Drone Wars

This post is about a paradigm shift in how wars are fought.  But first, what's a "paradigm shift"?

The term was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in a book he wrote called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".  The book was published in 1962 and quickly became hugely influential.

His subject was Scientific Revolutions, major shifts in the way scientists think about a large and important subject.  His thesis was that in many cases there is a slow evolution in scientific thinking.  But every once in a while there is a major change that happens very quickly.  He called these latter events paradigm shifts.  And that was what he chose to focus on.

Kuhn started out as a physicist but his interests gradually changed into an exploration of how scientists know what they know.  He gradually became a social scientist.  And at the time social scientists in large numbers had come around to an idea called "cultural relativism".  This evolved out of anthropology but especially the work of Margaret Mead.

At the turn of the twentieth century social scientists believed in a "natural" and universal morality.  "Right and wrong" were universal and it was universally understood that certain things were inherently "right" and other things were inherently "wrong" from a moral point of view.  And the universal right and wrong closely followed what we would now call Victorian sensibilities.

But a couple of decades into the twentieth century Mead went out and studied what were then called "primitive societies".  And especially when it came to sex, their views on morality differed radically from Victorian thinkers.  Morality was relative and was heavily influenced by the norms of a particular culture.  And those norms differed widely from culture to culture.  And it wasn't just sex.  But I am going to leave it there in the interests of brevity.

Social scientists started doing "anthropological" studies of European cultures.  And they found that the way culture influenced morality in "advanced societies" was exactly the same as it was with the south sea islanders Mead had studied.  A lot of morality is indeed relative.  From there they leapt to the conclusion that all morality was relative.

And the social sciences suffer from a kind of envy of the so called "hard" sciences.  The two primary hard sciences are Chemistry and Physics.  In the hard sciences there is black and white when it comes to determining what is true and what is false.  Lots of people run lots of experiments and pretty much all of them come to the conclusion that "this is true" and "that is false".  Other sciences envied the ability of the hard sciences to definitively establish truth.  Social sciences endeavored to do the same but they kept falling short.

A specific social science experiment could come to a definitive result.  But then someone else would run the same experiment, or a similar one, and get a different result.  No one looks to Political Science, for instance, for the laws you need to follow to achieve a specific election result.  But a Civil Engineer can use physics to design a bridge.  And that bridge can be counted to hold up under a long life of heavy use.  Sociology, Anthropology, and other "soft" sciences, although not being as unreliable as Political Science, found they all had a "reliability" problem.

Eventually, they decided that the problem was not with their tools and analysis.  Instead there was a fundamental problem.  All "truth" is relative.  It inevitably has a cultural component.  There is no such thing as "absolute truth".  This solved the "softness" of the social sciences.  The "hard" science people were wrong.  There was no such thing as absolute truth.

This idea definitely made people in the social sciences feel good about themselves and their various fields.  They could now spin endless amounts of "analysis" in their technical journals.  Since "everything is relative" nobody could absolutely prove that the conclusions any specific article came to were wrong.  It became extremely easy to play the "publish or perish" game and win.  Everybody's a winner.

So how does all this relate to Kuhn and his book?  The book can be divided into two parts. In the first part he analyzes several situations in which scientific thinking undergoes a radical change over a short period of time.

He was able to find and analyze several of these "paradigm shifts".  And his analysis of and conclusions from these various situations were uncontroversial.  The people in the subject areas he covered agreed that what he had to say about these situations closely paralleled their understanding of what had happened.

The problem arose in the second part of the book.  Kuhn argued there that the old paradigm got some things right and other things wrong.  No problem so far.  But then he argued that the new paradigm got some things right and other things wrong.  What changed, he argued, were the mere details concerning what a specific paradigm got right and wrong.

All paradigms were the same in that they got some things right and other things wrong.  The paradigm shift, he argued, was driven by cultural changes within the scientific community rather than some inherent superiority that new paradigm possessed.  The paradigm shift did not make things better, just different.

