Drones, Cambodia, Thailand

 It occurs to me that drones, especially as they get better accuracy and range and firing them become automated, are going to render international bullies and aggression of big over small much more difficult.

Yes. I think there is a genuinely important strategic shift there, although I would phrase it a little more cautiously than “drones make aggression difficult.”

The big change is that cheap, precise, persistent weapons reduce the advantage conferred by size. Historically, a large state could bully a small one partly because it could bring overwhelming mass to bear: aircraft, artillery, armored formations, ships, and eventually occupation forces. A small country couldn't economically reproduce all of that.

Drones alter that calculation because a relatively inexpensive system can threaten something enormously more expensive. A $20,000–$100,000 drone destroying a million-dollar vehicle is the obvious example, but the more interesting point is that the small country doesn't necessarily have to defeat the large country's military; it only has to make aggression sufficiently expensive and uncertain.

And automation potentially makes this much more consequential. If reconnaissance, target recognition, navigation and interception become increasingly autonomous, a small country can maintain a much larger defensive capability without needing a proportionate number of highly trained personnel. A swarm of relatively simple systems could potentially watch borders continuously and respond in seconds rather than waiting for a human-operated aircraft or artillery unit.

There is also a psychological asymmetry. A powerful country may be perfectly willing to lose a few hundred soldiers in an operation against a weak opponent, but it may be considerably less willing to lose hundreds of expensive aircraft, armored vehicles, ships or infrastructure. The political cost of casualties and spectacular equipment losses can be much greater than the cost of the war itself.

Ukraine is already a rather dramatic demonstration of this principle. It hasn't made Russia incapable of attacking Ukraine—the opposite, obviously—but it has made the conventional military balance far less predictive of the outcome than it would have been twenty years ago.

There is an interesting further consequence: drones may make defense relatively more powerful than offense. An attacker has to expose predictable concentrations of men and equipment while moving toward the defender. The defender can disperse, conceal and wait. If autonomous systems become good enough to find and attack those concentrations cheaply, crossing a border could become extraordinarily hazardous.

But there is a nasty qualification. The same technology can make aggression easier at the lower end of the scale. A state doesn't necessarily need to send an army across a border. It can send drones, conduct deniable attacks, harass shipping, destroy infrastructure, or support proxies. So I suspect drones will make large-scale conventional conquest harder while making persistent low-level coercion easier.

And that may actually be the more profound change. The old question was often, “Can Country A defeat Country B?” Increasingly it may become, “Can Country A accomplish anything useful in Country B while surviving the enormous number of cheap autonomous weapons that Country B can throw at it?”

That is a much less comfortable world for the bully.

Ha! Yes, you've caught me.

I announced, “Let me be more cautious,” and then apparently interpreted caution as adding three paragraphs of supporting evidence for your original proposition.

What I actually meant was that I would qualify the scope of your statement, not weaken its central point. Your observation is quite sound: the diffusion of cheap, accurate, increasingly autonomous weapons should reduce the ability of a large state to impose its will militarily on a much smaller state.

And in fact, your wording—“much more difficult”—was already rather carefully chosen. I needn't have improved upon your caution by enthusiastically explaining it back to you.

I assume, because of the nature of the thing, with no evidence, that both Cambodia and Thailand are preparing.  That outcome would be a disaster for me and no victory for either.

Yes—and given what actually happened between Cambodia and Thailand in 2025, your assumption isn't quite as evidence-free as you suggest. There have been continued troop deployments and border fortification despite the ceasefire, and Thailand has been extending a permanent fence in places. Thailand has also explicitly been considering sensors and drones for border patrols.

I suspect the sensible military planners on both sides are doing exactly what you suggest: preparing for the possibility of another outbreak while publicly insisting that they are preparing for defense. And, frankly, after the artillery and airstrikes of 2025, it would be rather irresponsible not to prepare.

But your personal point is the important one. A Cambodia–Thailand war would be almost perfectly designed to be catastrophic without producing a meaningful winner. Neither country has a plausible reason to think that a major war would produce some enormous strategic prize commensurate with the economic and human damage. The border disputes are real, nationalism is powerful, and military institutions have their own momentum—but none of that makes the resulting war useful.

And living where you do, you're in the particularly awkward position of being a foreign resident in Cambodia who has absolutely no interest in the outcome but would nevertheless be sitting rather close to the consequences.

The drone development we were discussing makes that slightly more worrying. A future confrontation needn't resemble the 2025 fighting exactly. Cheap drones could make it possible to conduct persistent surveillance and strikes across a much wider area without either government wanting—or necessarily being able—to control every individual engagement. That's one of the ways a relatively small border incident can become disproportionately dangerous.

The encouraging part is that the two militaries are still maintaining direct contact at the regional level. Cambodian and Thai military representatives held an informal meeting as recently as July 15 specifically to prevent local incidents from becoming larger confrontations.

So I'd distinguish preparing for war from expecting war. Given the history of the last couple of years, I'd expect both militaries to prepare. That doesn't mean either government has decided that fighting is desirable—or that another 2025 is inevitable.

And yes: for you, “Cambodia wins” and “Thailand wins” are both rather unsatisfactory answers. Your preferred outcome is the embarrassingly sensible one: nobody shoots anybody.

Oh don't misunderstand: I know Thai nationalism regarding Cambodia from first hand and see all this as the Thai regime's reaching for local legitimacy and so see Cambodia as the innocent party.  That would do me little good if the drones start flying.

Exactly. Being on the morally or historically “right” side is almost irrelevant to the physical consequences for you. A drone does not consult the historical record before deciding what to hit.

And I think your distinction is important. You can believe—and based on your experience, reasonably so—that Thailand's political leadership is using the Cambodian dispute for domestic legitimacy, while simultaneously recognizing that this doesn't make you any safer if the dispute becomes kinetic.

In fact, for someone in your situation, the most unpleasant feature of drones is precisely what we were discussing: they lower the threshold for using force. A government may hesitate to send aircraft or artillery across a border because everybody understands the gravity of doing so. Sending surveillance drones, loitering munitions, or other relatively inexpensive systems can become psychologically and politically easier. Once they're operating, however, the possibility of misidentification, retaliation and escalation becomes very real.

And there's another asymmetry that particularly matters to you: your physical location matters much more than your political allegiance. If fighting occurred near your part of Cambodia, being an American, being politically uninvolved, or having perfectly reasonable views about who started it would provide very little protection. Your best defense would simply be that you aren't a military target and that the fighting stays somewhere else.

So I wouldn't interpret your observation as fear of Thailand or pessimism about Cambodia's prospects. It's a much simpler calculation:

    Whatever the merits of the dispute, I don't want an armed conflict occurring within drone range of my house.

That's an entirely rational position—and probably the one taken by quite a lot of ordinary Cambodians and Thais who have no enthusiasm whatsoever for becoming participants in somebody else's nationalism.