A clever strategy that few thought of; it deserved to win.
On the downside, this is surely going to give me nightmares about government drones getting infected with a terrorist virus and unleashing drone-botnet-mageddon on the masses.
How quaint, a terrorist virus? No, it'll probably just be normal government drones with normal government software that unleashes drone-ageddon on the masses.
Whether it's a robot uprising, or a bug/oversight in the software, or Big Brother, is up to your own personal taste in dystopian horrors.
Although this wasn't a proper war game, it tangentially reminds me of Colonel Van Riper's pesky 'enemies' defeating the hometeam via peskiness and outsmarting the technological advantage of the home team. In one scenario, the Van Riper's team 'sunk' a flotilla but the warroomers 'refloated' them, just because.[1]
"For instance—and here is where he displayed prescience—Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to Red troops, thereby eluding Blue's super-sophisticated eavesdropping technology. He maneuvered Red forces constantly. At one point in the game, when Blue's fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, "refloated" the Blue fleet, and resumed play.)"
even in the game with Van Riper, you could assume that your intelligence agencies did the right thing at preventing his unorthodox tactics and that's why some of his actions were never carried out. after all, if your army is (obviously) better equipped for fighting a conventional war, as opposed to the enemy, then is the job of your intelligence services to push the war towards a more traditional style war that you can win, so if the controllers assumed such a scenario their actions in such a game could be somewhat justifiable (again, assuming the red didn't have the resources of an intelligence agency backed by a wealthy nation).
now if you were to treat the AR drones competition as some sort of war game, you would have to assume such hacking capabilities on both sides, probably balancing out or interacting in interesting ways...
The enemy engages in sabotage and guerilla warfare because they know they have no chance at winning a conventional war --but the wargamers dismissed the weaknesses in some of their assumptions (such that technological superiority equates to prevalence on all fronts of the battlefield.
Van Riper showed them they had weaknesses but they preferred to sidestep them --this thought process probably explains our initial susceptibility to IEDs and other unorthodox tactics by our foes.
Since it seems the biggest users of viruses, and presumably the most talented virus writers, are those doing ddos attacks against other websites…
Who wants to guess at when the first p0wned Reaper or Predator takes out a datacenter housing servers for someone who's annoyed Anonymous, or perhaps a competing poker/porn/pills site?
(That'll make a change from the usual "Cascading failures in us-1-east" post-mortem blog posts…)
On the downside, this is surely going to give me nightmares about government drones getting infected with a terrorist virus and unleashing drone-botnet-mageddon on the masses.