Welcome to World War III
You know, we haven’t had a truly modern war yet but we are now about to do just that. In fact, it has already started.
Our recent wars have been fought with equipment and tactics that harken back to WWII. In this new world, the Abrams tank is nothing more than a millstone around the Army’s neck Our aircraft, aircraft carriers, surface ships and submarines are relics of a previous epoch. Both the strategies and tactics these artifacts force us into are outdated by the nature of the electronic battlefield.
A truly modern war will be fought electronically by adversaries who are screwing with each other’s information structures. They will be fought in space, as we knock each other’s satellites out of commission, using high-powered lasers concealed in commercial satellites that have maneuvering capabilities comparable to down-looking surveillance satellites. High-powered lasers have a unique advantage: they never run out of ammunition. As long as there’s sunlight to convert to electrical energy, the lasers will keep working.
Some adversaries will detonate nuclear device in low earth orbits over each other’s territories that will generate electromagnetic pulses that will fry the entire computer-based infrastructure, anything that has not been specifically hardened to withstand an EMP…and those hardened infrastructures may or may not be hard enough. Since we haven’t detonated a nuclear device since 1992…before we converted to digital technology…we have no idea if those hardened sites are hard enough.
The net result of an EMP attack would begin with basic services. Municipal water systems will shut down because they will be unable to control the flow of water….or bill their customers for the water they have consumed. Electrical grids will shut down because the transformers will be burnt to a crisp by the EMP. As a result, almost all electric vehicles will become useless but that doesn’t matter because gasoline pumps can’t pump gasoline without electricity and they can’t bill credit card customers. (In hurricane prone areas, many gasoline stations have their own emergency generators, but that doesn’t mean the electronically controlled pumps will work after an EMP attack.) There would be no traffic lights, no street lights, no telephone service, and no internet service. In fact, all commerce based upon credit card usage with simply stop dead in its tracks. From one minute to the next we would be thrust back into the 18th century.
Don’t have nuclear weapons or the systems needed to loft them into low earth orbit. No problem, because hackers can cause the same exact calamities without an EMP. Weaponized hackers will hack their way into each other’s command and control systems, wreaking havoc, while others will be saturating social media with false rumors designed to dishearten each other’s troops and civilian populations Within multi-ethnic countries, open conflicts will break out between groups with historical animosities toward each other. Denial of services attacks will shut down hospitals and clinics, the banking system, along with water and sewer, electrical service telephonic communications, and the internet services upon which we are now dependent.
Regardless of whether the attack employed an EMP ore a team of talented hackers, the results will be that the nations who have surveillance satellites aloft will lose their information advantage. We will be fighting blind. Since we have long since become dependent upon those satellites for both communications and intelligence, there will be wholesale breakdowns in communications between the command levels and the operators in the field. Communications from the presidential level all the way down to company commanders in the field will be disrupted, which means the commanders will have no idea what’s going on in the field, and the troops in the field will not be able to call for support or extraction.
A truly modern war will be fought with smart drones equipped with artificial intelligence. A truly modern war will be fought asymmetrically a far piece away from the population centers of the adversaries, where a stateless cohort of fanatics has access to the same technology as last year’s super powers.
In this modern warfare, our 11 nuclear aircraft carriers – the best in the world – will fail us as they are inundated by thousands of smart drones. Our nuclear submarines – the best in the world – will be tracked down and destroyed by submersible drones we can’t even see and against which we have no defense except drones of our own. Our tanks – the best in the world – will be overwhelmed by microbombs delivered by drones the size of your fist. Our aircraft – the best in the world – will be overmatched with hundreds of drones attacking and destroying each plane.
This isn’t science fiction. This is starting to happen right now in Ukraine, Russia, Israel and Iran. We aren’t completely there yet, but we are well on our way.
Let’s be very clear about one thing: tactical ballistic rockets may be much larger than your average drone, if there is such a thing, but that’s all they really are, very large drones. So, when Iran attacked Israel with a combination of three hundred rockets and drones, Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome held firm (with some assistance from the United States and several other friendly nations, including Jordan.) Attacking Israel with THREE THOUSAND devices at the same time might overwhelm the Iron Dome, which was not designed to absorb attacks of that size. Attacking with 20,000 drones and rockets will definitely overwhelm the Iron Dome because, when the Iron Dome is concentrating on the drones, it can’t focus on the rockets and vice versa.
