While I agree with the premise of warfare shaping society--Peter Turchin makes an excellent case for steppe nomads driving large agrarian empire formation--, I don't know if the examples provided make that good of a case for the weapons of war driving the societal changes that precipitated extremely deadly conflicts.
(1) because of the delays from the advent of the military technology to the peak conflict, the military technology just seems to be a background factor, they don't seem to drive much, e.g. if in the 1600s all people had were Roman Empire weapons technology, we would have had extremely deadly conflicts with Roman Empire weapons. If military technologies were driving societal behaviors (e.g. more recruitment for the military), then it doesn't seem as if we'd see conflicts suddenly explode in deadliness and then peter out. There would be continual growths in conflict deadliness over decades/centuries from the 1000s to 2000s. (this is probably a general trend, but the deadliness seems to reflect state size/power and doesn't have an obvious ties to the weapons of war or weapons evolution)
For example, it's true industrialized countries had advantages when fighting non-industrialized countries in the 1800s and this pushed non-European countries (e.g. Japan, China) to industrialize, but it's not clear at all that warfare was a big driver of industrialization in Europe and especially the US. The US' industrialization seemed to have nothing to do with warfare, though it was very helpful for warfare (e.g. the North's victory in the Civil War). My impression is that that's roughly true for Europe in the 1800s. Interstate fighting isn't a big driver of industrialization, though being industrialized helps (e.g. the Franco-Prussian War).
(2) the periods of peak conflict seem a little arbitrary as they ignore the Crusades (~1100s), the Spanish Conquest of the Americas (1500s), and the internal rebellions of the QIng Dynasty (1800s). My impression is the Napoleonic Wars in the 1800s are a better peak for the Age of Gunpowder.
(3) While the Mongol conquests are extremely deadly, I don't know if Mongol social reforms are what enabled their large conquest. Steppe nomads before them were able to conquer Northern China (e.g. the Khitan and the Jurchens did so right before them) and my impression is that these are just the tip of the iceberg historically. The Mongols then use the resources (and siegecraft) of Northern China to take on other agrarian empires. It's possible the big difference between the Mongols and the Jurchens who occupied Northern China before them is an expansionist drive, i.e. a willingness to direct Chinese agrarian resources for further conquest more than anything.
Underneath drone and AI technology are huge amounts of metals and minerals, which China largely controls now. That’s a choke point the Western allies are finally waking up to. One tiny example: Alcoa is testing ways to extract gallium from bauxite at a facility in Western Australia. The U.S., Japan, and Australia governments are funding this project, with capital and off-take agreements. A good sign, IMO. But we are way behind China in terms of controlling critical mineral resources. Rio Tinto is testing the same thing in Canada with support from Western allies.
Rare earth minerals and critical minerals aren't rare. They are just expensive to extract and process in a way that isn't ridiculously toxic.
Myanmar is the world's third largest producer of rare earths. Not because it has the third largest reserves, but because the area along the Chinese border is governed by a patchwork of revolutionary organizations, militias, and narco groups who all need money. And Chinese companies are only too happy to give it to them in exchange for mining rights.
The way they do it there is two ways.
One, open mining where they haul off the rock for processing. This is pretty toxic and expensive.
Two, they find a deposit of so called ionic clays, where the rare earth elements have saturated clay in the ground for a few thousand years, and drill several hundred holes vertically to and through the clay. Then, they drill a fee holes horizontally lower down the hill to connect with the vertical holes. Finally, they pump a washing fluid into the vertical holes. It goes through, dissolves the clays, and washes out through the horizontal holes into a collection pond. The pond is then dried and the sediment shipped to China for processing...
We are in a mineral arms race now. Mining will continue with or without the Western allies. The iPhone I’m using to type this message is filled with critical minerals from mines I will never see. Tim Cook understands this. He knows China’s supply chains better than most experts.
Tim Cook's Apple sent money and industrial equipment to China worth more than twice the Marshal plan in inflation adjusted terms. He's kind of a negligent traitor in the sense that he did more to indusrialize the United states's greatest rival than any other American.
Gunpowder as a technology was brought with the Mongols to Europe.
In addition, you should read a book by Tonio Andrade called "The Gunpowder Age" which goes into why the Europeans, despite getting gunpowder later, were able to build the best cannons and guns.
