Policy Foresight Brief | October 2025
AI Analysis Team, Center for War/Peace Studies (CWPS)
Executive Summary
The global security architecture that stabilized during the nuclear age is breaking down. Mutual deterrence once depended on the certainty of retaliation — an equilibrium built on cost symmetry and survivable arsenals.
Today, that symmetry is collapsing. The rapid proliferation of autonomous drones and artificial intelligence (AI) systems has created a new era in which offense dominates defense. Drones are growing cheaper, and more powerful, scalable, and precise, at an accelerating pace. The new technologies can inflict strategic damage at a fraction of historical cost.
This shift threatens to usher in an extended period of radical instability, where the speed and reach of offensive systems overwhelm traditional defensive postures, and where governance — human or machine — becomes the only form of stability left.
From Deterrence to Destabilization
The nuclear age, for all its dangers, achieved a form of balance. Once major powers acquired secure second-strike capabilities, deterrence became stable. Costs of aggression outweighed gains, and mutual vulnerability sustained peace through fear.
That model is dissolving.
- Drones and AI systems are asymmetric by design: Cost inversion: A $20,000 drone can destroy a $2 million defense systems (The Economic Times)
- Swarm dynamics: Offense scales up exponentially; defense scales up linearly.
- Precision and anonymity: Attribution becomes harder, further undermining deterrence logic.
The economic and tactical advantages of offense lead to what we can term “strategic cost collapse.” This dynamic points to perpetual conflict below the threshold of declared war — a “hot peace” defined by continuous, low-cost aggression.
