The US had a first strategic offset against the Soviet Union with nuclear strike, followed by precision strike, but now everybody has precision strike capability because the convergence of military drone technology with affordable commercial drones means even a 12-year-old with a hobbyist drone can conduct precision strikes.

The convergence of high-grade military attempts with very expensive drones down to hobbyists and smart people at the edge of battle adapting commercial drone technology focusing on low cost to deliver payloads in a very jammed environment means both Ukrainian versus Russian and Russian versus Ukrainian forces are developing effective drone warfare in contested battle spaces.

Russians just this week launched the first fully autonomous drone attack, an unmanned attack both ground and air against Ukrainian lines with no people showing up and machines sent against enemies, marking a Rubicon moment in warfare.

The first drone strike in US history was executed in fall 2001 because the counterterrorism center in the late 1990s identified drones as a promising idea; they strapped a Hellfire anti-tank missile to a Predator drone at Nellis Air Force Base for testing, which created the foundation for armed drone programs.

Large military drones like the Predator or Predator B, which are big turboprop aircraft that can stay aloft for 24 hours at 25,000 feet or higher with satellite communications and large 20-inch gimbal ball cameras capable of reading license plates or identifying faces from that altitude, have very limited effectiveness in contested battle spaces like Ukraine because they are in high danger of being shot down by missiles.

The Houthis have shot down a couple of Predator drones attempting operations over the Yemen theater, demonstrating that even non-state actors can defeat large military drone platforms.

Ragtag radical Islamic organizations including Hamas, the Houthis, and Hamas (likely Hezbollah intended), which are getting funding from Iran, plus ISIS, all now have drone technology and are using it against Israel and the United States.

ISIS was using small quadcopter drones heavily in Iraq and Syria to drop grenades, including through the hatch of armored vehicle turrets from 1000 feet altitude, killing occupants, demonstrating the tactical effectiveness of armed commercial drones at the lowest tactical level.

The precision strike capability has diffused down to the smallest lowest tactical level, and the US procurement system cannot keep up because the US uses $2 million missiles while adversaries have $20-50,000 drones that have been fired hundreds of times by the Houthis and Iranian-friendly militias in Iraq against US forces, forcing the US to fire two missiles per target to ensure a kill (double-tap), creating unsustainable cost-exchange ratios.

Developing better hard-kill low-cost capability for drone defense is essential, but the US Pentagon is far from achieving this, and because these lessons are not being learned, the next foe that figures out how to exploit US drone vulnerabilities will teach it painfully.

Israel conducted a drone strike on the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria and killed seven Iranian military advisers including three generals, which was a devastating hit targeting the IRGC figure who ran Hezbollah and aimed to degrade Hezbollah's ability to conduct operations against Israel and protect Israel's northern front.

It is a tragedy and dangerous to operate in a war zone, but if Israel was intentionally deceived about the aid convoy, then the strike worked very well for Hamas from a propaganda perspective because now international pressure shifts onto Israel to ceasefire and back off due to civilian casualties, meaning the disinformation campaign was an effective Hamas operation.

Ukraine conducted a drone strike on an oil refinery almost 600 miles inside Russian territory, which is significant because the strike was deep inside Russian territory at a distance (600 miles, not 60 miles or 6 miles) previously constrained by the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which attempted to keep cruise missiles or weapons capable of flying more than 300 km out of people's hands.

The Iranians ignored the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) by using Shahed 136 loitering munitions to provide to the Houthis, demonstrating that long-range precision strike is now pervasive globally.

Ukraine hit a refinery and caused huge damage inside Russia, missing a drone factory they were targeting by about two buildings, demonstrating that Ukraine has both long-range drone strike capability and significant targeting accuracy.

Ukraine is sending a message with its deep strike into Russia that it can dive deep into Russian territory and is trying to up the transaction cost to make the Russian people and especially the Russian government bleed economically, even though there were no deaths from that particular strike.

Ukraine developed its long-range drone capability themselves by taking a reliable motor and turbine engine (which were concentrated in Ukraine as part of Soviet industrial capacity) combined with any kind of guidance system available almost off the internet, and the drone doesn't really need a camera since it just drives itself to a specific coordinate using GPS, which cannot be jammed that far inside Russia because jamming would threaten their own aviation.

Ukraine is using sea drones as well as air drones and has had great success driving the Russian Navy largely off the Black Sea to the point that even cargo ships are now able to reach from Bosphorus by hugging the Romanian coast and make it to the port of Odessa to offload and export products.

The Russians initially invaded with ships right up on the Ukrainian coast, but Ukraine developed, fielded, and deployed sea drones continuously to this day, and while not every suicide drone hits, if one out of three or one out of five hits, that's still really good attrition mathematics for forcing the Russian Navy to retreat.

The battle is the ultimate laboratory of innovation because you have to innovate or you're dead, and therefore innovation is happening in both Ukrainian and Russian forces really quickly, suggesting that the Russians have taken elements of their old industry and are out-matching Ukraine with 6-to-1 advantage in artillery while also developing autonomous drone warfare capabilities.