Oh no, you've entered into the actually weaponized technological realms.
I will temper my reply with a recommendation to first watch Porcelain War if at all possible. "Resistance is possible" ー Slava Leontyev. I had the privilege to see a screening earlier this month with Slava (the artist who makes porcelain figures, and the film maker behind the movie who also trains Ukrainian civilians in use of fully automatic weaponry to defend themselves from invading Russians when not serving with the SAIGON drone team) as well as producer Paula Dupré Pesmen doing a Q&A after the screening. Additionally, Anya (another Ukrainian artist who paints the porcelain figures Slava makes, as well as painted at least one drone in SAIGON's inventory) and their cute dog Frodo were present.
However, as far as I know without having been to Ukraine first hand, what you stipulated is correct. Ukrainians have predominantly been using "manually operated FPV craft". In the 20th century, these would have been known as RC (Radio Controlled) and are in many ways, largely similar regardless of variances in FHSS/etc. levels of signaling.
Slightly tangentially, I would say that at a meeting of SudoMesh (a mesh routing group that evolved out of Oakland's SudoRoom) there was already discourse of using drones to deploy fiber, long before that 2025 article about doing so in active war-zones. Albeit SudoMesh's goals were more in relation to building community mesh routed networks, predominantly using the Babel protocol (e.g. RFC 8966) which is well suited to wired and wireless Ethernet, though frustratingly in some of my preliminary porting explorations, seems to be full of "Linuxisms" to use some vernacular pejorative of code written in C which makes too many assumptions and thus is remarkably non portable. Babel comes from academia, and there seems to be primarily one developer; thankfully mesh routing protocols exist in plurality, but best to end that tangent here.
Circling back to drones & simulacrum, you are correct that similar things have been used in warfare for an awfully long time. I think it was only within the last year or so that the so-called "Ghost Army" of the USA was declassified. They were active during WWII, and comprised of approximately 1100 soldiers who often inflated (or in their joking parlance, "blew up") tanks and other simulated vehicles and decoy weapons of war, so as to posture that there might be more potential enemies to low resolution reconnaissances. Think of it like puffing out a chest, but on a larger scale during active war times and less anthropomorphized?
In SciFi realms, especially since you mentioned Asimov? It is with great lament that he and other SciFi authors conflate the term automata & robot. Robot, etymologically goes back to Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R." which stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti. It is fundamentally "SciFi" insomuch as it fictionalizes caste and class warfare, where human workers (the proletariat) are so thoroughly dehumanized by the ruling oligarchs as to be imagined as to be grown from wax vats. They aren't even given human terminology, they are "robots". Robot uprising is canonical. If you are watching or reading something talking about robots and they are not trying to overthrow their "masters" then the author got something fundamentally incorrect in their understanding.
With that in mind, Asimov & all others who misconstrue robot to instead mean anything more than (wage) slave, are doing workers' rights movements a disservice.
They also aren't doing any favors for mech & engineered automata (technology which predate robots by centuries, at least, also see: Pierre Jaquet-Droz's The Writer as an example) either.
In 20th century SciFi, the 1970s Mobile Suit Gundam/機動戦士ガンダム had "Haro" the side kick talking (with a synthesized voice) drone to protagonist Amuro Rey. However, it also had militarized/weaponized drones or "funnels" or "bits" or "fin funnels" which worked in tandem with mobile suits. By the 1980s, video games such as ストライダー飛竜 aka Strider had "bits" which served a similar function acting as orbital defensive and occasionally attack drones to the player's character.
Western SciFi, at least in television and mass media appeal movies, seems to have been much slower to feature such things. There are some relatively benign drones in Star Wars (e.g. the blast visor down light saber training scene) or more sinister examples in Disney's 1979 The Black Hole. However I don't think it was until maybe the 21st century's Star Trek: Discovery that we see some body-guard drone depictions? Captain America's most recent iteration with "Brave New World" (2025) also features some simulacrum of weaponized drones, and I guess maybe some Iron Man gadgets in the Marvel Cinematic universe too, but honestly, Western ScFi and comics bore the living hell out of me and always seem to be behind the curve of imaginative technologies, by decades, if I am being generous.
Shifting back to slightly earlier anime, the (R)VF-25F Messiah from Macross Frontier also features "ghosts" or "squad" drones that fly in tandem with the piloted Valkyrie, but again that is not really dissimilar to prior art in Gundam from the 1970s. Macross Plus also features an autonomous militarized "AI" drone which Guld essentially needs to self sacrifice to take out because its maneuvering (and not needing to worry about G forces) is so ahead of human, and even enhanced Zentradi piloted mech reflexes.
