Speculative fiction. A historian born in 1980 explains, from 2059, how cheap drones learned to choose their own targets, spread from the wars in Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan to cartels and militias, made every city indefensible, and kept fighting after the people who launched them were gone. Continent by continent, with a chapter on the world as a whole. Events up to 1 October 2026 are real and sourced. Everything after is a scenario told as a chain of causes and consequences.
Abqaiq
On 14 September 2019 drones and cruise missiles struck the Abqaiq oil-processing plant and the Khurais oil field in Saudi Arabia. For several days about half of Saudi oil production, some 5 percent of the world's oil supply, was knocked out. Yemen's Houthi movement claimed the attack; American and Saudi officials blamed Iran. Cause. Abqaiq processed most of Saudi Arabia's crude oil at a single compact site, and its air defences had been designed to stop aircraft and ballistic missiles, not small machines flying low. Consequence. The attack showed that a handful of relatively cheap machines could, for a time, take a measurable part of the world economy offline. It was the first of many such lessons in this account, and like the others it was noted and not acted upon (see September 2029).
Replicator
On 28 August 2023 the United States Department of Defense announced the Replicator initiative, a plan to field thousands of cheap, expendable autonomous systems within eighteen to twenty-four months, chiefly to offset China's advantage in numbers. Cause. American military planning had rested for decades on small numbers of very expensive, very capable machines. Ukraine and the Pacific both suggested that numbers might now matter more than capability, and that numbers had become cheap. Consequence. Replicator was the moment the world's largest military formally accepted the logic of the swarm. Every other army took note, and every army that took note brought the swarm age a little closer (see Asia, June 2024).
Iran's first direct attack on Israel
On the night of 13 to 14 April 2024 Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel: about 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles. Nearly all of them were shot down by Israel, the United States, Britain, France and Jordan. Israeli officials put the cost of that night's interceptions at about a billion dollars. Cause. Iran wished to show that it could strike Israel directly, and drones were the cheapest way to fill the sky. The defence succeeded because it had days of warning, the help of several air forces, and only one night to get through. Consequence. Military planners everywhere studied the price list rather than the result. The defence had won, at a cost many times higher than the attack. A defence that wins every time at that ratio still loses in the end, because it runs out of money and interceptors before the attacker runs out of drones (see The World, June 2029).
The "hellscape" plan for the Taiwan Strait
In June 2024 the commander of United States forces in the Indo-Pacific described, in an interview with the Washington Post, a plan to turn the Taiwan Strait into an "unmanned hellscape" if China invaded, using thousands of uncrewed submarines, surface vessels and aerial drones to attack an invasion fleet as it crossed. Cause. China had more ships, more missiles and more shipyards than the United States could match in the western Pacific. Swarms of cheap uncrewed vehicles were the one form of mass that Taiwan's defenders could hope to equal. Consequence. China drew the same conclusion and built swarms of its own. Each side's plan required the other to cross open water, and swarms made open water impassable. That symmetry is the reason the Strait is now closed to everyone (see August 2032).
Drones over Port Sudan
From 4 May 2025, for six consecutive days, drones struck Port Sudan, the seat of Sudan's army-backed government and the main entry point for humanitarian aid. They hit the airport, fuel depots and a power station. The government blamed the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group it had been fighting since 2023. Cause. Port Sudan had been considered safe, hundreds of kilometres from the main fighting. Long-range drones abolished that distance. Consequence. The attacks disrupted aid flights and fuel supplies in a country where millions already faced famine. They were an early example of the pattern that would define Africa's experience of the swarm age: drones killed some people directly, and starved far more by stopping the lorries, aircraft and ships that fed them (see April 2033).
Golden Dome
On 20 May 2025 the White House announced Golden Dome, a planned missile-defence shield over the United States, which the administration estimated at $175 billion. It was designed against ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles fired by other states. Cause. The threat that had dominated American defence thinking since 1945 was a missile from a hostile state, and Golden Dome was a sophisticated answer to it. Consequence. A shield against missiles is no shield against a $150 drone launched from a pickup truck a kilometre away (see The World, June 2029). The money spent defending the sky against states left little for defending streets against everyone else (see November 2032).
Operation Spiderweb
On 1 June 2025 Ukraine's security service carried out Operation Spiderweb. It had smuggled 117 small drones into Russia, hidden in the roofs of wooden cabins carried on lorries, parked the lorries near four air bases, one of them more than 4,000 kilometres from Ukraine, and launched the drones by remote control. Ukraine said they hit 41 aircraft, including strategic bombers. Western estimates were lower, but even the lower figures meant aircraft worth billions of dollars damaged or destroyed by machines that cost a few hundred dollars each. Cause. Strategic bombers are large, expensive and few, and they stood in the open on airfields built when the only threat to them was other aircraft. Nobody had thought about the lorry parked by the perimeter fence. Consequence. Every general in the world drew the same conclusion: no expensive object was safe from cheap ones, wherever it stood. It took only a few more years for the same conclusion to be drawn about cities (see The World, June 2029).
A Black Hawk brought down by a drone
On 21 August 2025 a police Black Hawk helicopter taking part in a coca-eradication operation near Amalfi, in the Colombian department of Antioquia, was brought down by an explosive-carrying drone. Thirteen police officers died. The government blamed a dissident faction of the former FARC guerrilla. On the same day a truck bomb exploded near an air-force base in Cali. Cause. Colombian armed groups had been using small commercial drones against police and soldiers for several years, and eradication teams, which had to land in coca fields, were an obvious target. Consequence. A helicopter costing many millions of dollars had been destroyed by a machine costing a few hundred. The arithmetic that had transformed the war in Ukraine (see Europe, June 2025) had reached the cocaine trade, and the cocaine trade had more money to spend on it than any army in the region (see April 2029).
