The stadium is aroar with eighty thousand raucous attendees and casts a short shadow in the midday sun. In the distance, peppered specks rise from nests unseen before gathering over the horizon like iron filings in a magnetic field. Small payload drones, hundreds of them, race balefully forward; the orchestrated swarm twists and folds in hivelike unison as it approaches its target. In response, nearer to the stadium, another group of drones ascends in concert and rushes to meet its hostile counterpart. The confrontation is swift, and casually anticlimactic, with only a few citygoers caring to notice the whir of propellers or the hissing and buzzing of the interceptors’ high-powered microwave pulses. The sky is clear once again, and the game goes on uninterrupted. This emergence and facile neutralization of drone threats is commonplace here, in a potential future.

This cross-section of a shocking and indeterminate future, and those to follow, are meant to demonstrate, and warn of, the transformational nature of an imminent drone-age shift. The widespread adoption of UAV technology, piggybacked on the inexorable AI surge, will significantly repaint both international power relations and the daily lives of regular people in a manner that few understand. With foresight, or the lack thereof, we will shape the trajectory of inevitable drone developments that are going to permeate every pore of society — from agriculture and medicine to policing and national security. Considering the possible ways in which this strange tapestry of a drone-led future might be stitched together is essential to remaining ahead of the proverbial eight ball. The alternative, ceding control to the whims of fate and chaos and bellicose adversaries, is untenable.

INFRASTRUCTURE & AGRICULTURE

Infrastructure development will undergo drastic change with the advent of advanced and ubiquitous drone technology. Construction sites strangely devoid of human laborers — instead populated by powerful heavy-lift drones, nimble inspector craft, and bipedal robots — will be more productive, efficient, and safe than ever before. Gargantuan cranes with arms outstretched, fresh metal glinting through measured pivots, rotate powerfully over the earth. These monumental, industrial beings are autonomous, assisted by dozens of seeing-eye drones whose data feeds into a shared machine intelligence. Despite these eventualities, the demand for human capital in the construction industry will not necessarily diminish; in fact, it might even become a bottleneck. Small handfuls of foremen will be able to run entire projects on their own, aided by autonomous systems, meaning that the number of concurrent structures being raised will be limited only by regulatory obstacles and the availability of these human overseers.

These scalable, autonomous construction sites remain the domain of the near future, with current drone technology focused primarily on the planning, inspection, and maintenance of infrastructure projects. Inspection of buildings, bridges, dams, and other structures is made safer, faster, and cheaper: no climbing, no unseemly scaffolding, no dangling humans. Drones can cut the cost of bridge inspections in half (a third of bridges in the U.S. currently need repairs) and reduce the need for construction rework by 80 percent. Issues like cracks, corrosion, and foundational weakness can be detected early by autonomous drones equipped with LiDAR sensors and ultrasonic probes, preventing small problems from snowballing into economic or human disasters. Sites will soon be equipped with their own stationed drones, autonomous and self-charging, that monitor infrastructural health continuously and provide project managers with real-time status updates.

In the coming age, farms will not sleep when the sun goes down; drones will work around the clock to protect crop yields and monitor livestock. Rustic family barns sitting bare on flat plains will look like nocturnal beehives, with luminous agents approaching for payloads before dutifully buzzing back into the dark. These small flying machines will flit nonstop through thousands of crop-rowed acres, addressing issues like pest treatment, disease, and water shortage on the individual-plant level. UAVs equipped with thermal sensors will both identify and quarantine sick animals to minimize spread. Others will surveil the property for thieves, monitor perimeter fencing for repair needs, and ferry supplies — like coils of fencing wire, small fuel tanks, and medicine — across the farm. On a more macro level, specialized atmospheric drones engaged in air quality monitoring and pollution research will gather data useful for, among other things, the optimization of land management. In 2023, Pirate Wires interviewed Augustus Doricko of Rainmaker, a company using cloud-seeding drones to increase rainfall over targeted areas like farms and watersheds. The reanimation of long-dead sci-fi dreams such as this will be a not infrequent occurrence.

