The most obvious use case for a grasshopper/earwig size explosive is as a self-assembling munition. Users dial in the critical mass necessary for destruction of the target and program the members of the munition group to identify, track, and assemble at the target's weak point, insuring that at least one of the explosive initiators (primers) makes it into the assembled munition and once their internal mesh network confirms that critical mass, primer, etc are in place, a detonation is initiated.
The individual units could travel a circuitous route to the actual target without raising much suspicion and once in the immediate vicinity they could be programmed to rapidly converge on the target.
That's how I see it. With self-assembling munitions you have less waste of resources, you can target individuals in a command structure or individual critical components of their military infrastructure and you could do it with things that could be made to be relatively inconspicuous so that an observer could see them as a normal part of the environment. Until they converge of course and if this happens fast enough it can be difficult for the targeted entity to unravel exactly how it all went down.
Futurist predictions tend to most often be wrong because they fail to account for easier / cheaper ways of obtaining the same effect. This seems like such a case.
Why are you self-assembling anything when you can park a remotely operated machine gun along someone's driving route?
This just provides another tool in the inventory. You're forcing the adversary to plan for strategies to mitigate attacks like this. Everyone already knows about remote-controlled machine guns and those who feel threatened by the prospect of having something like this used against them are actively working to mitigate the threat.
With a self-assembling munition you have a new, novel method of conducting an attack that literally forces an adversary to use a zero trust threat model 24 hours a day against every little thing that moves once the adversary understands how it happened.
When the grass can suddenly come alive with dormant, self-assembling munitions that have suddenly detected that a target on their list is in the vicinity then it adds another layer of complexity to force protection since both human and material assets could be targeted at any time from any direction by something like a bug-sized bot that may not even register in your consciousness until it is too late.
The individual units could travel a circuitous route to the actual target without raising much suspicion and once in the immediate vicinity they could be programmed to rapidly converge on the target.
That's how I see it. With self-assembling munitions you have less waste of resources, you can target individuals in a command structure or individual critical components of their military infrastructure and you could do it with things that could be made to be relatively inconspicuous so that an observer could see them as a normal part of the environment. Until they converge of course and if this happens fast enough it can be difficult for the targeted entity to unravel exactly how it all went down.
Future war looks scary to me.