"Hopping drones", with movement akin to the hunting method of robins [0], will be used as a kind of living minefield in military operations. When anti-air is absent/suppressed, they will engage in high energy aerial maneuvers to cover as much ground, with as little contest, as possible. Once emplaced, they will lower their signature and engage in low energy defensive fire/ambush behaviors, to hold territory.

The critical consideration is that movement is dangerous, under conditions of pervasive battlefield surveillance, so when it is possible at all it must be exploited to its full potential, and thus can be conducted via an expensive process such as flight. In turn, to make movement dangerous to the enemy, one must make terrain frictionful to cross, through high lethality, low detectability assets, of which mines are the paradigmatic example.

[0] Brief bursts of flight interwoven between slow stalking of different ground locations for worms.