The Homeless Crisis

 There has been a lot of talk about homelessness in the past few years.  It's a problem.  There's no doubt about that.  Where the conflict comes in is when people start talking solutions.  At one end of the spectrum are the "ride them all out of town on a rail" people.  At the other end of the spectrum are the "Governments should spend tons of money on either new construction or housing subsidies for the poor" people.

The former strategy has been employed with modest success in the past.  It drove numbers down, at least temporarily, and only in some places.  What it mostly did was move the problem around without actually eliminating it.  The later strategy has also been moderately successful in the past.  It too drove the numbers down. at least in some places.  And it had the virtue of not moving the problem around.  But it too did not eliminate the problem.

These two strategies are only two examples of the many strategies that have been tried in the past.  That means that we can look to history for guidance as to the likelihood of success of any strategy we might now consider.  And that means, as anyone who has read my previous work knows, it's time for a dive into history.

For my historical dive I am going to stick with Seattle's history on the subject.  The historical experience of every city and every region is distinct.  Seattle, for instance, featured a large "Hooverville" encampment during the Great Depression.  The homeless congregated in large numbers on then undeveloped land.

Hooverville was the historical equivalent of the "Tent Cities" we now see, but on a much larger scale.  Back then the homeless built shacks out of tarpaper and scrap lumber rather than scrounging up cheap tents.  And they congregated in one place.  But the idea was the same.

Not every city had a Hooverville, but many did.  It was one of many common patterns that have emerged and reemerged over the years in response to the periodic bouts of homelessness the country has suffered through.

Seattle's experience with homelessness has some unique components.  But there is enough commonality of experience to permit Seattle to stand in for all those other places without loosing anything essential.  And away we go.

And I am going to start with a simple question?  Seattle didn't always have a homeless problem, did it?  And the answer is NO.  Seattle didn't always have a homeless problem.  That's why history, which is almost always helpful, is even more helpful than usual. We can see how things were when there wasn't a problem.  Then we can see what changed to cause the problem, and to make it go away.

And we know there is a solution:  go back to the way things were when homelessness was at most a minor concern.  So, let's start with the way things were during some of those periods.  Early in Seattle's history it had something called "Skid Road".  Over time this phrase morphed into the now widely used term "Skid Row".  A skid row is a neighborhood full of cheap, crappy housing.  As a result, poor people live there.  They do so because that's the only place they can afford to live.

Skid Road came about because of Seattle's early connection to the timber industry.  '49ers flooding into San Francisco and surrounding areas in search of gold set off a local construction boom.  The completion of the first transcontinental railroad a decade or so later caused the San Francisco metropolitan area to continue to flourish for more decades.  That extended the construction boom.  Both events also cemented San Francisco's position as the financial capital of the west coast until well into the twentieth century.

But for our purposes what's important is that the wood used to build all of those buildings in the then booming metro San Francisco area had to come from somewhere.  And a major source for that wood was the Puget Sound region.  The headquarters of the regional timber industry was Port Townsend, now a sleepy tourist destination, but then a very big deal.  But Seattle, in the form of the Yesler Sawmill, got in on the action.

The big industry in Seattle in the early years was cutting down trees, milling them into lumber, then putting them onto ships bound for San Francisco.  Seattle had, and still has, steep hills.  Back then the hills were covered with trees.  If Seattle was to grow into a metropolis the trees had to go.  Luckily, trees were valuable due to the San Francisco construction boom.  This allowed the timber industry to power a lot of Seattle's early growth.

But it is harder than one would think to get the trees down Seattle's steep hills and into the mill.  So, something called a "log flume" was constructed.  Instead of water, the thing a flume normally moves, Seattle's flume moved logs.  And it was, in essence, a giant slide.  The process of cutting down the trees, turning them into logs, putting the logs into the top of the flume, letting them slide down into the water at the bottom, then floating them to the sawmill, was called "skidding".

And after all the trees had been cut down the flume no longer had a purpose, other than being an eyesore and being in the way, that is.  So, it was then taken apart and the timber it had been constructed from was fed into the sawmill.  What was left was a road.  But before that Skid Road was a neighborhood.  It was an undesirable neighborhood.  No one wants heavy logs flying by their house.  And, of course, there was always a chance that a log would pop out of the flume and crash into someone's house.

Given all that, it is no surprise that the only people who lived in that particular neighborhood were poor people who had no better option.  So, the association between a Skid Row neighborhood and poor people dates back to the origin of the term.   And the term originated in Seattle and nowhere else.

Back in those early days there were no zoning laws.  If someone wanted to build a log flume in the middle of town there was no law against it.  In fact, it was encouraged.  After all, it would bring money into the local economy.  Similarly, if someone wanted to throw up crappy housing that only poor people could be induced to live in, there was no law against that either.  That's how things worked back in the day.

People always had a place to live.  It was substandard, dangerous, and often uncomfortable, but it was.  It put a roof over the head of almost everybody.  When it came to housing poor people, and thus keeping them off the street, all that was necessary was to have Skid Row type neighborhoods in your city.  Poor people found hanging out in the more desirable parts of the city could be herded into the less desirable parts.

And it worked.  Cities were cut up into neighborhoods.  The poor people lived in the slums, i.e. the Skid Row parts of town.  Rich and powerful people lived in the fancy parts of town.  There were usually gradations in between.  Some parts of the city were closer in nature to the slums.  But they were a step up from the worst slums.  Some parts were quite nice, just not quite as nice as the nicest parts of town.

Eventually, this got formalized in the form of zoning laws.  City Governments started putting rules in place to designate the boundaries of the various neighborhoods.  And they started mandating construction standards.  These varied from pretty much anything goes in the slums to allowing only high quality construction in the fancy parts of town.

Codes for the fancy parts of town might mandate minimum square footage, both of the house and of the lot, forbid activities like multifamily dwellings, manufacturing, retail, warehousing, and the like.  Other neighborhoods permitted all of the activities prohibited in the fancy parts of town, and were silent on things like minimum square footage and the like.

These zoning laws worked.  There was a place for everybody and everybody knew their place.  One modern twist on this idea was called Redlining.  Supposedly, lines on a map were used to delineate the boundaries of the various neighborhoods.  Red lines were used to delineate the boundaries of the neighborhoods set up for the undesirable groups, Asians or Blacks, for instance.  They weren't allowed to cross the "red line" and move into the rest of the city.

Seattle, had a Chinatown, for a long time the only place where people of Chinese extraction were allowed to live.  It was eventually joined by Japantown (Japanese), Little Saigon (Vietnamese), and others.  Each maligned group got its own ghetto.

The term "ghetto" was coined in Europe.  It referred specifically to the neighborhood Jews were confined to.  But the usage of the term was eventually broadened by Americans.  In the U.S. it was most commonly used in association with the neighborhood were Black people were forced to live.  In Seattle, the Black neighborhood was called the "Central District".

One feature of ghettos of all kinds is that housing prices are lower there.  One popular excuse for creating and maintaining ghettos is that "those people drive housing prices down".  The point of ghettos was to discriminate against the people who were forced to live there.  That made living in or near a ghetto unpopular.  And popularity is really what determines the desirability of a particular location.

There is only a modest correlation between the actual desirability of a location and its price relative to land in other locations.  There are intrinsic factors that go into how desirable a specific location is.  They are things like convenience, the view, amenities like being on the waterfront, and so on.  But a study of these intrinsic factors only gets you so far when it comes to predicting a piece of property's market value.