Agricultural drones, leveraging techniques like precision spraying, have already reduced chemical usage by 47,000 metric tons and saved over two hundred million metric tons of water. Spot treatment by drones also increases yields, with one Washington farm reducing insect damage by 80 percent. Less conventional use cases, including herding livestock, picking fruit, and planting 40,000 reforestation seeds in a single day, are also on the rise. In locales where bees prove insufficient, drones are even beginning to serve as replacement mechanical pollinators. Falling variable costs and lower labor requirements will reframe global discussions about food scarcity, immigration, and agricultural subsidies, with smaller farms able to efficiently manage much larger plots of land and alter existing economic power structures. All told, the agricultural drone market is projected to reach $30 billion in annual revenue by 2030, radically reshaping food supply chains.

EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES

Consider also the impact that drone technology will have on emergency medical services. Imagine interstate traffic that is bumper-to-bumper for miles, futile beeping coming from some handful of the thousands of cars stuck in an inescapable, inchwise stop-and-go. One of these, an ambulance, is carrying a heart designated for a pediatric patient who, after waiting months for an organ match, will likely die without it. The child’s new heart must arrive within four hours of procurement to be viable, the sooner the better. Seeing the unexpected delay, the ambulance team quickly packs the organ into a secure payload and dispatches a quadcopter transport drone to the destination hospital. In all likelihood, hospitals of the future will preempt this obstacle entirely: traffic-monitoring drones will have already predicted the jam and apprised the hospital of the situation, at which point a UAV will fly high above the chaos and deliver the heart directly.

Over 46,000 organ transplants were conducted in the United States in 2023. Quicker transport times are associated with better patient outcomes, and the sort of major delay described above is not unheard of: In 2023, a pro-Gaza-ceasefire protest on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge blocked all westbound traffic for four hours. Three UCSF organ transplant deliveries were significantly delayed, one of which had to be rerouted over the Golden Gate Bridge. One transplant surgeon at UCSF noted that two other large transplant centers in the Bay Area, Stanford and CPMC, were “probably suffering from the same issues as well.” While no known complications have been directly attributed to the protest, the proliferation of drone technology will completely eliminate the transport-delay risks posed by such scenarios. Only three transplanted organs to date have been drone-delivered, a kidney in 2019 and a pair of lungs in 2021, but this will soon become standard protocol.

Remote and impoverished regions also stand to increasingly benefit from medical applications of this sort of drone transport technology: Zipline, an autonomous logistics company, partnered with both the Rwandan and Ghanaian governments to create large UAV distribution networks for blood, vaccines, and other medical supplies. The medical drone-delivery network in Rwanda alone has completed over 500,000 flights to date. India is already using drones to deliver medical supplies to areas in the Himalayas which are otherwise difficult to reach (between five and ten percent of India’s government-run primary healthcare centers are “nearly inaccessible” and prone to obstruction by natural disasters). Initiatives like these will expand globally to all similarly afflicted parts of the world.

SEARCH & RESCUE

In the relatively well-infrastructured United States, payload drones soaring over untamed terrain and conquering natural barriers to access are more relevant in search and rescue applications. A man lies at the bottom of a ravine, teeth gritted at the sight of wet, white bone protruding from his right shin. Looking up, he sees a sky crowded out by towering oaks. Listening, he hears only bird calls and the endless buzzing of insects. He knows that he is alone, and that he may remain that way for quite some time. His pack drone, a small but heavy-lift quadcopter that transports supplies between camping spots, soon notes that he did not arrive at the next checkpoint and sends for help. Hikers like these, lost or injured beneath densely forested mountain trails, will be quickly found by autonomous drone swarms, each unit communicating with the others to ensure that all ground is covered. Once the hiker is located, but before rescuers are able to arrive, drones will perform a condition assessment and rapidly retrieve any necessary interim supplies like water or bandaging.

