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Brutality and injustice made us raise our hands towards the sky for years; God didn’t respond to us, but drones came to our rescue.
—M. F. Moonzajer, Afghan citizen
From the beginning of recorded history to just a few hundred years ago, armies fought with primitive muscle-powered instruments, usually variations of farm implements or beasts of burden. For the most part, armies won or lost based on the concentrated muscle power of converging lines of infantry. Gunpowder would make the mounted knight obsolete, to be sure. Even until the American Civil War, generals still maneuvered their armies by muscle power and considered the push of the bayonet to be decisive in battle.
Technology in the early days of the Industrial Revolution improved slowly. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the infantry muskets used by Gen. Robert E. Lee as a young captain in the Mexican War of 1846–48 were no different from those used by the British redcoats at the battle of Breitenfeld in 1631. In a similar manner, Lord Nelson felt no technological inferiority sailing his flagship Victory into the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, even though Victory was more than a hundred years old.
Later in the nineteenth century, the pace of technological change accelerated rapidly and in the course of this change altered war fundamentally. Generals of the period failed to understand the implications of change on the battlefield . . . and they paid a horrible price in blood. Lee knew that his Soldiers were firing rifles capable of killing out to ranges ten times greater than the smoothbore muskets his Soldiers had carried in Mexico. He was aware that rifling allowed artillery to shoot with precision out to four miles or more. Yet, on the third day at Gettysburg he sent 13,000 men across 980 yards of open wheat fields. Even though historians consider Lee to be America’s greatest combat general, he was still the victim of his past experience in Mexico. He knew technology had changed the character of warfare, but as so often happens in warfare, even he, one of the best and brightest of generals, could not escape the visceral, firsthand experiences of his past.
THE MACHINE-GUN DISEASE
Fast-forward fifty years to 1914 and the beginning of World War I. British, French, and German generals—all of whom had read accounts of Gettysburg—similarly sent their Soldiers across open fields in the face of rifles improved to fire smokeless powder and small-caliber bullets. These same bullets were strung together in belts to be fed into Hiram Maxim’s invention, the “machine gun,” which mowed down a generation of young men. It took almost seven million dead to teach the generals how to deal with this first “precision revolution” in accuracy, range, explosive power, and mass.
In 1915 after the tragic battle of Loos, the British general staff collected at Salisbury Plain to discuss how many autofiring devices a regiment needed to support an attack across the trenches. Should the standard complement of 18 machine guns be increased to, maybe, 24? Actually, the right answer has turned out to be 1,800, enough to make every rifleman a machine gunner. The Germans came to this conclusion 30 years later on the Eastern Front during World War II. The Russians learned the proper number in 1947 with the invention of the AK-47. The U.S. Army decided on automatic fire for all infantrymen in 2012.
In 1995 I created the “Army After Next” Project, an extraordinary group of very young Soldiers and civilians tasked to find the technology that might usher in the next shift in the course of war. Certainly, future gazing is a perfidious craft, and war is the most complex of all human endeavors to anticipate. The primary conclusion of our group was that the next transformational technology to change the nature and character of war—in effect, the “machine gun” of the twenty-first century—would be the armed drone.
We studied the Gulf War carefully, and we concluded that early drones used in that war would someday be capable enough to see, track, and eventually “stare” at the enemy below, and with such clarity as to create an opaque battlefield. Several high-level war games at the Army War College in 1997 confirmed that the creation of what we then called an “unblinking eye” would also change the enemy’s behavior. An overhead perch would reduce his aggressiveness, cause him to hide and go to ground without having had the opportunity to mass his forces. We had discovered the new “machine gun” that would ensure future victories.
At the time we postulated all sorts of futuristic drone-like technologies that might perform the staring function. We thought about very-high-flying balloons, space-based telescopes capable of watching tactical movements by small units thousands of miles below. The games strongly suggested that the technology of choice was the drone; in our virtual experiments, we armed them with precision missiles, because we realized that it took too long for one machine to find a target and another to kill it.
