On 17 May 2026, Jonah Goldberg posted a reply on X that sent me down a rabbit hole I have not entirely emerged from. Responding to a clip of Chamath Palihapitiya, the venture capitalist and All-In Podcast co-host, arguing that Taiwan would cease to be strategically important within eighteen months once semiconductor manufacturing moved to American soil, Goldberg wrote: “This is a great example of widget guy thinking once the widget problem is fixed, everything will be fixed. Never mind the democracy erasure, let’s send him to Tokyo, Seoul, Manila, and Sydney to tell our allies that betraying Taiwan will be fine once we can make our own chips.” The post received 164,000 views. Goldberg had named something worth naming, and this piece is an attempt to take that naming seriously.

Subscribe now

Palihapitiya’s argument, stripped to its structure, runs as follows. Taiwan’s strategic importance to the United States rests primarily on its semiconductor dominance: TSMC produces the chips on which Nvidia, Apple, and the American defence industrial base depend. As that dependency reduces through domestic manufacturing, the strategic rationale for defending Taiwan weakens proportionately. Eighteen months from now, the argument goes, chips will be made elsewhere, the problem will dissolve, and Taiwan will be just another island. David French of the New York Times called it strategically and morally impoverished thinking. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute noted that Taiwan’s importance extends to its position in the first island chain, to what a Chinese seizure would mean for the regional order, to the precedent it would set for every democratic government currently weighing how much Washington’s commitments are worth. Malcolm Davis of ASPI put the moral dimension plainly: sacrificing a liberal democracy of 24 million people who have struggled hard for their freedoms would resemble the appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938. None of this appeared to have complicated the original argument.

Palihapitiya is a successful investor with genuine analytical instincts. He is also a Widget Person. And the Widget People, however intelligent, are uniquely dangerous precisely because they are not wrong about the widget. They are wrong about everything the widget is leaning against.

What a Widget Person Believes

The Widget Person is not defined by bad faith, though bad faith is sometimes present. They are defined by a particular kind of single-factor reasoning applied to problems that are fundamentally multi-factor. They identify a real constraint, find a technological or structural solution to that constraint, and conclude that removing the constraint resolves the problem. The widget, in their model, is load-bearing. Remove it and the structure falls. Replace it and the structure holds. What the Widget Person consistently underestimates is how many other structures are leaning against the same wall.

Psychologists understand why this generalisation occurs. The “halo effect” describes the tendency for success in one domain to bleed across into how we judge a person’s abilities in every other domain. Put simply, excellence in one domain, carried across all others. The Widget Person benefits twice from this. First, audiences take a genuine track record in technology or finance and generalise it into an assumed mastery of geopolitics and war strategy. The Second, is called “earned dogmatism”: when people see themselves, and are seen by others, as experts, they feel entitled to be more rigid and dogmatic in their views.

Crucially, this is not about actual competence; it is about felt expertise. This dogmatic behaviour is considered by audiences as substantially more appropriate for perceived experts compared to novices. The more successful the Widget Person has been, the more license they feel, and are granted, to highlight their widget, and dismiss all others.

The pattern recurs with remarkable regularity. The internet was going to make authoritarian governments impossible by giving citizens access to information that regimes could not control. The Arab Spring seemed to validate this thesis. The subsequent decade of digital surveillance states, algorithmic manipulation, and information warfare demolished it. The widget was real. The conclusion drawn from it was not. Economic interdependence was going to make major power conflict obsolete. The deeper China and Russia were integrated into global trade, the more costly conflict would become for all parties, and therefore the less likely. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent economic decoupling demonstrated that political will and nationalist grievance can override the logic of mutual commercial interest. The widget was real. The conclusion drawn from it was not.

Nuclear weapons were going to make conventional war obsolete. This was stated with great confidence in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It preceded Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands, two Gulf Wars, the invasion of Ukraine, and the Iran war of 2026. The nuclear shadow changes the calculus of escalation at the highest levels. It does not prevent conventional conflict below that threshold. The widget was real. The conclusion drawn from it was not.

The Taiwan Case: What the Widget Misses

The semiconductor argument for Taiwan’s strategic importance is genuine and significant. TSMC produces over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. A disruption to its operations would cripple Nvidia, Apple, and effectively every major technology company on earth. The silicon shield theory, that this dependency deters attack, has real strategic logic. And if that dependency were substantially reduced through domestic manufacturing in the United States and allied countries, the calculus would shift.

