Technological Asymmetry as a Force Multiplier

There is, however, a second reversal, and that is the focus of this article. For most of the 20th century, the defence economy was defined by the "guns vs. butter" dilemma: every resource allocated to security was diverted from development, and poor nations paid for deterrence with economic backwardness. The low-cost revolution alters this logic. The very assets that today make an economy competitive — civilian drones, sensor networks, resilient telecommunications, sovereign cloud infrastructure, encryption, microelectronics assembly, and, above all, a robust pool of software talent — also make it defensible.

Defence ceases to be a standalone sector and becomes an emergent property of a technologically sovereign civilian base. The drone used in agribusiness is the same one that can be mobilized during a crisis. This convergence of the industrial base and military capability makes dual-use technology an organizing principle rather than simply a technical detail, giving technological asymmetry its transformative potential for emerging nations.

This transformation is particularly relevant for resource-constrained nations because it does not depend on scale. An effective asymmetric force relies not on expensive platforms or massive budgets, but on connectivity, data, software, and rapid decision-making. For emerging countries, this rebalancing represents a rare opportunity to build credible deterrence without replicating the military structure of major powers.

This article builds upon the essay A Realistic Defence for Emerging Countries, in which we identified technological asymmetry as one of the fundamental strategic choices for emerging countries seeking to construct a coherent and realistic defence architecture. The aim here is not to prescribe a doctrine, but to offer an analytical framework for thinking about these key variables.

The arsenal of asymmetry: essential components

Technological asymmetry is not an abstract idea, but a set of concrete choices for developing military capabilities.

Its first axis lies in unmanned systems, which range from tactical missions — short-range reconnaissance, surveillance and fire support — to strategic functions, such as long-range drones, attacks on critical infrastructure and access-denial operations. Recent conflicts, particularly in Ukraine, have demonstrated that smaller forces can paralyse armoured columns, saturate air defences and maintain continuous pressure through swarms of low-cost systems. Iran, Azerbaijan and Türkiye were among the first to recognise this and incorporated it into the conflicts in which they took part or were suppliers.

Loitering munitions, the so-called “kamikaze drones”, constitute a particularly relevant subset. The Israeli Harop and the Iranian Shahed-136 have demonstrated that deep precision strikes can be carried out using tools that cost much less than the destroyed targets. For countries with extensive land or sea borders, this capability changes the defence equation. It is worth noting that none of these systems were born from purely military programmes. They derive from industrial and technological ecosystems that combine commercial components and rapid integration.

Electronic warfare constitutes the second axis of this arsenal. Jamming, GPS spoofing (broadcasting false positioning signals), signal interception and degradation of data links can paralyse systems that are far more expensive than those used to neutralize them. Russia invested heavily in this dimension and demonstrated, at the beginning of the war, how electronic degradation can nullify conventional advantages. The rapid Ukrainian response — with software adaptations, frequency changes and accelerated development of cryptographic solutions — highlighted that speed of adaptation is, in itself, a strategic asset.

The third axis is anti-drone defence, today a priority for any force facing the widespread use of unmanned systems. From low-cost kinetic interceptors to embedded electronic warfare systems and high-energy lasers, effective protection requires multiple, integrated layers, including a low-cost terminal layer capable of sustaining prolonged saturation. Although designed to intercept rockets, the Israeli Iron Dome system, in conjunction with Arrow and David’s Sling, offers perhaps the most sophisticated example of this approach: not a single defensive system, but a tiered one that imposes increasing costs on the attacker at each stage.

The fourth axis is made up of distributed sensors and resilient communications. Situational awareness is worth more than firepower that cannot identify its targets. Low-cost sensor networks, integrated through data-fusion software, can cover large territories at decreasing marginal costs. With Western support, Ukraine connected ground and airborne sensors to command centres capable of responding within minutes to Russian movements. The most significant example is the Sky Fortress network: around 10 to 14 thousand acoustic sensors, each costing between $400 and $1,000 US dollars, monitor low-altitude airspace for less than $60 million — a fraction of the cost of equivalent radar coverage. The United States Army has requested acoustic drone detection systems, while a study by the US Army’s Center for Army Lessons Learned has recommended their adoption along NATO's eastern flank. Asymmetry, previously a lesson for peripheral countries, is becoming part of the doctrine of major powers themselves.

Extending asymmetry to sea and space

For countries with a significant maritime presence, unmanned naval assets represent a strategic frontier that remains largely underexplored. Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) can execute maritime denial missions at a fraction of the cost of conventional corvettes, frigates and submarines. Ukraine surprised the world by employing improvised surface drones—such as the Magura V5 and Sea Baby—to strike a substantial portion of the Russian Black Sea Fleet starting in late 2022, forcing its withdrawal from Sevastopol despite Ukraine not possessing a single conventional combat vessel. It was the subsequent surface-drone campaign that unequivocally demonstrated that a denial-oriented navy could be built outside traditional shipyards. Emerging nations with extensive coastlines can thus develop coastal denial capabilities that align with their fiscal constraints, without seeking to build power-projection navies.