Subjective factors also figure into the calculation.  If we study actual land values for a typical U.S. city in the 1950s, a city like Seattle, then we can subtract the intrinsic factors to determine the how much subjective considerations affect a property's value.  It turns out that subjective factors are very important.  Land in a "rich" neighborhood was highly overvalued while land located in a ghetto was highly undervalued.  Zoning had a large influence on land values.  But that, after all, was the point.

Since then, a number of forces eventually substantially diminished the ability of zoning to distort land values.  Two big ones were suburbanization and civil rights.  Suburbanization had two effects.  First, a lot of middle class and rich people moved to the suburbs.  That siphoned off a lot of the people occupying the top financial tiers.  This made it harder to maintain inflated land values in pricier neighborhoods.

In Seattle's case the metropolitan population was growing just enough to exactly offset suburban flight.  As a result, migration to the suburbs did not cause Seattle's population to decline.  On the other hand, it didn't grow either.  Instead, it remained essentially unchanged for several decades.  That meant that enough rich and middle class people continued to live in the city to keep prices stable, or increasing slowly, in rich and middle class neighborhoods.

To this day there are lots of neighborhoods in Seattle that are filled with nice houses occupied by middle class people.  These kinds of neighborhoods provide more than half the housing currently available in Seattle.  And these neighborhoods have seen little change.  Change has been confined to the poorer neighborhoods.

The other impact of suburbanization eventually had an equally large effect.  Seattle got hemmed in.  The last time Seattle expanded its borders was in the '60s.  That meant that Seattle couldn't implement the "sprawl" strategy used by cities like Huston and Phoenix.  Given a choice, people preferred to live in detached single family homes.

But there was just no place inside Seattle's city limits to build more.  So, Seattle built high density housing, apartments and condos.  This should have caused the population to increase.  But there was a countervailing trend.  The number of people living in the typical house declined.  In Seattle's case, these two opposing trends balanced out.  It wasn't until the '90s that the high density trend got the upper hand and Seattle's population started growing again.

Initially, suburban living was very desirable.  Cheap land allowed suburban developments to be reasonably priced.  Huston, Phoenix, and other similarly situated cities, were able to grow by annexing more and more land, which they filled with suburban sprawl.  But that sprawl eventually meant that new suburbs kept getting farther and farther away.  And that has caused the commute to anywhere interesting to get longer and longer.  So these new outer suburbs have gotten less attractive over time.  As a result, they now attract poorer and poorer people.

What civil rights did, starting in the  '60s, was to make discriminatory zoning practices like redlining illegal.  Initially, these anti-discrimination laws were honored in the breach.  But over time enforcement slowly ramped up.  Eventually, this made it harder and harder to use zoning to enforce the rigid boundaries that used to characterize neighborhoods.  The eventual result was gentrification.

People started viewing neighborhoods not by who traditionally lived in them but by the intrinsic factors they provided.   Previously undesirable neighborhoods started becoming sought after.  Take, for example, Seattle's aptly named Central District.  As the name implies, it is centrally located.  That is a very desirable feature.

Gradually, many of the Blacks that had traditionally lived there were pushed out by white people with more money.  And besides being able to pay more in the first place than many Blacks could afford, they had the money to fix up the housing they found there.  Early adopters took advantage of what had been undesirable, and therefore cheap, to snap up properties that they otherwise couldn't have afforded.  These properties eventually became desirable, and therefore valuable.

Over a period lasting more than thirty years all of the less expansive parts of Seattle have gotten gentrified.  And what that meant was that all of the cheap housing got replaced by expensive housing.  Contemporary Seattle no longer has a Skid Row.  And that means that there is no place in Seattle for the poorest people to live.  Seattle used to have a bunch of SRO (Single Resident Occupancy) hotels.  These were essentially flop houses where even very poor men could afford to live.  They are now all gone.

Seattle is an extreme case.  But the general trend is universal.  Not every city has lost all of its "flop house" quality housing the way Seattle has.  But pretty much every city has far less of it now than it had fifty years ago.  And pretty much every city has lost a lot of the housing that people occupying the bottom few rungs of the economic ladder could afford.

Seattle used to be an easy place for a person making the minimum wage, or perhaps a little above it, to find housing that was both affordable and decent.  That kind of housing is now effectively nonexistent.  Again, the near universal trend is for people in those income brackets to find it very hard to find a place they can afford to live in, even if they live in a place that is thousands of miles away from Seattle.

That has put a lot of people into a severe squeeze when it comes to finding housing they can afford.  Then there are drugs and mental health.  We are more than fifty years into the War on Drugs.  It has been a failure all along the way.  But one side effect is that people who end up with serious drug problems too often find that they have little access to effective treatments.  As a result, a lot of them end up on the street.

People having mental health problems also have trouble getting effective treatment.  Their illness causes them to have poor judgement.  And that leads to the kinds of actions that lead to them also finding themselves out on the street.

Finally, there are the otherwise squared away people who for one reason or another have hit a serious financial problem.  That is often enough to put them out on the street.  The street has become the dumping ground for all the problems that society does not want to deal with.

Tents are cheap.  Sleeping bags are cheap.  Grocery carts are cheap.  Derelict cars and motor homes are cheap.  The result is a lot of people living on the street, in a tent tucked back somewhere, or living in a junker vehicle.  Things have gotten out of hand.

There are several problems here that need to be fixed.  We tried dealing with drugs by locking lots of people up.  What we ended up with was a fantastically expensive prison industry and no relief on the drug front.  We used to have mental hospitals.  But we got rid of them and decided that "community based" treatment was the way to go.  That too has been a failure.

If we give the squared away people a helping hand they will take it and soon be off the streets.  But the number of helping hands are far fewer than the number of people who could use the help.  At the other end of the spectrum are the people who have become comfortable living on the street.  They steadfastly refuse all offers of help.  I have no interest in making their lives easier.  In fact, I am okay with some of the yesteryear tactics that were designed to get them to go elsewhere.

I am firmly of the opinion that throwing money at this particular problem is a mistake.  Government, no matter what level you want to talk about, doesn't have enough of it.  Nor am I convinced that an infinite amount of money, should it become available, would be effective.  Even if a lot of money was available, this is the kind of problem where the need will always expand by the amount necessary to consume however much resource is thrown at it.

But the problem is not insolvable.  It didn't used to exist.  It can be made that way again.  History tells us that the proper approach is a legal/regulatory one.  Before discussing the main change, let me address some changes in the law that would not solve the problem, but they would help.  Current law make sit almost impossible to deal with junker vehicles and the people living in them.

The law should be changed so that it is illegal to park a vehicle on a public street that is not "street legal".  All vehicles parked on city streets would have to conform to all safety standards and the like; and they should be required to have current "tabs".  This would get the worst of the junker vehicles off of public streets.  If people want to allow people to live in junker vehicles parked on their private property, okay.  But not on public streets.

It should also be illegal for someone to pitch a tent on a sidewalk, in a public park, etc.  Again, if people want to allow other people to pitch tents on their private property, that's another thing.  Will these changes make it harder for homeless people to find a place to lay their head?  Yes.  But it will also free up a lot of resources that are currently playing whack-a-mole.  That's not enough to fix the problem.  But it is a start.

