How the Ancient Greek General Themistocles Would Beat the Chinese in Drone Combat

In our last post entitled, “Themistocles, the Best Drone Warfare Tactician No One Has Ever Heard Of,” we talked about how Themistocles engineered a way for the Greeks to beat the Persians, even though the Persians had an overwhelming advantage in ships, likely at more than 2:1.

How did Themistocles pull this off? Strategic use of space. He lured the Persians into the narrows of the Straits of Salamis so that the Persians could deploy only half the number of their 1,200 ships against the Greeks. And the restricted space also played to the Greek’s superior seamanship. The Greeks were simply much better at maneuvering their ships, a key advantage when there was a chaotic mass of ships raming each other with little space to turn. 

But Themistocle’s strategic use of space doesn’t offer much useful insight into how the US could hope to beat the Chinese in the Taiwan Straits for two reasons. 

First, drones operate in three dimensions so geography ordinarily can’t be used as a way to strategically restrict space. Except, if there were mountains on the west side of Taiwan (like on the northern side of the Strait of Hormuz), then those mountains could be used to create a bulwark against invasion. Mountains make it incredibly difficult to locate and penetrate positions, even for drones. And it’s logistically difficult to deploy any scale of forces when there are mountains right up against the water. There is just nowhere to go.  

But Taiwan’s geography is the exact opposite of what one would hope: there are mostly mountains in the east and gently sloping plains in the west. In other words, directly across from China you would want those mountains, but the mountains are the other side of the island. 

There really can’t be a “Battle of Salamis” part 2 here. 

So what would Themistocles do? Well, another reason why Themistocles targeted the Persian navy (instead of focusing on the million-man Persian army) is this: logistics. Ships were the only way to transport enough food to feed such a large army. If you took out the Persian navy, you also stopped all shipments of food. No food, no army. 

This is the ancient equivalent of the "kill the archer, not the arrow" doctrine under U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth during the current conflicts with Iran (which ironically is modern-day Persia). Just like Themistocles’ emphasis on destroying logistics capabilities in order to stop the Persian army,  the "kill the archer, not the arrow" doctrine signifies prioritizing the destruction of enemy launch sites, command structures, and offensive capabilities rather than solely intercepting incoming missiles and drones. 

And this sets up a shameless promotion of the Modovolo Lift, the world’s first and only payload-centric-designed drone.  How do you kill the archer with a drone that costs up to 4x less than competing systems (indeed, at a cost so low that militaries view the Lift as attritable)? 

The answer: payloads. The Modovolo Lift can carry electronic warfare, optical detection, and other technologies (plus the edge compute to run them) to find the archer and then finish the job with its munitions capabilities.