It all boils down to economics. It takes billions of dollars, and years of effort, to produce one new aircraft carrier, but the same amount of money could pay for millions of drones that could be available for use in a matter of days or weeks, depending upon who you buy them – or their components – from. The same logic pertains to other naval vessels, aircraft, and mechanized armor. In fact, you can buy killer drones for much less than the $13 billion we spent on the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford.
There are quite a few science fiction novels that describe the use of androids in military operations but reality has bypassed the robot infantry. In the 2019 film, Angel Has Fallen, the president of the United States (played, of course, by Morgan Freeman), is attacked by a flight of self-directed mini-drones launched from a truck equipped with multiple launching tubes. The drones take out the entire presidential security team, except for Freeman and Gerard Butler, who plays the intrepid Secret Service agent Mike Banning. The same type of self-directed drones could be used to attack ground forces from overhead or down at knee level, and it would be impossible for infantry units to defend themselves from such assaults.
In 2019, the concept of launching hundreds of self-directed drones was considered science fiction. On April 13 of 2024, Iran committed an act of war against Israel, using drones. This is actually the first time that Iran has ever struck Israel. (To be fair, Israel bombed the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, killing seven Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers, including three high-value targets.) Since the Iranian embassy in Damascus is technically Iranian sovereign ground, this was an act of war by Israel against Iran. Israel’s cause of action was that much of the support being channeled to Hamas was coming from Iran via Syria.
Hamas has been launching missile and drone attacks on Israel since 2007, a date that coincides with the Israeli-American cyber attack on Iran’s uranium refinery, disabling twenty percent of the centrifuges…but these attacks have never risen beyond the annoyance level….until Hamas attacked Israel directly on October 7, 2023.
However, the most salient point about the Iranian attack – a supposed retaliation for an April 1 Israeli missile attack on the Iranian Embassy in Damascus – is that it was a gesture, not a genuine retaliation because the attacks were aimed at relatively isolated targets, rather than Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or Haifa. Iran wanted to make a statement. not go to war against Israel, a country with which it shares no borders and against which its chances of success would range between slim and none.
Iran actually informed the United States (through Switzerland) exactly when the attack was going to be launched and exactly which targets had been selected, so that the US could tell the Israelis when the attack was coming and where they were going to be hit.
In order to launch a ground attack against Israel, Iran would have to cross Iraq, Iran’s sworn enemy for many centuries, or go through Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, all of whom have strong financial and political ties with Israel today, and none of whom would allow an Iranian army to pass through their territories unopposed. (In actuality, since none of these nations have the military capacity to defend themselves against Iran, the United States – and Israel – would inevitably be drawn into the conflict if Iran chose to launch a ground attack against Israel.)
Three hundred drones and missiles is nothing. Iran could easily have launched three thousand projectiles and might have the capacity to launch ten thousand more…but they didn’t because they really don’t want to get into a shooting war with Israel which has the technological expertise to destroy Iran’s entire computer infrastructure in the same manner that they destroyed Iran’s uranium enrichment program in 2010.
Drones have been in use by the military for more than two decades, but now their time has come. Drones have arrived as weapons of war. Produced in large numbers, released in large scale attacks, these faster, smaller drones are virtually impossible to detect and interdict. (The ones that Iran used were larger, slower, long-distance drones that are easily targeted and destroyed.)
The bottom line is that the U.S. military – and every other first-world military that has been built to either support or oppose the U.S. military – is basically obsolete….as we are about to find out.
There is another point of view, one that supports the notion that wars are won or lost by boots on the ground, that, in order to win a war, you have to take and hold the high ground, the strategic features of the physical landscape…but that is no longer true.
Drones can do that too. They can hold real estate against attempts by defenders to take back areas taken during drone attacks.
Welcome to the future. Hope you enjoy the show.
04/18/2024 @ 1:42 am
Drones are perhaps the major characteristic of Gen. 6 fighters, not that any are deployed yet. As of now, they’re likely to be accompanied by swarms of drones.
In terms of taking out power, there may be elements of MAD in that.
In terms of satellites on the battlefield, a certain amount of that is handled closer to the ground with AWACS. However, the F35 is capable of behaving as a sort of mini AWACS by itself. A stealthy, numerous, highly networked one.
There is no reason for a drone to be more effective against stealth than other weapons, be ye ground radar or aircraft.
04/18/2024 @ 10:09 am
Actually, AWACS communicate via satellite uplinks. Curve of the earth problem makes direct radio contact problematic, especially when an enemy is jamming your radio signals. Pulsed lasers can be used to communicate by bouncing them off satellites. And then there’s what Elon Musk is doing with his starlink technology.
