If you can show me the time that a faceless drone operator has actually successfully suppressed an opposing force, I will agree with you. We saw it in Afghanistan, and we are seeing it in Ukraine today: the people with the drones actually can't use them very effectively in terms of ending a war. They can kill a lot of people efficiently, and even get a high-value target once a year or so, but they can't seem to do what is necessary to end a war.

Winning a war isn't about force: it's about morale and mindset. If you can't stop people from fighting against you, you can't win a war. A drone has never walked into a community and gotten people to put down their guns.

Everything you just said is true of rifles, grenades, swords, and spears.

Drones are weapons. They're one of the many tools of war. But war has always been about culture, food, politics, religion, demographics, and many other factors.

People win and lose wars. Weapons help.

Throughout history ordinary soldiers were often unwilling to fight against people from their own community. This often limited how authoritarian governments could respond to public unrest forcing them to accept reform or even leave power. Obviously they tried solving this by stationing troops far away from their home regions, creating various elite forces/deaths squads etc. But these all very expensive and/or required significant forethought.

Drones on the other hand are cheap and require fairly few people to operate. A few deaths squads in the control might be enough to suppress an entire country.

Mind you, the Assadists came out on top in Syria; they don’t use drones so much, but old fashioned siege warfare against population centres, terror bombing and chemical weapons.

Is not dying to something you cannot even see, that drops grenades on you or fires rockets at you a hit to morale?.

As I understand it, once you have already joined a guerilla organization like the Taliban, you have generally made peace with the fact that the drones are there. Watching someone die by hellfire missile strike further confirms that the evil people who are oppressing you by drone need to be stopped. Also, showing other people the aftermath of a strike helps to convince them to support you because they think they might get caught in the friendly fire.

It's a little like surrounding an army on an open field: If you give the losing side in a pitched battle an escape route, many of them will run, but if you surround them, they will fight to the death because there's nothing else they can do.

Well the USSR, one of the greatest “empires” of all times, collapsed with barely any violence (in relative terms) and very unexpectedly. I’m not sure having access to drones could have helped that much when nobody in a position of power really wanted to preserve it.

While it’s not exactly that straightforward but democratic reforms is what basically killed it. Gorbachev allowed independent power centers to form which weren’t controlled by the party apparatus and these new centers had no reason to preserve the union/empire even though relatively few people (outside of the Baltic region and the Caucasus) actually wanted to abolish it. Internationalist empires like the USSR, Austria-Hungary, Ottomans, Tsarist Russia (outside of the core regions), Yugoslavia and even Rome to some degree tend to be very fragile. Any rapid attempt to reform the system tends to destabilize it to such a degree that it can no longer survive without extreme violence.

China and the US (still) are nation states and not real empires, therefore they are almost immune to some of the issues which brought down most historical empires (nation states are much better in enacting reforms and generally much more flexible). Of course that’s not permanent and might change in a generation or two, for instance if different US states continue drifting apart economically, culturally and socially.

> China and the US (still) are nation states and not real empires

Tell the Tibetans and the Uighurs that the PRC is a “nation state” not a “real empire”