Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) have evolved from niche military platforms into widely available technologies used across commercial, industrial, and recreational sectors.

Their rapid proliferation has unlocked enormous economic value, enabling new services in logistics, agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and media production. Yet the same access has created a parallel security challenge.

In the twenty-first century, conflict has expanded far beyond guns, borders, and physical terrain. Strategic competition increasingly targets how people think, decide, and assign trust. This shift has given rise to what military planners and scholars describe as cognitive warfare, a form of contest that operates not on the battlefield, but within the human mind.

For over a century, military communications were built around a simple logic: radios connect people. Orders flowed down hierarchical chains, reports flowed back up, and information moved along predefined paths. This model shaped the way forces organised themselves on the battlefield.

But now, that paradigm is now under sustained pressure.

As low-cost drones proliferate, the decisive advantage is shifting away from interceptors and jammers, and upstream towards detection, classification and attribution. Passive RF, acoustic and optical sensing are becoming foundational, not supplementary.

Most of the world’s internet traffic runs under the sea. Submarine fibre-optic cables carry the vast majority of international data, connecting markets, banks, cloud platforms and military networks. Recent incidents in Northern Europe made this glaring strategic weakness painfully.

For decades, Western defence strategy has been shaped by kinetic threats, conventional military power, territorial defence, and deterrence based on visible force. While these capabilities are still essential, they are no longer sufficient on their own. Biological risk is emerging as a strategic defence issue that challenges the assumptions underpinning traditional military postures.