Unlike the first part of the book, this was very controversial.  Kuhn did himself no good by failing to provide specifics.  If his thesis was correct then he should have easily been able to find things the old paradigm got right that the new paradigm now got wrong.  He provided nothing along these lines.  It wasn't necessary to do so, according to cultural relativism.  "It's just a given that truth is relative".

Hard science people like myself were incensed.  But social scientists liked this result.  And the general public, who read the book in large numbers, didn't understand what the fuss was all about.  The first (and larger) part of the book was fine so the second part must be okay too.  And social scientists muddied the waters by vociferously leaping to Kuhn's defense.

Eventually everybody moved on.  And slowly and grudgingly social scientists have retreated from universal cultural relativity.  Hard scientists continued to rack up results that proved to be robust when incorporated into everyday life.  Social scientists, with no check on even the most outlandish ideas, found their arguments sounding more and more esoteric and ridiculous.  This has resulted in a retreat.  The retreat is most notable in the "repeatability" backlash.

In the last few years several attempts have been made to repeat "foundational" studies in the social sciences.  And it turns out the results frequently come out substantially differently the second time around.  These results have caused more and more people to call for the repeating of more experiments.

Funding organizations have been reluctant in the past to underwrite the cost of redoing experiments where there is no evidence of fraud or incompetence.  But the reluctance has been diminishing as the very interesting results of attempting to repeat old "gold standard" experiments have come out.

And this, in turn, has resulted in a concerted effort to understand what is going on.  Why are so many of these experiments not repeatable?  And this has resulted in an effort to understand how to design and execute experiments that do result in repeatable results.

With that, let's get back on track.  Kuhn did establish the concept of a paradigm shift when it comes to the physical (hard) sciences.  And it turns out that the same idea applies to military strategy and tactics.  Let me give you a few examples.

An early example is the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.  In this battle "knights in shining armor" were handily dispatched in large numbers by English Yeomen wielding longbows.  It turned out that the English Longbow was powerful enough to drive an arrow completely through the armor of the day.  It took a while but this marked the beginning of the end of the armored knight's ability to dominate a battlefield.  Strategy and tactics had to adapt to the new paradigm.

Another example was the American Civil War.  In the decades leading up to the War the rifled musket was introduced and slowly became more and more widely available.  By the start of the War almost all of the soldiers on both sides were equipped with rifled muskets.  Only a few carried "smoothbore" muskets.

The rifling caused the musket ball to spin after it left the barrel of the gun.  That, in turn, caused it to fly straight for longer distances.  In the smoothbore era armies needed to get within about a hundred yards of each other before musketry became accurate enough to be dangerous.

With both types of musket the rate of fire was typically about a shot per minute.  That was slow enough that soldiers facing smoothbore muskets had enough time to charge a hundred yards across a field and get in among the enemy.  Some would be killed or wounded during the charge across the field, but not enough of them would be killed or wounded to blunt the force of the charge.

So a standard tactic for a long time was to line all your soldiers up.  You would then march them to within a hundred yards of the other army's soldiers, also lined up.  Then you would charge.  With a little luck, and hopefully superior numbers, your army had a better than average chance of carrying the day.

Rifled muskets, however, were accurate out to about three hundred yards.  If one army marched their soldiers up to about a hundred yards away the other army could cut them to pieces before they could even start to charge.  If one army charged from three hundred yards away then the soldiers in the other army could fire enough times before the two armies closed to decimate the charging army.  As a result the idea of lining up the two armies on an open field became a recipe of suicide.

Confederate General Lee was the first to figure all this out.  Instead of lining his soldiers up he placed them in cover, behind trees, behind a wall, in a trench or a "fox hole", and had them wait to be attacked across an open area by the northern army  From there his soldiers would pot away at the fully exposed northern soldiers while staying mostly under cover where they were hard to hit.  With their rifled muskets this tactic allowed them to cut apart northern armies that were much larger than they were while suffering few casualties.

It took several years for the northern generals to adapt.  That's why the north did so badly in the first couple of years of the War.  The one time Lee charged across a field instead of digging in and waiting to be attacked was at the Battle of Gettysburg. That battle was a big win for the north and a big loss for the south.