Then there's the big one, zoning.  Zoning is the most powerful tool in the government toolbox.  Lots of zoning changes have been made over the last few decades that have increased the minimum standards for major remodels or new construction.  This has made it illegal to construct slum housing.  A tight housing market has made it a good idea for owners to upgrade cheap housing to the point where it is no longer cheap.  What has been done can be undone.

But there is no political will to do this.  And for a very good reason, NIMBY.  I own my house.  It has increased tremendously in value since I bought it.  I like that.  And a significant contributing factor to its increase in value has been tight zoning.

Tight zoning floats all boats.  Even if you don't fix your house up the fact that the housing market is tight means that prices have been going up and up and up.  It has also made deciding to fix up your house (and maybe flip it) into a no brainer for anyone owning a house at the low end of the market.  (Flipping houses has now been a thing since This Old House went on  the air in 1979.)  All of this has had a positive impact on my net worth and the net worth of the pretty much every other home owner in Seattle.

The single largest class of housing in Seattle is single family residences.  All those people have a vested interest in keeping prices increasing at a good clip.  They are the silent majority in this discussion.  They don't say much, but politicians hear them anyhow.  These voters want the homeless problem fixed.  But they want it fixed in a way that doesn't interfere with the steady rise in the value of their house.

That kind of thinking blocks the best way to fix the homeless problem.  If cheap, slum-quality housing was readily available then lots of people would move off the street.  If developers can make a profit building cheap slum-quality housing, they will build it.

But nobody (meaning all the people who own single family homes in Seattle, and many of the ones who live in multi-family units) wants a bunch of slum-quality housing being built in Seattle.  And the resistance is especially fierce to building such housing nearby.  Not.  In.  My.  Back.  Yard.

Most slum-quality housing comes about as a side effect of the real estate cycle.  Prices go up and builders build.  They keep building and building as long as demand is strong.  Then something happens.  Demand dries up.  But construction involves long lead times.  They can't just stop on a dime.

When the market turns by the time all the projects that were in the pipeline complete a substantial housing surplus has built up.  This causes the value of some properties to drop by a lot.  This drop puts downward pressure on the entire housing market.  In a declining market often the only way landlords can keep their financial heads above water is to turn some of their property into slum-quality housing.

In this scenario nobody has any real say in the matter.  Market pressures overwhelm people's normal inclinations.  So, the fact that some people (those still hanging on who live near the newly created slum-quality housing) object vigorously to what is happening doesn't matter.  They don't have the leverage necessary to stop it from happening.  So, it happens.  The market now has slum-quality housing and poor people have some place to get off of the street and out of the weather.

Historically, this is what has happened in Seattle.  The Roaring Twenties turned into the Great Depression.  That produced a lot of cheap housing.  Besides the creation of Hooverville, a significant number of large houses that had been occupied by a singe family got turned into boarding houses.  The landlady maintained some public spaces in common, living room, dining room, etc.  Tenants got a room of their own.  But that was it.  They shared a bathroom down the hall and did all their entertaining in the shared public areas.

There are no rooming houses in contemporary Seattle.  Nor are there any apartments where tenants share a bathroom.  And nobody now lives an a unit where their bed swings down from behind a door in the wall (a "Murphy" bed).  Most people would find these kinds of accommodations appalling.  Not surprisingly, current zoning laws make these types of units illegal.  But they are how we used to have cheap housing.

The closest we come in the modern era is the Tiny House.  These feature a minimum of amenities and very little in the way of square footage.  Tiny Houses initially violated all kinds of Seattle's zoning laws.  I think a loophole has since been introduced that makes them legal, but I'm not completely sure about that.  And, of course, nobody wants Tiny Houses in their neighborhood.  And heaven forbid that anyone would propose the apartment equivalent of Tiny Houses.

So we continue to go in circles.  The thing that would actually work gets vetoed.  And, as I pointed out above, it gets vetoed for good reason.  It is also important to note that people who buy newspapers or who watch the local news on TV are the people doing the vetoing.

And it is bad business to alienate the people your business depends on.  So, the people who write for the newspaper, or report the news on local TV, go out of their way to avoid pointing out the obvious.  But I don't own a newspaper or TV station.  So, there it is.

Not surprisingly, I don't expect anything to change any time soon.  Lots of whining.  No effective action.  Before leaving the subject, let me make a couple of additional observations about what does not work.  The first one is rent control.  New York City is the poster child for rent control gone badly awry.

NYC has a lot of apartments, and has had them for a long time.  Not surprisingly, landlords sometimes get up to mischief.  About a century ago NYC put in some laws that were supposed to reign in this mischief.  But times changed and markets evolved.  NYC kept updating and updating their rent control laws in an attempt to stay ahead of the situation.

In spite of cycle after cycle of updates the regulations could never keep up.  Eventually, the rent control rules were so byzantine that nobody could understand them.  Support for rent control in its then current state slowly collapsed.  That led to successful efforts to roll back and simplify rent control regulations.  NYC still has rent control.  But the current system is a shadow of its former self.

The point is that in the long run it didn't work.  It got so bad at one point that NYC had more slum-quality housing than any other type.  At that point nobody was happy.  Rent control is one of those things that sounds like a good idea.  And it can work pretty well for short periods of time.  But in the end it doesn't deliver the desired result, enough low cost housing to satisfy demand.

What does deliver large quantities of low cost housing is zoning.  With proper zoning laws the market can deliver housing in quantities sufficient to make a difference.  Builders will build if they can do so profitably.  But right now they can't build cheap housing profitably.  That is unlikely to change any time soon for the reasons listed above.  But it needs to be said.  Rent control discourages construction.  Over time, it makes things worse.

Another idea that keeps getting proposed is to severely restrict the ability of landlords to evict tenants.  This idea comes from a good place.  Lots of landlords have engaged in discriminatory practices of one kind or another in lots of places and at lots of times.  Restricting the rights of landlords to evict tenants seems like a good way to fix this problem.

It too is another problem that can work well in the short run.  Seattle had an eviction moratorium during COVID.  As a short term measure it kept people housed in a time of severe economic distress for many.  But to see how things play out over the long term when a landlord's ability to evict is severely constrained we need to look no farther than Cabrini Green.

Cabrini Green was a large public housing development that was built in Chicago.  Its goal was to humanely house poor people at a price they could afford.  It was part of a federal program that reached its peak in the '60s.  And in the early years Cabrini Green was a big success.  It consisted of a series of large apartments that provided decent housing at subsidized prices.  A lot of God fearing and law abiding families moved in and were initially happy.

But it soon became almost impossible to evict anyone from Cabrini Green.  The ostensible reason was to avoid discrimination as most of the tenants were Black.  But over time an unintended consequence surfaced.  In a population as large as the one at Cabrini Green there were bound to be a number of bad apples.

They formed gangs and things soon got out of control.  That led to a situation where nobody was safe.  And it became impossible to deal with vandalism.  Later, drug use, drug dealing, and shootings became rampant.  Eventually Cabrini Green became one of several projects that gave public housing a bad name.  It was eventually torn down.  By that time it had degenerated into a lawless slum.

Appropriate eviction regulations are not something where a black-and-white solution is possible.  Landlords need to be able to kick bad apples out.  Discrimination needs to be controlled.  There is no simple solution that delivers both objectives simultaneously.  Only a nuanced approach can do that.

People like bright-line laws and regulations.  This is where some behaviors are always permitted and other behaviors are always prohibited.  But that kind of approach has been tried many times and has failed every time.

