Why Toilet Paper, Medieval Knights, and the Battle of Midway Predict that the Shahed Drone is a Temporary Phenomenon

$35,000 vs. $1 million. 

That’s the cost difference between the Iranian Shahed drone and the AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles being used to shoot down the Shahed. 

Everyone can do the math. That’s an asymmetric disadvantage of more than 28x. And that’s definitely a problem. But it’s not a new problem. Because for at least the last 1,000 years, asymmetric disadvantage has been a key driving force in military paradigm shifts. 

Let’s start with the medieval knight. At its peak, knight technology in the late 14th century had evolved so that the knight was the medieval equivalent of a tank: armor-plated from head to toe and riding a “destrier,” an armor-plated specially-bred battle horse. And that technology dominated battlefields for approximately 300 years. 

But there was a problem. The destrier was an outrageously expensive “capital asset.” Its annual maintenance cost was equivalent to several hundred times a contemporary laborer’s annual wage, and it required an extensive amount of training over several years. So if a destrier was killed in battle, it wasn’t easily replaced. 

And that was a problem, because (i) a knight without a destrier is a sad knight and (ii) starting in the 14th century, it became incredibly cheap to kill knights on destriers.  Asymmetric disadvantage. 

First, the English used the Welsh longbow during the Hundred Years' War (first at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and then the last time at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415) to almost literally mow down the pride of the French knight nobility in minutes. More sad knights. Then, at the Battle of Grandson in 1476, the Swiss used a square formation with men holding 12-18 feet pikes to make an impenetrable hedgehog that slaughtered the Duke of Burgundy’s knights. Even more sad knights. 

The result? A military paradigm shift. Asymmetric disadvantage created by the longbow and pikemen meant that the “capital asset” (i.e., the knight and destrier) was replaced with the relatively cheap long bowman and the infantry pikeman. 

But this paradigm shift wasn’t isolated to the Medieval world. 

Let’s fast forward to World War II and the Battle of Midway, the second (the Battle of the Coral Sea being the first) naval battle in history where none of the ships made visual contact with each other. And that’s because it was fought entirely between aircraft launched from aircraft carriers and those aircraft dropped the bombs and torpedoes that sank the ships.   

And that was a problem because prior to the Battle of the Coral Sea, all naval battles were fought between extraordinarily expensive battleships (aka the “capital asset”) lobbing shells at each other. Capital asset fighting capital asset. No asymmetric disadvantage. 

Just like the pikeman and the long bowman, the airplane changed all of that.  A World War II airplane like the Douglas SBD Dauntless was super-cheap, only $1 million (in today’s money), and a battleship was billions of dollars (also in today’s money). Asymmetric disadvantage. 

But all this cheapness lasts only so long. Yes, the pikeman was cheap and the Douglas SBD Dauntless was cheap. But within a century the pike was replaced by the musket, which could kill hapless pikemen from over a 100 feet away. And within a few years of the end of WWII the Douglas SBD Dauntless was obsolete, replaced by fighter jets that could destroy faster and better.

But in order to extend those performance gains, it cost more. Neither was cheaper. And the evolution continues from there. Today’s fighter jets are now themselves capital assets with missiles (at a cost of $1 million per unit) that are essentially capital assets too. And all of this takes decades to develop and produce at extremely low quantities. 

Enter the Shahed: the modern version of the pikeman and Douglas AD Skyraider.  But just like those technologies, the Shahed will evolve and cUAS will evolve to counter the Shahed. And those performance evolutions mean complexity on both sides.  And complexity means cost. 

The result? The Shahed will be replaced by the next modern equivalent of the musket. 

So what about toilet paper?  Well, we all remember those happy-fun days of early 2020 when the world was ending and there was sheer panic. About toilet paper. There was a 732% increase in demand in March 2020 for toilet paper, drying up (pun intended) the supply of TP for the next 6 months. 

Here’s the thing. Manufacturers did not ramp up production in response to that demand spike because they knew it was temporary. 

Defense procurement works the same way. A country can only financially sustain defense purchases for so long. So when demand spikes because of a conflict, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a production increase will follow suit. 

The evolution of the Shahed (and other drone designs) will mean that you don’t want to be the guy who has 20 packs of TP in his garage.  Because unlike the toilet paper, there is a limited life span for those drone assets. 

The lesson is not that the Shahed is unimportant. Quite the opposite. The Shahed is one of the most important military innovations of the last decade because it exposed a fundamental economic imbalance in modern warfare. It revealed that many of the world's most advanced militaries have optimized for exquisite capability rather than sustainable cost.

But history suggests that these moments never last.

The knight gave way to the pikeman. The pikeman gave way to the musketeer. The battleship gave way to the fighter jet. In every case, the disruptive technology created a temporary period of asymmetric advantage before being replaced by something faster, more capable, more survivable, and inevitably more expensive.

The same thing will happen with the Shahed.

The future battlefield will not be dominated by $35,000 drones any more than medieval battlefields remained dominated by pikemen forever. The pressures of survivability, electronic warfare, autonomy, navigation, countermeasures, and range will force drone systems to become increasingly sophisticated. And sophistication has a habit of showing up on invoices.

That does not mean defense planners should ignore today's drone threat. It means they should be careful about assuming that today's technology and cost curves will remain permanent. Because they won't.

And that brings us back to toilet paper.

The biggest mistake in March 2020 was assuming that a temporary spike represented a permanent change. Some people filled their garages with enough toilet paper to survive several apocalypses. Manufacturers, meanwhile, largely ignored the panic because they understood something important: demand shocks are often transient, but production decisions are enduring.

The Shahed is creating a similar temptation. Governments, investors, defense companies, and military planners are all looking at today's battlefield and projecting current conditions indefinitely into the future. History suggests that is a dangerous assumption.

The real question is not whether the Shahed is changing warfare. It clearly is. The real question is what comes after the Shahed.