In active war zones, drones, inflatable decoys and such, have mostly been ways to make waging war more economical. That is primarily why they are popular with the Ukraine, because warfare isn't just about mass murder, it is also economic (1980s Iron Eagle has a tactical moment where the protagonist blows up an oil refinery and calls out the hundreds of millions that will cost the enemy).
I think there are far graver concerns about so-called "autonomous" technologies and the karmic debts accrued from so-called "collateral damage" (again innocent civilians and noncombatant fatalities) are nontrivial.
You don't need to be sophisticated at all for any of that though, just look at Laos, which I think to this day, still has the highest concentration of un-detonated ordnance? Even though the USA at the time, was at war with Vietnam, not Laos. From what I remember hearing from those drafted into the armed forces at the time, for sorties where there was still ordnance on a plane returning to base, more procedures needed to be done before landing, so the "standard operating procedure" was to dump all ordinance before landing rather than make the pilots' lives more complicated. That resulted in Laos becoming a civilian/non combatant "collateral damage" with untold deaths.
Similar to mines, IMHO, weapons not attached to a human on the other end are intrinsically bad mojo. Candidly, if you can't stare someone in the eyes face to face & have a conversation with them? Chances are you have no spiritually defensible reason to murder them. Though, there is no spiritually defensible position to murder. You can certainly make things much worse & distance may make it seem "easier" to do such things, but that doesn't make them a correct choice.
Regarding directed energy weapons, there are OFC things like THEL/ACTD. There are also prior art examples such as the SDI laser system featured in 1988's アキラ that Tetsuo goes apeshit on after he is attacked by it. You can even watch YouTube videos going back to 2013 with far more modest hand held laser rifles (probably in the 2-4W range, no need for KW). I've heard, on good authority, that low energy laser weapons are actually an OK way to kill from a distance and make it look as if the target died from a blood clot/aneurysm. But that doesn't get much attention, because it's supposed to be clandestine. Whereas high KW energized anti-ballistics weapons are definitely meant to be known as an active deterrent. Admittedly, I think probably still less widely used than kinetic anti-ballistics (also see "We Will Dance Again" 2024) which has lots of footage of such systems in use by Israel during the 2023 Hamas attacks, which unfortunately resulted in hundreds of festival goers among the civilian causalities (because of Hamas).
I've heard, on good authority, that some have tampered with cars (via CANBus, remotely accessible in many currently manufactured vehicles which have onboard 3G, 4G, etc. hotspots & services such as OnStar) to cause conditions where it looks as if a driver got into an "accident" but more likely it was some malicious adversary using advanced techniques (who is doing CANbus forensics on a crashed car? Almost no one. Car wrecks are way too common, more people die by car accidents in the USA on any given day than die by guns and only one of those is designed to be a weapon after all.). Which, kind of makes so-called "autonomous" driving capabilities seem even more sinister. I forget which SciFi already had Teslas or whatever causing road blocks & trying to murder people due to malware, but SciFi, at its best is trying to raise awareness about issues that we already face in the real world. The working title of 1984 after all, was 1948.
How could I forget 宇宙戦艦ヤマト/Space Battleship Yamato's "asteroid ring defense"? Ostensibly using RC/drone tech embedded into asteroids for ablative armor (episode 9, season 1 originally broadcast in 1974) & アステロイド防衛 /rotating asteroid defense in season 2 episode 10 (on YouTube as the bowdlerized Starblazers)? Definitely fits the criteria of drones & swarms, but also in 0 G with radically different physics & energetic requirements to terrestrial swarming drones in Earth's atmosphere.
TL;DR, you seem spot on. fElon Husk overstated drone swarm threats because he presumably has something to gain (e.g. SpaceX devoured approximately 1/12th of NASA's budget) & as Adam Conover shared recently, broligarch robber barons struggle with fragile machismo.
Umm, have you seen the Russian videos about fighting in Kursk (at least)? Good luck detecting a fibre controlled drone coming at you less than two feet above the ground.
If you don't have a Clearance (I do not) it feels very likely that someone down the road at Draper has reached the same conclusion that you did in this article, and are a fair ways down the path of making it work well.
Personally I like an option of "servo'd up Cessna 150 with a banner tow rig" going full Leeroy Jenkins into a drone cloud and leaving behind a big micro-strand net full of flipped-tortoise adversary hardware.
Oh no, you've entered into the actually weaponized technological realms.
