Surviving war on a drone battlefield

 

A British expert writes:

The key factor today is the electromagnetic spectrum – he who controls this, controls the battle space and will win the war. The ability to jam the enemy’s signals, and to push your own signals through enemy jamming, confers the ability to operate the most common kinds of drones in any given area. Often a nearby transmission relay – perhaps carried by a “mothership” drone higher above the battlefield – will let drones operate even inside the enemy jamming envelope, as the relay is nearer to the drones than the jammers are and has line of sight to them. In general the Ukrainians have tended to have the upper hand in this electromagnetic struggle, aided at times by harder-to-jam satellite communications such as Elon Musk’s well-known Starlink. But that doesn’t mean they’ve had things all their own way.

The contested electronic environment has seen the advent of drones trailing a hair-fine communications line back to their controller. Some in the media believe these to be a new thing, but in fact these drones appeared quite a long time ago. The line unspools as the drone flies along, in a similar fashion to old-school anti-tank missiles dating back many decades. The comms line can be kilometres long and is completely proof against jamming. This brings a slight smile to old soldiers like me who remember weapons such as the Tube-launched Optically-tracked Wire-guided (TOW) missile, as we see old-fashioned methods overcoming the latest and most brilliant electronic-warfare systems. The fibre optic drone will be effective until somebody produces a flying pair of scissors or something, which they will, and soon.

. . .

Many people have written off the main battle tank because so many thousands have been destroyed by these cheap and ubiquitous drones. But these have mostly been aged ex-Soviet examples dating from decades ago. Even the Western tanks which have been taken out have not been the latest and best available. I will argue in my new book that a properly equipped modern tank, with its own jamming equipment and automated Active Defence Systems (ADS) which can knock down incoming missiles and even hypervelocity penetrators fired by enemy tanks – let alone slow-flying drones – will survive and win. A tank’s massive power pack can generate enough electrical power that next generation tank jamming systems will be impenetrable by most drones, and any which do get through will fall victim to its ADS before they can strike. These 60-ton, rumbling armoured monsters will still be kings of the battlefield: the Israelis, who made ADS a reality and who are masters of electronic warfare, have no trouble operating their modern Merkava tanks in the teeth of Hamas and Hezbollah drones.

The other old-fashioned battle magic which will let us operate in the new electronic desert is Mission Command. This is the concept in military leadership ... that emphasises empowering subordinates to make decisions and act independently to achieve the commander’s intent. It’s about trust, initiative, and speed of action. The temptation is to neglect it in an era when we are all so very tied to our mobile phones, but the Ukraine war is showing us that we do this at our peril. A surfeit of communication has messed up at least as many military operations as a lack of it, and a commander at any level who waits to hear back from his boss when an opportunity appears in front of him is not a real officer at all.

When technology is changing warfare at an exponential rate, it is almost impossible to develop military capability for next year, let alone the next decade ... It is essential that we have a flexible and agile force, and that we are not too seduced by some new technology today which will be redundant tomorrow. The principles of war have not changed and at its heart are the soldiers who close with and fight the enemy.

There's more at the link.

From the perspective of an old-school "grunt", I hope he's right.  The thought of being a piece of living meat on a battlefield filled with robots determined to turn me into dead meat is not a happy one!

However, I'm not sure he's right.  Think of it in economic terms.  To recruit, train and deploy a single soldier on a technologically advanced battlefield must run into several hundreds of thousands of dollars, even for plain-and-simple infantry troops.  A battlefield hunter-killer drone costs (according to news reports) only one or two thousand dollars.  A drone controller can send out hundreds of the things and guide them to their targets, making it a very economical way to wage war.  The drones may have to be a lot bigger and more sophisticated to take out a big, heavily armored target like a tank, but that will only increase their price to, say, five figures instead of four;  and a modern tank, with all its sophistication, costs well into seven figures (some are apparently approaching eight figures).  Therefore, the cost advantage is still overwhelmingly on the side of the drones.

Can a battle be fought entirely by drones?  Yes, I suppose it can, in the sense of destroying an opposing force.  However, what about occupying the land on which the battle was fought?  I'm not sure a drone force could be useful for that.  Sure, they can kill anything and anyone trying to live there (including civilians such as farmers, travelers, etc. - drones won't discriminate unless their operators are willing to do so), but that's not the same as occupying and claiming it as one's own territory, because if one tries to do that, the enemy will kill your forces just as surely as you'll kill theirs.  Sounds more like a technological stalemate to me, a war without end.

Killing enemy soldiers until there are no longer enough of them to fight on used to be the way to win a war.  Now, when drones can be replaced off-the-shelf for relatively low cost, can enough of them be killed to have the same impact?  If lives are cheap to generals, drones are even cheaper.  Where might this take us in combat?  I'm not sure I want to know . . . except that I don't want to be on or anywhere near that battlefield!

Peter