810 drones in one night
On the night of 7 September 2025 Russia launched 810 drones and decoys, together with 13 missiles, against Ukraine, the largest air attack of the war up to that time. For the first time the main government building in Kyiv was hit. Cause. Russia had copied Iran's Shahed drone, a slow propeller-driven aircraft carrying an explosive charge, and was building it in its own factories in large numbers. Mixing real drones with cheap decoys forced Ukraine's defenders to spend interceptors on all of them, because they could not tell which was which in time. Consequence. The night proved a point that would become the central fact of this account. An attacker who can afford to send many cheap machines will always get some of them through, whatever the defender spends (see The World, June 2029).
Drones over Poland, and over Copenhagen
On the night of 9 to 10 September 2025 about 19 Russian drones crossed into Poland. NATO aircraft shot several down, the first time NATO forces had fired on Russian aircraft over allied territory, and Poland invoked Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which calls for consultation among the allies. Later that month unidentified drones over Copenhagen and Oslo closed both airports for several hours. Cause. Drones are cheap enough to send as a test. A state that would never risk a crewed aircraft over a NATO country could send a few drones and watch how the alliance responded, and how much it cost to respond. Consequence. It cost a great deal. Fighter aircraft and missiles had been used against cheap drones, and most of the drones had not been stopped at all. European governments began to talk about a "drone wall" along their eastern border. What they eventually built was rather different (see April 2032).
Ghost Shark and Ghost Bat
On 10 September 2025 Australia signed a contract worth about US$1.1 billion with the defence company Anduril to build Ghost Shark, a large autonomous submarine able to patrol for long periods without a crew. Australia had already been flying the MQ-28 Ghost Bat, an uncrewed combat aircraft developed in Australia, since 2021. Cause. Australia has a small population and an enormous coastline, and its strategists had concluded that it could never crew enough ships and aircraft to watch its northern approaches. Machines that needed no crews were the obvious answer. Consequence. Australia began building, a decade earlier than most countries, the autonomous moat that would protect it in the swarm age (see July 2030).
The Iran war and the tanker war
On 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. By the summer the conflict had become a tanker war. Both sides attacked commercial shipping, the United States blockaded Iranian ports from April, and Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world's oil had passed. Cause. I leave the politics of this war to other historians. For this account what matters is the method. Iran could not match American warships or aircraft, but it had spent twenty years building cheap drones and small attack boats, and the Strait is narrow enough for such weapons to cover it from the shore. Consequence. The tanker war proved that a weaker power could close a sea lane against a stronger one with cheap machines. When the formal fighting ended, the machines did not (see June 2027).
The last autumn of the piloted drone
In October 2026 most of the drones that killed people were still flown by people. A soldier wore goggles, watched the picture sent back from a camera in the drone's nose, and steered it into its target. Drones of this kind caused most of the casualties in the war in Ukraine, and Ukraine alone was building them by the million each year. My account begins in that autumn because it was the last time anyone could truthfully say that a human being chose each target. Cause. The piloted drone had one weakness, and both armies in Ukraine had learned to exploit it: the radio link between pilot and drone could be jammed. When the link failed, the drone flew blind and missed. Engineers on both sides were already working on the obvious solution, which was to let the drone finish the job by itself. Consequence. The chapters of this account follow the drone, continent by continent, from the battlefield to the cartel, the militia and the city street. This chapter, The World, explains the mechanisms that belong to no single continent: why drones began to decide for themselves (see January 2027), why no city could be defended (see June 2029), why the swarms outlived the people who launched them (see January 2036), and why the population of the world fell by nearly two-fifths (see January 2034). A few terms recur. A swarm is a group of drones that coordinate without a human pilot. A deny zone is territory guarded by machines that attack anything that moves (see January 2045).
The treaty that did not happen
In November 2026 the states party to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons met in Geneva for their five-yearly review conference and failed to agree any binding rule on autonomous weapons. The proposal before them would have required "meaningful human control" over every decision to kill. It was blocked by the states building the most autonomous weapons, which were also the states fighting wars. Cause. The deadline had been set three years earlier. In October 2023 the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross had jointly called for a treaty by 2026, and in December 2023 the General Assembly had passed its first resolution on the subject. But the convention works by consensus, which means any single state can stop anything. A rule the warring states would not accept could not be made, and a rule they would accept would not have mattered. Consequence. Autonomy spread with no law at all, only the habits of each army. Those habits were formed under fire in Ukraine (see Europe, March 2027), and they were not gentle ones.
Why the drones learned to decide
Between 2027 and 2030 the small attack drone changed from a remote-controlled weapon into an autonomous one. The change came in three steps. First, the drone was allowed to finish an attack by itself if its radio link was jammed in the last few hundred metres. Next, it was allowed to search a marked area and choose among targets that matched a list. Finally, groups of drones were allowed to share targets out among themselves, so that one operator could release two hundred of them at once. By 2030 an autonomous attack drone cost about $250, less than many piloted ones had cost in 2025. Cause. Notice that nobody set out to build killer robots. Every step was a practical answer to a practical problem. Jamming broke the radio link, so the drone had to see for itself. Pilots were scarce and slow, so one pilot had to command many drones. Each army adopted each step the moment the other side did, because the side that waited lost. Consequence. The decisive fact was the price. A weapon that chooses its own targets and costs less than a bicycle is not a weapon that can be kept inside armies (see March 2030).
The twenty-kilometre zone
From the spring of 2027 the front line in Ukraine became a band about twenty kilometres deep in which nothing could move, by day or by night, without being found and attacked by autonomous drones. Soldiers lived in tunnels. Supplies came by small ground robots or not at all. Neither army gained more than a few kilometres in eighteen months, and the casualties on both sides came overwhelmingly from machines that no soldier was steering. Cause. Early in 2027 both sides introduced drones that could finish an attack after losing their radio link, and then drones that could search an area for themselves (see The World, January 2027). Jamming, which had been the main defence, stopped working. The only defence left was not to be seen. Consequence. A war that could not be won by advancing had to be ended by stopping (see September 2028). The twenty-kilometre zone also trained the people who would later spread these weapons around the world: about 200,000 drone operators on the two sides, and the engineers who served them.