Most European powers sent "observers" to the Civil War.  But this was a war fought by "colonials", not real European soldiers.  But wait, there's more.  The famous "Charge of the Light Brigade" happened at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.  This battle involved European soldiers on both sides.  The soldiers out in the open, the now famous Light Brigade, were mowed down almost to a man.

The European generals should have learned from either the Civil War or Balaclava, but they didn't.  At least not as quickly as they should have.  But they eventually figured it out and lines of soldiers in uniforms blasting away at each other eventually disappeared from the field of battle.

The Civil War was responsible for another innovation, the machine gun.  The "Gatling Gun" saw first use during that war.  But only a few of them were available so they did not play a significant role in the outcome.  The Gatling Gun is a big heavy unwieldy device.  It was quickly replaced by smaller, lighter, but equally deadly devices like the "Maxim Gun".  Maxim's design was quickly copied and other, even lighter and more compact designs soon followed.

Machine guns in a number of configurations were in wide use by the time World War I started.  Again the generals completely underestimated the ability of as few as one machine gun's ability to totally disrupt an infantry charge.  This didn't stop general after general on all sides from ordering up senseless charge after senseless charge.  The result was mass slaughter which went on for years even though it only took about six weeks for it to become apparent that an infantry charge, no matter how aggressively prosecuted, was doomed to failure.

What made it obvious that the old tactics didn't work any more was the emergence of something called "the western front" about six weeks after the start of the War.  Armies were lined up in close proximity to each other.  But now they were located in "trenches", a feature that Lee had quickly adopted in the opening weeks of the Civil War.

In spite of this the slaughter continued unabated as general after general said "this time an infantry charge will finally work".  What broke the stalemate and led to different tactics was the introduction of the "tank".  By working together, a combination of tanks and infantry could mount a successful charge even in the face of well placed machine guns.

There were many paradigm shifts in World War II.  I am only going to briefly mention one.  Before the start of the War, the "queen of the sea" was the Battleship.  This was a large, heavily armored vessel that sported six to nine very big guns.  The barrels of these guns ranged from 14 to 18 inches in diameter.

They could hurl a "shell" weighing a couple of tons accurately into a target, say another Battleship, that was located across many miles of ocean.  A Battleship fighting another Battleship was an even match.  But a Battleship fighting a smaller ship, say a "Cruiser", could successfully take it on and easily destroy it.

The problem was that you could sink a Battleship using bombs dropped from airplanes.  And the Battleship had no effective way of fending off the airplanes.  And the ideal airport for these airplanes was a large ship called an Aircraft Carrier.  The cost and complexity of the two ship types were comparable.  Both were fantastically expensive to build so a country could only afford to build a few.  And more of one type inevitably meant fewer of the other type.

Pearl Harbor effectively demonstrated the relative effectiveness of the two ship types.  The Japanese won the battle using all Aircraft Carriers and no Battleships in the battle.  The losing US forces consisted of all Battleships and no Aircraft Carriers.  None of the Japanese ships were sunk.  Many of the US ships were sunk.  In World War II the Aircraft Carrier grabbed the title of "queen of the sea" away from the Battleship.

And there is a paradigm shift that happened not long after that war that hasn't really garnered much notice.  World War II involved large armies operating in opposition to each other.  If we include their equivalent at sea and in the air then we can say that nothing else mattered to the outcome of the War.  Korea was roughly the same.

On one side you had the armies of North Korea eventually augmented by the armies of China.  On the other side you had the armies of South Korea augmented by the armies of the US and other UN allies.  But it was, for the most part, an army versus army affair.  It turns out that was the last time that happened.

Vietnam marked a fundamental change.  On one side you had a traditional army, mostly the US army but also the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  On the other side you had North Vietnam.  It had a traditional army.  But for the most part the fighting was done not by the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army, but instead by the Vietcong, a "guerilla" army.  The Vietcong was NOT organized like a then traditional army.  But it won in the end.

It engaged not in set piece large "army on army" battles, but instead in hit and run, wear them down, tactics.  This was not unlike the tactics that American forces used until late in the Revolutionary War.  The Vietcong would strike and then fade back into the Vietnamese civilian population.

