The Real Revolution in Military Affairs

From the Roofing Tile to the FPV Drone

The Siege of Sparta by Pyrrhus, François Topino-Lebrun, 1799/1800

By some estimates, 60 to 70 percent of casualties in the Siege of Argos came from roofing tiles being dropped on the heads of soldiers. They fly through windows, are dropped from the walls, and slip through the open creases of your breastplate. The phalanx’s oldest insurance policy—armor, cover, or courage that might save you—is collapsing. This wasn’t a tactical shift, but the start of a military revolution.

The old way of war was smothered on the streets of Argos in 272 BC when the mother of an Argive soldier shattered Pyrrhus’ spine with a simple piece of masonry. The roofing tile alone was unreliable and vulnerable when used alone—but when combined with your son distracting Pyrrhus from behind—it reshaped how battles were fought.

The fact that someone’s mom could decapitate an entire invading force with nothing more than earthenware demonstrated the fact that muscle-fueled force was over as the key player in the conflicts of the era. Courage could no longer protect you from being unceremoniously killed in the middle of a city street.

The phalanx without someone’s mom embedded in your formation wasn’t just defeated—it was slaughtered.

Some people might argue that grabbing a nearby heavy object and dropping it on someone’s head was merely a tactical innovation in the long-running tradition of throwing shit at people on a battlefield, but this analogy misses the scale of the shift. It was someone’s mom who did it. There was a new apex predator on the battlefield—anyone could kill a King by just throwing shit at them.

For a fraction of the cost of training and equipping a professional phalangite, you could create a swarm of rocks that can disable costly elite military formations. The defense production of entire militaries changed overnight, with thousands of disposable roofing tiles becoming an essential part of any combined arms army.

The challenge quickly became how exactly an invading army could organize itself around this new innovation—the essential aspect of any systematic change in military affairs. You could no longer just look in front of you, you had to look up, too. The soldiers of Pyrrhus’ army began to speak of being haunted by the threats coming from the rooftops; it was like there were a thousand women with heavy tiles in every window of Argos.

In the old days, the soldier across from you felt fear, but now? Safely tucked away in their home, the operator of a roofing tile doesn’t have to feel the stress and terror of combat. A brick doesn’t feel fear or get tired.

For centuries, the spear marched on human shoulders. Now it falls at 9.8 m/s, unburdened by fear, untouchable by flesh.

We have, since the dawn of written history, used tools to kill one another in war to achieve these political ends. Yes, the FPV drone does not feel fear or fatigue. Neither did the atomic bomb, the arquebus, the spear, or a ceramic tile.

No matter how revolutionary you think your theory about the newest tool is, you haven’t invented something new.

War is what war has always been—organized violence used to obtain a political object. It is a social activity between human beings. There is still a human being operating that FPV drone, the same way it was a human being that crippled Pyrrhus with a broken off piece of a roof.

Anything else would not be war.