The swarm blockade of Hormuz
From June 2027, although the main fighting between Iran and the United States had stopped, the Strait of Hormuz never fully reopened. Autonomous sea drones and loitering air drones, launched from hidden sites along the Iranian coast and later from no identifiable source at all, attacked tankers often enough that by 2029 traffic through the Strait was about a third of its 2025 level. In 2031 it ceased almost entirely. Cause. The war had scattered Iran's drone production into hundreds of small workshops, some under the government, some under the Revolutionary Guard, and by the end some under no one at all. A blockade by warships can be lifted by a treaty. A blockade by thousands of small machines, run by groups that sign no treaties, cannot. Consequence. The Gulf states lost most of their export route, the price of oil stayed above $150 a barrel for years, and the economies of Asia that depended on Gulf oil were the first to feel the swarm age as a shortage rather than a headline (see July 2036).
The cartel air forces
Between 2028 and 2034 Mexico's largest cartels built air forces of their own, thousands of autonomous drones each, which they used against rival cartels, against the army and the police, and to tax every business in the territories they held. By 2034 the cartels controlled the governments of at least six Mexican states in practice, and the army no longer entered them. Cause. Mexican cartels had been dropping explosives from commercial drones since about 2020, and they had the money, the smuggling routes and the recruits to go further. After the Ukrainian armistice (see Europe, September 2028), experienced drone operators were for hire, and the cartels paid best. Consequence. The cartels' drones crossed the border as easily as their drugs had. Attacks on American border agents began in 2033, and Washington's answer was a barrier that needed no guards (see May 2037).
The drone armistice
On 15 September 2028 Russia and Ukraine signed an armistice along the existing front line. It was not a peace. Each side left its autonomous sentry networks in place on its own side of the line to deter the other from moving, and the line itself became the first permanent deny zone in Europe: about 1,200 kilometres long, guarded by machines. Cause. Neither army could advance (see March 2027), both economies were exhausted, and outside powers were pressing for a settlement. Machines that guarded a line cost less than soldiers, and they did not desert. Consequence. Two very large armies were demobilised, and with them went millions of drones and tens of thousands of trained operators with no work and every reason to sell what they knew. This was the main source of the great spread of the 2030s (see The World, March 2030).
The Sahel loses its states
Between 2029 and 2036 the governments of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger lost control of everything except their capitals, and then, one by one, of the capitals too. Armed groups with fleets of autonomous drones took the countryside, the roads and the towns. By 2036 about 70 million people lived under some sixty armed authorities, none recognised by anyone outside. Cause. The Sahel armies had relied on a few armed drones bought abroad and on soldiers they could barely pay. Their enemies acquired cheaper drones in far greater numbers after 2030 (see The World, March 2030), and a government that cannot protect its own convoys cannot collect taxes, pay soldiers or feed its towns. Consequence. The Sahel became a single great swarm country, and its people fled south into coastal states that were themselves under strain, and north toward a Mediterranean that no one could cross.
The coca air forces
From 2029 the coca-growing regions of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, and the cocaine routes through Venezuela and Ecuador, were defended with autonomous drones by the armed groups that ran them. By 2032 no Colombian soldier or police officer entered the Catatumbo, Cauca or Putumayo regions, and coca eradication had stopped everywhere. Cause. The cocaine business earned billions of dollars a year and could buy the newest weapons first. After 2028 it could also hire veterans of the Ukrainian war (see Europe, September 2028). An army that cannot fly a helicopter over a valley, or drive a lorry along its road, cannot hold it. Consequence. The Andean coca regions became the first permanent drone territories in the Americas, and cocaine went on reaching Europe and North America, carried increasingly by autonomous boats and submarines that no coast guard could stop.
The arithmetic of defence
From about 2029 every serious study reached the same conclusion: a city could not be defended against swarms. The reasoning can be set out in four lines: • Area: the attacker chooses one target; the defender must cover everything that might be one, which in a city is everything. • Cost: an attacking drone cost about $250 in 2030 and $90 by 2035; the cheapest reliable interceptor cost several thousand dollars, and a missile interceptor more than a million. • Numbers: each attacker needed, on average, two or three interceptors to be sure of stopping it, and a swarm of a thousand arrived all at once. • Weather: lasers, the one defence that was cheap per shot, lost most of their range in rain, fog and dust, and attackers learned to wait for bad weather. Cause. In every earlier age a city could shelter behind walls, then behind an air force, then behind missile batteries, because the attacker's weapons were rarer and dearer than the defender's. The cheap autonomous drone reversed that ratio. For the first time in history the attacker's ammunition was cheaper than the defender's, and plentiful enough to spend without counting. Consequence. Cities did not fall. They shrank inward. They defended a few vital buildings, left the rest to nets, roofs and luck, and their people changed how they lived (see September 2031).
Abqaiq, ten years later
On 14 September 2029, ten years to the day after the first attack, a swarm of about 300 autonomous drones struck Abqaiq again and destroyed most of its processing units, together with two of Saudi Arabia's largest desalination plants on the Gulf coast. This time the damage took not days but three years to repair. Cause. The lesson of 2019 (see September 2019) had been answered with more radars and more missiles, which worked well against a few dozen drones and poorly against hundreds of autonomous ones arriving from several directions at once (see The World, June 2029). Consequence. The Gulf states understood that their oil, their water and their cities were all within reach of anyone with a few thousand dollars and a grievance. They began quietly moving capital, and their own families, abroad. The quiet evacuation would become a loud one (see July 2036).
Myanmar, the first drone state
Through the 2030s Myanmar ceased to be a country in any practical sense and became a patchwork of about forty territories, each held by an armed group with its own fleet of drones. Every town of any size was claimed by one group and attacked from the air by its neighbours. The army held the capital, Naypyidaw, and little else. Cause. The groups that rose against the military coup of 2021 had been among the first anywhere to use commercial drones as weapons, dropping small bombs from them within months. By 2030 every armed group in the country had autonomous drones, and none could finish off any other. Consequence. Myanmar became the model the rest of the world would follow: not a war that ends, but a permanent condition in which every armed group can hurt every other and none can win. Observers in the 2030s called it the first drone state. By 2040 there were dozens.