The US could have won the war by engaging in a genocidal slaughter of the Vietnamese population.  If they killed all the civilians, a capability they certainly had, they would have left the Vietcong no place to hide.  At that point the military superiority of US forces could have made short work of the Vietcong.  They rightly chose not to do that and lost the war as a result.

And that set the pattern for most future military engagements.  On one side you often have a regular army constructed along roughly traditional lines.  On the other side you have a guerilla force that can engage in hit and run tactics then fade into the civilian population.  The best outcome from the "traditional army" side is a long drawn out stalemate.  At some point the civilian population may turn against the guerillas and rat them out.

But another common outcome is that the guerilla force eventually outlasts the regular army side.  They either win or the situations transitions to a negotiated power sharing arrangement.  I will note that in almost all circumstances, the guerilla army is able to continue fighting for long periods of time because it gets substantial outside support.

With that let me finally turn to the issue at hand.  And the issue is best understood in what I just argued was an obsolete configuration, that of regular army against regular army.  The event that triggered this post was the recent attack against Saudi oil facilities.

As I write this it is unclear who initiated the attack or who was behind it.  The attack involved what was originally reported to be something like nineteen separate strikes against two of Saudi Arabia's largest oil processing facilities.  As far as we know, there was no advanced warning.  There was certainly no effective defense.  There is even a small amount of confusion as to what type of weapon was used.  Initial reports characterized them as drones.  Later reports indicate that it might have been a mixture of drones and rockets.

What this attack indicates is the level of maturity of drones as weapons of war.  The closest parallel is with airplanes.  The Wright Brothers flew the first successful "heavier than air" machine.  (Balloons, dirigibles, zeppelins, etc., are all characterized as "lighter than air".)  About five years later, the Wright brothers made and flew a machine that was fully maneuverable.  (The original machine was only capable of flying in a straight line.)  About a decade after that first flight, World War I broke out.

At the start of the War airplanes appeared to have no military use.  But people quickly figured out that they could be used effectively for reconnaissance.  The addition of a camera resulted in a mature reconnaissance capability.  But how to arm them?

This was solved within a couple of years by mounting machine guns that were synchronized so they did not shoot the propeller away.  Larger four engine planes were quickly developed that could drop modest but significant amounts of bombs on a remote target.  By the end of the War the airplane had completed its transformation into a fully mature machine of war.  Everything afterwards, with the possible exception of the Aircraft Carrier, was just a refinement.

Drones have not progressed quite that quickly.  The first drone was the V-1 "Buzz Bomb" Nazi terror weapon.  It consisted of a jet engine mounted on an explosive filled conventional airframe.  Added to this was a primitive navigation system consisting of a gyrocompass and altimeter to keep it flying straight and level.  The V-1 was fueled with a precise amount of fuel.  The machine would fly until it ran out of fuel.  Then it would crash and blow up.

They were not very accurate so they had to be aimed at a large target like the city of London.  That might have been good enough except for a British program called "Double Cross".  It was also called the "twenty" program because two the "X"s in Double Cross add up to twenty in roman numerals.

The program's main objective was to capture every single spy the Nazis sent to England.  They actually succeeded.  Most of the spies were killed or imprisoned.  But the others were set up with "clandestine" radios so they could send messages back to Germany.  But all the radios were really run by the British.

And one of the things they did was send back bogus information about where the V-1 drones had crashed.  The Nazis thought they were pulverizing London.  In fact they were mostly blowing holes in fields outside London.  The Nazis never caught on to the deception.

So the Nazis pioneered drone technology but were unable to use it effectively.  But the advent of small, power stingy computers changed all that.  That, and GPS.  Jet engine design has improved substantially since the V-1.  But even the primitive jet in the V-1 was good enough.  Airframe design has advanced too since the V-1.  But the airframe of the V-1 was also good enough.  Explosives have progressed little since the V-1 so it goes without saying (but I'll say it anyhow) that the old explosives were good enough.