Maritime efforts will work similarly, with larger boats serving as bases of operation for smaller drone swarms that can expand radially outward and aid in the geographic process of elimination. Larger Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) with multi-day endurance will work in concert with these teams to survey vast areas of open sea for survivors and identify points of interest. The U.S. Coast Guard is already in the process of procuring these sorts of drones for both rescue and defense applications, awarding Shield AI, a company building cutting-edge drones (and the AI pilots that fly them), a $200 million contract for their V-BAT systems.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton, both of which struck in the fall of 2024, serve as a relevant example of current drone involvement in the provision of American emergency services. Drones were pivotal in the preparation for and response to these disasters, collecting storm data pre-landfall and assisting with search and rescue in the aftermath. As reported by Commercial UAV News, Anduril’s Altius-600 and Blackswift’s S0 were both deployed alongside Saildrone vehicles to gather critical preparatory data from the storms while they were still moving over the ocean. In North Carolina, after the devastation brought by Helene, UAVs with thermal imaging capabilities assisted with the location of people in distress. Even private drone operators stepped up: Jeff Clack of Bestway Ag, an agricultural tech company whose offerings include DJI drones, took matters into his own hands and used “heavy-lift drones to deliver… supplies to about 100 people who were cut off.”

FIREFIGHTING

In cases of search and rescue involving fires, UAVs that are able to navigate through heavy smoke and withstand extremely high temperatures will assist with the location and safe extraction of victims. Dealing directly with the prevention and extinguishing of wildfires will also look very different in the drone-led future: careful autonomous surveillance of fire-prone land by sophisticated UAVs will allow firefighting teams to put isolated blazes out before they spread uncontrollably. Drones are already useful for the execution and management of controlled burns, an important preventive measure, and will become increasingly so as the technology develops and is more widely adopted. During crisis scenarios, understanding the positional movement and relative hot spots of wildfires via drone-captured, real-time data allows firefighters and governments to make better tactical decisions.

Meanwhile, in the city, smoke billows from the southern face of a glass-paneled highrise, pouring outward into the sky through a window in its upper third. Rising up parallel to the structure are two thin shapes, each connected to a line which trails it like a string on a balloon. A small, unmanned helicopter rapidly enters stage left, already matching the elevation of the fire, and pauses for a moment before launching cryogenic projectiles into the blaze, recoiling with the force. The two hose-connected drones arrive seconds later and begin spraying fire-suppressing foam into the building’s opening. They then enter the site and search for survivors. The spread has been successfully contained, damage has been minimized, and no fatalities are reported.

This scene, soon to recur in all developed metropolises, is nowhere near a reality in the United States. In China, however, leaps have already been made in the development and implementation of these sorts of drones. For example, in the Shaanxi province, three hose-connected drones were used to put out a multi-story building fire (whether or not this was a pre-ordained test situation is uncertain). The Chinese Aerial Scooter Drone can rise two hundred meters in thirty seconds before launching fire-suppressing dry-powder bombs. XCMG Group’s AP35/G2 UAV can carry a payload of over a hundred pounds, in addition to towing foam hoses, and has been put to use in both forest fire and highrise settings.

In America? Fire-department use of drones is almost exclusively limited to the realms of surveillance and intelligence-gathering. In the wake of the recent Los Angeles fires, which have reportedly resulted in the deaths of at least twenty-four people and wreaked over $250 billion of economic damage, this lack of progress is even more concerning. Compounding this international delta is the fact that, across all “U.S. public-safety agencies,” ninety percent of drones in use are designed and manufactured by DJI, a company that was recently added to the Department of Defense’s list of “Chinese military companies.” While that number is from a 2020 survey, and steps are being taken to limit Chinese drone usage, the status quo remains largely unchanged.

FOREIGN DOMINANCE

The imbalance mentioned above is a microcosm of a much bigger issue: Chinese drone companies, for a host of regulatory and economic reasons, have dominated their American counterparts in both the U.S. and global markets. According to AUVSI, “companies based in China and subsidized by the Chinese government control 90% of the consumer drone market, 70% or more of the enterprise market, and 92% of the state and local first responder market.” DJI, far and away the largest Chinese drone company, was able to achieve this dominance through early market entry, favorable and asymmetric regulatory conditions, and funding in the form of substantial Chinese state subsidies and American venture capital.