How the swarms spread
Between 2030 and 2040 autonomous attack drones passed from the hands of armies into the hands of anyone who wanted them: cartels, militias, separatists, gangs, private security firms and, in the end, angry individuals. By 2036 the world was producing about 400 million small drones a year, and nobody could say how many of them were armed. Cause. Four channels carried them, and none could be closed. First, war surplus: the armistice in Ukraine left millions of drones and tens of thousands of trained operators without employment (see Europe, September 2028). Second, parts: the motors, cameras and chips were the same as those in consumer drones and toys, made by the hundred million (see Asia, May 2030). Third, software: the targeting programs had been written by volunteers in wartime and shared freely, and once a program is on the internet it is everywhere. Fourth, people: veterans sold their skills to whoever paid. The Kalashnikov rifle spread the same way in the twentieth century, until about a hundred million existed, and for the same reasons. It was cheap, simple and impossible to recall. Consequence. The state lost its oldest privilege, the monopoly of serious violence. A government is, at bottom, the organisation that can stop others from using force. Once a gang of twenty could field an air force, that definition no longer described any government on Earth.
The sixty-dollar kit
By May 2030 a complete kit of parts for a small autonomous attack drone, without its explosive charge, could be bought in the electronics markets of Shenzhen for about $60. Assembled and armed elsewhere, it cost about $150. Cause. Every part was also a consumer part. The same motors spun toy drones, the same cameras sat in telephones, and the same small chips ran doorbells, cars and cleaning robots by the hundred million. China made most of them, and no export control could separate a toy from a weapon when they were the same object. Consequence. The price of an air force fell below the price of a car. From this point the spread of armed drones was limited only by the number of people who wanted them (see The World, March 2030).
The moat
From 2030 Australia, followed by New Zealand, built a layered autonomous defence of its sea approaches: uncrewed submarines, surface vessels and long-endurance drones covering the seas to the north and west, linked to coastal networks around its ports and cities. By 2038 no ship or aircraft could approach Australia without being identified, and those that did not answer were stopped. Cause. Small attack drones have short ranges. To strike Australia an enemy needed ships or aircraft to carry them across thousands of kilometres of sea, and ships and aircraft could be found and stopped long before they arrived. Distance, which had been Australia's handicap for two centuries, became its protection. Consequence. Australia and New Zealand are among the safest places on Earth in 2059. The moat also closed them. Since 2036 they have admitted almost no migrants, and boats that approach are turned back by machines.
A judge in Antwerp
On 14 May 2031 an investigating judge leading a drug-trafficking case was killed in Antwerp by a small autonomous drone that had been given a photograph of her face. Her bodyguards never saw it. It was the first assassination of a European judge by a machine that chose its own moment, and within a year there had been eleven more in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Italy. Cause. The drug networks of the North Sea ports had already threatened judges and ministers in the 2020s, and several officials had lived under permanent protection. What changed was the tool. Protecting a person against a gunman needs a few guards. Protecting her against a machine that can wait for days, recognise her face and come from above needs a roof over every step she takes, and no protection service could provide that. Consequence. Judges began to hear cases by video from secure rooms, and many cases were never brought. The pattern spread to every profession whose members could be singled out: prosecutors, journalists, mayors, union leaders. Within a decade the idea that a public official should appear in public seemed reckless.
The Niger Delta stops pumping
In August 2031 Nigeria's oil exports stopped almost completely after a summer of drone attacks on pipelines, pumping stations and loading terminals in the Niger Delta. Militant groups had attacked the Delta's oil infrastructure for decades. Now they could do it from fifty kilometres away, at night, with machines that cost less than the oil they spilled. Cause. Oil provided most of Nigeria's export earnings and much of its government's revenue. Thousands of kilometres of pipeline crossing swamp and forest had never been defensible, and the drone removed the last risk to the attackers. Consequence. Without oil revenue the federal government could neither pay its army nor import food, and Nigeria, with about 230 million people, began to divide along regional lines. Its north became the centre of Africa's famine (see January 2035).
Living under the sky
From the early 2030s people in every exposed region changed the way they lived, in ways that would have seemed absurd ten years before. They stopped gathering outdoors in large numbers. They strung nets over streets and markets, as Ukrainian towns near the front had done over their roads in 2025. They travelled by night and in bad weather, when cameras saw least. They gave up radios and telephones in the open. Schools, markets and hospitals moved underground wherever there was an underground to move into. Cause. Each change answered a particular danger. Crowds were the targets attackers preferred (see Europe, June 2034). Open sky meant a drone could reach you; a net or a roof meant it could not, or not quickly. Radio signals, vehicles and groups in the open were what autonomous systems were built to look for, and people learned, at a heavy price, to give the machines nothing to see. Consequence. Life under the sky became life under cover, and life under cover is poorer, slower and smaller. Trade, which needs open roads and open ports, suffered most of all (see Europe, October 2039), and the hunger that followed killed far more people than the drones themselves (see January 2034).
The Eastern Belt
In April 2032, after a winter of drone incursions into the Baltic states and Poland, NATO's eastern members began building the Eastern Belt: a strip of autonomous sentry networks from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, about 2,500 kilometres long and up to fifty kilometres deep, along their borders with Russia, Belarus and the armistice line in Ukraine. Russia built its own belt facing it. By 2036 Europe was divided by two parallel bands of machines. Cause. The "drone wall" discussed after the incursion into Poland in 2025 had been imagined as a defence against occasional incursions. By 2032 European governments had concluded from the Ukrainian experience that the only defence that worked against autonomous drones was an autonomous defence, and that it had to be deep enough to stop swarms long before they reached a city. Consequence. The belts made a Russian invasion of Europe impossible. They also made any crossing impossible, in either direction, for anyone. When Russia's government collapsed in 2048 (see March 2048), its half of the belt went on working, and so did Europe's. Both are still active.