Our drone of choice in the nineties was Global Hawk, a huge Air Force unmanned drone that carried a large payload and could loiter over a single point for hours. In subsequent literature we forecasted the transformational impact of a true “unblinking eye” and pushed the Air Force to get on board. Fast-forward six years. We watched on television as huge Air Force B-52 bombers made lazy eights in the sky over the Taliban in Afghanistan. There it was: small Special Forces units mounted on horseback were sending up precision targeting data to the circling bombers with cell phones and laptops. There was our unblinking eye. Later, we learned that the Air Force and CIA had codeveloped a smaller killer-drone, the Predator . . . and the race was on. We were right after all.
Sadly, it did not take long before our military fell victim to the machine-gun problem. We saw the same phenomenon play out again with aerial surveillance using drones. It reminded us of how long it had taken for armies to embrace autofiring infantry weapons fully. The machine-gun disease is with us still, and the impediments are many: the Army and Air Force have a bad habit of building units around machines and overstuffing them with staff officers, crews, support groups, and other excessive and expensive overhead. By 2005, newly formed Air Force drone squadrons were manned with more than a hundred airmen. Soon, the cost of proliferation became too high in human capital. Thus rapid proliferation, enough drones to secure the safety of Soldiers on the ground, became too expensive.
Since its inception, the Air Force has demanded control of everything that flies. The idea of drones being proliferated widely to everyone (like machine guns in World War I) is anathema to radical proponents of a centrally controlled Air Force. Likewise, bean counters in the Pentagon decry the costs inherent in a huge proliferation of different types of drones dispersed among many different services and functions . . . the bean counters want efficiency, standardization, rationalization, and economies of scale. The needs of Soldiers like Sergeant Giunta and Captain Swenson, who might have found some use in an orbiting drone that warned them of danger, simply is not a factor in a bureaucrat’s short list of important things. Finally, the military’s turgid weapon-buying bureaucracy cannot keep up with rapid advances in drone technologies, particularly since civilian companies, not defense agencies, make most such advances. While today the Army struggles to launch a next-generation “hand thrown” drone, such a simple battery-powered device is sold at Walmart.
During my visits to combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan, I watched how the military coped with the promise of the unblinking eye. Every commander was vociferous and unequivocal about one fact: Soldiers should never have to die to find information about the enemy. Thus the most important task for the future should be to avoid surprise by acquiring the ability to see the enemy first. In wars within the American era 52 percent of close-combat deaths have been suffered trying to find the enemy. Today in Afghanistan that proportion has grown to 84 percent.
I gained a glimpse of how decisive a truly effective unblinking eye might be in combat when, in the fall of 2008, I was the guest of the 5th Special Forces Group, based then at Taji Airfield, just outside Baghdad. It was two in the morning. The small confines of the Special Forces Command Center were sparsely manned and deathly quiet. Spaced evenly across the ceiling were six flat-screen televisions, each projecting sharp images—downloads from Predator drones. Each screen followed a night raid in progress in real time. I watched, transfixed, as a dozen small black dots scattered across each screen; clearly, they were Special Forces “direct action” teams closing in on sleeping Al Qaeda terrorists. Occasionally the group commander, Col. Darcie Rogers, sitting next to me, would note when the collective groups of black dots started to converge. The feed was soundless, but we could see the moment very clearly. A flash of black momentarily blanked out a portion of the screen, and then we watched the frantic scattering of the few black dots lucky enough to rush away from the kill zone.
As these six small raids played out nearly simultaneously, Colonel Rogers noted dryly that after three years of night raids Al Qaeda knew about the drones. He found it interesting that, over time, the presence of these fearful aerial eyes was forcing Al Qaeda to change its behavior. Its fighters avoided windows. They tried to disperse and hide under sheds and thick trees. They rarely fought back when surprised by the raids. Some tried to run; their panic came across the screens as staccato, jerky rushes and darts that the maneuvering Soldiers below watched on their (still classified) handheld sensors, linked to the drones orbiting above. Death came instantly and from a place they could not see. In effect, the presence of drones and ground sensors in the hands of these elite small units decided the outcome far before battle began.
