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"Only The Beginning": How To Profit From The Asymmetric Warfare Boom

Zero Rss
1 month 3 weeks ago
"Only The Beginning": How To Profit From The Asymmetric Warfare Boom

Low-cost kamikaze drones are fundamentally reshaping the modern battlefield and forcing militaries to rethink procurement strategies built around expensive, high-end weapons systems.

In the Middle East, US Special Forces learned the hard way that cheap Iranian Shahed-style drones can eliminate multi-million-dollar (if not billion-dollar) communications, radar, and command-and-control nodes.

The result of this Iranian offensive with cheap drones, which exposed a missing air-defense layer over high-value U.S. military communications systems across the Gulf region, will trigger a defense procurement reset. The U.S. military is now racing to source, order, and stockpile low-cost one-way attack drones, interceptors, and counter-UAS systems before the next conflict erupts - or US-Iran ceasefire blows up.

Piper Sandler analyst Clarke Jeffries is now arriving at the same conclusion we have been highlighting:

We anticipate one of the biggest lessons of the 2020s will be how affordable drone technology fundamentally reshaped the modern combat environment and set the stage for a reevaluation of the procurement, organization and strategy of ~$3T in annual global military expenditures.

While drones have existed in the modern military apparatus for decades at this point, it was the Ukraine war (as one of the first near-peer conflicts in recent memory) which provided demonstrable evidence of how specifically lightweight and affordable systems could change the paradigm of combat.

Jeffries provided clients with a detailed overview of the nine public and nineteen private companies powering America's emerging drone industry. His takeaway: this is still the early chapters of a market set for massive growth, as the U.S. military and allied nations push the procurement cycle into higher gear next year and through the end of the decade.

He sees the first wave of the market centered on inexpensive UAS production, domestic supply chains, and rapid procurement, while the second wave will be driven by autonomy, swarming, mothership configurations, and deeper integration into command-and-control networks.

He pointed out that AI software will be as important as hardware, with platforms such as Palantir's Maven Smart System poised to turn massive drone sensor feeds into highly usable battlefield intelligence.

"With most nations averse to endure undue cost to the already punishing economics of pursuing a war, we see proliferation of Group 1-3 UAS as an inevitability and the next major technology inflection point for the aerospace and defense industry," the analyst said.

He continued: 

Democratizing asymmetric warfare; sUAS has redefined the rules of engagement. Much of modern military history has been the story of haves and have-nots, with 10 countries accounting for 72% of global military spend and dominating production of the most capable and exquisite systems. Drone technology however (and specifically small unmanned aircraft systems: sUAS) has vastly increased the accessibility and affordability of highly capable military equipment and subverted the advantage of using exquisite systems into a costly strategy. In Ukraine and Iran, drones of all sizes have become de facto standard for air campaigns launched as low-cost attritable munitions. These drones are regularly countered by more expensive defense methods: missiles, interceptors, rockets creating a challenging cost-exchange issue. Every drone launched is net dollar advantage to the belligerent firing them. With most nations averse to endure undue cost to the already punishing economics of pursuing a war, we see proliferation of Group 1-3 UAS as an inevitability and the next major technology inflection point for the aerospace and defense industry.

Jeffries lays out three key conclusions about the rapidly changing defense landscape:

Public companies flagged by Jeffries as benefiting include AeroVironment, Ondas, Red Cat, AEVEX, Redwire, Insitu and Teledyne FLIR, while private names include Anduril, Skydio, Shield AI, Quantum Systems, Performance Drone Works, DZYNE, Firestorm Labs and Neros.

An example of this technology. Meet DZYNE's BlitzBox system ... 

The American company Dzyne has introduced the BlitzBox system, a container for covertly launching a swarm of attack drones. On the outside, it looks like an ordinary cargo box, but inside, it can hold up to 100 Blitz drones, ready to launch in minutes.#DroneWars #UAS #UAV pic.twitter.com/w9aRaZYrCZ

— Drone Wars (@Drone_Wars_) May 27, 2026

He noted, "Today, most militaries are still in the earliest innings of their sUAS efforts: building defensible supply chains, refining specific designs, aligning the organizational and budgetary structure to successfully field these systems."

Follow the money...