We need to allow the enforcers to exercise a degree of discretion.  Then we need to monitor the enforcers to make sure they are using that discretion wisely.  That's not something that we as a society are good at.

If we continue to avoid doing what works when it comes to homelessness, remember that there is another way to fix the problem.  We can just have another Great Depression.  Maybe continuing to bump along ineffectually is not such a bad idea after all.

On War - Ukraine

Every once in a while war fighting goes through a paradigm shift.  I believe that this is true with respect to the current conflict in Ukraine.  But cutting to the chase is no fun.  So I am going to first drag you through a lot of history.  I think it's interesting and informative history.  I hope you end up agreeing with me.  And in what may seem to some like an excessive move, I am going to start in prehistoric times.

The word "history" used to have a precise definition.  If events got written down then those events were "historic".  In the (it was assumed) time before written records were an option, any event that happened was characterized as a "prehistoric" event.  Modern scientific techniques have made the situation far less cut and dried.  As a result, the definition of "history" has gotten more fuzzy.  But, generally speaking, anything that happened before about 2,500 years ago (and a lot that has happened since) gets categorized as prehistoric.  So, . . .

In prehistoric times if circumstances were conducive, a tribe could double its population in about thirty years.  What that meant in practical terms was that human populations grew to, and stayed at, the highest level the landscape could support, its so called "carrying capacity".  So, most tribes were population limited most of the time.

And these population limited tribes lived in close proximity to other tribes that were also population limited.  And that led to conflict because the only way a tribe could increase its population was to increase the amount of land it controlled.  And the only way for one tribe to increase the amount of land it controlled was at the expense of another tribe.

During this period tribes lived in close proximity to the same other tribes for long periods of time.  Then as now a minor injury can easily get infected.  With the advent of modern medicine that's usually not a problem.  But, to state the obvious, there was no modern medicine back then.

People of that period had no effective way to deal with infections, so an infection could easily lead to death or serious disability.  Since fighters were drawn from the relatively small general population of the tribe, it was important to minimize their chance of an injury that could lead to an infection.

That concern often affected the way tribes of the period fought with each other.  A popular tactic of the period is now called "counting coup".  The side that counted the most coup was adjudged to be the winning side.  A fighter was given credit for counting a coup if he just touched a fighter from the other tribe.  He didn't have to hurt him.  He just had to touch him and get away untouched (and presumably unharmed).  Counting coup allowed warring tribes to agree on who was winning without putting the health of either tribe at risk.

And it almost doesn't need to be said.  But weapons like knives and spears that were developed for hunting and killing big game could also be used when a conflict escalated to the point where bloodshed was called for.  So, that's how more serious wars started out being fought.  And little strategy or tactics were involved beyond those used to hunt big game.  One fighter would use standard hunting tactics to stalk another fighter.

But over time population aggregates grew and specialization set in.  City states developed armies consisting of specially trained fighters called soldiers.  Strategy, tactics, and weapons got more sophisticated, but not by much.  Shields were introduced.  And knives evolved into swords.  But even large battles generally involved the use of only the simplest tactics.  They were usually fought melee style.

In a melee the each army charges at the other army.  The armies soon intermingle and the battle devolves into a series of one-on-one fights.  This is what we almost always see when we see a movie that includes a battle.  In the movies, who wins the battle is invariably decided by a single mano-a-mano fight between the main good guy and the main bad guy. That's not what happens in reality, but it makes for compelling drama.

Relying on melee tactics, and your army's ability to win more one-on-one fights than the other guy's army, is not the best way to win wars.  Too much is left up to chance.  Lots of people in lots of places and at lots of times came up with better ways.  But, in the interests of simplicity and brevity, I am going to focus on how things evolved in Western cultures.  Bear in mind that things generally progressed along similar lines everywhere.

The Greeks were one of the first to figure out that there was a better way.  They developed the Phalanx.  They lined their soldiers up in rows.  Each soldier had a pike (a long spear), a shield, and a sword.  The front "rank" (row) of soldiers were placed close together so that there were only small gaps between their shields.  The pike, with its butt jammed into the ground, poked out between pairs of shields.

An attacking army, presumably using melee tactics, would smash up against the wall of shields.  In the case of any opposing soldiers who avoided getting impaled on a pike the Greek soldiers would stab the at them with their swords.  The opposing soldiers had a hard time getting at the Greek soldiers because they stayed hidden behind their shields.  Jamming the butt of the pike into the ground allowed Greek soldiers to fend off opposing soldiers even if they were mounted on horses.

Usually some of the opposing soldiers would somehow succeed in breaking through the front rank.  But behind the front rank was a second rank.  And behind that a third.  And so on.  The succeeding ranks could deal with any opposing soldiers who broke through.  They could also step forward and replace any soldier in the front rank who got killed or injured.

Greek armies using Phalanx tactics were extremely successful against pretty much all comers.  But eventually opposing armies figured out that the best way to beat a Phalanx was to use flanking tactics.   You went around the end of the Phalanx and attacked the formation from the rear.  Once opposing armies figured this out, Greek armies stopped having as much success.

But they still had a lot of success.  That is until the Romans came along.  The Romans came up with a better tactic than the Phalanx.  It was called the Roman Square.  What the Roman Square gave the Romans was an ability to defend against flanking tactics while continuing to retain the other advantages of the Phalanx.

The Romans organized their soldiers into squares.  Each wall of the square was set up like a Phalanx.  But the Roman Square did not have an end.  It only had corners, which the Romans reinforced as best they could.  Roman soldiers could defend themselves successfully from attack regardless of what direction it came from.  There were only a few battles fought between Greek Phalanxes and Roman Squares.  But that was enough to demonstrate the clear superiority of the Roman Square.

Eventually, the Roman Empire fell apart.  It took a lot of organization and resource to create and maintain a large army that was capable of fighting using Roman Square tactics.  Rome eventually lost the ability to field and maintain such an army.

That left an opening for various hordes using tactics that would not have worked against Roman armies in their prime.  The hordes poured through the gaps that were opened up by the decline and ravaged the carcass of the Roman Empire.

Once things settled down, it was left to the relatively small communities that remained to figure out a way to stay safe.  That's when castles popped up all over the place.  When an invading horde showed up all of the peasants burned their fields, gathered up everything that was portable, but especially their livestock, and retreated to the local castle.  The castle typically held enough supplies to keep everybody fed and housed for a couple of years.

The invading horde quickly denuded the countryside.  But if the retreat to the castle had been done properly, they found only a limited amount of food with which to sustain themselves.  If they could successfully storm the castle relatively quickly then they could raid the castle's stores and life would be good.  If not, their best option was to quickly move on in search of better prospects elsewhere.

Early castles were essentially large piles of rock.  All they needed were tall, steep walls and enough interior space to house the local population and store their supplies.  The main tools for "reducing" a castle (punching a hole in a wall) were the trebuchet (large gravity powered slingshot), the catapult (large spring powered sling shot), and the battering ram.  If the door was strong enough the battering ram was ineffective.

In theory, catapults and trebuchets could be used to knock walls down.  In reality, they were only able to do this for poorly built castles with thin walls.  Most often the stones they hurled, which were relatively small and had a relatively low velocity, could do little or no damage.  So, in most cases the castle was sturdy enough to hold out long enough to force the horde to give up and move on.

