While I agree that drones are the end of the modern militaries, I’m not sure that what comes next will be better.  I get worried that this stuff will trickle down to police organizations who think drones in the sky is better than actual policemen interacting with the populace.

Nuclear submarines are considerably more expensive, and you need to be part of the nuclear fuel club to operate them, so that’s mostly superpowers-and-wannabes territory. Ballistic missile subs are even more specialized: not necessarily much more expensive than normal nuclear submarines; but unless you’ve got a big red safe full of nuclear launch codes and some sort of nuclear warfare strategy, they are about the most expensive way imaginable to launch missiles, so only nations with nontrivial nuclear arsenals would bother.

One thing that would make automated subs radically easier and cheaper is being able to skip most or all of the pressure hull. With crewed subs, you have a fairly large area that needs to be kept at livable temperature and pressure, which makes for demanding naval architecture, expensive construction, and low crush depth(even crazy-expensive titanium-hulled military submarines crush at depths that make research subs smirk). If you don’t have a crew, though, just a CPU in an epoxy puck, you can start operating at previously impractical depths with drug-sub level engineering. You don’t necessarily even need a hard hull.

Liquid fuels, say, being mostly incompressible, can simply be stored in bladders. Potential drag or buoyancy issue; but no pressure differences to worry about. 

A great read and clearly ahead of its time.

Canada just went through an absurdist rendering of a procurement process for the next fighter jets (they were going to be the F35s the US is planning).  Eventually the fix was exposed and the buy was cancelled (or at least put off for a while).  Heads rolled, careers suffered.  And all for a rapidly obsolescing conception of airpower and airborne militaries.

Anyone who reads SF and pays attention to tech news must grasp that a thousand $1 million drones beats a single $1Billion jet in a fight.  Even if the jet can kill half of them (unlikely) the other half will surely kill the jet – and it is more likely to take much less than 1000:1.  Drones do not operate within human survival rules (max Gs etc).  The same applies to underwater drones.

Drones are the end of modern militaries.  That could potentially be a good thing.

It only takes a few thousand little quiet robots – at a cost measured in millions, to take away a billion dollar submarine’s one big advantage (being hidden).  Put a little explosives on those robots and the subs are obsolete.  Ditto aircraft carriers and anything else.  Of course, try making that argument in a Pentagon budget committee meeting and see what happens.

For that matter, airborne drones are very close to making fighter and bomber jets obsolete as well. 

Though currently I’m sure militaries are drooling at the prospect of total situational awareness and yet more firepower, the end result (once the tech goes mainstream) will be that it will be possible to deny the oceans to ships and the air to planes.  This could be a good thing – if the goal is to prevent invasions and war.  It could be a bad thing for obvious reasons as well.