Drones

War’s latest thing is drones.  Some see them as heralding a revolution in warfare.  I see them as a problem different in quantity rather than quality, although I am mindful of the old Russian saying that quantity has a quality all its own.

What drones are bringing to battlefields is a great enlargement in the number of aircraft engaged in ground support.  Because of the cost of modern combat airplanes, if ground forces find themselves under air attack, they can be confident it will be over quickly.  Usually, it means just one enemy fighter-bomber overhead; with attack helicopters, the number may be greater, but if they want to stay alive, helicopters do not fly over enemy lines.  They shoot from well behind their own.

In contrast, ground forces may find themselves operating under constant air attack by drones.  This may be new to them, especially to American ground forces, but history has seen it before.  In World War I, an area of the Western front where a major offensive was underway might see many aircraft, friendly and enemy, overhead much of the time.  The Germans formed whole squadrons of purpose-designed ground support aircraft such as the Halberstadt CL II whose mission was trench-strafing.  The Allies undertook that mission too, with ordinary fighter aircraft, which cost them a lot of fighter pilots.  In the early years of World War II, British and French forces facing the German Schwerpunkt suffered relentless Stuka attacks.  At Normandy, allied fighter-bombers were so numerous the movement of German mobile reserves was greatly slowed.

My point is that drones do not face us with a novel problem.  That said, they do offer a serious challenge to every ground force’s air defense.  So what’s the answer?

The first answer builds on the old Marine Corps saying, “Every Marine is a rifleman.”  We now need every Marine or soldier to also be an anti-drone gunner.  The lightweight drones that present the greatest number of threats (because they’re cheap) are vulnerable to rifle fire.  And most troops enjoy shooting at things in the air.

In the longer run, every army needs some sort of “sky cleansing” device, Raid that kills every bug in the room.  Possibilities range from aerosols to small barrage balloons to directed energy weapons.  Whatever the technology, these anti-drone defense’s most important characteristics must be that they do not have to be aimed at individual drones.  They sanitize, for a time, a broad area.

The proliferation of drones over the land battlefield (I will talk about their implications for naval warfare in a future column) faces the United States with some unique problems.  First, because our Army and Marine Corps stress always being on the offensive (contrary to Clausewitz’s advice), we have to be up and moving, which makes us much easier for drones to target.  At least at this stage of their development, drones favor the defensive.

Our second unique problem is that the enormous R&D and procurement bureaucracy through which we buy military equipment, always from a cartel of just a few big companies (because only they can navigate the endless, arcane procurement regulations), makes it impossible for DOD to quickly acquire anything or to obtain systems that are cheap, simple, and needed in large quantity.  To put the latter requirement in perspective, Ukraine is working to build 1,000,000 per year.  They can do that.  We cannot.

Finally, the way the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are likely to employ drones is to further centralization of decision making.  Our vast headquarters will delight in controlling every movement of every soldier or Marine, each of whom can be watched individually through drone feeds.  The pace of our OODA Loop, already slow, will get slower.  Paralysis by too much information will become more common.  Commanders will become managers instead of leaders, as too many are already.  Reconnaissance drones are the dream of every Second Generation armed service.

The drone problem is serious but it is not novel.  History points to some answers, technology to others.  To the degree drones favor our enemies, it will be largely because of our own systemic weaknesses.