His basic thesis is that Europe had terrible walls in comparison to China and this caused China to not develop the gun type weapons earlier.
Chinese walls in the year 200 AD were, as a matter of course, 5 to 10 meters wide, of a similar height, with a trapezoidal cross section made by stacking pounded earth and then cladding the outside in stone.
When gunpowder first appeared in the 800's, it could do nothing to these walls. Short of digging under the walls and blowing them up, gunpowder weapons were too weak to do anything to the walls that they already had had for a thousand years.
So they developed a lot of incendiary and grenade type anti personnel weapons, but not many cannons type weapons. Remember it took the biggest cannon ever produced to knock down the Theodosian walls around Constantinople... And those walls were about as thick as the walls around several dozen Chinese cities.
When gunpowder got to europe, it was a different story.
There were a lot of castles and walls that had walls that were 1 to 3 feet thick and made of stacked stones. Really weak, crude cannons could knock them down easily. And they did. So Europeans started working on the cannons to knock down all the legacy fortifications they had. This caused them to iterate and develop them further. Add in their use on ships, and Europe had an incentive to work on fast, accurate, high velocity guns.
When the Europeans had to develop new walls to resist cannons, the innovation was the star fort. These were carefully designed walls with angles to avoid presenting an enemy with a direct perpendicular shot. In addition, their walls had a squat trapezoidal cross secton and we're built out of packed earth clad with stone. The walls that the Europeans developed to stop gunpowder were similar in construction to the walls the Chinese had been building since before gunpowder was invented.
It was these fortifications and the accompanying cannons that enabled the Europeans to successfully place forts around the world and resist efforts by local kingdoms, that often outnumbered them by orders of magnitude.
The argument is oversimplified here, hut it's a great book.
You keep leaving a great deal out. And you are taking credit for points of view that have been thought out decades ahead of you.
1) The first role of defense is to prevent the conflict. This is the bulk of expenditure, thinking and effort
2) The UKR conflict would have been over in the first month with US current technology. To your point, howitzers don't matter in the modern conflict; we determined that in 1998.
3) At nation state level, conflict, electronic warfare, social engineering, etc matter a lot more than battlefield conflict.
4) Battlefield conflict doctrine is constantly updated, hence the army's procurement of UAVs. However, the military has no interest in a UKR like conflict. It is awful game theory. Their goal is an asymmetric battle. UAVs are symmetric battle. Neither side will have a huge advantage. It is a poor doctrine. The military has been thinking about the points you raise, but 30 years ago. And made other blocking maneuvers.
5) US military is thinking about macro issues like how food supply fits into military power. Or how Ozempic going off patent in China helps China redirect from HC cost to military.
6) I doubt China thinks it can militarily dominate the US with UAV technology as a silver bullet. Since military doctrine is mostly about creating a threat to avoid war, in what world would US capitulate out of UAV fear?
7) UAVs are more likely to end proxy conflicts. Much like 9/11 ended airplane hijackings. We were working with UKR years ago on network-centric warfare, which is one reason they have advantages in this conflict.
All of these are good points that I would summarize as “don’t over-learn lessons from Ukraine”. The Ukraine conflict has demonstrated that drones are powerful weapons in a conflict between two decrepit Soviet militaries with very outdated hardware and barely any supply of modern stealth technologies for either missiles or aircraft. This conflict should be extremely instructive for developing nations that might go to war.
But that doesn’t really describe the kind of wars the US might fight in the future. Quadcopter drones will do nothing against conventional aircraft that aren’t parked on a tarmac; they can’t move fast enough, fly high enough or travel far enough. And NATO powers in general, and the US in particular, aren’t going to be zoned out of a battlespace by air defenses of the kind that are shutting down both Ukraine and Russia from air superiority. This war would have been over in a couple of weeks had the US Air Force been sent in to support Ukraine from the beginning; Russia had (and still has) no way of dealing with that degree of conventional air power. (Whether it would have been over because Russia retreated or because they initiated the nuclear apocalypse, though, is an open question, and the fact that nobody but Putin knows the answer for sure is probably the main reason we didn’t do this.) Even if you accept their own claims about their most advanced modern air defense systems (and their claims are historically very exaggerated), they still can’t target an aircraft like an F-35 unless it’s practically right on top of them, by which time the aircraft has been in weapons range to destroy the defensive radar for over a hundred miles.