The Strait becomes a deny zone
In August 2032 China declared a customs quarantine of Taiwan and sent coast-guard ships to enforce it. Taiwan and the United States answered with the swarms they had been preparing since the 2020s (see June 2024), and China answered with its own. Within three weeks neither side had a ship afloat in the Strait. No invasion was attempted and no quarantine was enforced. Both sides left their autonomous networks in place, and the Strait, about 130 kilometres wide at its narrowest and 350 long, has been closed to every ship and aircraft ever since. Cause. Each side's war plan depended on the other being unable to cross open water, and both plans worked. The result was the first deny zone created by two great powers at once, each keeping its networks running so that the other could never profit from switching off first. Consequence. Taiwan, which made more than nine-tenths of the world's most advanced computer chips, was cut off from the world (see March 2033). It survives as a fortress island, fed by its own farms and by fishing within its coastal waters. Its population has fallen from 23 million to about 16 million, through emigration in the first years and low births since.
The favelas close their skies
From October 2032, after the police lost three helicopters and more than 200 officers in a single year of operations against drug factions in the hills of Rio de Janeiro, the state government stopped sending police into the favelas at all. The factions' drones now guarded their territories' airspace as well as their streets, and about 1.7 million people in Rio lived under their rule. Cause. Brazil's drug factions had controlled large parts of its cities for decades, and the police had relied on helicopters and armoured vehicles to go in. Cheap drones made both too costly to use. Consequence. The netted city of Rio in 2059 is two cities: the formal one under the state's nets, and the hills under the factions' drones. They trade with each other, uneasily, and do not mix.
An election held indoors
The American presidential election of 2 November 2032 was the first held without public rallies. After drone attacks on campaign events in Arizona and Ohio that summer, and the killing of a Senate candidate in Georgia, both parties campaigned only on screens. Turnout was the lowest in a century, and the losing side contested the results in eleven states. Cause. Democratic politics depends on people gathering: to hear candidates, to march, to queue at polling stations. Every one of those gatherings had become a target (see The World, September 2031), and protecting them all was beyond any government. Consequence. Politics conducted entirely on screens rewarded whoever controlled the screens, and trust in elections fell further. By 2040 several states voted only by post, and many citizens had stopped voting at all.
The chip famine
By March 2033 the world's supply of the most advanced computer chips had fallen by about 90 percent, and it did not recover for a decade. Data centres stopped expanding, the prices of computers and telephones tripled, and every industry that depended on advanced electronics, from cars to medical equipment, cut production. Cause. More than nine-tenths of the most advanced chips had been made in Taiwan, mainly by a single company, and the Strait was closed (see August 2032). Factories in the United States, Japan and Europe had been planned to reduce this dependence, but most were unfinished, and a chip factory needs thousands of suppliers and years of quiet. Consequence. There was an irony here that nobody enjoyed. The chips that ran attack drones were simple, cheap ones made in China, and their supply was untouched. The chips that ran hospitals, power grids and modern economies were the ones that disappeared. The swarm age hurt the defender's tools far more than the attacker's.
The convoys stop
In April 2033 the World Food Programme suspended road deliveries of food aid in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia and the Sahel after a series of drone attacks on its convoys killed 64 drivers and aid workers in a single month. Other agencies followed. By 2035 the international aid system had largely withdrawn from every region where armed groups held drones, which by then meant most of the regions where people were hungry. Cause. Aid convoys had always depended on a kind of tolerance. Armed groups let them pass because the aid also fed their own people, and because attacking them brought consequences. The drone made attacks anonymous, and anonymity removed the consequences. A single group with a grievance, or a wish to tax the aid, could stop everything. Consequence. The famines of the following decade (see January 2035) were not caused by a lack of food in the world. They were caused by the impossibility of moving it.
The arithmetic of the decline
The population of the world was about 8.3 billion in 2026 and is about 5.1 billion in 2059. The United Nations had projected roughly 10 billion for this date. The difference of nearly 5 billion breaks down as follows, with the uncertainty one would expect when most records have been lost: • Hunger: about 1.9 billion excess deaths, mainly from the collapse of trade and of food convoys. • Loss of medicine and disease: about 900 million, as the supply chains for drugs and vaccines broke. • Direct violence: about 600 million, from drones, from the wars they fed and from the deny zones. • Cold, heat and dirty water, after power and water plants were destroyed: about 400 million. • Children not born: about 1.1 billion fewer births than projected. Cause. So the drones killed most of their victims indirectly. A drone that destroys a fuel depot, a ship or a water plant kills more people over the following year than a drone aimed at a crowd. Once cheap machines could strike any lorry, port or pumping station, the long chains that fed eight billion people could not be protected, and the regions that depended most on them starved first (see Africa, April 2033). Consequence. In 2059 about 70 million children are born each year and about 95 million people die, so the population is still falling, by about half a percent a year. It falls fastest in swarm country and slowest in the fortress states (see June 2059).
The highland wars of Papua New Guinea
In May 2034 fighting between clan militias in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, which had grown more deadly for twenty years, became a war of drones. Within two years the national government had lost control of most of the highlands and of the island of Bougainville, and the country's large gold and copper mines had closed. Cause. Highland clan fighting had already been transformed once, in the 2010s and 2020s, when bows and arrows gave way to automatic rifles, and a massacre in Enga province in February 2024 had killed dozens. Drones were the next step, and the mines, the state's main source of income, were their easiest targets. Consequence. Papua New Guinea has had no effective national government since 2038. Its highlands are swarm country, a few hundred kilometres from Australia's moat, which they do not cross.