So, for a long time the local castle was able to successfully keep relatively small communities safe.  Not surprisingly, castles sprung up all over the place.  But the castle and its surrounding population came to form a community.  And each community was able to, and found a need to, support a small number of "Knights in Shining Armor".

You see, it wasn't only large roaming hordes that communities needed to be defended from.  It was also small bands of brigands.  The brigands did not need to storm the castle to be successful.  With their small numbers they could live off what had been left behind in the retreat to the castle for relatively long periods of time.  All the brigands needed to do to do very well for themselves was to successfully terrorize individuals or small groups in the community that surrounded the castle.

Since it was fixed in place, the castle could not defend the community against brigands.  A small but powerful mobile defense was required.  That need led to the development of the Knight.  Knights had enough offensive capability to handle small bands of brigands.

They also had the defensive capability necessary to fend off whatever counterattacks the brigands could come up with.  And the infrastructure necessary to build and maintain the castle was all that was needed to support one or more Knights.

As nations eventually re-emerged their kings organized groups of Knights into small but powerful armies.  A group of Knights could easily overcome anything short of another group of Knights.  So, periodic wars between groups of Knights became a common occurrence.  And, since the peasants had no effective defense, it became easy for the family that controlled the castle, and with it the Knights, to use their Knights to oppress their local peasants and promote themselves into the aristocracy.

This castle/knight model prevailed in Europe for hundreds of years.  What broke the stalemate was the Battle of Agincourt.  English Yeomen (a kind of peasant) became expert in the use of the longbow.  It was powerful enough to shoot an arrow that could pierce the strongest armor a Knight could wear.  The English Yeomen were agile enough to stay out from under the hooves of the horses of the French Knights.  The French Knights, on the other hand, had no defense from the arrows of the Yeomen.

But Agincourt turned out to be a one-off.  English society changed.  Soon, yeomen became unwilling to spent their entire youth training to draw the heavy longbow and then shoot it accurately.  But that didn't stop the Knight from being doomed anyhow.  Because at about this time the Crossbow came into common use.

Crossbow archers used a crank to load a bow that was every bit as powerful as a longbow.  Crossbowmen could not load and fire as quickly as a yeoman could.  But they were quick enough to easily handle a group of Knights.  And the Crossbow did not require the strength or training the longbow did.  So, it was relatively easy to field large numbers of Crossbow archers.

The Knight in Shining Armor soon vanished from the scene.  Because hot on the heels of the Crossbow came gunpowder.  A musket was complicated and expensive to construct.  It was also difficult to operate and maintain.  But not so hard that Musketeers didn't soon start showing up everywhere.  Once they were available in large numbers, they quickly drove soldiers equipped with any of the previous weapons, up to and including the Crossbow, off the field of battle.

The grownup version of the musket, the cannon, also had a big effect on warfare.  They rendered the traditional castle obsolete.  You see, they were powerful enough to knock down the walls of even a well-constructed castle.  This did not obsolete castles.  But it radically changed their design.  It quickly became apparent that the best defense against an attacking army that used cannons was to mount cannons on the walls of the castle.

The "pile of rock" school of castle design was quickly replaced by very sophisticated designs.  Now sight lines and fields of fire were critically important.  Geometry and trigonometry became critical tools in creating a successful design.  Battles often featured castle mounted cannons duking it out with "field pieces", cannons mounted on custom designed carriages and towed around by teams of horses or oxen.

And battles between large armies of soldiers returned.  But, as has always been the case, effective tactics follow from the capabilities of the weapons the armies are equipped with.  And by now, soldiers were routinely equipped with muskets.  That meant tactics needed to be developed that used soldiers equipped with muskets to best advantage.  And a variant on the Phalanx turned out to fill the bill.

Imagine you are the general of an army that is lined up at one end of a field.  All of sudden the other army, which is lined up at the other end of the field, charges.  What do you do?  In the pre-musket era, the answer is not much.  Nothing much is going to happen until the two armies get to within arms length reach of each other.  Then it's often melee time.

But if your army is equipped with muskets there is a lot your can do before the two armies get to within arm's length.  You organize your army into a Phalanx of musketeers.  Specifically, you line your soldiers up in three ranks that face the enemy.  Then you wait until the other army gets to within a couple of hundred yards of your army.  They you have your army start shooting at them.  For best effect they have to shoot in a disciplined manner.

The first rank is the front row.  They fire their muskets in a "volley" (all at the same time) then retreat back to replace the old third rank.  The old second and third ranks each move up one rank.  What was the second rank now becomes the first rank, for instance.  They, in turn, set up and fire their volley.  They too then retreat to the back.

The two back ranks again move up one rank causing what was originally the third rank to now become the first rank.  They, in turn, set up, fire their volley, and retreat.  If everything has gone well, the original front rank has had enough time to reload.  They now resume their original position in the first rank where they are ready to fire their volley and retreat when their turn comes.

This evolution can be continued nearly indefinitely.  Minor variations can be used to cause the army to move slowly forward or slowly backward.  Done right this rank-on-rank setup provides a good rate of fire that can be maintained for long periods of time.  So, lots of enemy soldiers are killed or injured well before they get to arms-length distance.

It becomes critically important that soldiers be extensively trained.  They need to be execute the various "evolutions" reliably and to perform their tasks quickly.  They also need to be able to shoot accurately and stand up to being shot at.  A well trained and equipped army has a big advantage over a poorly trained or equipped one.  Best of all from the general's perspective, the battle almost never devolves into hand-to-hand combat.

The process of loading a musket and preparing it for firing is complex, and to modern eyes, time consuming.  But experience determined that three ranks of well trained soldiers was the right number to maintain a consistent and relatively rapid rate of fire.  And this style of fighting lent itself to large armies.  And colorful and consistent uniforms made it possible for talented generals to maintain control of the battle.

A well trained and led army that fought using these tactics was almost always able to overcome armies using other tactics.  The colonials managed to have some success in the U.S. Revolutionary War using what we now call Guerilla tactics.  But in the end that war was decided by battles fought along the lines I have just described.

But technology marches on.  And the impact of the next generation of technological advance was first seen on a large scale in the U.S. Civil War.  What changed was the widespread use of the rifled musket.  A traditional "smooth bore" musket was accurate out to about 100 yards.  An elite athlete can traverse 100 years in 10 seconds.  Figure something like 30 seconds for a soldier carrying his gear.

In that 30 seconds an army using the tactics I just described can get off perhaps one volley.  Often that is not enough to break the charge of well trained and disciplined soldiers.  So, two armies using smoothbore muskets would slowly inch closer and closer together.

At something between 100 and 50 yards one army would charge the other and things would quickly get ugly.  By this time it was standard practice to equip muskets with a bayonet, essentially a long, sharp knife.

Now back up and try the same tactic with rifled muskets.  They are accurate out to about 300 yards.  It takes more than three times as long to charge across 300 yards as it does to charge across only 100 yards.  This gives the non-charging army time to get several volleys off.  In practice, if they have been properly trained, the defending army is going to cut the charging army to shreds well before it can get close.

Robert E. Lee, the Confederate General, was the first Civil War general on either side to figure all this out.  He was also the first to figure out what to do about it.  Now, the defense had a substantial advantage.  And the defense's advantage could be increased even more by having it fight from behind cover.  The better the cover the bigger the advantage.  The Civil War saw trench warfare used on a large scale for this very reason.