The longer-ranged attack drones that Russia and Ukraine are using are also not a new technology; we just usually call them “cruise missiles”. They were first developed in the 1940s and have been continually refined since then, but the low speed flight that makes them relatively affordable by comparison to high-speed ballistic missiles also renders them highly vulnerable to air defenses. Modern electronics have somewhat tilted the cost equation in favor of the attacker when using these kind of basic cruise missiles, but solutions to that have already been found, such as the already-deployed Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System that retrofits old 70mm unguided rockets with a basic guidance package that’s more than sufficient to seek and destroy subsonic electric-powered drones, at a cost of around $30k per shot, comparable to the price of even the cheapest long-range strike drones. The US has been using this to great effect against the Houthis, flipping the cost equation on them and forcing them to use much-more-expensive and limited-supply anti-ship missiles instead of cheap drones, which puts much more significant strain on their resources and those of their backer, Iran.
I think by far the scariest thing we’ve seen from Ukraine has been the shipping container attacks that they successfully executed against Russia. This is something genuinely new and dangerous as most military facilities are not currently equipped with the kind of point defenses needed to respond to an attack of this kind. And the ubiquity of cargo container transport in all developed nations — and the degree of blind trust afforded to globalized trade to keep the system moving — render us especially vulnerable to this kind of strike. That said, this is more of a capital investment question than a technological one. Building automated point defenses to shoot down autonomous quadcopter drone swarms is just an application of technologies we already have, not something that will require breaching new frontiers of scientific research.
Honestly, my main reason to despair for the US is simply that we’ve already succumbed to the most devastating weapon of the modern age: the twisted, destructive version of ourselves forged in the demonic hellfire of social media. The only wars the public cares about fighting are culture wars with one another, and they much prefer to keep getting cheap consumer goods from China, paying low taxes and getting fat entitlement checks to spending money on war preparations because they think no one would be crazy enough to attack us. And I think that’s going to remain the case until we suffer a catastrophic defeat, probably against China: it’ll take another Pearl Harbor to wake people up to the threat. Except this time, we won’t have the industrial base to do anything about it, and we’ll be up against an opponent that’s not going to be inclined to be a charitable victor and is more likely to want to knock us flat and keep us that way so we can’t challenge them in the future.
While I agree with many of your points, this statement stood out:
"This war would have been over in a couple of weeks had the US Air Force been sent in to support Ukraine from the beginning; "
That has been the supposition for many wars, including US wars, and hasn't borne out often, and not between major powers since the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1998, it took NATO air forces 78 days to get Serbia to agree to end hostilities. And Serbia didn't have a nuclear deterrent that would reduce US scope of action, the way it would be with Russia.
Would the war be different with US involvement? That is a certainty, but the only one. Would it be over by now? Possibly, but there are reasons to doubt. It's possible it ends because we're all dead. It's possible that Putin is prepared to let a much larger share of men of military age expire on the battlefield, which might take more than a decade. Another possibility is the war evolves into asymmetry. Another is that the US decapitates Russia, and then we have endless internecine war across much of the Russian space, including Ukraine.
Over in a couple weeks? That's the most common delusion in history, and the costliest.
China could easily make us capitulate in a wartime environment, no?
1. Immediately ban all exports and watch our war production (and everything else, eventually) seize up. Shut down pharma exports.
2. Flip all the "destroy critical infrastructure" switches they've set up. Make power plants blow up, take out telecommunications and power grids across the country, etc.
3. Do 100 distributed drone attacks out of shipping containers and trucks - same thing Ukraine did to blow up Russian bombers within their borders.
I don't get the sense we have any similar tools to fight them with. We'd have to use actually, long-range weapons, which seems like something we wouldn't do even in the scenarios above, for MAD reasons.
Ha ok, so you’re just saying UAVs alone won’t make the US capitulate to China, but agree that China has a suite of tools that could make us capitulate.
China needs us as much as we need them - so neither is eager for a way. China does want to scare our population so we spend money we may not have. China would rather spend money on growth than defense.