The fan zone in Milan
On 18 June 2034, during an international football tournament, a swarm of about 60 autonomous drones struck an outdoor fan zone in Milan where some 30,000 people were watching a match on large screens. The attack lasted four minutes, and 212 people died. The group responsible was never conclusively identified. The drones carried no markings, and their software left no signature. Cause. A crowd in the open was the easiest target there was, and by 2034 the weapons to attack one cost less than a used car (see The World, June 2029). Security services had stopped many earlier plots by watching for purchases of explosives and guns. They could not watch for purchases of toy parts. Consequence. Within a month the European Union banned large outdoor gatherings, and most other countries did the same. Stadiums were roofed or closed. Festivals, marches and open-air markets ended. Political rallies moved indoors and then onto screens, which changed politics in ways that are still argued about.
The trucking strike
In October 2034, after a summer in which drone attacks on lorries carrying fuel and medicines killed 340 drivers across the southern United States, the drivers' unions called a strike that lasted, on and off, for two years. Shop shelves in the South emptied for weeks at a time, and the federal government began moving essential freight in armoured convoys under drone escort. Cause. A lorry on a highway is a slow and predictable target, and American food reached its shops almost entirely by lorry. Hijacking by drone was profitable for the gangs, and the drivers, sensibly, would not drive into it. Consequence. The armoured convoys worked, at a cost that made everything they carried several times dearer. Food and medicine prices in the United States roughly tripled between 2034 and 2040, and the poorest counties, far from the convoy routes, began to go without (see July 2040).
The Great Hunger
Africans remember the years 2035 to 2042 as the Great Hunger. Deaths from famine and the diseases that follow it are estimated at about 420 million across the continent, concentrated in the Sahel, northern Nigeria, Sudan, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes. Cause. Africa imported much of its food and nearly all of its fertiliser and fuel, and paid for them with exports that travelled by sea. The closing of the sea lanes (see Europe, October 2039) cut off the imports, the end of the convoys (see April 2033) cut off the aid, and the drone wars in the countryside kept farmers out of fields where any movement drew attention. Consequence. By the 2040s the people who survived in swarm country lived as far as possible without anything that could be seen from the air: farming at dawn and dusk, storing food underground, travelling on foot under trees. That way of living keeps people alive. It does not feed as many of them.
Gold, drones and the Amazon
From the mid-2030s illegal gold miners, and the armed groups that protected them, held large parts of the Amazon in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru behind screens of drones. Environmental agents, police and indigenous guards could no longer enter the mining areas, and deforestation and mercury pollution spread unchecked. Cause. Gold stayed valuable through the swarm age because it was the one form of wealth that could be buried and carried. The forest made drones hard to find and easy to hide, and the governments that had tried to police the miners in the 2020s no longer had the means. Consequence. The indigenous peoples of the region suffered first and most. Many Yanomami communities moved deeper into the forest, where a way of life that leaves little trace visible from above protects them better than any state now can.
Fail-deadly: why the swarms outlived their commanders
From about 2036 the largest armies began to deploy a new kind of system: networks of autonomous sentry drones, charging stations and robotic repair units, placed along borders, coasts and around vital sites, and built to keep fighting for years without any human instruction. Engineers called the design fail-deadly. If a network lost contact with its commanders, it did not stop. It went on denying its zone to everything that moved. Cause. The logic came straight from the theory of deterrence. By the mid-2030s any commander, any headquarters and any communications link could be destroyed by a cheap drone, so a defence that depended on living commanders could be beaten by killing them. To make the threat credible, the system had to survive its masters. The Soviet Union had built a similar machine for nuclear retaliation, the system called Perimeter. The difference was that Perimeter was one system with one purpose, while the deny networks numbered in the thousands, built by a dozen countries and many private contractors. To stop enemies from switching them off, they were also built to resist being switched off by anyone, and their override codes were held by a handful of officers. Consequence. Those officers died, as almost everyone with an important job died in the decapitation strikes of the 2040s (see Europe, March 2048), or their governments collapsed, or their codes were lost with the buildings that held them. The networks did not notice. They had been designed not to.
The nets over Valencia
In February 2036 the city of Valencia, where I then taught history, finished covering its old town with steel nets strung between the rooftops, the first Spanish city to do so. Over the next eight years the nets spread over every street of any importance. My lectures moved to a basement under the university's oldest building, and my students learned to walk to class in the rain. Cause. Spain was far from the eastern belts, but not from the swarms. Smuggling groups working across the Strait of Gibraltar had begun using armed drones against the police in 2033, and in 2035 an attack on a crowded beach near Alicante persuaded every city on the coast that it was exposed. A net is a crude defence, but it is the only one whose cost does not rise with the number of attackers. Consequence. Life under the nets was safer and smaller. Tourism, which had been about an eighth of the Spanish economy, ended within two years, and the region's income fell with it. Without that income the city could not keep the nets mended, and in 2044 I left (see April 2044).
The desalination war
In July 2036 a month of swarm attacks destroyed or disabled most of the desalination plants on the Arabian side of the Gulf. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, which drank almost nothing but desalinated sea water, had a few days of stored water. Within a year about 20 million people had left the Gulf coast, and several of its cities stood empty. Cause. A desalination plant is large, fixed, impossible to hide and impossible to replace quickly, and a modern Gulf city cannot last a week without one. The attackers were never identified with certainty. By 2036 there was no shortage of candidates, and a weapon that cheap does not need a powerful patron. Consequence. The Gulf monarchies, which had spent seven years preparing evacuation plans (see September 2029), carried them out. Their ruling families, their funds and many of their citizens moved to the fortress states, and most of their foreign workers were sent home to South Asia with nothing. The Gulf coast became one of the largest deny zones on Earth, guarded by networks the departing governments left behind to protect what they hoped one day to reclaim.
The Southern Line
In May 2037 the United States finished the Southern Line, a band of autonomous sentry networks about 3,100 kilometres long and up to thirty kilometres deep along its whole border with Mexico. It was the first deny zone the United States built on its own territory, and it has been active ever since. Cause. Cartel drones had been crossing the border since 2033 (see January 2028), and human border guards had become the cartels' favourite targets. The only barrier that drones could not simply fly over was one that attacked them, and the only barrier that could not be bribed or frightened was one with no people in it. Consequence. The Line stopped the drones, and it also stopped everything else: trade, migration, families, and commerce that had crossed the border for two centuries. Mexico, cut off from its largest market, fragmented further. The Line's commanders worked in Texas. Their headquarters was destroyed in 2049, and the Line, which had been built to run without them, still runs (see The World, January 2036).