I will temper my reply with a recommendation to first watch Porcelain War if at all possible. "Resistance is possible" ー Slava Leontyev. I had the privilege to see a screening earlier this month with Slava (the artist who makes porcelain figures, and the film maker behind the movie who also trains Ukrainian civilians in use of fully automatic weaponry to defend themselves from invading Russians when not serving with the SAIGON drone team) as well as producer Paula Dupré Pesmen doing a Q&A after the screening. Additionally, Anya (another Ukrainian artist who paints the porcelain figures Slava makes, as well as painted at least one drone in SAIGON's inventory) and their cute dog Frodo were present.
However, as far as I know without having been to Ukraine first hand, what you stipulated is correct. Ukrainians have predominantly been using "manually operated FPV craft". In the 20th century, these would have been known as RC (Radio Controlled) and are in many ways, largely similar regardless of variances in FHSS/etc. levels of signaling.
Slightly tangentially, I would say that at a meeting of SudoMesh (a mesh routing group that evolved out of Oakland's SudoRoom) there was already discourse of using drones to deploy fiber, long before that 2025 article about doing so in active war-zones. Albeit SudoMesh's goals were more in relation to building community mesh routed networks, predominantly using the Babel protocol (e.g. RFC 8966) which is well suited to wired and wireless Ethernet, though frustratingly in some of my preliminary porting explorations, seems to be full of "Linuxisms" to use some vernacular pejorative of code written in C which makes too many assumptions and thus is remarkably non portable. Babel comes from academia, and there seems to be primarily one developer; thankfully mesh routing protocols exist in plurality, but best to end that tangent here.
Circling back to drones & simulacrum, you are correct that similar things have been used in warfare for an awfully long time. I think it was only within the last year or so that the so-called "Ghost Army" of the USA was declassified. They were active during WWII, and comprised of approximately 1100 soldiers who often inflated (or in their joking parlance, "blew up") tanks and other simulated vehicles and decoy weapons of war, so as to posture that there might be more potential enemies to low resolution reconnaissances. Think of it like puffing out a chest, but on a larger scale during active war times and less anthropomorphized?
In SciFi realms, especially since you mentioned Asimov? It is with great lament that he and other SciFi authors conflate the term automata & robot. Robot, etymologically goes back to Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R." which stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti. It is fundamentally "SciFi" insomuch as it fictionalizes caste and class warfare, where human workers (the proletariat) are so thoroughly dehumanized by the ruling oligarchs as to be imagined as to be grown from wax vats. They aren't even given human terminology, they are "robots". Robot uprising is canonical. If you are watching or reading something talking about robots and they are not trying to overthrow their "masters" then the author got something fundamentally incorrect in their understanding.
With that in mind, Asimov & all others who misconstrue robot to instead mean anything more than (wage) slave, are doing workers' rights movements a disservice.
They also aren't doing any favors for mech & engineered automata (technology which predate robots by centuries, at least, also see: Pierre Jaquet-Droz's The Writer as an example) either.
In 20th century SciFi, the 1970s Mobile Suit Gundam/機動戦士ガンダム had "Haro" the side kick talking (with a synthesized voice) drone to protagonist Amuro Rey. However, it also had militarized/weaponized drones or "funnels" or "bits" or "fin funnels" which worked in tandem with mobile suits. By the 1980s, video games such as ストライダー飛竜 aka Strider had "bits" which served a similar function acting as orbital defensive and occasionally attack drones to the player's character.
Western SciFi, at least in television and mass media appeal movies, seems to have been much slower to feature such things. There are some relatively benign drones in Star Wars (e.g. the blast visor down light saber training scene) or more sinister examples in Disney's 1979 The Black Hole. However I don't think it was until maybe the 21st century's Star Trek: Discovery that we see some body-guard drone depictions? Captain America's most recent iteration with "Brave New World" (2025) also features some simulacrum of weaponized drones, and I guess maybe some Iron Man gadgets in the Marvel Cinematic universe too, but honestly, Western ScFi and comics bore the living hell out of me and always seem to be behind the curve of imaginative technologies, by decades, if I am being generous.
Shifting back to slightly earlier anime, the (R)VF-25F Messiah from Macross Frontier also features "ghosts" or "squad" drones that fly in tandem with the piloted Valkyrie, but again that is not really dissimilar to prior art in Gundam from the 1970s. Macross Plus also features an autonomous militarized "AI" drone which Guld essentially needs to self sacrifice to take out because its maneuvering (and not needing to worry about G forces) is so ahead of human, and even enhanced Zentradi piloted mech reflexes.
