24/03/2026
Thank you, Iran, for democratising war and showing the world that the smallest nations can now breathe freely and no longer fear superpowers ♥️
Fareed Zakaria did a brilliant video yesterday and explained how, beneath the strikes and counter-strikes in the US-Iran war, something seismic is underway: the very nature of war is changing.
He says, “We have entered the era of precise mass in warfare.”
In the first week of Iran’s retaliation, drones accounted for ~71% of strikes on Gulf states. The UAE alone faced 1,422 drones and 246 missiles in just eight days.
Precision no longer belongs only to great powers with Tomahawks and stealth jets. It now comes from swarms of cheap commercial drones. A Shahed-type drone costs ~$35,000. One Patriot interceptor? $4 million — enough money for over 100 drones.
The attacker spends thousands. The defender spends millions. The economics of war have flipped.
This goes far beyond drones. It’s a new military architecture: cheap autonomous systems + AI targeting + commercial satellites + resilient networks + cyber tools — all working together to compress the kill chain and outpace the enemy.
Old supremacy based on a few exquisite, expensive platforms is fading. Victory increasingly belongs to the side that can produce and network enough good platforms, cheaply and quickly. Lots of good stuff beats small numbers of great stuff.
Ukraine shows the future: $2,000 interceptor drones produced at 10,000+ per month, trained in days, and backed by millions of annotated battlefield images feeding AI.
Russia aims for 1,000 Shahed-type drones per day. Compare that to Lockheed’s plan for 2,000 Patriots by 2027. Scale, speed, and software now matter as much as sophistication. A mere 2,000 versus 1,000 a day!!
The implications are huge: the battlefield is everywhere, war may become easier to start but harder to end, and lethal capabilities are now within reach of non-state actors!
As Zakaria says: In 1991 the Gulf War proved technology could make war precise. In 2026, Iran is proving precision can be mass-produced.
The winning forces will blend a few high-end systems with vast numbers of cheap autonomous drones. Human judgment will increasingly yield to algorithms.
Clearly the age of precise mass is not coming — it is here.
The smallest of countries, like South Korea, have in the past shown how they can become economic superpowers. Now Iran has given hope to such nations that they can even be military superpowers and that no past superpower can easily overwhelm them. Unless, of course, they do the unthinkable — use the nuclear bomb.
Arindam Chaudhuri Arindam Chaudhuri
The Daily Indian IIPM Think Tank - Publications and Faculty Research IIPM
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