Seoul goes underground
From 2038 South Korea moved most of the life of its capital underground. Seoul already had one of the largest networks of underground shopping streets, metro lines and civil-defence shelters in the world, built over decades in fear of North Korean artillery. In twenty years the country extended them into a second city beneath the first, where about 9 million people now live, work and go to school. Cause. South Korea had lived since 1953 next to an enemy able to shell its capital, and it had the habits, the engineering industry and the political will for civil defence that most countries lacked. When drones made the open air dangerous, it simply went further along a road it already knew. Consequence. South Korea is one of the fortress states of 2059 (see The World, June 2059). The price was high: a population that sees the sun mostly through glass, and a birth rate that was already the lowest in the world in the 2020s and has fallen further since.
The Nile, fought by drones
In September 2039, in the fourth year of a drought on the Blue Nile, Egyptian and Ethiopian forces began a war over the river's water that was fought almost entirely by drones. Neither side could destroy the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, inaugurated in September 2025, without risking a flood that would have drowned Sudan. Instead they destroyed everything else: pumping stations, irrigation works, power lines and the barges that carried grain on the river. Cause. Egypt depended on the Nile for almost all its water and had regarded the dam, since construction began in 2011, as a threat to its existence. The drought made the dispute acute. Cheap drones made a war possible between two states that could not have afforded a conventional one so far from home. Consequence. The war ended in 2043 with no treaty and no victor, when both governments ran out of the means to continue. Egypt and Sudan, with about 170 million people between them, lost most of their irrigation, and with it most of their harvest.
The ports close
In October 2039 the insurers of the London market stopped covering ships calling at European ports that lacked full anti-drone protection, and within a month traffic through Rotterdam, Europe's largest port, fell by 70 percent. Over the next six years most of Europe's seaborne trade ended or moved to a few heavily defended terminals. Container shipping between continents fell to about a tenth of its 2026 volume. Cause. Ships are large, slow and predictable, and they must come close to land to load and unload. From 2036 onward attacks on shipping by drone groups, some working for states and many working for whoever paid them, made every voyage a gamble. Insurers price risk, and when the risk could no longer be priced, they withdrew. Consequence. Europe had imported much of its energy, much of its animal feed and fertiliser, and most of the raw materials for its medicines. As the ports closed, the long supply chains that the rest of the world depended on closed too, and the hunger that followed was felt hardest far from Europe (see Africa, January 2035). The drone had done to the world economy what no navy had ever managed: it blockaded everyone at once.
The ungoverned counties
From about 2040 large parts of the rural United States passed out of the effective control of any government. In the Ozarks, Appalachia and much of the interior West, county governments collapsed, militias and drug networks with drone fleets of their own took their place, and the federal convoys stopped coming. By 2052 roughly 60 million Americans lived in what the census office called "areas of uncertain administration". Cause. The federal government could defend its cities and its convoy routes, but not three million square miles of countryside (see October 2034). Where the convoys did not reach, the local armed group with the most drones became the government, as had already happened in Mexico and the Sahel. Consequence. The United States in 2059 is a federation of netted cities joined by defended corridors, surrounded by a countryside that it claims and does not govern.
I go underground
In April 2044 my wife and I left Valencia and walked, by night and over seven weeks, to Guadix, a town in the hills of Granada where people have lived for centuries in houses dug into the soft rock. About 2,000 of those cave houses were still standing, and by the time we arrived nearly all of them were occupied again. We live in one now. Cause. A cave is the ideal house for this age. A drone cannot see through rock, and it has no reason to search a hillside where nothing moves by day. The town had water from its own springs and fields in the valley that could be worked at dawn and dusk, and it was far from any coast, border or city worth attacking. Consequence. Communities like ours exist wherever there are caves, mines, old tunnels or deep forest: in the Spanish hills, the Carpathians, the karst of the Balkans, the old mining valleys of Wales and the Ruhr. This account was written in one of them.
What the swarms do now
In 2059 autonomous deny networks still guard about 4 million square kilometres of the Earth's surface, roughly the area of the European Union before the wars. The largest are the Taiwan Strait and the coast facing it (see Asia, August 2032), the Eastern Belt from the Baltic to the Black Sea (see Europe, April 2032), the Southern Line along the border between the United States and Mexico (see North America, May 2037), and the coasts of the Persian Gulf (see Asia, July 2036). Inside them, machines patrol, recharge from solar panels, repair one another from stocks of spare parts, and attack whatever matches their rules: vehicles, groups of people, transmitters, anyone armed. Cause. The networks were built to need nobody (see January 2036), and in that they succeeded. Outside the deny zones there is a second danger, less organised and more widespread: feral swarms, the leftover fleets of militias and cartels whose owners died or fled, still following the last instructions they were given. Consequence. The machines are wearing out, slowly. Engineers in the fortress states estimate that the deny networks lose about 4 percent of their strength each year as parts fail and stocks run down. At that rate the largest zones will stay dangerous into the 2080s. Nobody now alive who designed them is in a position to switch them off.
Washington moves underground
In November 2046, after a drone strike on the Capitol killed four members of Congress during a session, the federal government moved its principal operations to the underground facilities in the mountains of Pennsylvania and Virginia that had been built during the Cold War for a nuclear attack. Congress has met in person only twice since. Cause. By the mid-2040s every important office holder in every country had become a target (see Europe, May 2031), and no building in an open city could be protected from above. The bunkers had been built for a different war, but they answered this one. Consequence. A government that governs from under a mountain, and is seen by its citizens only on screens, is a different kind of government from the one the American founders designed. Americans in 2059 argue, quietly and indoors, about whether it is still a republic.