But the calculus would shift in one dimension of a problem that has at least six. Taiwan sits at the centre of the first island chain, the geographic barrier that determines whether the Chinese navy can project power freely into the Pacific or remains constrained within it. A Chinese seizure of Taiwan breaks that chain. It changes the strategic geography of the entire Indo-Pacific in ways that have nothing to do with semiconductors. It would validate the proposition that territorial aggression against democracies succeeds when the aggressor is powerful enough, a lesson that would be absorbed by every authoritarian government watching. It would test whether American security guarantees to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia mean anything under pressure. It would determine whether the rules-based international order is a real constraint on state behaviour or a set of norms that exist only when convenient.

The mind does not weight those stakes evenly, it reaches for the vivid, personal image and forgets the rest. When researchers asked how much people would pay to save 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 migrating birds from drowning in oil ponds, the answers were essentially identical in all three cases. The picture in the head of an oil-soaked bird did the work; the magnitude didn’t matter. The semiconductor story has that kind of vivid imprint, we’ve felt supply shocks, understand price rises and cherish Nvidia stock. The first island chain and the signal sent to would-be expansionists is less tangible, the logic more complex, and the impact is unclear. The widget argument lands harder not because it is truer, but because it is easier to picture.

None of these dynamics are altered by where chips are manufactured. The widget is real. The conclusion drawn from it requires the assumption that the chip dependency is the only reason Taiwan matters, which requires ignoring most of what the last seventy years of Indo-Pacific strategy has been about. The Widget Person is not wrong about the chip. They are wrong about the problem.

Drones: The Latest Widget

The same reasoning has migrated to the battlefield, and it is worth examining carefully because the drone case is considerably more sophisticated than the Taiwan chip case, which makes the Widget Person’s error harder to see and therefore more dangerous.

Read more

Two Systems, Two Prices

The United States government has been documented buying stock in defence technology companies it subsequently praised by ticker symbol, directing federal contracts toward start…

Read more

The Maxim machine gun was going to decide wars too.

David Olusoga’s recent documentary series A Gun Through Time traces the Maxim gun from its invention in 1884, through the British military’s initial…

Read more

The Counter-Revolution

The same consultancies that told you the metaverse could be worth $5 trillion now want you to trust the AI boom, and to trust that this time it will be great for ordinary people…

Read more

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Here is a fact that should be more alarming than it is. Russia and Ukraine, locked in a war that has defined the geopoliti…

Read more

Read more

Sino-Russian relations are showing signs of strain. Europe and its Asian allies should exploit that.

On 4 February 2022, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping stood together in Beijing and declared a partners…

Read more

Credit: BBC News (2026).

Israel and the Limits of Strategic Exceptionalism

The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 killed 1,195 people, took 251 hostages, and constituted the deadliest single day for Jewish…

Read more

When historians write about the fracturing of the post-Cold War order, the common milestone will be Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Trump's return to the White House. We disagree. Both events were ca…

Read more

Photo source: The Guardian, Mohammad Mohnsenifar.

There is a story we keep telling ourselves, and we keep being surprised when it ends badly.

Subscribe now

The story goes like this: a brutal regime holds a populatio…

Read more

Source: Lloyd’s List Intelligence (2026).

The Regime That Earned Its Enemies

For those of a liberal disposition, confronted with the confirmed US–Israeli strikes on Iran and the death of Supreme Leader…

Read more

(Credit:

Read more

On 16 January, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) hosted a timely and incisive discussion examining Latin America’s response to the US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Ma…

Read more

Aviation is entering a decisive stage within its decarbonisation trajectory. The outcome will not be determined by breakthroughs in engineering alone, nor by optimistic technology roadmaps. It will b…

Read more

Helsing’s CA-1 Europa Drone. Source: Reuters.

For nearly three decades, large Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance (MALE) drones like the US’s Predator and Reaper have been the backbone of Western air power - the unblinking eyes in the sky delivering intelligence and strikes with surgical precision. During the Global War on Terror, these platforms were the aerial bedrock of Western counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy, and European nations have been almost entirely dependent on American and Israeli-made MALE drones.

