“There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.” – Battlestar Galactica (2005)
I hate to make fun of India. I heard they lost power at their largest mall, and hundreds of people were stuck on the escalator for hours.
I was originally going to write about another topic, but then I saw this article (LINK) about how the Army® was testing a fighting force using a system that combines soldiers, flying drones, and land drone vehicles and I couldn’t resist. The short explanation of the system is that flying drones are used for real time reconnaissance, and followed up with both living troops and land drones to attack an enemy. Those are followed up by McDonalds® and Starbucks™.
Based on the simulations that they have run so far, a group of soldiers augmented with the drones was able to attack a defending group of 120 soldiers and win. This isn’t unusual – defending soldiers lose all the time, just ask the Trojans. But in this case, the attackers were a platoon-sized group of only 40 soldiers. They also claimed nearly zero casualties in the simulation, although one participant ran out of GoGurt©.
This version tested well, except in certain areas of Asia.
This is opposite of all of general wisdom about conventional warfare. General wisdom (based on hundreds of years of us killing each other) says that a competent defending force has roughly a three to one advantage – that is, 120 defenders is equal to 360 attackers. In practice, if troops were available you’d probably nearly double the number of attackers to 600-700 troops to overwhelm the defenders and minimize attacker losses. Yet, the Army exercises showed they’d be able to defeat those 120 defenders easily with only 40 soldiers if they remembered to pay Comcast® for Internet.
The reason that this works for the attackers is fairly simple – the flying drones give nearly super-human information about where the adversary is. For soldiers, this is nearly a super power – to be able to see and know where the enemy is without them knowing where you are. It provides a significant advantage so attacks can be precisely planned and ambushes detected. The Army has recently ordered 9,000 Black Hornet® drones from FLIR™ and they’re going into service – at a price tag of $15,000 each.
Every single picture of this drone I found was someone looking lovingly at it as it floated above their hand.
The other type of drone mentioned were land drone systems. When they first ran the simulations, the Army commander would get information from the flying drones and then bring up the troops and land drones, but that allowed the adversary to know that the attack was coming, so in later simulations the attacking commander tried to bring up the air and land drone forces for a simultaneous attack. So what did the land drones look like?
My bet is that they will something like the picture below, a combination of weapons and sensors so that the drone can attack without exposing humans. Sort of a combat Roomba®.
Want an A.I. uprising? Because this is how you get an A.I. uprising.
In the article, the author casually noted that the augmented drone/soldier combination wouldn’t be all that effective against Russia. Honestly, I think he’s being optimistic. When attacking any state-sponsored military, the countermeasures required to detect and stop the drones are generally far cheaper than the drones themselves. The only way to completely stop the countermeasures is to increase the autonomy of the drone systems to the point where they’re making a lot of decisions by themselves, or by air dropping lots of vodka for the Russian troops.
Again, defense costs less than building an attacking force. A great list of ways knock out drones is here (LIST), H/T to the Docent over at Practical Eschatology (LINK) for the link. He always has pretty interesting links and commentary, so consider dropping by on a regular basis. History has shown that advances in military technology are generally short-lived.
In many ways, it is nearly certain that the Russians could easily field sufficient electronic deterrents to knock our small drones out of the air, and also potentially use them against us by using our radio communication signals to pinpoint attacks. The Russians routinely jam our GPS® signals, and it’s likely they’re the reason that my Wi-Fi goes out at 3:00AM, just when I’m trying to upload a post. Fighting Russia, the advantage probably goes away. In some senses, increased technological complexity can work against soldiers in a big way – that complexity must be supported by logistics – the average soldier carries twenty pounds of batteries into combat. If there aren’t spares? What then?
Similarly, China would likely be immune to such attempts at force multiplication, since they’re making most of our electronics anyway and have probably inserted code that turns our electronic hardware into Pokémon® games if we ever declare war on them. Though anecdotal evidence indicates that the quality of the individual Chinese troops would be stunningly deficient when compared with the average soldier of the United States, I believe that they have no intention of ever fighting a stand-up war against the United States. Any attacks China makes will be surprising and asymmetrical and probably focused against Western economic systems.
So who is the Army thinking about using this technology against?
It probably won’t change the outcome in Afghanistan, where the Afghans are fighting a guerilla war using 100 year old rifles and improvised bombs. They don’t depend on holding ground to win – they just have to tire the United States out. Drone technology already is saving their lives, but it won’t win the war. And if it won’t (probably) work as effectively against Russia or China, who are we preparing for?
The Cubans? Venezuela? The Great Heathen Penguin Army of Antarctica?
I’m pretty sure that Barney wore it better . . .
My fear is that the answer is that the technology might be used here in the United States, not by our soldiers, but by our police. Whereas there are plentiful and relatively inexpensive ways to detect and/or defeat drones by a State actor, the idea of using them to control and defeat a semi-organized and relatively low tech group of citizens seems more likely.
The police are already becoming a military force. In 1980, there were 3,000 SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) raids a year. In 2016 there were 50,000-80,000 such raids yearly. Over $5 billion worth of military equipment has been transferred.
In fairness, he also took a Tour of Italy at the Olive Garden®.
I wonder how much of that technology is in Virginia? But I’m sure that if citizens give up their guns, the police will turn all that stuff back in. Right?
What, the cops have no intention of turning it back in? Maybe the Great Heathen Penguin Army has the right idea . . . .