What has progressed is the ability to fly a small robot aircraft, and that's all a drone is, along a complex flight path and then cause it to hit a small target like a building.  It took a fairly long time for this capability to be developed.

The most important component was a small, light, powerful, computer that used very little power.  These were not really available until about 1990.  Now you can buy one for less than $25.  It has also helped that small light-weight cameras and other sensors are now both inexpensive and widely available.  The last piece of the puzzle was GPS.

The second generation of drones were the "cruise missiles", first developed by the US military, but soon after by others.  These were primitive by modern standards and wildly expensive.  For this "second generation" drone GPS was not available but an adequate but very hard to use alternative was found.  They weren't ready for combat use at the time of the Gulf War (1990-91) but were ready for the Iraq War (2003 and onward).  They were a significant component of the "Shock and Awe" opening to that war.

The modern story of drones has been a gradual evolution of early cruise missiles.  The first upgrade was to replace the old navigation system with GPS.  I am not going to go into the details but with the old system the path the drone had to fly was tightly constrained by the limitations of the navigation system.

GPS freed the drone to fly any path the operator wanted.  This meant it could be "programmed" to fly around defensive installations and the like.  This upgrade was not available for use in the Iraq War but rolled out shortly thereafter.  It has been a standard feature of drones ever since.

Since then, changes have been more evolutionary than revolutionary.  Originally, a "drone" was different than a "cruise missile".  Early drones were like early airplanes.  They were easy to adapt for reconnaissance duties.  And early drones were flown by hand.  The first couple of generations required a high degree of piloting skills to operate.  They also started out pretty small.  Cruise missiles, on the other hand, were "launch and forget" devices.  They were on their own to perform their missions.

But over time drones got bigger and more capable.  Once a certain size was reached it was possible to attach a bomb.  The first "bomb" was actually a Hellfire missile.  But that was because these early generation drones were very expensive.  By having it fire a Hellfire it was not necessary to sacrifice the primary vehicle (the drone) in order to blow something up.  And the top of the line military drones are still very expensive.  But the price and capability of entry level drones has come down rapidly.

We now think nothing of having a smart phone with a GPS receiver in it.  It is also capable of running a sophisticated "nav" application.  It is obvious from this that a light, power stingy, powerful, "nav" package is now both cheap and easy to come by.  And airframes have always been relatively cheap.  Engines, propeller or jet, have also gone way down in price.  Explosives have never been expensive nor required any great skill to employ.  The result is that drones have gotten cheaper and easier to design, build, and operate year by year.

Drones that can be "flown" by relatively low skill operators have now been available for years.  And this capability is no longer expensive.  Anyone can now buy a hobby quadcopter where the onboard computer supplies most of the skill necessary to keep it in the air.  Amazon has an assortment priced from $50 to $500.  From there it is not a big step to a drone that flies itself.

My point is that it is now possible for a mid-sized nation state to develop a pretty sophisticated drone for a manageable number of millions of dollars.  Once the design is set then very capable units should cost less than $100,000 each to manufacture.  In the military hardware business, that's dirt cheap.  A country like Iran could easily afford to manufacture tens or hundreds of them.

And that's what seems to have happened.  While it is unknown, at least to the general public, who made the devices that blew up the Saudi oil facilities, nor where exactly they were launched from, nor the path they flew, we do know that all this is within Iran's capability.

Iran has actually shown considerable skill in this area.  They have developed (or modified designs they got from elsewhere) a number of rockets and drones.  Several years ago a very sophisticated US drone was downed over Iran.  There was an argument at the time about whether it crashed due to mechanical problems or was shot down.  But, in either case the Iranians ended up with physical possession of it.  That means that at a minimum they could reverse engineer the airframe and power plant.

Then a few weeks ago they shot down a high flying US drone.  In this case there is no question.  They shot it down.  This means they currently have the capability to fly a rocket to an altitude of 70,000 feet and hit (or blow up) a relatively small device, the drone.  That's a substantial rocket capability.  They are known to also have much larger rockets.

Whether they can be used for the kind of precision mission the Saudi strike represents is unknown.  But they can certainly fly a large chunk of explosive to within the boundaries of a town or city.  There they can cause it to explode just like the V-1 did.  My point is that they have developed a substantial level of technological capability.

