>They will still make the same airplanes, drones, radars tanks and whatever.
Eventually there'll be fully autonomous drones and how competitive they'll be will be directly proportional to how fast they can react relative to enemy drones. All other things being equal, the country with faster microchips will have better combat drones.
Alternatively, the country which has the biggest drone manufacturer in the world that can sell a $200 drone[0] capable of following a human using a single camera and sending the video in real time over 20 km using the same inhouse designed chipset both for AI control and video transmission [1] would probably win.
> All other things being equal, the country with faster microchips will have better combat drones
That's very unlikely imo.
When it comes to drones.. no matter how fast your computation is, there are other bottlenecks like how fast the motors can spin up, how fast the sensor readings are, how much battery efficient they are etc...
Right now the 8 bit ESCs are still as competitive as 32 bit ESC, a lot of the "follow me" tasks were using lot less computational power than what your typical smartphone these days offers...
Current drones are very limited compared to what they could do with a lot more processing power and future hardware developments. E.g. imagine a drone that could shoot a moving target hundreds of metres away in the wind, while it itself was moving very fast.
"Large" drones (aircraft rather than quadcopter) seem to follow the same rules as manned aircraft and engage with guided or unguided munitions of their own. If the drone is cheap enough then "drone as munition" seems likely to win.
Eventually there'll be fully autonomous drones and how competitive they'll be will be directly proportional to how fast they can react relative to enemy drones. All other things being equal, the country with faster microchips will have better combat drones.