China and we are running wargames on economic warfare, and other domains. Noad is on a side issue that could become bigger, but people who have fought wars for the last 30 years understand the balancing nature. The US has controlled battle domains for 30+ years and has tremendous practical experience that others lack. Others, including China.
This is true, but keep in mind that the Chinese will be checked by the same fears that prevented the US from going all-out against Russia: it is extremely dangerous to land a knockout punch to a heavily-armed nuclear power, because they may decide that if they’re going down, they’re taking you with them. That will remain the case and force some degree of caution with massive conventional overmatch until someone develops a perfectly reliable countermeasure to modern nuclear missiles, one reliable enough that national leaders are willing to gamble the entire existence of their nation on it.
If you read military doctrine, US and China have been thinking about economic warfare, cyber, and non-nuclear foring functions like food, as baseline warfare planning for 30 years. In 1998 when I was involved, we were more concerned about the flow of Soy than nuclear for balancing superpower status.
The connections you draw are interesting. Perhaps mass-training of AIs by observing people playing video games would be an adaptation to move society toward readiness for drone warfare.
Thanks for the essay. As noted in the comments below unclear if drones are the be-all, end-all or whether the three eras you noted perfectly fit...nevertheless, your point that AI, electric stacking and other technological developments are upending and will continue to upend how nations battle, seems to me, totally on point. Whether they are the cause of effect of societal change, however, is unclear to me. But they certainly go hand in glove.
Very depressing read for me to start my Thursday (but a worthwhile read nevertheless.)
Iran has good drone tech and lots of drones. Didn’t help at all against Israeli and American attacks from the air. Eventually, of course, drones will be fighting drones in the air, but conventional air superiority over the battlefront is still highly effective now. Ukraine is really a demo of what happens when neither side has an airforce capable enough to suppress air defenses (in part because American AWACS are able to operate safely from behind NATO lines). With your opponent having air superiority, dug in front lines would be insanity, and the infrastructure necessary to transport and supply drones and armor and artillery would be at risk of destruction.
Dispersed guerilla forces with small drones able to launch terrorist type attacks from a distance or launch a massed attack against a military target will still be impossible to bomb into submission, of course, but this would be very different than what we see in Ukraine (more like the USMC’s new strategy)
For a short conflict, which most conflicts are, initial stocks matter a lot.
For longer conflicts, countries will burn through their initial stocks of drones and munitions and production capacity becomes important. If a country is dependent on products from other countries to make weapons, then their railway, road, and harbor connections are weak points in a long conflict.
Russia shares a large enough border with China and Pacific Ocean-facing ports, so this would be tough for Ukraine to target. The oil infrastructure is a better target. China has sufficient capacity and area that an adversary would have to strike a lot of locations to meaningfully hit capacity.
But other smaller countries? Seems like a different situation. A country with US-level air power could destroy such infrastructure quite easily. It turns out that Russia doesn't have close to US-level air power, but Israel seems to have it at least regionally.
The domestic use of drones for population control scares me, or the use by terrorist groups. One of my dystopian predictions is that within our lifetimes, a drone bunker, anti-drone drones, or point lasers may be things we have installed in our communities and/or our homes.
As you noted, the broader issue is the acceleration of technological change. Won't that become highly destabilizing as perceptions of unknowable adversary capabilities increases? I'm reminded of Nick Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Not only are we pulling balls from his metaphoric urn faster, but the destabilizing FOMO, potentially seen as 'strike 1st or lose/die', becomes a major geopol risk itself.
This is an extraordinarily narrow point but I wonder if you could expand on your argument that the 17th century, (implicitly) rather than the early 19th century, represents peak of gunpowder warfare?
Nuclear weapons still beat drones.
Drones are a useful complement to traditional firepower but not a replacement.
Recently Russia have made gains, with Ukraine citing the lack of legacy systems.
Ukraine continuously call for more tanks, artillery, and long-range missiles - drones were born from necessity because of lack of alternatives.
Geographically the future battlefield of Taiwan with its vast beaches and forests does not suit the type of drone warfare seen in Ukraine.
https://challengerresearch.substack.com/p/the-drone-frenzy-why-preparing-for?r=5jzlze
Aren’t servers the main point of failure then? The answer would be to identify server farms and bomb them.
Drones linked by fiber optic to the operator’s terminal reduce that risk, but for yes, for networked drones.
