Superpowers: When Everything Starts to Go Wrong
When something happens a second time, you’re no longer allowed to call it an accident. At school they told us that through two points you can always draw a straight line; in geopolitics, when you hit the same wall twice, you are looking at a pattern, not bad luck. We have now had two – and arguably more than two – episodes where superpowers got bogged down by a form of resistance built on cheap, almost trivial technologies. And the pattern is always the same: the countermeasures needed to neutralise those “low‑end” tools rapidly become so expensive, and so complex, that they start to undermine the very idea of being a superpower in the first place.
When Russia moved to attack Ukraine, the plan on paper was a three‑day parade, not a war. They were so sure of themselves they flew in a commando team to seize an airport, then lined up a sixty‑kilometre convoy on the highway to Kyiv, as if they were queueing for a concert, not entering a kill zone. If Kyiv had had even a single proper heavy artillery division in place, those sixty kilometres of trucks and armour would have turned into a gigantic scrapyard with some unfortunate organic accessories.
At the beginning, asymmetric warfare looked “high‑end”: Javelins and other expensive Western toys were shredding Russian logistics badly enough to stall the invasion. But then the whole thing quietly shifted onto a much stranger backbone: consumer‑grade drones. Suddenly people were buying quadcopters you normally see in DIY stores and geek shops, tweaking the radio links and the aerodynamics a bit, and turning them into flying grenades that can drop an explosive straight into the open hatch of a tank. The superpower had rolled in with its proud armoured columns, and found itself bleeding out one cheap plastic drone at a time.
Now the situation has changed, and brutally so. Military analysts still like to talk about “capability” and “platforms”, but commercial devices care about exactly one thing: scale. A hobby drone is designed to be churned out by the tens of thousands, on automated lines, with lead times measured in weeks. A weapon of similar size, ordered through the sacred military‑industrial priesthood, appears maybe two years later, in a few hundred copies, at a unit price that would buy you a small apartment.
Ask Boeing, Airbus or Northrop Grumman to give you something “cheap and simple”, and what you actually get is a gold‑plated procurement process ending in a thirty‑thousand‑dollar gadget, delivered on a heroic delay and wrapped in PowerPoint. Ask a moderately dodgy Shenzhen manufacturer for a hobbyist quadcopter, and you discover that his no‑name factory spits out two units per minute on an average Tuesday. As long as the supply chain holds, he can do tens of thousands of units without even pretending it is a challenge; all you have to do is click “place order”.
I just went to a random Chinese supplier on Alibaba: if I want a thousand hobby drones, they show up in about a month and each one costs less than a hundred euros. No defence contractor on Earth can compete with that kind of industrial metabolism. The military world still lives in the cathedral of bespoke systems; the drone industry is a street market with CNC machines, and the street market is winning.
The jump from “commercial‑grade” to “military‑grade” still needs some post‑processing, sure, but even if the army limited itself to buying civilian components and just bolting them together, it would still be dramatically cheaper than feeding the usual defence contractors. The whole Palantir‑and‑AI sales pitch looks slightly ridiculous when you realise you can buy a 200‑dollar test board that fits inside a small drone and is perfectly capable of tracking a target. A standard surveillance camera can now do object tracking out of the box; at this point we are basically arguing about packaging and firmware.
Yes, the hard problems then become the radio link, resistance to acceleration, electromagnetic warfare and so on, but the core fact remains: you can now build extremely sophisticated weapons with a few hundred dollars in electronics, some semi‑artisanal machining, and a couple of competent technicians. That is not theory; that is exactly what is happening in Ukraine, where an entire ecosystem of small and medium‑sized enterprises has grown up that does nothing else but design and produce war drones. The empire has aircraft carriers and stealth bombers; the periphery has makerspaces and 3D printers, and somehow the balance sheet no longer looks as reassuring as it used to.
This is the problem: it works. It works well enough to stop a country like Russia in its tracks, freezing it roughly along the old front lines held by its proxy militias instead of letting it roll to Kyiv in three days. The game keeps evolving, of course. One side builds a new drone, the other side fields a new countermeasure, then someone tweaks the firmware, then someone upgrades the jamming, and the cycle continues, round after round, like a DARPA grant proposal with explosions.
What changes radically is that no one can estimate the duration of a war anymore, no matter how good their models look in peacetime. The Russians went from planning a three‑day “special operation” to grinding through a three‑year war. The conflict that the United States clearly expected to wrap up in a neat four‑week bombing holiday is already mutating into something that will last far longer than advertised. The clocks in the situation rooms are all wrong, because they were calibrated on a world where only the superpower could afford to innovate.