DJI had its first commercial breakthrough in early 2013 with the Phantom 1. The consumer and commercial drone markets were still nascent at this time, which meant two things: one, that DJI was in a very strong position to capture and retain market share, and two, that FAA regulations around drones were still largely undeveloped and unformalized. Consumer operators were effectively unregulated, with the FAA originally deferring to a measure from 1981. The now-archaic Section 333 exemptions allowed businesses to conduct basic commercial operations, and DJI products accounted for 71 percent of these FAA exemptions by mid-2015 (since over two-thirds of purchased consumer drones were actually being used by businesses for commercial applications). By 2017, DJI accounted for 72 percent of the global drone market.

Chinese offerings struck a critical balance of quality and price that led to commercial viability; the American-made competition was too expensive, and much of the bleeding-edge American drone industry was focused on large, government-contracted defense UAVs that already preferred domestic supply chains and had less price sensitivity. In addition to the low materials and labor costs inherent to the Chinese manufacturing environment, China also provided the company with substantial state subsidies that, in combination with American venture capital funding from firms like Accel, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia, gave them a major competitive edge. (In 2015, China debuted its “Made in China 2025” initiative, a push which included significant funding for DJI.)

REGULATION

While all drone products sold in the United States are technically bound by FAA standards, American drone manufacturers are subject to continuous regulatory scrutiny throughout the entire design and development processes. Chinese drone-makers, for obvious jurisdictional reasons, are instead under the supervision of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC). Bilateral aviation agreements between the U.S. and China allow the FAA to defer to CAAC oversight, with FAA standards only applying upon import to the United States (e.g. compliance with Remote ID requirements). This leads to significant asymmetric regulatory barriers for American drone companies, like lengthy R&D-approval processes, restrictive test-site access, and complex “type certification” requirements akin to those for commercial aircraft, that compound their preexisting disadvantages. In one instance, Matternet, an American drone company, was required to get a type-certificate “similar to what Boeing would be required to produce a 737.” By the time they could get this from the FAA, the technology of their specified drone was less competitive in the market.

Now, in an attempt to minimize espionage risk and hamper the Chinese drone industry, America is increasingly turning to top-down protectionism. Successively restrictive versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), alongside waves of bans and procurement rules from the Department of Defense and others, are clamping down on the use of Chinese drones and components by federal agencies. The recent Countering CCP Drones Act, though it was not in the final 2025 NDAA due to concerns of economic fallout, would have put all DJI products on the FCC Covered List and effectively banned them. In a year, this decision will be revisited.

These protectionist measures, however, are an incomplete approach and have side effects. The current enforcement and future expectation of restrictions on Chinese-made drones has sent businesses and underfunded public agencies scrambling. Many cannot afford the cost delta between American and Chinese products, forced to decommission entire drone programs overnight, while others endure months-long waits for American-made replacements. Unmanned Vehicle Technologies, for example, an American drone and robotics dealer, waited 142 days for an order of two drones from a manufacturer in the United States. In that time, UVT “ordered and received approximately 270 drones from Chinese manufacturers.” Restricting Chinese drones is only half of the equation: America needs to unleash its own drone-manufacturing industry.

DELIVERED BY DRONE

Drone delivery is one of the incredible fields of the future that is particularly limited by the ponderous pace of FAA rulemaking. Streamlined approvals for Beyond Visual Line of Site (BVLOS) operations, essential to the expansion of drone delivery services, are contained within something called Part 108. This piece of regulation, of course, remains stuck in bureaucratic limbo hell well beyond purported statutory deadlines. While certain companies have been able to attain individual BVLOS authorizations through arduous lobbying, with Amazon finally receiving approval in May of 2024, many companies still face significant regulatory barriers. The process is highly fragmented and unstandardized, with the scope of approved BVLOS waivers ranging from high-flying free rein to still requiring a line-of-sight observer.

Amazon’s go-ahead will allow them to significantly expand their Prime drone delivery services — their new MK30 UAV offers “double the range and half the noise” of any previous Amazon drone. Zipline, mentioned earlier in connection with Ghana and Rwanda, is the biggest drone delivery service in the U.S. (over one million deliveries completed) and plans to cover 30 million people in ten states by the end of 2025. Wing, another large drone delivery service, hit 400,000 deliveries in January of 2025 and is expanding rapidly due to its partnership with Walmart. The world in which battalions of small servicecraft drop packages off on your doorstep, shaving delivery timelines even further, is just around the corner.