While I agree with the premise of warfare shaping society--Peter Turchin makes an excellent case for steppe nomads driving large agrarian empire formation--, I don't know if the examples provided make that good of a case for the weapons of war driving the societal changes that precipitated extremely deadly conflicts.
(1) because of the delays from the advent of the military technology to the peak conflict, the military technology just seems to be a background factor, they don't seem to drive much, e.g. if in the 1600s all people had were Roman Empire weapons technology, we would have had extremely deadly conflicts with Roman Empire weapons. If military technologies were driving societal behaviors (e.g. more recruitment for the military), then it doesn't seem as if we'd see conflicts suddenly explode in deadliness and then peter out. There would be continual growths in conflict deadliness over decades/centuries from the 1000s to 2000s. (this is probably a general trend, but the deadliness seems to reflect state size/power and doesn't have an obvious ties to the weapons of war or weapons evolution)
For example, it's true industrialized countries had advantages when fighting non-industrialized countries in the 1800s and this pushed non-European countries (e.g. Japan, China) to industrialize, but it's not clear at all that warfare was a big driver of industrialization in Europe and especially the US. The US' industrialization seemed to have nothing to do with warfare, though it was very helpful for warfare (e.g. the North's victory in the Civil War). My impression is that that's roughly true for Europe in the 1800s. Interstate fighting isn't a big driver of industrialization, though being industrialized helps (e.g. the Franco-Prussian War).
(2) the periods of peak conflict seem a little arbitrary as they ignore the Crusades (~1100s), the Spanish Conquest of the Americas (1500s), and the internal rebellions of the QIng Dynasty (1800s). My impression is the Napoleonic Wars in the 1800s are a better peak for the Age of Gunpowder.
(3) While the Mongol conquests are extremely deadly, I don't know if Mongol social reforms are what enabled their large conquest. Steppe nomads before them were able to conquer Northern China (e.g. the Khitan and the Jurchens did so right before them) and my impression is that these are just the tip of the iceberg historically. The Mongols then use the resources (and siegecraft) of Northern China to take on other agrarian empires. It's possible the big difference between the Mongols and the Jurchens who occupied Northern China before them is an expansionist drive, i.e. a willingness to direct Chinese agrarian resources for further conquest more than anything.
Underneath drone and AI technology are huge amounts of metals and minerals, which China largely controls now. That’s a choke point the Western allies are finally waking up to. One tiny example: Alcoa is testing ways to extract gallium from bauxite at a facility in Western Australia. The U.S., Japan, and Australia governments are funding this project, with capital and off-take agreements. A good sign, IMO. But we are way behind China in terms of controlling critical mineral resources. Rio Tinto is testing the same thing in Canada with support from Western allies.
Rare earth minerals and critical minerals aren't rare. They are just expensive to extract and process in a way that isn't ridiculously toxic.
Myanmar is the world's third largest producer of rare earths. Not because it has the third largest reserves, but because the area along the Chinese border is governed by a patchwork of revolutionary organizations, militias, and narco groups who all need money. And Chinese companies are only too happy to give it to them in exchange for mining rights.
The way they do it there is two ways.
One, open mining where they haul off the rock for processing. This is pretty toxic and expensive.
Two, they find a deposit of so called ionic clays, where the rare earth elements have saturated clay in the ground for a few thousand years, and drill several hundred holes vertically to and through the clay. Then, they drill a fee holes horizontally lower down the hill to connect with the vertical holes. Finally, they pump a washing fluid into the vertical holes. It goes through, dissolves the clays, and washes out through the horizontal holes into a collection pond. The pond is then dried and the sediment shipped to China for processing...
Method two is "How to poison groundwater 101"
But it is cheap.
We are in a mineral arms race now. Mining will continue with or without the Western allies. The iPhone I’m using to type this message is filled with critical minerals from mines I will never see. Tim Cook understands this. He knows China’s supply chains better than most experts.
Tim Cook's Apple sent money and industrial equipment to China worth more than twice the Marshal plan in inflation adjusted terms. He's kind of a negligent traitor in the sense that he did more to indusrialize the United states's greatest rival than any other American.
Noah, incomplete sentence in footnote 2?
It takes a huge amount of energy...
