Line of sight needed, trivial to jam, power hungry, trivial to fox hunt. These are not boogyman devices. The real boogyman devices are the ones in space. Big militaries don't need things on earth to do any of the things you listed and way more.

Keep in mind that this is a very low bandwidth, high latency mesh network. Great for sending short text messages, absolutely terrible for guiding drones.

That’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how autonomous your drone is and what you need to guide it to do…

...but also resistance in the context of authoritarian capture.

ExpressLRS[0] (drone / radio control protocol) also uses LoRa, I wonder if anyone's tried mesh networking it…

[0] https://www.expresslrs.org/

Russia and Ukraine both use meshed drone control networks now, dunno which tech stack, but likely this or similar.

Yeah. Actuality I was thinking about less sophisticated adversaries. So called "failed states", nonstate groups, organized crime, amateur surveillance, corporate espionage, sabotage.

Mesh networks are already used by both Russia and Ukraine to guide drones.

With the obvious solution of putting mesh nodes on the drones, foregoing the scattering part.

For everyone else, IoT is already there. And good old paying people to do things (the supply of dumb people never gets depleted).