Mutually Assured Destruction is meaningless when you don’t know who launched the EMP attack and therefore don’t know who to retaliate against.
Stealth technology is overrated. You become visible to the adversary the moment you release your weapons. The stealth concept was initially developed to assist attacking aircraft to evade enemy radar. In ariel engagements, they are less worthy. They can deflect missile attacks, but are useless against canon fire.
The number of drones an F35 can carry versus the number of drones that can be launched against a flight of F35s would create a very one sided battlefield advantage for the adversary who could keep sending more and more drones, while the F35s are restricted to whatever they can carry in their bomb bays.
The reason that drones will be more effective against stealth technology is primarily that with an overwhelming advantage of numbers favoring the incoming ordinance, the attackers can blanket once combat has been engaged.
But these are quibbles. The non-quibble part is that drones are available to non-state actors, and even to far out crazies here and abroad.
04/19/2024 @ 12:15 pm
Not all drones are created equal.
As to stealth, knowing the aircraft is there and being able to lock onto it are two very different functions.
If you’re talking air to air combat, being able to get close enough to use a cannon is very difficult against F35’s or F22’s. You’ll be shot down way before you get that close. If you think the technology is overrated, you should listen to American pilots at Red Flag.
There’s another issue: the F35 in particular can launch a missile at any target the pilot can see, and the pilot’s helmet allows them to look through the aircraft virtually in a total sphere. They can accurately launch at someone behind them.
They also share battlefield data. With enough of them, a limited amount of Earth curvature could be worked around.
04/19/2024 @ 2:00 pm
The total cost for the 186 F22s in service and 14 more that are on order is around $70 billion The total cost of the 630 F35s in service comes to $69 billion. The addition 2,500 on order will come to $275 billion but they are only being delivered at the rate of 500 per year.
Times two for replacement parts, maintenance and repair, and we have a total cost of around $374 billion x two or $748 billion.
Now you could throw a top line state of the art air to air combat drone at an F22 or an F35, and the drone would lose. At a cost of up to $25 million each, that’s a losing proposition….but if you use bottom drawer drones at around $700K each (and the Ukrainians are having success with much cheaper drones than that), you could put more than 1 million drones up against a total of 3,330 F22s and F35s. (assuming you have the money, and some of these actors do.)
That works out to ratio of 300 drones per US fighter.
Now, there’s never going to be a battle between all of the US fighters and all of the drones, but in any given encounter, an adversary with properly placed drone launch sites could put up 300 drones for each American fighter. No aircraft can carry enough counter-measures to offset 300 incoming drones, especially if the drones are so small that targeting radar can’t grab them….and some are. (All the drone has to do is fly into the engine intake. It doesn’t even need to be explosive. A bird could disable an F35.)a
<strong>I just read that the Ukrainians are taking out Russian tanks with $300 drones. Where do you get a $300 drone? I have a few people I would like to…..
And, no, I don’t think the American technology is overrated. I think our planes and our pilots are the best in the world…against any other country’s planes and pilots. But I maintain that going head to head against odds of 300 to 1 is utter insanity and the math proves that is a feasible scenario. War is a numbers game and the numbers are against us.
What I am arguing is that reliance on last generation equipment, command and control paradigms is a great way to lose the next war.
04/20/2024 @ 1:03 am
There are not F22’s on order.
You’d need small drones with very high speed and fairly high range. They have to carry fuel. You can’t go after supersonic jets with cheap drones. And stealth jets are hard to hit, numbers or not. Drones have to, among other things, get past decoys.
The US is fairly close with aircraft-based laser weaponry. On ships, some are already deployed. Lasers are cheap to operate and fast to aim.
04/18/2024 @ 7:01 am
This is interesting. Your third from last paragraph which starts, “there is another point of view…”, just happens to be my point of view. Years ago, I used to have this same conversation with an Air Force officer in my friend’s barber shop. We went back and forth about which military service was necessary, his Air Force, and my Marine Corps, in the final analysis in war. His view was essentially the one that you stated, albeit with less advanced technology than the list you have compiled here.
My counter is this. Every advance in technology, probably since the horse, has seemed to make the previous methods of making war obsolete. Every time it has been a flawed assumption. One recent example of technology that was going to change everything was nuclear weaponry. On the optimistic end, some thought that its presence would make war obsolete because of its massive effectiveness. On the pessimistic end, others thought that life would be obliterated.