And the design, construction, and operation of drones no longer requires all that much technological capability.  And, most importantly, Iran is NOT a super-power.  It is not even a great power.  It is, at best, a power.  But that's all it now takes to be a major player in the business of using drones as weapons of war.  And there are a lot of countries that have capabilities roughly similar to Iran's.  This is no longer a game that is restricted to just the big boys.

And my larger question is:  does this represent a paradigm shift in the way war is waged?  I think it does.  Consider the tank.  Tanks are extremely expensive to develop and very expensive to manufacture.  The drone is a very good tank-killer.  It is much cheaper than a tank and the tank really doesn't mount an effective defense to a drone attack.

The last time tanks were used effectively was in the Iraq War, a war in which drones played no substantial role.  That War represented special circumstances for other reasons too.  Before active combat started the US and its allies completely destroyed the Iraqi capability to put anything into the air.  So, the Iraqis could use only ground based defensive measures.  The Iraqis had lots of tanks of their own so they stood a good chance anyway, right?  Wrong.

Before they even attacked, the US and its allies were very effective at finding where many Iraqi tanks were located.  This made them easy to destroy as soon as the offensive started.  The US also had an airplane called a Warthog that was a great tank-killer.  Warthogs killed a lot of Iraqi tanks but the Iraqis killed no Warthogs.

There were very few tank-on-tank battles in that war.  There has been substantially no tank-on-tank warfare since.  Tanks are now far easier to kill than they are to build and operate.  The US military knows this and has been trying to de-emphasize tanks.  But building tanks brings a lot of money into a congressional district so Congress keeps forcing them to build more.

The performance of Jet Fighters is limited by the amount of punishment a pilot's body can take.  It is relatively easy to build a high performance military jet that will kill anyone on board long before the plane itself suffers any damage.  Boeing has a contract to turn a standard Airforce fighter jet into an unmanned vehicle.  The Airforce doesn't like to talk about this project because the Airforce is run by pilots.  In their heart of hearts they know they are obsolete but admitting that would cause them to eventually lose their jobs.

Their is an argument going on now about giving an unmanned drone a mission and sending it on its way without a human in the loop.  Supposedly, this is caused by a concern that these devices will go rogue and start wiping out large numbers of the wrong people.  That's not a worry I share.  But unmanned autonomous vehicles of all kinds represent a massive paradigm shift.  This will threaten the position and power of a large group of currently very powerful people and institutions like the US Airforce.

World War I shows just how resistant people can be to this kind of change.  Literally millions of lives were lost after it was blindingly obvious to everyone from generals to buck privates that the old military tactics no longer worked.  I think the attack on the Saudi oil infrastructure is a clear example of how much things have changed.  But no one was killed and the Saudis say they can get everything back working within a couple of weeks.

I am not sure that I believe the Saudis.  But the Nazis threw large amounts of resources and creativity at recovering from bomb damage during World War II.  Time after time they were able to get facilities back online and producing within remarkably short periods of time.  Certainly the Saudis have the will and the resources to do the same when it comes to quickly getting their facilities back online.

But what if the Iraqis (or whoever) launch an attack that is ten times as large?  Whoever it was, I don't think the recent attack was all that difficult or expensive to mount.  So why shouldn't they mount another attack or a bigger attack or both?  And then another and then another.

The rules have changed.  The paradigm has shifted.  And a quick study of any of the military paradigm shifts I listed above will demonstrate that being on the wrong side of a paradigm shift is extremely costly in blood, treasure, and the national interest.

The US has been in the vanguard when it comes to developing, improving, and using drones.  That leads many Americans to believe we are on the right side of the paradigm shift.  But I don't think the US at any level has seriously considered the ramifications of the fact that counties like Iran can now play drones right back at us and our allies.

It is time to figure out how to operate effectively in this new regime.  I see no evidence that anyone in the US is trying to make the appropriate adjustments.  We continue to spend most of our military budget on things like tanks, solutions appropriate for the last war.  Or was it the war before that?