There are two competing narratives about the future of warfare. For nearly the past two years, drones and artillery have been hailed as the way forward. The June 2025 Iran-Israel war revived the view that stealth warplanes are the future.

These are two fundamentally different views, however, neither truly unseats the consistently outperforming and cost effective cruise missile.

In the winter of February 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was stopped by artillery, heavy infantry weapons, most notably MANPADs and Javelin missiles, and Russian incompetence. As the war dragged on and expensive weapons became scarce, remote controlled aircraft hobbyists developed weaponized drones.

While pioneered by ISIS in the 2010s, these hobbyists developed a variety of formidable single-use and multi

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