The way it actually plays out is, short of the elimination of human life on the planet, everything continues, including war. And given that, and until humans are supplanted by machines entirely, all things human continue. Walking, scratching, spitting, eating, and more to the point, grabbing and holding…ALL continue as long as humans form civilization. Drones won’t grab, hold, and assess value for their lives. They have no lives. Drone won’t propagate and bequeath. They don’t have life to make that necessary or desirable. Short of another life form which forms a civilization limited by a finite universe, the essential model of war will not change. Infantry can evolve into cavalry, or mechanized infantry, but standing on, grabbing, and holding won’t change until humans are no longer part of the picture. All of the technology listed supports a human’s basic agenda. A drone has no reason to survey a landscape, or destroy anyone on it, except for the fact that a human desires possession of it. Remove the human element, and you remove the war. Drones have no need to dominate one another. An inanimate thing can sit still for eternity more easily than it can function toward some purpose.
Once humans are fully supplanted, it all becomes moot. The only change to war is that it will cease.
Incidentally, I own 3/4’s of the uncharted universe. I have named all the planets and stars Bill1 thru ∞. I have acquired these by a modern war where I never actually found them, landed on them, or can even provably indicate where they are.
Now, do I really own and control them? What do “own”, “control”…or “them” mean without human experience?
04/18/2024 @ 10:24 am
Actually, AWACS communicate via satellite uplinks. Curve of the earth problem makes direct radio contact problematic, especially when an enemy is jamming your radio signals. Pulsed lasers can be used to communicate by bouncing them off satellites. And then there’s what Elon Musk is doing with his starlink technology.
Mutually Assured Destruction is meaningless when you don’t know who launched the EMP attack and therefore don’t know who to retaliate against.
Stealth technology is overrated. You become visible to the adversary the moment you release your weapons. The stealth concept was initially developed to assist attacking aircraft to evade enemy radar. In ariel engagements, they are less worthy. They can deflect missile attacks, but are useless against canon fire.
The number of drones an F35 can carry versus the number of drones that can be launched against a flight of F35s would create a very one sided battlefield advantage for the adversary who could keep sending more and more drones, while the F35s are restricted to whatever they can carry in their bomb bays.
The reason that drones will be more effective against stealth technology is primarily that with an overwhelming advantage of numbers favoring the incoming ordinance, the attackers can blanket once combat has been engaged.
But these are quibbles. The non-quibble part is that drones are available to non-state actors, and even to far out crazies here and abroad.
I knew you would react to the boots on the ground paragraph. I put that in precisely to trigger you so I am gratified that you took the hook.
Here’s the thing about drones. Drones are robots. Robots equipped with AI can be instructed to have the “Desire” to take and hold targets. They can be reproduced in infinite numbers, so they don’t have to propagate themselves.
A drone attack would be like a non-stop artillery or a rainstorm of hand grenades that are smart enough to actually target specific soldiers, going right down into their fox holes, if anyone still digs fox holes. It’s a supply and demand problem. The troops on the ground will have their own drones (they come in individual launching tubes) but the question is the age old ammunition question: how many tubes can one man carry? Think back to when English archers could get off six or seven arrows to one volley from the French crossbow infantry at Agincourt (the crossbow men were actually Italian mercenaries.) Then translate that to the American West, where horse soldiers could carry many times the number of rounds than the number of arrows a warrior could carry.
If we wanted to take, hold and keep American territory, we could do that….at the expense of a constant attack that would cost many lives.
Ultimately, the new battlefield will be drones against drones. Why would we send our kids into harm’s way when we no longer have to?
Glory? My father told me that glory was highly overrated. He said the ones who were seeking glory were the first to die.
04/18/2024 @ 3:29 pm
Land can’t be seized and held with drones. You can’t build factories, farms, homes, etc…just monitoring it from the air. The territory has to have some practical use, or else it is not worth trying to grab it. And, no, grabbing it is not about “glory”. It is about making use of it.
04/18/2024 @ 6:46 pm
Land can be seized and held with drones. Airborne drones dropped from motherships can destroy any ground force in a matter of minutes…unless the ground force is equipped with their own drones, and then it is a matter of who has more (or better) drones. The airborne drones will have the advance of constant re-supply.
Of course, the motherships are vulnerable themselves, so it depends upon how many of them each side has. During WW2, the Germans had superior tanks. Russian and American tanks were inferior, but we had a shitload more of them than the Germans had.
When you were talking with your Air Force buddy at the barber shop, you were thinking about outmoded hardware, helicopters, A10 wart hogs, and the rest of that generation’s hardware.
Drones aren’t just airborne vehicles. There are drones on the ground, too, currently in use by the US military (experimentally) to clear buildings, counter IEDs, and trigger suspected ambushes by rolling into them and triggering on board munitions.