In the space domain, the expansion of commercial satellite constellations opens a window of opportunity for countries unable to sustain large-scale, autonomous space programmes. Ukraine combined connectivity from SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation, imagery from commercial observation satellites operated by companies such as Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs, and open-source intelligence to maintain near-real-time situational awareness of Russian movements. A hybrid space architecture – combining minimal national capabilities, access to commercial constellations and partnerships with allies – can offer emerging nations a strategic reconnaissance capability that would otherwise be unattainable in terms of cost and time through purely national programs.

However, this dependency has a flip side. The selective disruption of Starlink coverage over Crimea at a critical stage of the Ukrainian campaign highlighted that access to foreign commercial infrastructure can leave military operations vulnerable to decisions made by private actors outside the national chain of command. This hybrid architecture is, therefore, simultaneously a window of opportunity and a source of vulnerability. Consequently, a national space capability, however limited, ceases to be a luxury and becomes the factor that transforms a service contracted with third parties into an autonomous capability.

The economics of smart defence

The organizing principle of any asymmetric architecture is cost imposition: ensuring that every adversary action imposes a cost on the aggressor that exceeds the cost of the defence itself. This principle is not new. It lies at the heart of guerrilla warfare, mine warfare and the strategic use of natural obstacles. What has changed is the scale and precision with which it can be applied through low-cost, high-impact technologies. A field of defensive drones capable of destroying a $10 million combat vehicle with a $500 projectile represents an asymmetry of 20,000 to 1—a ratio no economy can sustain indefinitely. In military terms, this Cost-Exchange Ratio renders continued offensive operations unsustainable without doctrinal adaptation.

In this context, smart defence is not synonymous with cheap defence, but rather with maximising efficiency in the relationship between investment and strategic effect. An army capable of returning drones to service within 48 hours holds a structural advantage over one that takes 18 months to replace a fourth-generation fighter jet. Replenishment speed thus becomes a form of deterrence: an adversary anticipating its attacks to be rapidly absorbed and reversed has less incentive to launch them.

This logic elevates industrial replenishment capacity to the level of a central strategic variable. The conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated that high-intensity warfare consumes munitions, vehicles and drones at a rate few economies can sustain; even major powers have faced bottlenecks in the supply of ammunition and electronic components. For emerging nations, this implies that the ability to produce critical items domestically—even on a limited scale—becomes a direct component of deterrence. A country capable of sustaining its own replenishment for six months is significantly harder to coerce than one dependent on external supply chains vulnerable to blockades.

However, there is an additional conceptual step that redefines the notion of strategic depth. Classical deterrence relied on stockpiles. Today’s era of dual-use deterrence relies on the capacity for continuous production without vulnerable concentrations. An assembly line distributed across multiple workshops, dispersed 3D printers and containerised micro-factories – manufacturing organised as a network rather than a single facility – deprives the adversary of concentrated industrial targets. Hence the importance of mapping and monitoring civilian industrial infrastructure that can be converted for defence purposes if needed. This model of "distributed reconstitution" shifts strategic depth from territory to a latent industrial base lacking a single centre.

Software as sovereignty

Among the components of technological asymmetry, software is the one most frequently underestimated. The attack vector – a drone or missile – is visible and tangible. In contrast, the code that controls it, protects it against jamming and integrates data into the command system is invisible, even though it constitutes a critical dependency.

A country that operates systems whose software is controlled by third parties lacks operational sovereignty, even if the hardware is located within its own territory. Reliance on foreign software for weaponry, communications and command functions represents a vulnerability that does not appear in traditional military inventories but can paralyse operations during conflicts or diplomatic crises. Software sovereignty therefore requires long-term investment in national software development ecosystems and indigenous cryptography that can be independently audited and modified.

The dual-use technical reserve is the human component of this equation. Engineers, programmers, drone operators and electronic warfare specialists trained in the civilian sector constitute a mobilisable pool of talent that no defence budget could fully maintain on active duty. Tech start-ups, software developers and civilian drone pilots can be rapidly integrated into the war effort, generating tactical innovations that conventional armed forces would struggle to produce due to bureaucratic rigidity. Mass digital mobilization is an institutional instrument that emerging nations should study. It is a digital levée en masse: a mass mobilisation, not of bodies in the trenches, but for talent, code and productive capacity.

The supply chain represents another frequently underestimated structural vulnerability. The global semiconductor shortage between 2021 and 2023, which impacted the automotive industry, foreshadowed what could occur in conflict scenarios involving nations dependent on imported electronic components for their defence platforms. The US CHIPS and Science Act, together with European investment in companies such as ASML and semiconductor fabrication plants, reflect efforts by major powers to reduce this vulnerability. For emerging nations, the solution lies in diversifying suppliers, maintaining strategic stockpiles of critical components and mapping external dependencies that could cripple operational capabilities even before a conflict begins.