Lessons from the Ukraine & Iranian Conflicts

Notable Drone Programs

Notable UAS Contracts

The UAS Blue List

Past, Present and Future of the Drone Operator

Swarming

Rise of Mothership Drones

In a separate note, Needham analyst Austin Bohlig noted that increasing congressional support for drones and counter-drone technologies has been reflected in the FY27 National Defense Authorization Act and related appropriations bills.

Related:

The safe conclusion is that the public and private drone companies mentioned above are positioned to reap major rewards as military procurement cycles shift toward these low-cost systems and annual global military spending surges in the coming years.

Professional subscribers can find more war tech notes at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/19/2026 - 20:45
Tyler Durden

Brooks Koepka’s wife Jena Sims cracks golf joke amid US Open disappointment

NY Post
1 month 3 weeks ago
The 2026 U.S. Open is underway, which means that many of the world’s best golfers have come together at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, N.Y., this weekend. While several top golfers have performed well to this point, several others have disappointed in a major way. Perhaps the most notable is 36-year-old American standout Brooks...
Grant Young

Elon Musk Vs The Democrats: Outcomes Vs Process

Zero Rss
1 month 3 weeks ago
Elon Musk Vs The Democrats: Outcomes Vs Process

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

Years ago, when my oldest son was a Boy Scout, he was asked to write a report/make a presentation on a modern American “hero.” He chose Elon Musk, and I, of course, rolled my eyes so hard they nearly popped out of my head.

I knew Musk was a successful businessman, but I also knew that he was both an advocate for and a seasoned manipulator of Big Government. Tesla, for example, received a $465 million Department of Energy loan in 2010 under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, a Big Government scheme to encourage private companies to advance Big Government priorities (namely, fighting Climate Change by reducing carbon emissions). Likewise, Tesla was, at least at the time, commercially viable only because of the more than $1 billion ($7,500/vehicle) in federal EV tax credits claimed by its buyers. Without government greasing the proverbial wheels a bit, Tesla would have struggled to get the literal wheels rolling out the sales floor doors.

Moreover, Musk publicly acknowledged that he voted for Obama and presented himself as part of the “green” business revolution, men and women who could and would “do well by doing good.”

My, how things change.

Just a short decade later, Elon Musk is, indeed, regarded as a genuine hero by most on the American political Right—and by anyone who favors free enterprise—while he is loathed and actively derided by his former friends and allies on the Left. Especially this past week, after the SpaceX IPO made him the world’s first trillionaire, the Democrats and other leftists who once loved him, partnered with him, and sang his praises loudly have shown nothing but contempt for him and hatred for his inarguable business success. As the controversial Democratic Senate nominee from Maine, Graham Platner, ominously put it, “Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire. Let’s make sure he’s also the last.”

How, exactly, did we get here?

The biggest part of the story is Musk’s own political evolution, which proceeded slowly, in stages, but was accelerated at a handful of inflection points.

Of these inflection points, two stand out among the others.

The first of these took place during President Biden’s first year in office.

Biden and his administration were knee-deep in pushing a new, far more aggressive climate agenda. On his first day in office, Biden issued 17 executive orders, several of which addressed climate change and other environmental matters. Most notably, he signed an order to reinstate the nation’s participation in the Paris Accords, thereby placing a policy-making emphasis on electrification and decarbonization. A big part of that effort—as would be evinced in the “Inflation Reduction Act” passed the following year—was pushing the purchase of electric vehicles. To that end, on August 4, 2021, Biden hosted an EV “summit” at the White House. He invited three EV makers—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis—to watch him sign another executive order, this one mandating that half of all new vehicles sold in the United States by 2030 be EVs. Of the three, GM had the largest percentage of its sales derived from fully electric vehicles—1.5 percent. Ford sat at 1.3 percent, and Stellantis didn’t even have an electric vehicle for sale in the American market. Meanwhile, Tesla was the nation’s largest EV auto seller at the time, and 100 percent of its vehicles were fully electric. Yet Musk and his company were left off the Biden team’s guest list.

What GM, Ford, and Stellantis did have, of course, was the support of the United Auto Workers Union. In fact, the three also just happened to be the largest UAW employers. Tesla, by contrast, had long fought the unionization of its factories and had been embroiled in a rather ugly dispute with the UAW. In response to the snub, Musk vented a bit, tweeting:

Biden held this EV summit. Didn’t invite Tesla.