Gunpowder as a technology was brought with the Mongols to Europe.
In addition, you should read a book by Tonio Andrade called "The Gunpowder Age" which goes into why the Europeans, despite getting gunpowder later, were able to build the best cannons and guns.
His basic thesis is that Europe had terrible walls in comparison to China and this caused China to not develop the gun type weapons earlier.
Chinese walls in the year 200 AD were, as a matter of course, 5 to 10 meters wide, of a similar height, with a trapezoidal cross section made by stacking pounded earth and then cladding the outside in stone.
When gunpowder first appeared in the 800's, it could do nothing to these walls. Short of digging under the walls and blowing them up, gunpowder weapons were too weak to do anything to the walls that they already had had for a thousand years.
So they developed a lot of incendiary and grenade type anti personnel weapons, but not many cannons type weapons. Remember it took the biggest cannon ever produced to knock down the Theodosian walls around Constantinople... And those walls were about as thick as the walls around several dozen Chinese cities.
When gunpowder got to europe, it was a different story.
There were a lot of castles and walls that had walls that were 1 to 3 feet thick and made of stacked stones. Really weak, crude cannons could knock them down easily. And they did. So Europeans started working on the cannons to knock down all the legacy fortifications they had. This caused them to iterate and develop them further. Add in their use on ships, and Europe had an incentive to work on fast, accurate, high velocity guns.
When the Europeans had to develop new walls to resist cannons, the innovation was the star fort. These were carefully designed walls with angles to avoid presenting an enemy with a direct perpendicular shot. In addition, their walls had a squat trapezoidal cross secton and we're built out of packed earth clad with stone. The walls that the Europeans developed to stop gunpowder were similar in construction to the walls the Chinese had been building since before gunpowder was invented.
It was these fortifications and the accompanying cannons that enabled the Europeans to successfully place forts around the world and resist efforts by local kingdoms, that often outnumbered them by orders of magnitude.
The argument is oversimplified here, hut it's a great book.
You keep leaving a great deal out. And you are taking credit for points of view that have been thought out decades ahead of you.
1) The first role of defense is to prevent the conflict. This is the bulk of expenditure, thinking and effort
2) The UKR conflict would have been over in the first month with US current technology. To your point, howitzers don't matter in the modern conflict; we determined that in 1998.
3) At nation state level, conflict, electronic warfare, social engineering, etc matter a lot more than battlefield conflict.
4) Battlefield conflict doctrine is constantly updated, hence the army's procurement of UAVs. However, the military has no interest in a UKR like conflict. It is awful game theory. Their goal is an asymmetric battle. UAVs are symmetric battle. Neither side will have a huge advantage. It is a poor doctrine. The military has been thinking about the points you raise, but 30 years ago. And made other blocking maneuvers.
5) US military is thinking about macro issues like how food supply fits into military power. Or how Ozempic going off patent in China helps China redirect from HC cost to military.
6) I doubt China thinks it can militarily dominate the US with UAV technology as a silver bullet. Since military doctrine is mostly about creating a threat to avoid war, in what world would US capitulate out of UAV fear?
7) UAVs are more likely to end proxy conflicts. Much like 9/11 ended airplane hijackings. We were working with UKR years ago on network-centric warfare, which is one reason they have advantages in this conflict.
All of these are good points that I would summarize as “don’t over-learn lessons from Ukraine”. The Ukraine conflict has demonstrated that drones are powerful weapons in a conflict between two decrepit Soviet militaries with very outdated hardware and barely any supply of modern stealth technologies for either missiles or aircraft. This conflict should be extremely instructive for developing nations that might go to war.
But that doesn’t really describe the kind of wars the US might fight in the future. Quadcopter drones will do nothing against conventional aircraft that aren’t parked on a tarmac; they can’t move fast enough, fly high enough or travel far enough. And NATO powers in general, and the US in particular, aren’t going to be zoned out of a battlespace by air defenses of the kind that are shutting down both Ukraine and Russia from air superiority. This war would have been over in a couple of weeks had the US Air Force been sent in to support Ukraine from the beginning; Russia had (and still has) no way of dealing with that degree of conventional air power. (Whether it would have been over because Russia retreated or because they initiated the nuclear apocalypse, though, is an open question, and the fact that nobody but Putin knows the answer for sure is probably the main reason we didn’t do this.) Even if you accept their own claims about their most advanced modern air defense systems (and their claims are historically very exaggerated), they still can’t target an aircraft like an F-35 unless it’s practically right on top of them, by which time the aircraft has been in weapons range to destroy the defensive radar for over a hundred miles.