POLICING & THE STATE

For this reason, despite all of the bans, the continued dominance of DJI on price point means that local and state funds are still used to purchase predominantly Chinese drones: 80 percent of “law enforcement agencies that deploy UAS” use them. (On the state level, only Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, Nevada, and Tennessee have passed resolutions addressing this.) The need for a strong domestic UAV-tech supply chain starts to become more obvious in this context. One of the most interesting current case studies in this area, offering a window into the future, is the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s (LVMPD) “Drones as First Responder” (DFR) program. The department is using American drone technology from companies like Skydio and BRINC for tracking suspects, documenting crime scenes, and conducting pre-interaction surveillance. This sort of real-time aerial intelligence significantly reduces response times and gives officers situational information that can prevent unnecessary casualties.

The LVMPD follows strict FAA regulations that prohibit the weaponization of drones, a precedent which was set in part by Connecticut’s attempt (and subsequent failure) to lethally weaponize their police department’s drones. In November of 2024, the NYPD announced the launch of their own DFR program, reflecting a desire to replicate the successes of LVMPD and others. Drone-led policing capabilities will expand over time, with a continued introduction of autonomy, creating the potential both for vastly reduced criminal activity and, if we are not vigilant, authoritarian misuse.

In one such potential future, artificial intelligence networks and the vast deployment of autonomous drones have resulted in what some might describe as an oppressive surveillance state. This semi-totalitarian government has, at great cost, completely eliminated all traces of civilian crime. Before the balance of control tipped irretrievably, however, society was thriving and higher-trust than it had ever been. Litter was collected by servicecraft mere seconds after hitting the pavement. The incidence of homelessness had dropped precipitously after national borders grew airtight and drug transports were unable to operate without detection. Children ran about the city streets past dark, parents made unafraid. Some wealthier and more skeptical families employed private drone protection, but strong-handed regulatory measures eventually eliminated all non-governmental drone ownership, citing the potential disruption of “peace and safety,” a progression which ended in the near-total disarming of society.

NATIONAL SECURITY & WAR

National security, of course, is of paramount relevance in the discussion of drones. The nature of war is changing faster than it has at any point since the post-World War II nuclear proliferation, and drones are one of the major cruxes of this change. It is essential that America not rely on China for any segment of the defense supply chain, let alone UAS design and manufacturing, technologies parallel to AI that will determine international power balances in the second half of the twenty-first century (and beyond). Already, in the war between Russia and Ukraine, we have seen the emergence of so-called “kamikaze drones.” Iranian Shahed-136 UAVs, which Iran themselves used to attack Israel in April of 2024, are Russia’s primary weapon of choice for this tactic — reported costs are low for the units, only $20,000 each. Russia hopes to produce six thousand of them by mid-2025 in newly constructed factories.

Modified commercial DJI drones, strapped with explosives, are being used as weapons of war by both sides. Russia has been connecting fiber-optic cables to its human-operated drones, making them unjammable without requiring any advanced software or hardware. As one Ukrainian government advisor said, “This war is a war of drones, they are the super weapon here.” On January 14th, 2025, Ukraine launched an unprecedented series of deep drone strikes within Russian borders, hitting seven different regions and forcing “at least six cities to restrict their airspace.” Huge numbers of Ukrainian casualties are tied directly to drone-led attacks — and while drone swarms are not yet a part of this conflict, Ukraine predicts that this technology will enter the fray sometime in 2025 with the continuing integration of advanced AI into autonomous aircraft systems.