Subscribe now

That dependency risks repeating itself as “loyal wingman” drones move closer to service. Western nations can’t wait until the 2040s for their development, they need them now. In the “Great Power” conflict paradigm we now find ourselves, air superiority is not guaranteed. In this environment MALE drones are liabilities, and 4^th/5^th generational fighter jets are increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated air defence networks. Deploying the number of manned jets that would be needed would be too expensive – not to mention the lack of pilots in most NATO countries. Loyal wingman drones offer a solution by enabling combat mass while (hopefully) staying within budget and saving human lives.

Unfortunately for Europe, domestic initiatives are few, and to be operationally ready by the end of the decade nations are increasingly turning to the US. However, with an increasingly unreliable US under the Trump administration, Europe cannot afford to become entirely dependent on US loyal wingman drones, like during the MALE era. If it wants to achieve strategic autonomy, Europe must harmonise and properly fund domestic initiatives, and it must do it quickly.

The Shifting Geopolitical Environment: from MALE to “Loyal Wingman” Drones

MQ-9 Reaper. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.

Today’s geopolitical environment has changed from the counterinsurgency era of the past decades. Gone are the permissive skies of that battlespace, replaced by contested airspace amid a resurgence in Great Power Competition. Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance (MALE) drones, like the MQ-9 Reaper, long the West’s aerial workhorses during the War on Terror, are now reduced to ancillary roles. Slow moving and not designed for stealth, MALE drones like the Reaper would be expensive sitting ducks in a contested airspace like the Taiwan Strait.

In Yemen, since late 2023 it’s estimated Houthi rebels have downed somewhere between 15-23 MQ-9 Reapers. To put this into perspective, since its introduction in 2007, there is only 1 confirmed instance of a Reaper being shot down.

The proliferation of sophisticated Russian and Chinese integrated defence systems (IADs) and anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) bubbles have impacted not just MALE drones, but manned aircraft too. Traditional 4th and 4.5-generation jets (F-15, Typhoon, Rafale) and even 5^th-generation jets (F-35) are assessed to lack the range and extreme stealth needed to survive missions into these highly protected airspaces.

An XQ-58A Valkyrie unmanned aerial vehicle flies in formation with an F-22 Raptor and F-35A Lightning over the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground testing range, Ariz., during a series of tests (Air Force2020).

Doctrine has shifted to the development of loyal wingman drones – defined as AI-driven jet engine powered large uncrewed aircraft. The idea of loyal wingman drones is to act as cost-effective force multipliers to manned aircraft, with anywhere from 2-8 flying in a manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T). They can have different capabilities, like electronic warfare or air-to-air combat, giving the manned aircraft different options depending on the mission and circumstances. First-generation loyal wingman drones are being built to fly between Mach 0.8-0.9 (2-3x faster than a Reaper). While autonomous, the manned aircraft will control them using some form of interface. Loyal wingman drones will enable the combat mass needed for missions into highly protected environments and provide protection to the manned aircraft who can send them ahead.

Like during the MALE era, America is leading the way in their development. The US already has test flights, while European programs are still in the design phase. The US has a clear, unified and well-funded program through the US Air Force (USAF) to support their development – called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. While Europe has one trilateral program between France, Germany and Spain, as part of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), and it’s at risk of collapse. Apart from that each nation is funding and developing its own program, including the UK and Italy which are part of the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) – where the joint funding is to only develop the 6^th-generation jet (with Japan), not the loyal wingman drones.

US Loyal Wingman Drone Developments

Anduril’s YFQ-44A “Fury” CCA. Photo Credit: TWZ Reader.

As we enter 2026, increment 1 of the USAF’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program is progressing well. The winners of increment 1 (Anduril and General Atomics (GA-ASI)) are doing test flights with prototypes, and the race between nine vendors for increment 2 is well underway. The USAF has allocated $8.9 billion so far for increment 1 of the CCA through to 2029, funding amounts for increment 2 are yet to be announced. For Anduril and General Atomic (GA-ASI) low-rate initial production (LRIP) is slated for 2027-2028, with full operational status by 2029-2030.

A number of US firms are also self-funding CCA initiatives with an eye to the USAF’s increment 2, US Marine and Navy initiatives and international sales. Lockheed Martin, through its Skunk Works subsidiary, has developed the Vectis and is aiming for test flights in 2027. Kratos Defense, the pioneer of the self-funded drone model, has developed the Valkyrie, and in a partnership with Northrop Grumman in January 2026 announced they won a US Marine contract (MUX TACAIR) using the Valkyrie as the base airframe. The Valkyrie was the first loyal wingman drone to test flight back in 2019 and is in serial production already.