Then, as today, no special unit—Special Forces, Delta Force, SEALs, or Rangers—would dare go into such inhospitable places without a drone overhead. I wondered what would have happened had Sergeant Giunta and Captain Swenson had the same capability overhead during their horrific fights. Why isn’t it possible for every close-combat unit in harm’s way to have exactly the same life-saving unblinking eye overhead?
Sadly, the Air Force is today’s machine-gun corps. In April 2015 the Air Force reduced the number of Predator and Reaper drone sorties it was able to fly from sixty-five to sixty, citing the stress that a sixty-five-sortie “mission tempo” was having on drone pilots . . . pilots flying from Creech Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. Just a few years ago, in 2008, the Air Force was content with flying thirty-three missions per day until Secretary of Defense Gates forced them to push toward meeting the needs of ground commanders. The Air Force leadership complains now that the demand for drones is insatiable and cannot be met. Of course, the real question, like the question never asked in World War I, is, “How many does the war fighter need?” Is it sixty or six hundred? If it takes six hundred to keep Soldiers and Marines alive, then why doesn’t the Air Force just do it? Now you see the problem.
With such disappointing support from the Air Force, the Army has been forced to get into the armed-drone business in spite of huge fiscal problems. To its credit, the conventional Army in Iraq and Afghanistan has made some progress with new drone technologies. In 2008 Task Force Odin, a manned and unmanned aviation brigade stationed at Balad Airfield in Iraq, offered the promise of such a capability. However, the view provided by Task Force Odin’s aerial systems was limited in time (a few hours) and space (a few square kilometers) at an exorbitant cost. The hope, never realized in Iraq, was to deploy a system capable of staring across the battlefield constantly, 24/7. A staring drone would give commanders the ability to detect the enemy’s behavior by watching, over time, his tempo, cycle of operating, and what Soldiers call “pattern of life.” Armed with such information a commander would be able to anticipate the enemy’s action perhaps days or weeks in advance.
Drones are particularly useful for fighting irregular wars, the sort of conflicts that dominate battles throughout the American era. The enormity of the battlefield, the enemy’s propensity to hide among the people in urban areas, and his understanding of the benefits to be gained from collateral damage to the people require that on tomorrow’s battlefield the enemy be watched constantly and tracked reliably in real time. Unfortunately, thanks to a modern-day corollary of machine-gun disease, our ground forces have far too few drones. Those few capable of seeing over great distances and staying airborne for very long periods are controlled by politicians and generals, often in distant places; some are even flown from bases in the United States. Too many are dedicated to “terrorist plinking” in Pakistan and Yemen, far too detached from real war to help the Giuntas and Swensons in their efforts to avoid ambushes and stay alive in the close fight.
Throughout history, a small-unit leader’s greatest desire is to see the enemy from over the hill. This task can best be done bloodlessly, using unmanned aerial robots. When Soldiers are in contact, a tactical commander should be able to observe the action very closely, so as to intuit the most intimate of the enemy’s thoughts and actions. He should also have a broad, complete, and uninterrupted macro view of his area of operations, such that the enemy would find it very difficult to hide or approach his position without detection. Such a capability should be sufficiently mobile and flexible to allow a tactical commander to employ it with a minimal transport and logistic burden. It must also belong to him, and him alone.
Thus speed of decision making and delivery are both essential for the task. Cold War doctrine was premised on the need to seize point objectives, in order to deny the enemy control of the high ground. This imperative to gain “positional advantage” also shaped every aspect of ground-force doctrine. Key terrain is still an important tenet in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is defined differently. At times, points of terrain can be objectives worth fighting for: an insurgent hideout, a bomb-making factory, perhaps a cache hiding weapons or propaganda materials.