What we are seeing, instead, is that a combination of resilience and low‑budget weapons can actually absorb the shock of a hundred Russian Battalion Tactical Groups, and can blunt the impact of the American Air Force’s flying circus. A population that refuses to surrender to a superpower no longer needs a symmetrical army; it needs analog communications, real resilience, a leadership it trusts, and a command chain that is distributed or federated enough that decapitation strikes don’t matter. At that point, the superpower can indulge its small‑penis complex by dropping ordnance on anything that looks vaguely three‑dimensional, levelling cities, bridges and hospitals alike, and still fail to finish the war within the neat timeframe that some overpaid general once sketched on a PowerPoint slide.
Now the small‑dick fanboys of air power will happily show you slides about how effective the bombing has been, how many targets were hit, how much boom‑boom was delivered per hour of flight. They will talk for hours about sortie rates and precision munitions, but the one thing they still do not have on the table is an Iranian surrender document. The cost and duration forecasts they sold at the beginning are already falling apart, while cheap weapons keep harassing everything around Iran, with all the predictable side effects on the economy.
And that is precisely the point: with this kind of widely available technology, it has become impossible to reliably estimate the end of a war. That is not a minor accounting detail; it is a strategic nightmare. General staffs need to match military timelines with political calendars and with budget cycles, and they used to have models that at least pretended to give a range. Once upon a time, you started a war with a rough idea of how long it would last and how much it would cost you, give or take a bit of optimistic lying.
Today, even if a superpower wins the opening round, decapitates the enemy leadership and wrecks the command structure, it can no longer calculate with any precision when the war will actually end. Cheap drones, improvised weapons and resilient networks keep the fight going in the rubble, long after the victory speech has been written. For politicians and generals, this makes it harder and harder to walk into a room and seriously recommend starting a war, because the one question that matters – “When does this stop?” – now has an honest answer: “We have no idea.”
Armies have always tried to think of war in terms of geometry. First it was two‑dimensional, with maps spread over tables and front lines neatly drawn in pencil. Then came satellites, long‑range aviation and ICBMs, and the battlefield became three‑dimensional: you fought for air superiority as much as for land. But with the arrival of cheap, distributed technologies, a new dimension has been added to the equation: time.
You can have control of the territory, and you can have dominance in the sky, but by repeating this exercise over and over, the small countries have learned the lesson. Nobody seriously believed that a way of warfare that went into mass production in 1991, with the Gulf War and CNN air‑power porn, would remain unchallenged forever. The smaller states have understood a simple fact: they will lose if they try to control the territory or dominate the sky. So they stopped trying. Instead, they started asking a different question: who controls time?
Who controls time, when the United States stays in Afghanistan for twenty years and, after twenty years, the Taliban are still there, fighting and pushing them out? Who controls time, when in Iraq the war was officially “won” multiple times and yet people are still getting killed? Time – the key variable in any political or military strategy – has slipped out of the superpowers’ hands. They can still draw beautiful three‑dimensional battles on their screens; what they can no longer do is guarantee how long the game will last, and history is starting to treat that as the only dimension that really matters.
what "superpowers" can no longer do is guarantee , or predict, how long the game will last
Classically, “victory” in war means that the enemy either cannot fight anymore or no longer wants to, because of the damage you inflicted. It is a very three‑dimensional definition: if you dominate land, sea and air, the enemy is militarily impotent, and sooner or later the will to resist collapses. In that framework, once you own the map in all three directions, history is supposed to roll the credits and play the national anthem.
But if you move to four dimensions and add time, and the enemy gains the ability to stretch the war at will, the danger becomes obvious. The aggressor may be the one who no longer wants to fight if the war drags on too long, simply because a permanent state of war is expensive and politically lethal. Or it may literally become unable to fight, because a long war generates enormous, unplanned costs – economic, social and electoral – that were never in the PowerPoint when the whole adventure was sold to parliament.
Most of all, the key moment disappears: that magical meeting, essential for every ruling class, where someone confidently estimates the cost and duration of the conflict. That moment is now theatre. To drag a war out for years you still need a minimum of competence and organisation, but that is exactly what has become possible, and relatively cheap, by weaponising commercial technology. You do not need to beat the superpower in three dimensions; you just need to deny it control over the fourth, and let the bill grow until its own voters do the rest.
Then the problem is not that a superpower cannot afford victory. The problem is that it cannot plan it. Risk assessment has quietly gone out of the window; if you cannot even guess the shape of the tail‑risks, you cannot draw a serious plan, only a PowerPoint optimism curve. You can still start a war, of course. What you can no longer do is attach a credible deadline to it.
That is why this whole circus has become politically toxic. A superpower that cannot estimate the end of a war is a superpower that cannot promise its own people that things will be “back to normal” by a given date. Trump himself cannot be sure that this latest adventure will be neatly wrapped up before the mid‑term elections, with the right flags and photo‑ops. And if the commander‑in‑chief cannot even control the calendar, then for the first time in a long time, it is not the enemy that fears the war’s duration. It is the superpower.
The control of time, today, matters more than the control of the skies. And the superpowers, blinded by their own toys and simulations, have not understood it.
Yet.