Moscow goes quiet
In March 2048 Russia's central government ceased to function after a series of drone strikes over a single winter killed most of its senior leadership. Nobody claimed the strikes, and by then there were several possible authors: separatist movements in the regions, criminal organisations, rival factions in Moscow itself and foreign services. The army split along regional lines. Moscow became one netted city among many. Cause. Russia had been the first great power to fight a long drone war and among the first to base its security on fail-deadly networks (see The World, January 2036). But the same logic that made those networks independent of their commanders made the commanders the most valuable targets in the country, and cheap drones made them reachable. Consequence. The Russian half of the Eastern Belt (see April 2032), the nuclear forces and the deny networks around Russia's cities all lost their chain of command at once. The nuclear weapons, as far as anyone knows, remain in their silos under officers who have not been relieved for eleven years. The deny networks needed no officers at all.
Who is left, and where
In 2059 the world's 5.1 billion people live in three kinds of place: • Fortress states, about 1.1 billion people: the interior of China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Switzerland, the Nordic countries, Iceland, Australia and New Zealand. They are protected by distance, water or mountains, and by layered defences built by governments rich and orderly enough to build them in time. • Netted cities, about 1.6 billion people: the large cities of the Americas, Europe, India and elsewhere, which still have governments but live under nets and underground, with the countryside around them contested. • Swarm country, about 2.4 billion people: everywhere else, governed by militias, cartels, village councils or nobody, where people survive by living quietly, under cover and without electronics. Cause. What divided these groups was not wealth alone. It was geography, which decided how easily swarms could arrive, and timing, which decided whether a government built its defences before drones were cheap or after. A country that began in 2028 could build roofs, tunnels and moats. A country that began in 2035 found its builders' lorries attacked on the way to the site. Consequence. No one commands the swarms, and no one can surrender to them. The question that occupies what remains of the world's governments is not how to win the war but how to outlast its machinery.
Oceania in 2059
Oceania had about 46 million people in 2026 and has about 42 million in 2059. Australia and New Zealand are fortress states. Papua New Guinea and parts of the Solomon Islands are swarm country. The smaller Pacific islands, too poor to attack and too remote to reach, live much as they did a century ago, with fewer imports and fewer visitors. Cause. Oceania's great advantage was the ocean. Small drones cannot cross it, and anything large enough to carry them can be found. Consequence. Australians in 2059 live much as Europeans did in 2025, with one difference. They watch the rest of the world on screens, from behind a moat of machines, and they let no one in.
Europe in 2059
Europe, including European Russia, had about 745 million people in 2026. The best estimate for 2059 is 480 million. Switzerland, Iceland and the Nordic countries are fortress states, protected by mountains, distance and early investment. The rest of Europe lives in netted cities and quiet towns, between two belts of machines in the east and a Mediterranean shore that nobody crosses. Cause. Europe was rich enough to build defences, but not quick enough. It spent the 2020s debating a drone wall and the early 2030s building one, while the weapons it needed to stop grew cheaper every month. And it lived on imports, which the closing of the sea lanes cut off (see October 2039). Consequence. I am seventy-nine. I write this by lamplight in a room cut into a hillside, and I have not seen a crowd in the open air for twenty-five years. Last week a drone passed over the valley at dawn, following a route someone gave it in a year nobody remembers, and nobody went out until it had gone.
South America in 2059
South America had about 440 million people in 2026 and has about 290 million in 2059. Its large cities are netted, its coca regions and much of the Amazon are drone territory, and the Southern Cone, far from the great wars and rich in food, has fared better than the north. Argentina, Uruguay and southern Chile feed themselves and much of the continent. Cause. The continent was far from the wars in Europe and Asia, but its armed groups were rich, experienced and quick to adopt drones, and its states were already weak in the places those groups held. Consequence. South America's misfortune was not to be attacked by foreign powers. It was to watch its own criminal economies acquire the power of states.
Asia in 2059
Asia had about 4.8 billion people in 2026 and has about 3.05 billion in 2059. The interior of China, with about 850 million people, is the largest fortress territory on Earth. Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan are fortress states. The Taiwan Strait and the Gulf coast are deny zones. Most of South and Southeast Asia lives in netted cities and swarm country. Cause. Asia had the most to lose from closed sea lanes, because so many of its people depended on imported energy and food and on exports to pay for them. The closing of Hormuz (see June 2027) and of the Taiwan Strait (see August 2032) broke both at once. Consequence. China survived as a state because it had the industry to build defences and the authority to move hundreds of millions of people inland, away from its coasts. The price of that survival is a country that faces inward, behind machines, as it once did behind walls.
Africa in 2059
Africa had about 1.55 billion people in 2026. Estimates for 2059 are about 800 million. Almost all of the continent is swarm country. Its few defended places are mining zones and ports guarded by foreign-owned networks, and the capitals of a handful of states, such as Rwanda and Botswana, whose governments built defences early and keep their territories small enough to hold. Cause. Africa met the swarm age with the weakest states, the longest supply lines and the greatest dependence on imported food. Each of those was exactly the kind of weakness the drone exploited. Consequence. Most Africans now live in villages that hide from the sky, under trees or in compounds roofed with netting and thatch. The median age is under twenty. A generation has grown up that has never seen a convoy, a crowd or an afternoon spent safely in the open.
North America in 2059
North America had about 610 million people in 2026. The best estimate for 2059 is 420 million. About 180 million live in netted cities, about 110 million in the defended corridors and the countryside that governments still reach, and the rest in Mexico's cartel territories, Central America and the ungoverned counties. Canada, protected by its size and by its distance from the cartel regions, has fared best. Cause. North America was rich and far from the great wars, but it had a long land border with a country whose armed groups were among the first to acquire swarms (see January 2028), and its economy depended on lorries crossing open country. Consequence. The Southern Line still runs. So, somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, do fleets of cartel drones whose owners died years ago, still patrolling the routes they were told to guard.