Invited GM, Ford, Chrysler, and UAW. EV summit at the White House, didn’t mention Tesla once and praised GM and Ford for leading the EV revolution.

Doesn’t it sound a little bias? It’s not the friendliest of administrations.

Seems to be controlled by the unions.

Just under a year later, Musk reached the second inflection point, which also turned out to be his breaking point.

In May 2022, the S&P 500 ESG Index conducted its annual rebalancing. And when it did, it removed Tesla.

ESG stands for “environmental, social, and governance” investing, a strategy that purports to push corporations to address issues beyond traditional profits and losses, focusing on the broader societal impacts of their operations. I wrote a whole book about ESG (The Dictatorship of Woke Capital) in which I made the case that its flaws are numerous and disqualifying. One of the most significant of these is that ESG has no set definition. It means whatever its practitioners decide it means in the moment, based on little more than preference and convenience. And this is precisely where the S&P’s index ran into problems with Tesla.

By any objective measure, Tesla should have been a mainstay of any investment strategy focused on environmental benefits. It was and is a pioneer in carbon reduction strategies in the personal transportation market. What could be more environmentally friendly than that? The S&P, however, objected to Tesla’s procedural strategies, or lack thereof. It argued that Tesla didn’t have a published “low-carbon strategy,” or verifiable “codes of conduct.” It noted that the automaker had been accused of racial discrimination and didn’t do a great job of handling a National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigation. In short, the ESG index tossed the innovator in “E” technology off its list of acceptable companies because it valued the process of the ESG strategy more than it did the outcomes.

Needless to say, this incensed Musk. On May 18, he (once again) tweeted his frustration:

Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500, while Tesla didn’t make the list! ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.

Not coincidentally, two and a half hours later, Musk returned to Twitter to make an announcement about his partisan political future:

In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold . . .

It is worth noting here that Musk didn’t just switch parties. He radicalized. His change in partisan affiliation and political involvement was night and day.

He went from a quiet, nominally aligned center-leftist to a full-blown, aggressive libertarian-conservative. Instead of giving $1,000 here and $1,000 there to Democratic candidates, he started throwing money into politics as if he’d never miss it (in part because he never would). He backed Donald Trump with millions of dollars and then joined his administration (for free) as the leader and organizer of DOGE. The combination of the union-driven and the ESG-driven snubs sent him over the edge. Not only would he no longer support Democrats, but he would support their opponents loudly and generously.

Although it would be easy (and not entirely wrong) to say that Elon Musk’s political evolution was a self-inflicted wound by the Democrats, who enthusiastically chased him out of their party, it’s more accurate to say that the break between the two was a structural inevitability. That inevitability was inarguably exacerbated and hastened by Democratic overconfidence and miscalculation, but that’s the difference between Musk simply leaving the party and becoming radicalized for the other side. Musk’s shift away from Democratic politics was likely always going to happen and is emblematic of the long-standing tension between so-called “progressives” and actual progress. The ideology that once sought explicitly to “better” the nation and its people has become little more than a machine for creating rules, often at the expense of that improvement. Musk’s fervent embrace of the Democrats’ opponents was driven by personalities—theirs, his, and probably Trump’s.

Think about it this way...

 The Progressive coalition traditionally has very much resembled the S&P ESG index noted above. It has always been carefully managed, regulated, labor-friendly, bureaucratic, and procedure-driven. It has always been more about process than outcome. Musk, for his part, is the opposite. He is disruptive, as capitalist entrepreneurs tend to be. He favors that which moves fast, eschews established rubrics, and achieves results. He is outcome-driven and cares very little (sometimes, maybe, too little) about process. The idea that he and today’s Democrats could have remained strongly aligned is, in retrospect, incongruous.

That’s not to say that he and the GOP are perfectly aligned, but certainly his ethos fits better there, at least for the moment.

The bottom line here is that while process values have their place, they can be self-defeating, particularly when they are allowed to serve as a substitute for experience and reality.

The Democrats don’t hate Elon Musk because he’s a trillionaire. They hate him because he became a trillionaire by breaking all their dearly held and largely outmoded rules.

There’s a profound lesson in that, if anyone is willing to learn it.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/19/2026 - 20:00
Tyler Durden

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