The longer-ranged attack drones that Russia and Ukraine are using are also not a new technology; we just usually call them “cruise missiles”. They were first developed in the 1940s and have been continually refined since then, but the low speed flight that makes them relatively affordable by comparison to high-speed ballistic missiles also renders them highly vulnerable to air defenses. Modern electronics have somewhat tilted the cost equation in favor of the attacker when using these kind of basic cruise missiles, but solutions to that have already been found, such as the already-deployed Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System that retrofits old 70mm unguided rockets with a basic guidance package that’s more than sufficient to seek and destroy subsonic electric-powered drones, at a cost of around $30k per shot, comparable to the price of even the cheapest long-range strike drones. The US has been using this to great effect against the Houthis, flipping the cost equation on them and forcing them to use much-more-expensive and limited-supply anti-ship missiles instead of cheap drones, which puts much more significant strain on their resources and those of their backer, Iran.
I think by far the scariest thing we’ve seen from Ukraine has been the shipping container attacks that they successfully executed against Russia. This is something genuinely new and dangerous as most military facilities are not currently equipped with the kind of point defenses needed to respond to an attack of this kind. And the ubiquity of cargo container transport in all developed nations — and the degree of blind trust afforded to globalized trade to keep the system moving — render us especially vulnerable to this kind of strike. That said, this is more of a capital investment question than a technological one. Building automated point defenses to shoot down autonomous quadcopter drone swarms is just an application of technologies we already have, not something that will require breaching new frontiers of scientific research.
Honestly, my main reason to despair for the US is simply that we’ve already succumbed to the most devastating weapon of the modern age: the twisted, destructive version of ourselves forged in the demonic hellfire of social media. The only wars the public cares about fighting are culture wars with one another, and they much prefer to keep getting cheap consumer goods from China, paying low taxes and getting fat entitlement checks to spending money on war preparations because they think no one would be crazy enough to attack us. And I think that’s going to remain the case until we suffer a catastrophic defeat, probably against China: it’ll take another Pearl Harbor to wake people up to the threat. Except this time, we won’t have the industrial base to do anything about it, and we’ll be up against an opponent that’s not going to be inclined to be a charitable victor and is more likely to want to knock us flat and keep us that way so we can’t challenge them in the future.
While I agree with many of your points, this statement stood out:
"This war would have been over in a couple of weeks had the US Air Force been sent in to support Ukraine from the beginning; "
That has been the supposition for many wars, including US wars, and hasn't borne out often, and not between major powers since the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1998, it took NATO air forces 78 days to get Serbia to agree to end hostilities. And Serbia didn't have a nuclear deterrent that would reduce US scope of action, the way it would be with Russia.
Would the war be different with US involvement? That is a certainty, but the only one. Would it be over by now? Possibly, but there are reasons to doubt. It's possible it ends because we're all dead. It's possible that Putin is prepared to let a much larger share of men of military age expire on the battlefield, which might take more than a decade. Another possibility is the war evolves into asymmetry. Another is that the US decapitates Russia, and then we have endless internecine war across much of the Russian space, including Ukraine.
Over in a couple weeks? That's the most common delusion in history, and the costliest.
China could easily make us capitulate in a wartime environment, no?
1. Immediately ban all exports and watch our war production (and everything else, eventually) seize up. Shut down pharma exports.
2. Flip all the "destroy critical infrastructure" switches they've set up. Make power plants blow up, take out telecommunications and power grids across the country, etc.
3. Do 100 distributed drone attacks out of shipping containers and trucks - same thing Ukraine did to blow up Russian bombers within their borders.
I don't get the sense we have any similar tools to fight them with. We'd have to use actually, long-range weapons, which seems like something we wouldn't do even in the scenarios above, for MAD reasons.
Modern geopolitical conflict is multi-domain. UAVs are a tiny part of the story. Economic forces are a powerful component of the calculus.