Boeings MQ-28A Ghost Bat. Source: Australian Aviation.

Read more

Photo Credit: Getty Images.

Britain’s Post-American Moment

Britain is approaching a decisive moment in its post-Cold War history, one in which long standing assumptions about security, restraint and Am…

Read more

This analysis was prompted by a concern raised in private conversation with a highly experienced aviation professional, whose career has involved sustained engagement with airpower, threat assessment…

Read more

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Western governments have spent billions attempting to stabilise countries like South Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Mali. Consultants were embedded in ministries. Constitutions were drafted. Elections were organised under armed guard. Entire institutional architectures were built on the assumption that violence could be contained for democratic nations to take root. Think tanks discussed socio-political and economic factors, yet few would address the elephant in the room. Cheap Russian mass-produced weapons made nation building impossible.

Subscribe now

Political order and stability depend on a monopoly of force. When non-state violence is expensive, risky, and difficult to organise, institutions have space to function. When violence becomes cheap and ubiquitous, politics collapses into coercion. No weapon has done more to cheapen violence than the Russian Kalashnikov rifle.

The Kalashnikov Asymmetry

In the early 2010s, a Western aid worker travelling through South Sudan was offered a rifle at a roadside market. It was an old AK-pattern weapon, aged but reliable. The price was roughly $80. Ammunition was plentiful, cheap, and sold locally. For less than the cost of a modest dinner in London, you could have purchase a weapon that can cut through vehicles and walls. Even as of 2017, a real AK 47 could be purchased for just $600 in Afghanistan Figure 1. For $600 you can destabilise a region. Rocket propelled grenade (RPG) launchers sell for between $750-3000. These cheap systems can destroy armoured targets and buildings, and the only training is to aim and pull the trigger. The Telegraph reported in 2015 that the AK-47 has killed more people worldwide than any other firearm.

Figure 1. The cost of an AK-47 worldwide and on the Black Market (Statista 2017).

An estimated 70–100 million AK-pattern rifles have been produced worldwide since the 1950s. The AK-47 and its many variants have become the most widely distributed firearms in history. These rifles are in service with 80+ countries and countless non-state actors. While many were produced under license or copied abroad, Russia itself has exported over 1 million AK-type rifles since 2000 to roughly 30 countries. The AK-47 is held by states, militias, criminal groups, and civilians alike. Their notoriety rests on durability and simplicity, and unbeatable cost-efficiency through obscene production scale.

More than 9 million shoulder-fired RPG-7 launchers have been produced globally since the early 1960s. They are in use in 40+ countries and are among the most widely distributed anti-armour weapons ever made. The weapon is simple enough to be used with minimal training and powerful enough to threaten armoured vehicles, helicopters at low altitude (immortalised in the film Blackhawk Down), and fortified positions. Launchers have often sold on illicit markets for well under two thousand dollars, with rockets available for a few hundred. The RPG-7 has kept US and ally forces on edge every time they went on patrol. For the cost of a used car, someone with virtually no training can neutralise military assets that cost millions.

The following example illustrates the absurd economic asymmetry of these weapons into perspective: even at the high end ($1,500 per rifle), spending $1 billion could buy on the order of 666,000 rifles - a tiny fraction of any nation’s armed forces - whereas nation-building budgets often exceed $1 trillion. That’s a difference of roughly a million-to-one between buying large quantities of small weapons versus whole-of-government reconstruction operations. You read that correctly, 1,000,000: 1.

These weapons are at the heart of modern state failure, and yet it is almost never discussed as a primary cause. Nation-building did not fail because political reconstruction is impossible. Nor did it fail because liberal democracies lack resolve. Nor simply because of cultural misunderstandings (though these have certainly mattered in the Middle East and North Africa). It failed because reconstruction was attempted in environments saturated with cheap, highly lethal weapons (mostly produced and distributed through the Soviet and later Russian arms ecosystem). How can one build a state when the dismantling it can cost less than a mobile phone?

Against this, consider the economics of Western intervention. The cost of deploying and sustaining a single soldier overseas runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars per year once logistics, rotation, healthcare, and equipment are included. A single modern armoured vehicle costs several million dollars. Precision-guided munitions can cost more than an entire militia’s annual arsenal. Every Western response operates at a radically higher price point than the threat it confronts.

Architects of Anarchy

Read more

The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. Source: Shutterstock.