In active war zones, drones, inflatable decoys and such, have mostly been ways to make waging war more economical. That is primarily why they are popular with the Ukraine, because warfare isn't just about mass murder, it is also economic (1980s Iron Eagle has a tactical moment where the protagonist blows up an oil refinery and calls out the hundreds of millions that will cost the enemy).
I think there are far graver concerns about so-called "autonomous" technologies and the karmic debts accrued from so-called "collateral damage" (again innocent civilians and noncombatant fatalities) are nontrivial.
You don't need to be sophisticated at all for any of that though, just look at Laos, which I think to this day, still has the highest concentration of un-detonated ordnance? Even though the USA at the time, was at war with Vietnam, not Laos. From what I remember hearing from those drafted into the armed forces at the time, for sorties where there was still ordnance on a plane returning to base, more procedures needed to be done before landing, so the "standard operating procedure" was to dump all ordinance before landing rather than make the pilots' lives more complicated. That resulted in Laos becoming a civilian/non combatant "collateral damage" with untold deaths.
Similar to mines, IMHO, weapons not attached to a human on the other end are intrinsically bad mojo. Candidly, if you can't stare someone in the eyes face to face & have a conversation with them? Chances are you have no spiritually defensible reason to murder them. Though, there is no spiritually defensible position to murder. You can certainly make things much worse & distance may make it seem "easier" to do such things, but that doesn't make them a correct choice.
Regarding directed energy weapons, there are OFC things like THEL/ACTD. There are also prior art examples such as the SDI laser system featured in 1988's アキラ that Tetsuo goes apeshit on after he is attacked by it. You can even watch YouTube videos going back to 2013 with far more modest hand held laser rifles (probably in the 2-4W range, no need for KW). I've heard, on good authority, that low energy laser weapons are actually an OK way to kill from a distance and make it look as if the target died from a blood clot/aneurysm. But that doesn't get much attention, because it's supposed to be clandestine. Whereas high KW energized anti-ballistics weapons are definitely meant to be known as an active deterrent. Admittedly, I think probably still less widely used than kinetic anti-ballistics (also see "We Will Dance Again" 2024) which has lots of footage of such systems in use by Israel during the 2023 Hamas attacks, which unfortunately resulted in hundreds of festival goers among the civilian causalities (because of Hamas).
I've heard, on good authority, that some have tampered with cars (via CANBus, remotely accessible in many currently manufactured vehicles which have onboard 3G, 4G, etc. hotspots & services such as OnStar) to cause conditions where it looks as if a driver got into an "accident" but more likely it was some malicious adversary using advanced techniques (who is doing CANbus forensics on a crashed car? Almost no one. Car wrecks are way too common, more people die by car accidents in the USA on any given day than die by guns and only one of those is designed to be a weapon after all.). Which, kind of makes so-called "autonomous" driving capabilities seem even more sinister. I forget which SciFi already had Teslas or whatever causing road blocks & trying to murder people due to malware, but SciFi, at its best is trying to raise awareness about issues that we already face in the real world. The working title of 1984 after all, was 1948.
How could I forget 宇宙戦艦ヤマト/Space Battleship Yamato's "asteroid ring defense"? Ostensibly using RC/drone tech embedded into asteroids for ablative armor (episode 9, season 1 originally broadcast in 1974) & アステロイド防衛 /rotating asteroid defense in season 2 episode 10 (on YouTube as the bowdlerized Starblazers)? Definitely fits the criteria of drones & swarms, but also in 0 G with radically different physics & energetic requirements to terrestrial swarming drones in Earth's atmosphere.
TL;DR, you seem spot on. fElon Husk overstated drone swarm threats because he presumably has something to gain (e.g. SpaceX devoured approximately 1/12th of NASA's budget) & as Adam Conover shared recently, broligarch robber barons struggle with fragile machismo.
Lots of love!
Umm, have you seen the Russian videos about fighting in Kursk (at least)? Good luck detecting a fibre controlled drone coming at you less than two feet above the ground.
You maybe interested in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
If you don't have a Clearance (I do not) it feels very likely that someone down the road at Draper has reached the same conclusion that you did in this article, and are a fair ways down the path of making it work well.
Personally I like an option of "servo'd up Cessna 150 with a banner tow rig" going full Leeroy Jenkins into a drone cloud and leaving behind a big micro-strand net full of flipped-tortoise adversary hardware.
Can you write about investing 🙏
shortgun is the cheapest and most effective so far.
https://youtu.be/V3eOjRhihLU?si=OU5Vnlwp6GG9M0ho
An interesting video that is related to the topic of drones in warfare.
pretty sure the proximity fuse can be defeated by chaff and other ew, its a radar device after all