Most of those interested in military and aviation history know how bombing forces developed. At first bombs (very small ones) were dropped on front lines and support positions behind those lines - because the aircraft of the day couldn't reach any further. As aircraft grew bigger, faster and more powerful, strategic bombing - attacking the enemy's population centers, factories, ports, etc. - became the new paradigm. It mattered not whether your bombs actually hit a military target, because every target was now considered to be supporting the enemy's war effort. Destroy an orphanage because it was built right next door to an industrial estate? No problem. Those orphans became "collateral damage" - unintended victims of the war. Those who killed them bore no moral responsibility for their deaths. They were simply "taking the war to the enemy", and that was a justifiable action.
Nuclear weapons didn't alter that scenario, except for the fact that one bomb could now destroy an entire city. Air forces didn't need to send hundreds of aircraft to drop thousands of bombs (and be attacked as they did so, losing many aircraft and their crews to enemy defenses). Instead, aircraft need not be sent at all. A missile could drop a warhead accurately enough to spare the bomber crews from the losses they would otherwise incur.
However, drone technology is evolving so fast that it's changing the nature of technology in war. It's not so much new as evolved . . . but that evolution is happening so quickly that it seems nobody can keep up with it. Take Ukraine, for example. When Russia invaded, Ukraine had effectively no air superiority to speak of, and few modern, high-technology weapons. In their absence, Ukrainians had to develop new technologies as quickly as they could - and they did so very effectively. We all know how Ukrainian drones stalemated the Russian advance in the Donbas area, and have led to a World War I-style trench warfare where neither side dares to advance in strength, for fear of the massive drone counterattack that would ensue.
What's more, Ukraine has now developed much larger, long-range attack drones that have gone far beyond what anyone had expected. Indeed, they've blurred the distinction between "drone" and "cruise missile" until the terms are almost interchangeable. Consider that a few days ago, Ukraine attacked a Russian oil refinery in Saratov, more than 1,700 miles from the launch site of the FP-5 Flamingo drones. The FP-5 is claimed to have a maximum range of some 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles). Is it a drone, or a cruise missile, or both?
Smaller drones have so altered the shape of modern conflict that they may even render nuclear weapons superfluous (at least in terms of the destruction of a nation's ability to wage war). HMS Defiant commented recently:
I see that some people who ought to know better are still nattering about the state of our munitions and our general unreadiness to wage war against China. Yes, yes, I know, dead horse, thoroughly beaten already but I did want to point out that the country that can turn out 80,000,000 iphones in a couple of months probably has no trouble turning out 40,000,000 high end killer drones with 300 mile ranges and 250 pound warheads.
The goal of the SIOP was to bathe in [nuclear] fire targets that needed to be destroyed affirmatively. If one could achieve the same effect by applying precise 250 pound bombs directly to the actual target and not just the neighborhood or city, then the same effect is achieved without all the excess radiation.
This poses a logical mans thinking problem for the evening. Every single HQ and logistics warehouse and fuel dump in Asia and the Western Pacific is in a precise, down to the inch known location on a target map. The putative bad guys have 40,000,000 drones. The other bad apples north of the 38th are known to be making lots of drones of their own and furnishing to their very good friends in Moscow.
. . .
You know another place where the heads lie uneasy at night? Yeah, Taiwan is in easy flight range of 40,000,000 expendable killer drones.
It does make me wonder though. Just what the hell is our answer to those 40,000,000 drones? ... We treat all weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, etc) as nuclear weapons and will retaliate if they are used against us. What possible form will retaliation take if drones alone are enough to execute a complete decapitation strike at just about every level of government overnight?
There's more at the link. Go read it all.
He poses an excellent question, to which (I suspect) nobody in the US government has developed any concrete, practical response as yet. Perhaps they should move faster on that . . .
Peter
7 comments:
I have been wondering, since the advent of the powered hang glider, why the Cubans in Miami haven't been bombarding Cuba with these things fitted with small explosive or incendiary warheads and a leaf blower motor. Cost would be under $100/unit, and the impact would be disproportionate.