Lee was a genius when it came to arranging things so that his soldiers were fighting from cover while often also holding the high ground.  This forced the Union soldiers to charge across open ground and often uphill.  That was the secret of most of Lee's success.

The proof of this is to be found in the Battle of Gettysburg.  There, the roles were reversed.  The Union soldiers held the high ground and were fighting from cover.  Lee's army was forced to charge uphill across open ground.  The battle was a disaster for Lee and the South.

There were many other technical developments during the Civil War.  Relatively instant communications thanks to the telegraph.  Vastly improved logistics thanks to railroads.  Improved battlefield surveillance thanks to tethered hot air balloons large enough to carry a person as an observer.  The introduction of the "ironclad" warship, which completely obsoleted the entire British Royal Navy, then the largest, most powerful, and most feared Navy of the time.

But another big change was in the rate of fire that various kinds of guns were capable of.  I watched a bunch of "frontiersman" movies and TV shows as a kid.  They had scenes showing the process required to load the "flintlock" muskets of the Revolutionary War era.  It was complicated and had to be done very carefully.  The process required to get the gunpowder to explode at the right time was particularly finicky.

By the time of the Civil War the "cartridge" was in common use.  It consisted of a small paper packet that contained a bullet, a measured amount of gunpowder, and a "firing cap".  The firing cap (a tiny sticky package containing a small amount of Fulminate of Mercury, or something similar, that would catch fire whenever it was struck) was affixed to the firing pin.

The powder was poured down the barrel.  The wad of paper was rammed down behind it with a "ram rod" so that the powder was held tightly in place.  The bullet was then added and rammed home.  The firing cap was affixed to the firing pin and gun was then "cocked".  It was finally ready to fire.

It is easy to see why this cartridge based process could take thirty or more seconds. Flintlock muskets could easily take twice as long, so the cartridge based process sped things up quite a bit.  And it was far less error-prone than the previous completely manual process that flintlocks required.  That meant far fewer misfires.  A faster rate of fire and far fewer misfires means more volleys fired at your opponent.

By the end of that war the modern "brass" cartridge was starting to replace the paper version.  Here, a brass "shell" holds everything (powder, firing cap, bullet) in place.  Now, you just "eject" the old shell, load the new cartridge, cock the gun, and you are ready to fire.  This new process was easily twice as fast and had the potential to become even faster.  It had little effect on the outcome of the Civil War because it wasn't widely used in that conflict.

The introduction of the brass cartridge enabled other advances.  One was the "repeating rifle".  This design included a "magazine" capable of holding several cartridges at once, and a lever that would perform the "eject, load, and cock" steps for you.  All you had to do was move the lever down and back up.  Repeating rifles were used by some U.S. Cavalry troops late in the War.  They were not made available to anybody else.

Then there was the Gatling Gun.  It was the first true "machine gun".  A machine gun can fire multiple bullets at a high rate simply by having its trigger pulled once.  The Gatling Gun had multiple barrels and a "belt feed" mechanism.  That permitted a sustained rate of fire of more than one round per second.  It too saw limited use on the Union side late in the War.  The South had nothing like it.

The repeating rifle became ubiquitous in the American West in the late 1800s.  The classic movie "Winchester 76" is built around one of the several models that were produced in large numbers by several gun manufacturers during this period.

The Gatling design persists to this day.  But shortly after the end of that war machine gun designs were introduced by other gun manufacturers that used a single barrel.  The single barrel design quickly became by far the most popular one.

Interestingly, European countries wrote the Civil War off as a minor skirmish between frontier bumpkins who lacked the sophistication of their European brethren.  So, they didn't learn the lessons they could have as quickly as they should have.

Part of this was financial.  The British, for instance, had invested a fortune over the years in building and maintaining a large fleet of wooden "Ships of the Line".  Theirs was the top-of-the-line design prior to the introduction of the ironclad.

It took took a while for the British (and most everyone else) to figure out just how obsolete the ironclad had made the older design.  Not surprisingly, it took several decades for the Royal Navy to completely switch over.  Other navies were not much quicker.

World War I turned out to be the Civil War writ large.  The submarine, a ship type that hadn't existed in any meaningful way in the Civil War era, played a large part.  The airplane, an airship type that not even visionary and Civil War contemporary Jules Verne had envisioned, went from being a toy to being an important weapon during the four year period the War lasted .  But it was the machine gun that ultimately turned out to be the biggest game changer.

At the start of the conflict both groups of combatants thought they understood how to fight a large land war.  The Germans with their General Staff were widely acknowledged to be the best prepared.  They created detailed plans that made heavy use of trains, just like in the Civil War.  They also made heavy use of the telephone.  But in terms of its effect, it was just a quicker and more convenient version of the telegraph.  It was an improvement rather than a fundamental change.

And while the French and British had General Staffs, they were considered inferior to the German one.  But that too was a matter of degree rather than something that conveyed an overwhelming advantage.  Discounting the first few weeks of the War, the General Staffing on both sides was roughly equal, equally bad.  Both side's military leadership reacted poorly to the fact that the War did not go they way they had envisioned.

And the reason, as I noted above, was the impact the machine gun had on strategy and tactics.  The machine gun made a massed charge across an open field completely impossible.  It didn't matter how many soldiers charged.  If they had to charge across even a short distance of open field the rate of fire of a few, well placed machine guns was high enough to guarantee that they would all be mowed down.

It took years and millions of casualties to convince the military leaders on both sides of that simple truth.  So, the Germans enjoyed quite a bit of success in the opening weeks of the War.  Then the British and French got their troops dug in and their machine gun nests set up, and that was that.

From there on it was "trench warfare in the mud" for years.  Both sides tried over and over again to overcome the other side's defenses by throwing massed bodies at them.  All they got for their efforts were mass casualties.  Famously, it was the Tank that broke the stalemate.

Specifically, a mixed unit consisting of infantry and tanks working in close coordination was able to defeat a defense consisting solely of infantry and machine guns.  Tanks alone had been tried.  They failed miserably.  World War I also did away with the last vestiges of the colorful uniforms that had been such a prominent feature of European armies for such a long time.

World War I was awful.  But the awfulness was mostly confined to the Western Front.  World War II spread the awfulness out.  There was nothing like the prolonged misery of trench life on the Western Front.  But there were gas chambers, mass starvation, carpet bombing of cities and, of course, The Bomb.  The death toll from all causes was estimated to be 80 million or more.

And, of course, World War II did not go the way the experts expected.  But by this time there was less surprise attached to that development.  One big surprise happened at sea.  The dominant naval weapon was expected to be the Battleship.  The Battleship was the many times descendant of the ironclad.  It was a ship that mounted a few big guns and was so strongly built that it could survive considerable punishment.

But the Battleship is a relatively short range weapon.  It can fire a round about fifteen miles.  And it can do so with surprising accuracy.  Nothing can stand up against a pounding by a Battleship except another Battleship.  But an Aircraft Carrier can project force out to more than three hundred miles.  If the distance between the two ships is say fifty miles, then the Aircraft Carrier can effectively attack the Battleship, whereas the Battleship can't do the same.

And it turned out that Battleships could be effectively attacked not only by airplanes but also by submarines.  Battleships have little in the way of defense against either.  That means that a Battleship must be surrounded by a fleet of smaller "screening" ships like Destroyers.  An Aircraft Carrier also needs a screening force of smaller ships.  But in addition to its offensive capabilities, an Aircraft Carrier can make a meaningful contribution to the defense of both itself and its screening vessels.

