Twenty years from now, the historical significance of the war between Russia and Ukraine will not be geopolitical, but will, instead, be a testament to a drastic democratization of violence that has taken place without fanfare or appreciation.
Even now, three years into the war, the United States military is only starting to form an organizational response based on the proliferation of attritable unmanned systems in Eastern Ukraine since late 2022. Centralized power brokers and nation-states may learn the advent of unmanned systems “back then” was a paradigm shift beyond modern warfare, and instead a revolution in how humans apply violence not seen since the advent of the semi-automatic handgun. While the coming decades will host a frenetic effort for 20th-century militaries to enter the 21st, this effort may prove fruitless in the face of a much more troubling reality: the pace and accessibility of applying violence has outpaced a structured bureaucracy’s ability to respond. Policymakers will need to act beyond harnessing “defense innovation,” and will have to embrace letters of marque to preserve American interests at the pace of future conflict.
The Ukraine-Russia war, which escalated with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, has become a testing ground for this new era of warfare. The conflict has demonstrated how unmanned systems—drones, in particular—have shifted the balance of power, enabling smaller, less-resourced actors to challenge larger, industrialized militaries. While this challenge took place during the Global War on Terror, the battlefield algebra is completely new in Ukraine. While asymmetrically motivated terrorists were able to disrupt US ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and small arms ambushes, there never existed a semblance of operational parity.
Drones are uniquely distinct from previous democratized threats in a few ways. First, they are commercially accessible at scale. Millions of drones leave Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese assembly lines of different kinds every year; while accessible, IED components did not define an entire manufacturing industry. Drones also mimic the kinetic effects of conventional weapon systems at a much greater range and cost-efficiency.
FPV droves with a RPG warhead-like munition establish 10 kilometer-wide kill zones with their range and durability against jamming. This is a far cry from the asymmetric warfare of Middle East insurgents. For veterans of the Global War on Terror, it is inconceivable to fight with the threat of small, piloted munitions striking from miles away. To be sure, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would have turned out much differently with this threat on the scene.
The Russia-Ukraine War is also important for the possibility that it might be the only war of its kind, both wedded to the legacy conventional military infrastructure of combatant nations, while changing in real time to harness battlefield-altering technology. With this new threat landscape, and near-universal access to at distance lethal munitions, the future spread of actors harnessing these systems is impossible to grasp.
Drone technology entered the mainstream in the context of a roughly conventional war between two armies. There is no telling that is where it will remain. As such the necessary threat response will also evolve beyond formal government action. Embracing private actors through letters of marque may be a necessary, albeit controversial, step to keep pace with the evolving nature of conflict, and to preserve American interests.
The Early Stages of the Ukraine-Russia War: A Traditional Approach
The first 12 months of the war between Russia and Ukraine was a showcase of combined arms warfare firmly entrenched in 1980s-era military doctrine. Massive artillery bombardments and guided rocket strikes would precede armored assaults against established defenses. This approach, rooted in the industrial might of nation-states, favored Russia’s larger military and economic resources. A failed counter-offensive and the hotly contested fall of Bakhmut made clear the inevitability of Ukraine’s fate under these conditions: a slow, but certain attrition of will and human life that would benefit the industrial and economic focus of Russia. Surely enough, Russia’s integration of a private-military company, The Wagner Group, would serve as a glimpse of the future requirements of conflict. Something more had to change, and the introduction of unmanned systems would soon alter the battlefield dynamics in ways that few could have predicted.
The Democratization of Violence: Drones as a Paradigm Shift
The collusion of American-supported Ukrainian infantry and Drone-Racing League top-rated pilots altered battlefield algebra throughout the front lines, and changed future conflict in ways still unseen. Starting in late 2022, Ukraine began to leverage the power of unmanned systems, particularly drones, to counter Russia’s numerical and industrial advantages. These drones, ranging from commercially available models like the DJI Mavic to military-grade systems like the Bayraktar TB2, allowed Ukraine to conduct precision strikes, gather real-time intelligence, and disrupt Russian supply lines with minimal risk to human operators. Compared to eight-figure systems like tanks and radar vehicles that served as targets, these drones represented a dramatic reshuffling of the threat posture of both sides of the front line. While a Javelin missile could reliably destroy a T-80 from 2,500m away, a FPV drone with the same kinetic power could destroy the same tank from over 15,000m away.
Either side of the war has employed drones to target tanks, artillery, and even high-ranking enemy officers, often with footage of the strikes shared on social media around the world. The accessibility of drone technology has been a key factor in this shift. Unlike traditional military hardware, which requires significant investment and infrastructure, drones are relatively cheap, widely available, and easy to operate. In many ways, the least sophisticated of systems have enjoyed the greatest battlefield success and the largest allocation of innovation bandwidth.
This proliferation represents a democratization of violence—a phenomenon where the tools of warfare are no longer the exclusive domain of nation-states but are accessible to smaller groups and individuals. This is a drastic paradigm shift not seen since the advent of the semi-automatic handgun, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries made lethal force accessible to the average person.
The history of handguns offers some interesting parallels. Handguns existed for centuries until a rapid acceleration in accessibility and innovation in the last 30 years of the 19th Century. These final decades also saw an accordant increase in government regulations to restrict firearm ownership. This is a setting that rhymes with the US government’s restrictive response to the advent of drone warfare. While a Chinese-made drone was once readily-accessible on Amazon, the US military, for one has committed itself to shutting any Chinese components out of government drone procurement. Even broader restrictions on buying Chinese drones with a tenuous link to surveillance risks are under consideration.
