munitions. This is also effective against infantry including infantry behind cover. Perhaps some limited indirect fire capability. Things get even worse for infantry on the future battlefield.

One side gets more bang/buck by spending to develop more cost effective weapons (UAS, UGV, etc.). Live fire exercises to get performance data + lots of simulation becomes the norm. Fewer unknowns like morale. This over determines the winner in potential conflicts.

Large military bases and civilian infrastructure generally remain hard to protect. Defender has to harden every possible target. Retaliation/deterrence is what stops others from just launching long range one way attack drones at cities.

Interceptors might solve this problem but prospect of retaliation is enough.

Terrorism

Weaponised drone technology could proliferate and solve the "deliver payload" problem but control of explosives is doing most of the work already. Terrorists can already plant remote or time detonated bombs. CF:gwern's excellent Terrorism is not about terror post. Don't expect huge issues there. High value targets like politicians and CEOs will have to worry about small UAVs that don't need a large payload in addition to snipers. Mostly no impact on general public.

Lots of individual mistakes here, that together serve to severely overstate the case made:

Failure to defeat Houthi Rebels: The US Navy's struggles against the Houthis' low-cost drone arsenal demonstrate how even non-state actors can challenge NATO air defense. NATO forces found themselves hard-pressed to counter relatively primitive drone attacks.

The Houthis were unable to touch US naval power. What the US couldn't do is defend ships in a very narrow stretch of water from drone, missile, and speedboat attacks. This is a very specific situation, and it's like saying there's an end to US ground power because they couldn't decisively defeat the Taliban. Asymmetric warfare works, more news at 10.

Also note the drones they were using were far from cheap, often costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Economic logic of drone warfare: In Ukraine, drones account for over 70% of combat kills—a proportion likely to increase. The economics are devastating: $1,000 FPV drones routinely destroy $7 million Abrams tanks. Modern tanks are dangerously outdated and the entire armored warfare needs to be redesigned from the ground up to face the realities of modern drone warfare.

You do see the videos where the tank gets blown up by the (closer to $5000) drone, you don't see the vast majority of videos where it does nothing. Meanwhile how many people were killed by the Abrams tank, and how useful was the Abrams tank when used correctly to break through enemy lines and regain movement - something drones are not really capable of.

Obsolescence of NATO doctrine: NATO's military doctrine remains rooted in pre-drone warfare assumptions, creating an embarrassing disconnect where peacetime generals lecture battle-hardened Ukrainian officers who possess actual combat experience against a lethal, drone-equipped adversary.

Given that Nato's doctrine assumes air superiority, which drones barely impact at all, I don't see how you could possibly draw such a conclusion from the war in Ukraine, where both sides decisively lack air superiority.

Navy should transition from few expensive carriers to distributed drone-launching platforms—hundreds of cheap drone carriers, underwater drone deployments, and autonomous loyal wingmen for the naval air-force.

The seas are huge, and cheap drones are short range and slow. Enemy ships are difficult to find in a vast empty sea. Ships are extremely difficult to destroy or cripple. Communications are almost certainly jammed. For drones to be useful they need to be:

• fast
• long range
• carry a large payload
• autonomous

We call such drones "cruise missiles" and they are extensively deployed in all NATO Navies. If you know a way to make them cheaper, then the DoD will almost certainly be very interested.

autonomous loyal wingmen for the naval air-force.

Current drone warfare is all about low cost, slow, short range, non-autonomous technology. Autonomous wingmen would by high cost, fast, long range, autonomous. I don't see how you could possibly draw conclusions about them from current events.

The Transparent Battlefield: Assume constant observation. Every movement is tracked, every concentration targeted within minutes. Forces must operate dispersed, communicating through secure mesh networks, moving constantly. Resources, command, logistics—everything dispersed, redundant, modular.

This is basically current NATO doctrine, and has been for years.

Technology parity: China has successfully replicated fifth-generation fighter capabilities (notably copying JSF technology through espionage) and is now mass-producing these aircraft at scale.

This is true, but note that China is investing heavily into this stuff (and aircraft carriers), not autonomous drone swarms.

are increasingly vulnerable to drone swarms and hypersonic missiles

I have seen zero evidence of this. Indeed hypersonic missiles are similarly vulnerable to air defences as non hypersonic ones, and come with a whole host of problems of their own.

I think the best way to express this reality that I've heard was from a buddy, who mentioned offhandedly that it is wild we live in a time when if Ukraine and Russia teamed up tomorrow (by magic or whatever, obviously this isn't a real thing) they would rapidly defeat the standing European militaries.  That's a historical anomaly big enough to choke on.

And, importantly, it wasn't true at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  At that point, neither of these nations were producing millions of drones annually.  Somehow, since going to war, both nations have grown dramatically stronger, in lockstep.  It's a deranged outcome.  If you read it in a novel, you'd laugh out loud.

Ukraine + Russia drone manufacturing goes up like a rocket, while France/Germany, which are not presently on fire and doing a draft...their drone production goes from nothing to nothing.  It's wild.

All this may be valid, but I would think politics and geopolitics also matter enormously, since they should determine who Europe's enemies are going to be. It's no secret that parties like AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France, and Reform in the UK have the potential to change Europe's direction substantially, and that the US, Europe's military big brother, is thinking about exiting NATO entirely, perhaps handing control of European forces to a German general as a transitional step. You mention that Pax Americana is ending, but focus solely on military issues. Ideology is changing too.