The many other innovations that War produced were more in the form of quantitative rather than qualitative changes.  Cryptography, in the form of Bletchley Park, Enigma, and so forth, had an outsized impact on the War.  But the interception and decryption of the Zimmermann Telegram led directly to the U.S.'s entry into World War I.

Similarly, the introduction by the Germans of the V-1 (first drone), V-2 (first large bomb delivered by a rocket), and ME-262 (first fighter jet) became hugely important in the Post War era, but had little impact on how the War itself played out.  The same is true of the A-Bomb.  It shortened the War (and was less costly in terms of Japanese damage and casualties than an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would have been), but it didn't change the outcome of the War.

In terms of the subject at hand, the Vietnam War turned out to be hugely important.  It reintroduced the American Public and U.S. Military leaders to the concept of a Guerilla War.  The European experience with war taught that the only thing that could successfully oppose a large, modern military was another large, modern military.

The U.S. had a large, modern military.  It's opponents did not.  That was supposed to result in a quick and relatively painless victory by the U.S.  It did not.  I have spent decades thinking about why.  You can find a number of posts on this subject if you scroll back through the archives of this blog.  But I think I can boil it down to one simple idea.  The Vietnam War was primarily a diplomatic conflict rather than a military one.

European military experience tells us that if you control the major cities, the countryside will follow.  Modern (and here I mean any time in the last 500 years) European countries have complex, integrated economies.  Control of the cities leads not just to control of the cities, but due to the integrated nature of the economy and the society, it also leads to control of the countryside.  And that means control of everything.

Large, modern armies are the best instrument for controlling large cities.  Ultimately, it was standard, European style tactics by the "colonists" (what later became the U.S.) and their allies that led to victory by the colonists.  The British had a large, modern military establishment, but were hampered by long supply lines and an inability due to domestic British politics to go "all in".  The Guerilla War tactics that were employed at some times and in some places were helpful, but did not decide the outcome.

If the U.S. had been willing to engage in a World War II "Total War" style of fighting in Vietnam, I believe that U.S. forces could have won that War.  But for a lot of good and sound reasons, reasons that I agree with, that option was taken off the table.  Instead, the U.S. military was forced to fight a limited war.

The U.S. played lip service to "winning the hearts and minds of the people", most of whom lived in the countryside and had little connection to nor reliance on the big cities.  But the U.S. never actually implemented a strategy that had a real chance of winning hearts and minds.  Instead they employed the usual "kill the bad guys and blow things up" approach.  This lost hearts and minds in the rural areas rather than winning them.  And that ultimately lost the war for the U.S.

One key mistake the U.S. made in Vietnam was in who they backed to run the country.  The U.S. propped up one incompetent and corrupt regime after another.  A relatively honest and competent Vietnamize government would have invested in winning and keeping the hearts and minds of its people.  The regimes we supported didn't.  And our military people didn't think it was their job to provide governmental services or to root out corruption.

After a few fits and starts the U.S. has managed to win the postwar in Vietnam.  That's because we have relied on diplomatic and other non-military means to win hearts and minds.  The U.S. now has good relations with Vietnam.  But we have repeated the same mistakes we made in Vietnam in several other places.  The most notable example is Afghanistan.

A simple rule I adopted after Vietnam was to ask whether the locals were willing to fight their own fight.  The Afghan regimes we propped up were never able to convince their own people that the war was worth fighting hard enough to win.  Not surprisingly, rampant corruption again played a role.

As a result, propping up the various regimes we supported required massive amounts of direct military support from the U.S. and its allies.  The Afghan soldiers and officers we supported required extreme amounts of hand holding to get them to fight at all.  Even so, little of the effective fighting was done by Afghanis fighting on our side.  It's not that Afghanis were incapable of fighting effectively.  Our opponents relied heavily on them and they achieved a decisive victory.

And that brings me to Ukraine.  From the time the Russians first invaded in 2014 right up to the present day, the Ukrainians have demonstrated a willingness to fight, and fight hard.  The Vietnamese and Afghani people were also willing to fight.  They just weren't willing to fight for the U.S. side.  The Ukrainians are.  As a result, I believe that properly supported with equipment and training, the Ukrainians can beat the Russians.  No U.S. troops need apply.

That's nice, or at least I think that's nice.  But it not what this post is about.  This post is about paradigm shifts in how wars are fought.  And Ukraine demonstrates a paradigm shift that is like the WW II shift from Battleships to Aircraft Carriers, only more so.  That shift was important, but it only affected a few components of how the overall war effort.

So, what's the seismic shift that's affecting how the war in Ukraine is being fought?  Drones.  They are everywhere and they are changing how nearly everything is done.  The biggest but not the only change comes from the widespread use of cheap FPV (First Person View) drones.  They, particularly when paired with artillery firing "smart" rounds, have completely upended battlefield tactics.

The Russians know tanks.  Since WW II they have built their army around high quality tanks, and lots of them.  But in Ukraine, their situation has turned out to be similar to that of Union soldiers in the Civil War charging uphill across an open field toward Southern soldiers who are dug in and equipped with rifled muskets.  In both cases, things go very badly for the side using tactics that are now obsolete.

A cheap FPV drone can locate a tank, even if it well camouflaged.  It can then "light it up" with what amounts to a laser pointer.  An artillery unit can then fire a single smart round.  That's often enough because a single hit is usually enough to destroy the tank.  And when used in conjunction with a cheap FPV drone, it often only takes only one round to score a hit.

It took the Russians a while to figure this out.  As a result they have lost a shocking amount of armor in Ukraine.  The Ukrainians have succeeded in taking out almost all of Russia's modern tanks.  Russia has been forced to resort to using tanks that are several generations old.  These tanks were only still around due to inertia.  They had been stored in warehouses with the expectation that they would eventually be scrapped.

But its not just the Russians that have been  slow to learn.  The top of the line U.S. tank is the M1 Abrams.  Many commentators said putting these tanks into the hands of the Ukrainians would be a game changer.  It was not.  It may be a better tank than what the Russians are using, but it isn't enough better to be a game changer.  Neither have tanks provided by various European allies like such as British, French, and Germans.

The combination of cheap FPV drone and smart artillery has also made running large supply convoys anywhere near the front line a big mistake.  The same is true for large troop concentrations.  Troops need to be disbursed and kept under cover at all times.  The same is true of supply dumps, especially fuel and ammo dumps.  They must either be kept well away from the front, or if located near the front, camouflaged and disbursed.

A small explosive, roughly hand grenade sized, can be carried by a "heavy duty" cheap FPV drone.  It is capable of taking out a car, pickup truck, or other small vehicle that lacks armor.  That means armored vehicles must be used wherever these drones operate.  They also make housing frontline troops in tents that are out in the open a very bad idea.  In general, it makes it hard to build up the kinds of concentrations of men and equipment that are usually required to make offensive operations successful.

The Russians have recently started trying out a new tactic.  They put soldiers on motorcycles, ATVs, and the like.  The idea is to allow them to move fast enough that they can't be hit by an FPV drone combined with artillery, or a heavy FPV drone carrying a small explosive.  It's too soon to know how this will play out.  But it is a stark indication  of how much cheap FPV drones have changed things.