Ha ok, so you’re just saying UAVs alone won’t make the US capitulate to China, but agree that China has a suite of tools that could make us capitulate.
Not reassuring!
UAVs are a tiny part of this.
China needs us as much as we need them - so neither is eager for a way. China does want to scare our population so we spend money we may not have. China would rather spend money on growth than defense.
China and we are running wargames on economic warfare, and other domains. Noad is on a side issue that could become bigger, but people who have fought wars for the last 30 years understand the balancing nature. The US has controlled battle domains for 30+ years and has tremendous practical experience that others lack. Others, including China.
This is true, but keep in mind that the Chinese will be checked by the same fears that prevented the US from going all-out against Russia: it is extremely dangerous to land a knockout punch to a heavily-armed nuclear power, because they may decide that if they’re going down, they’re taking you with them. That will remain the case and force some degree of caution with massive conventional overmatch until someone develops a perfectly reliable countermeasure to modern nuclear missiles, one reliable enough that national leaders are willing to gamble the entire existence of their nation on it.
Yes, but that’s true of Russia and other nuclear powers too.
In a non-MAD domain, standard conflict domain, it means China is the primary superpower, not the US.
They could hurt us a lot more than we could hurt them in ways that don’t necessarily trigger global annihiliation.
If you read military doctrine, US and China have been thinking about economic warfare, cyber, and non-nuclear foring functions like food, as baseline warfare planning for 30 years. In 1998 when I was involved, we were more concerned about the flow of Soy than nuclear for balancing superpower status.
The connections you draw are interesting. Perhaps mass-training of AIs by observing people playing video games would be an adaptation to move society toward readiness for drone warfare.
Thanks for the essay. As noted in the comments below unclear if drones are the be-all, end-all or whether the three eras you noted perfectly fit...nevertheless, your point that AI, electric stacking and other technological developments are upending and will continue to upend how nations battle, seems to me, totally on point. Whether they are the cause of effect of societal change, however, is unclear to me. But they certainly go hand in glove.
Very depressing read for me to start my Thursday (but a worthwhile read nevertheless.)
Iran has good drone tech and lots of drones. Didn’t help at all against Israeli and American attacks from the air. Eventually, of course, drones will be fighting drones in the air, but conventional air superiority over the battlefront is still highly effective now. Ukraine is really a demo of what happens when neither side has an airforce capable enough to suppress air defenses (in part because American AWACS are able to operate safely from behind NATO lines). With your opponent having air superiority, dug in front lines would be insanity, and the infrastructure necessary to transport and supply drones and armor and artillery would be at risk of destruction.
Dispersed guerilla forces with small drones able to launch terrorist type attacks from a distance or launch a massed attack against a military target will still be impossible to bomb into submission, of course, but this would be very different than what we see in Ukraine (more like the USMC’s new strategy)
It depends on how long the conflict will last.
For a short conflict, which most conflicts are, initial stocks matter a lot.
For longer conflicts, countries will burn through their initial stocks of drones and munitions and production capacity becomes important. If a country is dependent on products from other countries to make weapons, then their railway, road, and harbor connections are weak points in a long conflict.
Russia shares a large enough border with China and Pacific Ocean-facing ports, so this would be tough for Ukraine to target. The oil infrastructure is a better target. China has sufficient capacity and area that an adversary would have to strike a lot of locations to meaningfully hit capacity.
But other smaller countries? Seems like a different situation. A country with US-level air power could destroy such infrastructure quite easily. It turns out that Russia doesn't have close to US-level air power, but Israel seems to have it at least regionally.
The domestic use of drones for population control scares me, or the use by terrorist groups. One of my dystopian predictions is that within our lifetimes, a drone bunker, anti-drone drones, or point lasers may be things we have installed in our communities and/or our homes.
As you noted, the broader issue is the acceleration of technological change. Won't that become highly destabilizing as perceptions of unknowable adversary capabilities increases? I'm reminded of Nick Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Not only are we pulling balls from his metaphoric urn faster, but the destabilizing FOMO, potentially seen as 'strike 1st or lose/die', becomes a major geopol risk itself.
This is an extraordinarily narrow point but I wonder if you could expand on your argument that the 17th century, (implicitly) rather than the early 19th century, represents peak of gunpowder warfare?