European leaders in Ankara for a NATO summit are confronting the challenge of taking additional responsibility for their own defense. South Korea’s plan to train half a million “drone warriors” offers a potential response.
As the conflict in Ukraine shows, warfare is no longer a matter of industrial might — the ability to manufacture expensive aircraft, sophisticated tanks, precise munitions, and ever more centralized command systems that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, warfare has been changed by inexpensive, replaceable devices that are updated every few weeks and operated by soldiers who, in many cases, resemble video game pilots more than traditional combatants. The key lies not only in the drone itself, but in the combination of low cost, scale, intelligence, distributed production, and accelerated learning.
South Korea’s decision to distribute drone operations across the army, navy, air force, and marines stems from two factors. The first is North Korea, which views the conflict in Ukraine as a testing ground to which it has sent soldiers and instructors. The second is demographics: the South Korean military has shrunk by 20% in six years, to about 450,000 personnel, while the male population of draft age is falling rapidly. When there is a shortage of soldiers, the temptation to replace human labor with automation ceases to be a futuristic fantasy and becomes policy.
That said, training 500,000 drone warriors is not the same as having 500,000 capable operators. The bottleneck lies not only in purchasing drones but also in training instructors, procuring non-Chinese components, building reliable supply chains, and adopting a doctrine able to absorb technology faster than military procurement processes. Ukraine has succeeded thanks to extraordinary social mobilization. Lessons learned come back from the front within a matter of days. South Korea, like any democracy at peace, has laws, ministries, certifications, budgets, and bureaucracy.
Drones are rewriting the physical rules of the battlefield. In Ukraine, the kill zone, that strip of territory where any movement exposes soldiers to detection and attack, has expanded from a few kilometers to up to 20 kilometers, or even more. The concentration of sensors, FPV drones, loitering munitions, electronic warfare, and fiber-optic links has turned mobility — traditionally an advantage — into a risk. The front line does not move, because anything that moves can be seen.
This alters the economics of war. A cheap drone can destroy a tank, disable a piece of artillery, pursue a soldier, or force a convoy to stop. The prestige of expensive systems is pitted against the brutal arithmetic of saturation. A multi-million-dollar anti-aircraft missile against a drone that costs a few hundred or a few thousand dollars turns the tables in a war of attrition. Defense is no longer just about armor but about sensors, jamming, networks, camouflage, redundancy, mass production, and the ability to iterate faster than the enemy. The concept boils down to an uncomfortable idea: drones win battles; components win wars.
Taiwan understands. Facing China, it cannot compete symmetrically in terms of ships, aircraft, and missiles — but it can build a distributed, inexpensive, autonomous, and hard-to-neutralize drone defense. The island’s commitment to manufacturing its own drones, reducing dependence on China, and even supplying the US shows how industrial policy and technological sovereignty have condensed into a propeller, a camera, and a battery.
But what about when the human operator is taken out of the loop? Recent reports describe Ukrainian tests of fully autonomous drones capable of attacking without a video link or immediate human decision-making. Although these remain exceptional cases, they cross a dangerous moral and legal boundary. The International Committee of the Red Cross has long warned that autonomous systems could erode meaningful human control, the distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality, and accountability.
Drone warfare democratizes certain capabilities, but it does not necessarily democratize responsibility. Who is accountable for a mistaken autonomous attack? The operator who designated the target area? The programmer? The commander? Is the provider of the computer vision model? The state? The rules of conventional warfare have proved difficult to enforce; in algorithmic warfare, they may become meaningless.
The big question is not whether drones will change warfare: they already have, and the proof is right there, at Europe’s doorstep. The question is whether our institutions, our treaties, our military doctrines, and our democracies will be able to change at the same pace — or whether we must completely rethink the design of our armies. If they do not, parliaments and international conventions will no longer write the rules of war. Algorithms, makeshift workshops, and the hum of thousands of cheap machines on the battlefield will.
Enrique Dans is a Senior Fellow with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is one of the most prominent Spanish academics in the fields of technology adoption, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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