And that's just the impact of cheap drones.  Drones come in a wide range of sizes and capabilities.  Somewhat more capable drones, like those manufactured in Turkey for the U.S./Ukrainian side, or manufactured by Iran for the Russian side, are capable of taking out larger or better defended targets.  Again, FPV control turns these into precision, often one shot, munitions.

Further steps up the size/capability scale eventually leads to the equivalent of a Cruise Missile.  The Ukrainians only have access to a few of these.  But they have managed to use them effectively.  They have taken out fuel and ammunition depots hundreds of kilometers into Russian territory.  The Russians have used similar devices to damage or destroy infrastructure across the length and breadth of Ukraine.

Drones in this size range have had a devastating effect on the Russian Navy.  It has been effectively driven out of the Crimean Sea.  This should be a giant wakeup call for the U.S. Navy.  So far, there is no evidence that the message is being treated with the seriousness it deserves.

Imagine a U.S. Carrier Task Force operating somewhere in the South Pacific.  There the "defense in depth" strategy currently in use would likely be effective.  But the U.S. Navy, including Carrier Task Forces, frequently find themselves needing to operate in constrained spaces.  These spaces are more similar to the Crimean Sea than they are to the South Pacific.  And that means that the tactics used so effectively by the Ukrainians against the Russian Navy are likely to work pretty well against the U.S. Navy.

The Russians are currently trying to duplicate a feat attempted by the allies during World War II.  Then the allies made a concerted effort to use "precision bombing" to destroy the German's capability to manufacture ball bearings.  The idea was that almost all military equipment made heavy use of ball bearings.  If the Germans ran out of them, the thinking went, then the German war machine would literally grind to a halt.  The effort failed.  When it came to precision bombing, the precision necessary to make the plan work was just not possible back then.

Now, the Russians are attempting to destroy the Ukrainian electrical grid and its associated power plants.  The idea is to cast Ukraine into the dark.  If successful, the results would mirror what the Allies hoped to achieve during World War II.  With access to long range, high capacity, smart drones (i.e. precision bombing that actually works) they have had considerable success.  Most of Ukraine's electrical infrastructure has been damaged.  That has resulted in lots of outages and rolling blackouts.

But all drones have their vulnerabilities.  Inexpensive FPV drones use a two-way radio link.  TV pictures go from the drone to the operator.  Commands go from the operator to the drone.  No encryption  or other defensive measures are used.  So, a "jammer", a radio that broadcasts loud noise on the frequencies used by drones, renders these kinds of drone useless.  Also, since they are slow, noisy, and fly at low altitude, all it takes to shoot one down is an AK-47.

The life expectancy of a cheap FPV drone when in use at the Ukrainian front is less than an hour of flight time.  But they are cheap.  They cost less than a single artillery shell and are easy to manufacture in large numbers.  So, both sides put them up in large numbers and live with their short operational lifespan.  This "cannon fodder" approach gets less and less appropriate as you move up the size/cost/sophistication scale.

A drone that flies higher and faster is harder to shoot down.  A drone that uses encryption, stealth technology, or other defensive measures is harder to shoot down.  But it is also more expensive and available in much smaller numbers.  At the top of the line are cruise-missile-like drones that are capable of flying long distances, carrying heavy payloads, and doing their own navigation, and may include stealth features.

Since they don't depend on a radio link back to an operator you have to shoot them down (or jam the GPS signal they often rely on) to put them out of business.  But such drones cost millions of dollars each.  And adding stealth features jacks their price up even higher.

And then there's the air the not-cheap drones fly through.  Traditionally that air has been full of airplanes and helicopters.  Not so in Ukraine.  At the start of the current offensive the Russians were using helicopters and jets, particularly fighters, extensively.  But the Ukrainians were very successful in shooting them down.  Helicopters have also completely disappeared from the skies over Ukraine.  They are just too easy to shoot down using relatively cheap, shoulder fired rockets.

Russian jets are now used solely as "stand off" launch platforms.  They launch drones and missiles into Ukraine from low altitude and from well behind the lines in Russia.  Jets, both fighters and bombers, are the Battleships of the Ukraine war.  They have very limited offensive value and they are way to expensive to send into harm's way.  So, is this experience reflected in the U.S. defense budget?  No!

Tanks are job creators.  So, we keep building tanks.  Even the U.S. Army knows that there are lots better ways to spend our money.  But Congress keeps mandating that the Pentagon buy more.  So, they do.  The same thing is true of Jets.  The Pentagon is still buying F-35 Fighter Jets at a cost of more than a hundred million dollars per plane.  Now, the U.S. Airforce is run by pilots.  And pilots like to have planes to fly.  But the main reason they are being built is because of the jobs the program throws off.

You can buy hundreds of thousands of cheap drones for the price of a single F-35.  You can buy twenty or thirty top-of-the-line drones for the price of a single F-35.  You can buy thousands of midrange drones for the price of a single F-35.  But we are not building drones in anything like those quantities.

Ukraine can get lots of cheap FPV drones because China turns them out in large quantities for the world consumer market.  Midrange and top-of-the-line drones are hard for Ukraine to come by.  So, Ukraine has started making some of their own.  They have gotten pretty good at it, but they don't have the capability to turn them out in large numbers.  They do what the can and hope for the best, and hope for more help from the outside.

And, while important, that is not the point of this post.  The point is:  what is the U.S. doing about its own defenses?  The answer is not enough.  Sure, we should be doing more for Ukraine.  But for the purposes of this post the key point that has received little or no attention is that the U.S. should also be absorbing the lessons Ukraine can teach us.  And those lessons should result in a complete rethink of what our military needs to do its job.

The Pentagon has been funding a pilotless fighter program for years.  What most people don't know is that a major limitation on the performance of a fighter jet is the pilot.  A pilot's body can only take so much.  And the limitations imposed by what is survivable for the pilot means that the fighter operates at a far lower performance level than it could be capable of.

We've all seen Terminator, and a million movies like it.  So, nobody wants to put the machines in charge.  But we already have the solution to that problem, the FPV.  In fact, FPV technology is being used in the current robot fighter program.  And I suspect that one reason so little is said about it is that the project has been too successful.  It's an Airforce project, and the Airforce does not want to take the pilot out of the cockpit.

But I have already argued, I think successfully, that the jet fighter is obsolete.  So, maybe the robot jet fighter program is unimportant except as an example of a government boondoggle.  The problem is that the thinking behind how decisions are being made around that program, and so much else in the military sphere, is all the same.  And that's a major problem.

We need to increase our drone production capability by a factor of a hundred.  We need to move to the forefront of drone design and construction.  We need to do a top-to-bottom review of all of our military equipment and procedures.  Unfortunately, that would flag more than half of defense production as a waste of money.  We need to do a top-to-bottom review of U.S. warfighting tactics.  That too will uncover many major shortcomings that need to be plugged as quickly as possible.

We should see Ukraine as, among other things, a lab.  In the process of fighting for their lives they are learning what works and what doesn't.  The Russians are no rag-tag band of amateurs.  If something works against them it will likely work against everybody else too.  On the other hand, if the Russians develop a tactic that works, we need to react accordingly.

None of his is happening.  Various forces, not all of them political, have robbed the U.S. of its ability to focus on serious problems.  But that fact does not make this problem any less serious.  The only comfort to be taken at this point is that friend or foe, almost nobody is taking this problem as seriously as it needs to be taken.  That's small comfort, but better than nothing.