The liberal international order draws to an end. The great powers steel themselves for conflict. The generals plan; troops train; and preachers pray. But one question sucks at gathering strength like a marsh at horses’ hooves. Who will fight?
Generational dysfunction is imminent. Increases in life expectancy combined with collapsing fertility rates means that the population pyramid has inverted. Societies around the world are becoming saddled with ever larger numbers of the aging and infirm, unable to care for themselves without extracting resources and care from younger generations, who are greatly outnumbered by their predecessors. The universal selfishness of the liberal order — its self-indulgence paired with increased lifespan necessitated the infantilization and diminishment of future generations — has bred a churning resentment in those which the yoke has been fixed upon.
For the great powers, this dynamic is a crisis. Deterrence is now impossible. For, in the first case, the pool of willing recruits for a military is ever diminishing and, in the second case, the elderly will not let their caretakers perish in the Pacific. The greatest obstacle to credible deterrence is a small family. What is the point of maintaining Taiwan’s sovereignty if you lose your only son? Indeed, what good is sovereignty itself if you are not comfortable in your old age? For elderly leaders to send a generation off to war would be little more than spending down the stability of the regime for foreign policy ambitions. With the middling classes — today’s youth — dead and drowning in a faraway war, there can be little hope for the American system. Radicalism now only nascent in gathering political storm clouds would burst forth in great sheets. The inheritances of many American families would fall not to their rightful heirs, but to vast empires of caretaking enterprises, utilizing both the Floridian sun and golf cart rental charges to drain their victims dry. Vanished, vanished will be vast sums of wealth. And future generations of survivors will roll in the dust waiting for a Jubilee which will never arrive.
Conflict is, therefore, inevitable. China will not believe that the United States would sacrifice domestic stability to protect their Pacific allies. And, indeed, if we would, our domestic weakness (the olds) would not permit their retirement plan to be whittled away as soon as the cost becomes clear, which it would inevitably be given the proliferation of information and, in particular, the ubiquity of imagery which would ensure that the boomers would see, in graphic detail, the entrails of their supposed caretakers floating on the burning water.
It is of critical importance, therefore, for the American military to discover a method by which casualties in a war with China might be dramatically limited or otherwise distributed onto a wider generational range. Only by achieving this can deterrence be reestablished.
Many will, after reading to this point, naturally assume we ought to send those older generations off to war. No greater recompense might those generations provide for the decades of decline which they oversaw than sacrificing themselves to reclaim a semblance of honor. If the corpse of Madeline Albright could be reanimated, perhaps she could die in place of a 21-year-old infantryman and reclaim some semblance of honor which she lost when she promised Americans that normalizing trade relations with China would allow us to export our products to them without losing manufacturing jobs. President Zelensky has attempted this very thing: killing off his oldest citizens on the front lines to protect his younger, Westernized generations in a sort of blood sacrifice for NATO membership.
Such injustice is no solution. To rob the youth of their chests by allowing them to shirk their duties does little but exchange the destruction of their bodies for the destruction of their virtue. Indeed, even if we wish to rob them of their moral responsibility, modern warfare is unsuited for the old. It has become a question of technology. And technology is a subject for which the older generations are fundamentally unsuited. They might serve as cannon fodder. But little more is possible.
Consider, then, the young. Previously, they might be considered unsuited for warfare. Not strong enough. Not disciplined enough. Not resilient enough. Outside of the confines of Africa, these qualities prevented militaries from enlisting children in their ranks. But FPV drones have democratized warfare not just between technologically advanced militaries and technologically backwards ones but, indeed, between generations. Older generations are unaccustomed to the types of hand-eye coordination required to operate these systems to their maximum. Conversely, the young are particularly well-suited to pilot drones, given their extensive experience with video games. Even below the age of 10, children can now apply effective violence on the battlefield.
It is, in fact, likely that a drone force made up of children would be more effective than an equivalent force of normal military-aged operators. Given equivalent amounts of training, kids will naturally outstrip their older peers when it comes to drone piloting. And the earlier training can be started, the more quickly they will improve. These dynamics play out in a vast number of fields: chess, classical music, video games, and more.
Some might find such a proposal repugnant. After all, might drones not be made fully autonomous? Why leap to recruiting children?
Running AI models locally on FPV drones is a non-starter. Drones capable of running those models locally would be too expensive to build at scale and would take valuable compute away from less attritable systems. On the other hand, controlling the drone remotely with AI both wastes processing power when it could be better used elsewhere and tends to negate the advantages of full autonomy — if you need to maintain connection to the drone, why not have a human pilot it?
In addition, the time it would take to develop fleets of fully-autonomous FPV fleets is so advanced that it would do nothing to solve the immediate problem at hand. Deterrence cannot wait. It must be established immediately.
Policymakers should have no compunction about using children in this role. In the first place, employing children as drone pilots need not pose any danger to the children themselves. Physically, there is no need to deploy the pilots themselves on the battlefield. Predator drones are already flown from command stations back in the United States. There is little reason that FPV fleets cannot be operated in a similar manner by either in-theater or CONUS-based units.
While physical safety can be assured, children must also be protected mentally and emotionally. This is particularly true when employing FPV drones, which are a particularly intimate way of killing. FPV drones must be close to the enemy. Close enough to see faces; close enough to see panicked expressions; close enough to know the despair of a doomed man. This would be particularly hard on children. Many could succumb to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or other psychological disorders. And the impact of this would be devastating — it will be impossible to maintain military discipline under these conditions.
Given these constraints — child drone pilots should not be allowed to realize they are actually killing anyone. This can easily be achieved by two steps. First, a military academy must be constructed where children can be separated from their parents and placed into a controlled environment where their well-being can be ensured. In such an academy, children could be raised in a military culture, training as pilots through a variety of games, including inter-school competitions. Once a pilot is both skilled enough and disciplined enough, they can be graduated to a new “game.” Using artificial reality technology, this new game will appear to its participants as simply the next step of training. In reality, they will actually be piloting FPV drones in real combat situations to kill enemy troops. The truth of the matter can be hidden by using various technologies, such as generative AI, to change the aesthetic of the world. One might imagine children flying drones around a cartoon world trying to find animated dinosaurs to crash into in exchange for points - or something similar. If the children prove too cynical, all that is needed is to alter the aesthetics of the real world to look more like a typical shooter video game.
Of course, so as not to waste manpower, school trainees would be raised to understand that, one day, they will join the military itself. In this way, pilots would naturally swell the ranks of regular military forces as they come of age.
There are some limitations to this proposal, of course. Some might say that the latency from an FPV drone to a CONUS pilot would be too great. Conversely, it would be too difficult to prevent children from discovering the true nature of what they were doing if they were in theater. The natural answer to this problem will be to connect these military schools to a dedicated satellite constellation responsible for managing drone swarms on the battlefield. These constellations can be connected to a distributed network of command and control points on the battlefield, such as Palantir’s TITAN system, which themselves connect to the FPV drones through various routing points and, eventually, fiber optic wires plugged into the drones themselves.
It is only in this manner that conventional deterrence can be reestablished in the modern age. The great powers must turn to children to grow the ranks of their militaries to a sufficient degree. FPV drones offer a convenient manner to do so.
