Drones and Offensive Advantage: An Exchange – The Authors Reply

In “Will the Drone Always Get Through?,” we investigated empirically whether Medium-Altitude and High-Altitude Long-Endurance (MALE and HALE, respectively) drones make attacking comparatively easier or even easy in an absolute sense, as some analysts and scholars assume or claim. To conduct our analysis, we first translated existing arguments into testable hypotheses consistent with the literature on the offense–defense balance (ODB)—that is, whether drones shift the ODB toward the offense or to offensive dominance. Then we explored relevant disciplines such as radar engineering, electromagnetism, signal processing, and air defense operations to assess these competing hypotheses. For our analysis, we focused on currentand next-generation drones. Our findings suggest that currentgeneration drones neither lower the probability of interception by air defense systems compared to existing aerospace technologies, nor are they in the position to systematically avoid interception. Regarding next-generation drones, it is not possible to derive definitive conclusions, but our analysis suggests that scholars should pay more attention to how technological change affects the defense, not only the offense, as advances in semiconductors, big data, machine learning, and communications, among other fields, are going to significantly enhance air defense capabilities in the future. In the replies to our article, Jacquelyn Schneider, as well as Paul Lushenko and Sarah Kreps, criticize our investigation on several grounds: our findings are allegedly unsurprising; we should have investigated different dependent variables; we should have focused on different independent variables; and we should have employed a different measurement. These criticisms are either unwarranted or orthogonal to our analysis—that is, they neither question our methodology nor undermine our findings. However, we are grateful to Schneider and Lushenko and Kreps for engaging with our work. According to Schneider, our investigation is empirically correct; for Lushenko and Kreps, it provides the starting point to answer other research questions, including some they raise in their reply.