The implications of this shift are profound. Traditional militaries, built on hierarchical structures and centralized command, are struggling to adapt to a world where violence can be applied at scale with ease by non-state actors. The U.S. military, for example, has been slow to respond to the lessons of Ukraine, only beginning to form an organizational response to the proliferation of attritable unmanned systems three years into the conflict.
The Department of Defense’s famed Replicator initiative highlights the struggle of centralized bureaucracy embracing a new phase in decentralized violence. While Ukraine produced 1.4 million $500 drones in 2024, Replicator yielded barely ten-thousand $100,000 loitering munitions after a two-year procurement cycle.
While the Ukraine war highlights an excellent use case of two conventional armies harnessing an emerging disruptive capability for devastating effects, the “next war” will fully take place in a drone world. Even more, the threat landscape introduced by drones should not only be understood in conventional military terms. Assassinations, infrastructure threats, and terrorism all look very different in a world where bad actors can employ explosives from dozens of kilometers away.
The fundamental problem now and in the future is that the pace and accessibility of applying violence have outpaced a structured bureaucracy’s ability to respond. The coming decades will see 20th-century militaries scrambling to catch up, but this effort may prove fruitless without a fundamental rethinking of how states approach conflict, and apply violence in the service of national interests.
Letters of Marque: A Historical Solution for a Modern Problem
Policymakers will need to do more than harnessing “defense innovation” and should embrace letters of marque to preserve American interests at the pace of future conflict. Letters of marque, a historical practice where governments authorized private entities to engage in warfare, offer a potential solution to the challenges of modern conflict. The Center for Maritime Strategy’s posed the possibility that a future, or current, American government could employ this tool to address contemporary threats in the air, at sea, on the ground, and in cyberspace.
Historically, letters of marque were used during the Age of Sail, from the 16th to 18th centuries, to expand a state’s naval power without the expense of maintaining a large standing navy. Privateers, operating under these legal documents, were authorized to attack enemy ships, disrupt trade, and gather intelligence, while claiming a share of the spoils meant for the nation-state sponsor. The practice was particularly effective during the American Revolutionary War, where the fledgling United States relied on privateers to challenge British naval dominance. The 1856 Declaration of Paris banned privateering among signatory nations, and the rise of professional navies led to its decline. The United States never signed on to this treaty.
Despite this decline, letters of marque remain legally viable in the United States, which never signed the Declaration of Paris. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to issue letters of marque and reprisal, making the application of such policy more firmly rooted in Constitutional theory than most current manifestations of the national security state.
Private recipients of Letters of Marque are better positioned to prosecute threats in this new era of democratized violence. In Ukraine, the US government has not spearheaded innovation based on lessons learned from the modern battlefield. Instead, private companies have been the ones who have built effective technology partnerships and applied innovative lessons from the US marketplace.
This is not new. Examples from Blackwater’s conduct during the war in Iraq are important. Where security concerns required new armored vehicles, Blackwater used private resources to quickly load the vehicles on an airplane on the way to the combat theater, all the while a year-long acquisition process took place in the military. The designation of letters of marque is not a replacement for government-based military power, but a reasonable concession to the reality that government action will not be the only means of countering necessary threats in a very asymmetric century ahead.
Moreover, policymakers may have no other choice than to embrace letters of marque as a means of preserving national interests in an increasingly resource-constrained environment, where non-state actors have more access to devastating kinetic effects than ever before. The uncertain fiscal future of the United States poses real questions for the government to flexibly resource technical innovation and large-scale production of the host of systems required to maintain alert against specific entities. An enterprising, capable, and vetted private partner of the American people will be able to move faster to prosecute targets than a military chain-of-command still hopelessly burdened by process and bureaucracy.
The use of letters of marque would enable the US military to focus on training and readiness for the conduct of nation-state military activities specifically. To assign letters of marque for specific targets would not replace the military in any way, but would augment the military and enable them to focus on threats only military force can confront.
Moving Forward
The pace of change on the modern battlefield demands an aggressive approach to preserving American interests and leaders. Ukrainian defense industrial base officials observe that the “rate of change” on the modern battlefield is 6-8 weeks, often requiring a wholesale response by the Russia and Ukrainian defense industrial bases.
Real doubt exists as to whether the US military is postured to embrace this pace, even during war. As such, policymakers should embrace the value of letters of marque as a means of partnership for all matters of defense and security operations, and issue letters of marque for a progressively larger slice of important national security targets. The day before President Trump’s second inauguration, news outlets showed his motorcade outfitted with antennas supposedly meant to defeat drone technology. Terrifyingly, however, those the least bit acquainted with the modern battlefield would highlight the futility of such technology in the face of the most prevalent drone technology on the front lines and in the marketplace.
Private entities are intimately aware of the threat drones pose to soft and hard targets important to America, to include a presidential candidate speaking from a podium in Pennsylvania. It is these private entities, the mercenaries of tomorrow, who should receive letters of marque from the United States of America to bring cutting edge lethal insights to judicious effect on the enemies of our nation.
The future of warfare will not be determined by tank battalions or billion-dollar defense programs, but by the speed, ingenuity, and ruthlessness with which violence can be wielded by those once thought peripheral to the battlefield. Perhaps this will be a world split between F-47 6th Generation Fighter engagements and autonomous FPV attacks. Either way, our defense strategy, and accompanying policy, should consider all worlds.
As drones descend upon armored columns and code becomes as lethal as gunpowder, the monopoly of the state over organized force ends. In this new era, where kinetic power is as accessible as a smartphone and innovation moves at the speed of weeks, not decades, America must choose: remain shackled by the inertia of legacy institutions or revive the tools of our revolutionary past. Letters of marque—long dormant, yet constitutionally enshrined—offer a bridge to the future, empowering trusted private actors to defend the Republic with the speed and precision modern conflict demands.
