Roll Your Own Drone

In July’s Discontinuities for Current Intelligence, “Shanzai! The Era of DIY Warfare” focuses on the evolution of DIY weapons. With the combination of a rise in maker culture, easier access to the technologies of surveillance and warfare, and the fragmentation and diversification of tension from traditional state-on-state battles to new types of assymetric conflict, the role of bottom-up innovation in technology to fuel these conflicts becomes more influential. An excerpt:

“One wonders if we aren’t eventually going to see “peak arms,” in which the combination of know-how, technology and economics put a permanent crunch on the growth of the global arms trade, which now stands at almost half a trillion dollars, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The shift away from straight-forward state-on-state wars has heralded a proliferation of conflict types: not just battles between states and non-state actors, but also conflicts that only indirectly involve governments such as narco-wars, cross-border hacker battles, violent competition between corporations, and infighting among terrorist groups and insurgent organisations, to name but a few. This can only drive demand for the tools of high-tech, low-intensity conflict and broaden the global supply chains that provide them.”

Read the whole article.