But irregular warfare is war among the people, and it requires the controlling of populations. Such wars are fought on distributed, dispersed battlefields. As the enemy spreads out to contest the countryside or urban areas, we must follow him there. But the challenge in distributed warfare is to do more than just “spread out.” In fact, as units disperse they change their patterns of maneuver and behavior. They are forced through dispersion to forfeit their traditional advantages of mass, operational speed, and quick concentration of killing power.
DRONES IN FUTURE WAR
Wars of the future cannot be won without absolute domination of the air and cybersphere above our Soldiers. They must be protected by an “unblinking eye”—a constant, reliable, ubiquitous, and overwhelmingly dominant sphere of information. Think of this protective “cybersphere” as both an invisible barrier to blind the enemy and an eye that shifts, moves, and hovers to watch and track the enemy with great clarity, reliability, and precision. Experience in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan has shown dramatically that, to a great extent, today’s technologies now permit air and naval forces to create a fairly impervious shield of information, one that protects them in their relatively uncluttered mediums of war. The complexities of terra firma make the task far more challenging for Soldiers and Marines fighting on the ground.
A cybersphere is needed that is robust, layered with redundant capabilities, and reliable enough to accommodate with an enormous bandwidth the rich calculus of ground warfare. Even the global Internet and satellite communications of 2030 will not be sufficient to provide the connectivity necessary to sustain a battlefield cybersphere. Therefore, ground forces in all probability will have to take their bandwidth with them into the battle area. Most of the unit’s information systems and capabilities will be self-contained. Reliability and security will be ensured by a robust, layered system of sensors and communications that begin in space and descend down through the atmosphere to every variety of drones to ground sensors and sensors attached to Soldiers.
Dedicated tactical satellites in high earth orbit will tie the force to its support base in the United States. The next layer would consist of high-altitude, long-endurance, unmanned aerial vehicles flying in the stratosphere above the formation to provide continuous observation of the battle area. These superdrones would be stealthy and fly at altitudes above the reach of an enemy’s anti-aircraft missiles. They would be linked into the command centers, somewhere in the region and in the United States. Some might best be employed as high-altitude “cell towers” that connect together all of the Soldier cell phones in a single integrated network.
The medium drone layer would consist of improved versions of Predator and Reaper armed drones. A group of ten or twelve of these would be dedicated to a brigade in contact and linked directly to small units in a firefight. A small-unit leader, or a sergeant or lieutenant, would simply designate a close-in target with a handheld laser range finder. An Army or Air Force drone pilot in the United States would be cued to the sergeant’s beam and would verify the target and release the missile to the target. Such an arrangement would put killing effects on a tactical target in less than a minute.
The small drone layer would consist of small, cheap, disposable, handheld drones, some the size of hummingbirds, carried into battle in each Soldier’s rucksack. Whenever a unit in action came across an uncertain situation, the Soldier would release his drone to fly over roads and trails or hover inside buildings and bunkers. These silent, virtually invisible minibirds would lurk inside and provide video and infrared images to a small unit waiting to enter. Some of the devices in a Soldier’s rucksack would be “suicide” drones, essentially very small drones with small explosive devices attached. Think how many of Captain Swenson’s men might have been saved had Swenson flown an explosive drone into his target instead of throwing a hand grenade.
No reason exists for any ground action to be fought again without a drone overhead and sensors in the hands of every small unit involved. How many drones must be overhead to protect an infantry brigade in combat? Ask the same question about machine guns—I do not know. But I do know it is many, many more than hover over a brigade in Afghanistan today. The technology to buy and build this constellation of drones is at hand. If the military is too hidebound and slow to build it, then the Army and Marines should be able to buy it from enterprising civilian technology firms. With an unblinking eye overhead, every future close engagement should be an unfair fight. Enemies under the gaze of hundreds of buzzing unmanned machines will assume they are defeated before the first shot is fired.