The infantry (Marines or Dog Faces) don’t build factories etc. Civilian capital and labor do that once the ground has been secured.
The day of the rifleman isn’t done yet, but it’s definitely mid to late afternoon.
04/18/2024 @ 3:36 pm
There goes my treatment:)
‘Darth Day of Cicadas’
04/18/2024 @ 8:59 pm
Alan, you are trying not to understand. I’ll use different words. Think about what I am saying here.
First, drone can not hold land. They can destroy any force…let’s just say that is true for the sake of argument. Destroying is not holding. Defeating a group of personnel is not holding a territory. You are missing a step here. And no…I am not talking about out moded technology. I am talking about any technology. No matter how far you go into the future this will be so. The only point where it ceases to be so is when humans are replaced. Until then, the whole purpose of having the territory is to have it for living, manufacturing, farming, or military purposes. No one is going to spend the money and effort to destroy everyone in a space for no reason. It needs to have a reason that attaches to some human activity.
Next, infantrymen don’t build factories. I never said that they did. What they do is grab and hold the land. Then others come in behind them to make factories…and all the other stuff I already stated. That is the point. That is what I said the first time. That is actually how it works. There is a step beyond obliterating the life on a space. The next step is essentially colonizing it. That does require boots on the ground, and supply lines. It takes fingers and toes. It takes toilets and bed rolls. We dont colonize territory without people. And when we eventually do…humans have been replaced. The step where this is done by robots and drones, and humans do not plug into the equation anywhere…just isn’t a thing.
And, again, being able to destroy everything on a particular landmass is not new. Drones/robots can do it more efficiently than arrows and clubs, but the destroying is not holding and developing. Never was. Never will be.
04/18/2024 @ 9:47 pm
I understand you perfectly. I just disagree. As long as they keep manufacturing drones, drones can interdict any piece of real estate, repeatedly killing any military force seeking to occupy that landscape until the “invading” (they could actually be the defenders) force gets tired of losing people and stops sending them. Then, civilian development begins under the umbrella of the drone shield….but I think the human race is on the verge of putting itself out of business within this century. We might be here to see it…but I think that’s what’s coming.
04/19/2024 @ 5:42 am
“Then, civilian development begins under the umbrella of the drone shield…”
That part means boots on the ground. Those are the boots on the ground. At best, drones are a precursor.
04/20/2024 @ 12:35 pm
This is address to Kosh’s last comment. We ran out of replies.
With a massed array of drones, stealth technology becomes impotent. It is simply a matter of mapping feedback from the drones to find a place where they aren’t getting any images, and you have a target. Fuel: drones can be launched from anywhere, at close range to the target area, and therefore don’t necessarily need large fuel supplies.
Lasers are not designed to find targets the size of your head. I haven’t read anything about the specific capabilities of laser weapons so I would guess they are being designed for air-to-air combat between full size aircraft. The existing counter-measures are mostly designed to distract heat-seeking attackers Because the drones know that there are no friendlies in their target area, they can use smart technologies to target enemy aircraft without using heat sensors.
Stealth technology is also vulnerable to heat, humidity, and rain. A stealth-equipped aircraft in the midst of a rainstorm could be in trouble. If you fly above the clouds, in daylight missions, you are exposed to the sun.
This is an unending argument. I believe that our equipment is far superior to what the Russians and the Chinese have….but I think that the next few generations of drones are going to pose a very serious threat to our air and naval supremacy.
My reading on the subject indicates that laser weapons are handicapped by rain, fog, and smoke. They are also line of sight weapons and must remain focused on the target for varying lengths of time, depending on the power of the weapon and the distance from the target. While lasers are not limited to the carrying capacity of the aircraft, the power supplies are very heavy and can only supply a limited number of shots before the batteries are depleted I imagine that onboard generators might be used to recharge the batteries, but the laser beams require concentrated amounts of electricity that generators couldn’t provide directly to the lasers.
The best use of power weapons is apparently on naval vessels, especially if they are nuclear-powered but even a nuclear engine has a limited potential in terms of the amount of electricity the generator can push out, unless someone has figured out how to implement a direct conversion from nuclear radiation to electrical energy but even that alternative would have a limited ability to run the ship and provide power to the lasers.
The most important issue, for aircraft borne lasers, is the ability to keep the focus on the target long enough for the laser to take effect.
None of us really know what we are really talking about here…..so I will stick to my numbers argument, which the Ukrainians are providing the data for. Trading a $300 drone for a $4.5 million T90…..hmmm.