When it comes to UAS built for national security and defense applications, however, the United States is far from asleep at the wheel. Palantir’s VNav system, for example, is giving autonomous drones the ability to navigate with military precision in GPS-denied environments. Using stored satellite imagery and onboard compute, the AI is essentially able to plot its real-time trajectory and avoid drift by “reading a map.” Anduril’s Bolt family of drones, announced in October of 2024, are “man-packable” autonomous air vehicles (AAV) that are fully modular, can track and strike targets, and are available in munitions-equipped versions. The Pentagon also recently awarded Anduril a $250 million contract for their Roadrunner drones, reusable vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) units, and Pulsar systems, Electromagnetic Warfare (EW) units with counter-drone applications that can either stand on their own or be vehicle-mounted. Larger, plane-like vehicles are also a critical focus: ULTRA, developed by AFRL’s Center for Rapid Innovation (CRI) and DZYNE Technologies, is a three-thousand-pound reconnaissance drone with over eighty hours of endurance, and a maximum payload of over four hundred pounds, that is already flying missions in the Middle East. The roster of advanced American autonomous drone hardware, and complementary AI software, is far too large to cover in any meaningful way here. This, of course, is an important signal about how seriously we are beginning to address the existential risks before us.

SPACE & VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

Integral to both national security and existential futures, and poised to catalyze the pioneering of sci-fi-like drone technology, is the final frontier: space. The applications of UAVs to the near-infinity on which our blue marble rests are early, but with time they will become both fascinating and essential. Things that are already happening, like drone-enabled launch site monitoring, the development of autonomous space-debris collection, reusable unmanned space planes like the X-37B, and the planned autonomous flight of NASA’s Dragonfly on a Jovian moon, are proof enough. Future possibilities are endless: drones of all shapes and sizes, putzing around space stations conducting fully autonomous maintenance and repairs. Reconnaissance drones spilling out from an opened hatch on a space-farer’s floating ship, falling into formation as they funnel toward the unexplored planet surface below. Only time will tell how far these evolutions can be pushed.

Below the arcing of stars and spirited space-adventuring of generations to come, the skies are clear — save the birds and an occasional transport drone passing silently overhead. Towering bio-hybrid buildings draped with verdant ivory, attended to by swaths of assiduous airborne robo-gardeners, look as if they might have emerged in search of sunlight from the earth itself. A period of peace, less fraught with tension than its Dr. Strangelove-type predecessor, has settled upon the world. This is not for want of bad actors, but for their inability to find secrecy.

The reconnaissance and intelligence operations of the Western nations are unrivaled; adversaries can say or do very little without it being known, and constantly evolving anti-surveillance drones make it very difficult for allies of these nations to be spied on. Emergent from the lattice of pseudo-satellitic drones, sub-orbital AAVs, and multi-tendriled UAS is an invisible, impenetrable dome of complete knowing. Totalitarian potentialities of such an advanced network are held at bay, at least in the States, by the relative affordability of, and legally protected access to, small UAS and counter-UAV systems. In select European nations, where private access to such technologies is being stripped, some claim to see shadows of authoritarianism seeping through cracks in the oracle bones.

Early domestic drone-tech innovations were not controversial or difficult to fund, given their national-security-mandated priority, and the ballooning pie of economic productivity that resulted from their natural proliferation formed a positive feedback loop. Wider implementation of better autonomous hardware led to more prosperity, which led to more research and development, which led to better and cheaper UAS. Small teams of engineers were able to erect incredible structures, like the aforementioned stalagmitic wonders, with more agency than ever before. They cut private residences into remote crags, built public housing projects that were as efficient as they were elegant, and ensured that each creation was beautiful in its own right.

The rise of autonomous farms greatly increased both crop yields and the percentage of arable land while eliminating unnecessary chemical exposure. Fresh produce became cheap and widely accessible. Open fields of soft green and amber, rustling with the light breeze, saw bovine droves herded by autonomous drones (voluntarily pursued, of course, by the enthusiastic prancing of cattle dogs). Resource extraction was faster, cleaner, and easier, which, alongside acceleration in the construction of small nuclear reactors, resulted in a preponderance of energy to power all of these initiatives. Crime rates across the nation were at an all-time low after law enforcement had increasingly partnered with preventive UAS, reducing the incentives of violence.

Now, with all of this having come to pass, there seems to be an almost palpable optimism, a sense that things can change, and that we have significant say in how they change. A weird coalition between humans and their hive-minded autonomous aircraft, once an unnerving prospect, now powers the world forward in ways that not even the most visionary among us could have seen in a crystal ball. This, or something else entirely, lies ahead of us — with courageous optimism, we step into drone-filled horizons.

— G. B. Rango