In the current political climate, reindustrialisation has transitioned from a campaign slogan to a core pillar of national securi…

Read more

That thin, reedy, electric buzzing, it’s the sound of the modern war. It’s a sound that has replaced the deep, episodic violence of artillery with a continuous, ambient threat. Across Ukraine, Gaza, and every contested environment today, this acoustic signature signals a chilling, profound shift: the battlespace has moved into the mind. The tyranny of the small machine recasts human experience of conflict, turning war into a persistent psychological siege.

Drone warfare is a war of cheap machines and expensive consequences. Inexpensive, commercially available systems now impose a profound cognitive and emotional burden on both combatants and civilians. The persistent hum of drones overhead is more than background sound. It is the sonic trace of a century long trajectory that has brought warfare ever closer to the individual, making exposure continuous and pressure inescapable.

Subscribe now

The Five Ps: An Architecture of Psychological Warfare

The current drone phenomenon didn’t just appear overnight; it’s the endpoint of a steady evolution. This journey is best described through the Five Ps, the integrated shifts that have created this new architecture for psychological warfare.

1. Precision: It began with Precision, tracing a line from the early radio-guided ordnance of the Second World War (like the Fritz-X glide bomb) to the laser-guided bombs of Vietnam. This established the capability to guide munitions beyond brute force, laying the technical foundation for the targeted strike.

2. Persistence: This evolved into Persistence - the capacity for continuous surveillance using satellites and loitering platforms. Once precision became digital, it required a constant data feed, enforcing a state of continuous threat appraisal on the watched population, directly feeding hypervigilance.

3. Personalisation: This combination then led to Personalisation, famously institutionalised with the armed Predator drone post-9/11. Here, persistent surveillance fused with strike capability to focus war on the individual, using ‘pattern-of-life’ analysis to turn people into data profiles. It was politically neat, a ‘dream scenario’ of high value targeting without friendly casualties, but it created an intensely intimate form of remote killing.

4. Proliferation: The final two Ps converged powerfully in conflicts like Ukraine. Proliferation marked the shift from expensive, elite military systems to cheap, widely available First-Person-View (FPV) drones. Suddenly, commercial racing drones were weaponised, guided by operators in simple visors. This movement of aerial threat from strategic infrastructure to the individual human target democratised air power, creating the ‘Poor Man’s Air Force’ and accelerating the pace of innovation on the front lines.

5. Publicity: Finally, Publicity weaponised visibility. The intimate, visceral footage of a strike streams live to platforms like Telegram and YouTube, turning each act of war into a spectacle that is both propaganda and trauma. What once stayed secret now circulates, ensuring that the psychological damage is neurologically sustained long after the physical threat has passed.

German “Fritz X” Guided Bomb in the National Museum of the United States Airforce (2025).

The convergence of these Five Ps creates a battlespace specifically designed for strategic psychological attrition.

The Psychological Burden: Chronic Fear and Moral Injury

The technological convergence of the Five Ps creates two distinct, yet equally devastating, psychological outcomes on civilians and combatants alike, imposing a differentiated psychological burden. The following sections outline these effects.

However, due to the lack of data from active battlefields, we are left piecing together fragments from reports by journalists and human-rights investigators that sketch a picture both anecdotal and alarmingly consistent. This empirical vacuum is not accidental; the “fog of war” shields militaries from releasing data that could both call the ethics of these weapons into question and make recruiting new operators challenging, a fatal operational hazard amid combat.

The Civilian Experience: Ambient Threat and CPTSD

For the civilian population, the psychological cost is profound and chronic, stemming directly from the force of Persistence. Their experience is no longer one of episodic danger, but of ambient threat. The drone’s hum is a conditioned cue, a “sound of death,” that eliminates the concept of a safe interval or a secure domestic space. This continuous monitoring locks the brain’s fear circuitry into a state of chronic hypervigilance. Accounts from conflict zones show this relentless exposure - fear coupled with helplessness - aligns with the diagnostic criteria for Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD).

Moreover, the drone is actively leveraged for Psychological Operations (PsyOps), with reports detailing its use to broadcast screams and distress sounds over civilian areas. Worse, a torrent of cheap one-way attack drones hit civilian infrastructure like power grids and hospitals, directly attacking the population’s capacity for rest and recovery. This constant psychological drain makes populations vulnerable and undermines their resilience.

The Operator’s Burden: Intimacy and Moral Injury

Read more