There is also a collective response that is rarely considered: South-South pooling. Joint procurement arrangements for access to commercial satellite constellations, coordinated stockpiles of critical components and the sharing of sensor data among countries with converging interests can reduce the coercive power that individual suppliers hold over fragmented buyers. Supply vulnerability is largely a function of fragmented demand; aggregating that demand is, in itself, a form of sovereignty.

Technology transfer: The "how" of sovereignty

The previous sections described which capabilities matter. The question remains: how does an emerging country acquire them? The answer is not buying them. The market readily supplies finished products but withholds precisely what matters most: the capacity to produce, modify and integrate them. Buying a drone, manufacturing it and redesigning it within six-week wartime cycles are three radically different activities; only the last constitutes sovereignty. Technology transfer policy is therefore the link between the civilian industrial base and military capability.

An instructive – and paradoxical – case illustrates this dynamic: the transfer that generated the most sovereignty was the one that was denied. When Canada suspended exports of Wescam optical sensors for Bayraktar drones following the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Türkiye was forced to develop domestic substitutes through the Turkish defence corporation Aselsan. The ban turned dependence into capability. When met with an industrial base capable of absorbing it, the denial of technology can function as the most effective import-substitution program. For emerging countries, the greatest risk lies not in the denial of access itself, but in lacking the industrial foundation needed to respond.

This suggests a practical criterion for transfer negotiations: if the defence base is civilian, then the most valuable transfers are not major platforms but foundational dual-use technologies: semiconductor packaging and testing, radiofrequency and electronic warfare components, autonomy toolchains and secure communications intellectual property. Once mastered, these technologies boost both economic competitiveness and military capability. Negotiating the transfer of the platform while ignoring the component is like harvesting the fruit while forgetting the seed.

Shaping the rules of future warfare

Technological asymmetry is not static; it is a competitive dynamic in which the adversary also adapts. Cycles that once spanned decades—from doctrine development and platform acquisition to operator training—are now compressed into months or weeks, driven by the speed of software iteration and the commercial availability of components. It took Russia less than six months to adjust its drone employment tactics after Ukrainian electronic warfare systems began downing its initial models; Ukraine responded in similarly short cycles. This pace of adaptation requires emerging nations to develop institutional capacity for rapid learning and continuous operational change. Military structures that our averse to innovation and slow to change risk falling behind the pace set by technological transformation.

Finally, there is an often-overlooked normative dimension: technical credibility in international debates regarding lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). The question of when and how autonomous systems may make engagement decisions without human intervention lies at the heart of negotiations within the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) and other multilateral forums. Countries that develop autonomous capabilities without actively participating in these debates risk being excluded from shaping the norms that will eventually regulate them. Building technical credibility by demonstrating both mastery of the technology and a willingness to discuss its ethical limits constitutes a form of normative power that complements, rather than contradicts, operational capability.

Instead of waiting for major powers to define the rules governing the use of autonomous systems, emerging nations could take the initiative to establish standards for the certification, testing and interoperability of low-cost autonomous systems, becoming regulators before they become the regulated. Whoever defines the technical standard also defines the market – and the resulting norm. A “Geneva of the drone era”— one that is convened, not merely attended — would be one of the most cost-effective and enduring exercises of strategic power available to an emerging nation: normative sovereignty as an extension of industrial sovereignty.

Conclusion: Seizing the window of opportunity

Technological asymmetry is neither a universal solution nor a guarantee of security. It is, however, one of the most rational approaches available to emerging nations seeking to build credible deterrence without the resources of major powers. The combination of low-cost, connected platforms, systematic cost imposition, software sovereignty, a dual-use technical reserve, distributed industrial reconstitution, component-oriented technology transfer and active participation in international norm-setting offers a coherent and mutually reinforcing set of measures.

The unifying principle is simple: ensuring that any aggressor pays a cost disproportionate to the expected benefit. However, unlike a conventional arsenal—which remains a sunk cost until the moment of conflict—a dual-use base operates continuously to the benefit of the economy that sustains it, making it structurally more sustainable. In a world where the cost of destruction has already fallen below the cost of ownership for many military categories, the countries with the greatest potential for gain are precisely those least able to afford the alternative of costly imitation of major-power military architectures.

These reflections are not meant to constitute a universal recipe. Different socio-historical, geographic and cultural contexts will significantly alter potential outcomes. Rather, they offer an analytical framework, a set of variables relevant to constructing defence architectures in emerging nations.

About the authors

Dr Vinicius de Carvalho is a Reader in Brazilian and Latin American Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and the Circle U. Vice-Dean for Academic Chairs.

Jackson Schneider is a Senior Fellow at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) at Columbia University and a Trustee of the Brazilian Center of International Relations (CEBRI).