Not like this is new, the V-1 entered service in 1944 and was in essence a self guided (poorly) strategic/terror weapon. The US Rigel Missile could deliver the W5 warhead in the early Cold War. There is of course, the Tomahawk with its original TERCOM navigation system that could deliver its payload (conventional or nuclear) to a particular point with accuracy to within a few meters pre GPS. These used to be the tools of top tier militaries requiring the funding of a large military industrial complex to design and build the guidance and propulsion packages. The propulsion is now well within the hobbyist RC world, and the software and electronics can be supplied with small cheap SBC (single board computers) like the smaller Raspberry PI, or the ESP32. A Tomahawk missile cost's ~$2.5 million (likely not amortizing engineering development costs that were funded up front). Using high end RC parts (in particular ducted fan or jet propulsion), a SBC, Software locally developed, and several off the shelf automotive components (eg radars for terrain sensing) an autonomous cruise craft can probably be cranked out with a multi hundred mile range in the low to mid thousands of dollars range. If the cost is $10K you can buy 250 for the price of a Tomahawk. They'll be crude and accuracy will be dependent on whether your opponent messes with GPS signals in their neighborhood. Also they'll be rather prone to being defeated with high energy millimeter band weapons (essentially radar used to cause electrical noise/failure). Maybe if you double the cost you can put in enough shielding although that adds weigh and some things (like your Sensors) have to stick through the Faraday cage. Also, to get payload in the 100's of pound range (A conventional Tomahawk D model warhead is 690 lbs with 265 being a military grade high explosive, original was 1000lbs high explosive or W80 nuclear warhead) it would be at the high end of RC work; actually a Cessna 172 has a gross capacity after fuel of ~1000lbs. A Beechcraft Musketeer has about a 750 lb limit after fuel. Both top out about 125 knots airspeed. You might want to see if the plans for the old Bede BD-5J still exist; it topped out at like 250knots for the J (jet version) and was a kit plane, so the plans are probably VERY detailed, It had a 300 lb carrying capacity though you'd likely need 100lbs of that for fuel. Range was 935 miles, cost was like $30-50K, though a lot of that was for avionics that may NOT be needed. even at $50K your at 50 for the price of 1 Tomahawk, and stopping a wave of 50 targets is harder than stopping 1. And the current low end antiair weapon (e.g. US Stinger Manpad) runs about $40k a shot and production of them is not huge.
Unfortunately, the US .gov and military still believes (in general, not Milley) that the Treaty of Westphalia still matters, and would have to stop them.
John in Indy
I think a good distinction between a cruise missile and a drone is that a cruise missile is launched with the target pre-determined and doesn't need further direction (although it may be capable of in-flight reprogramming), and a one-way s**cide drone needs direction and two-way communication (sensor feed outward, control inputs inward) to find its target.
Which would put the Shahed drones into the category of low-cost cruise missile, not drone.
One nuke is its on form of decapitation strike... Just sayin...
AI will change drone activities as it evolves and as microcomputers gain power. Think of flying terminators.
ANd in fact the Ukraine/Russia war has shown that distinction. Very quickly both sides took to running blanketing radio noise at the control frequencies used by most known commercial and military drones. The solution to this was one that had used before in the US TOW (Tube Launched Optically Guided Wire Controlled) missiles and in some cold war era torpedoes. This led to battlefields covered with large amounts of optical fiber used to control the drones. But this is impractical past a couple thousand meters. You thus have to move to guidance. Simple versions of this (V-1, Rigel) depended on mechanical inputs and crude accelerometers combined with simple dead reckoning. The early Tomahawks used some very sophisticated inertial navigation hardware combined with a ground radar that was used to compare pieces of terrain(tercom) with known high resolution maps that let you cancel out errors that accumulate in the dead reckoning calculations over time. Later models also use GPS signals although that CAN be spoofed and/or overwhelmed. The $50 K inertial guidance sensors that lived in Trident D5 and Tomahawk missiles are really only a few percent better than the modern accelerometers that live in basic cell phone chips that are a few bucks each in quantities of 1000+. Amazing what 40 years of technical advancement provides. Modern dead reckoning, even without RADAR or GPS correction, is probably good to .1 percent of the distance traveled, so a 500 Kilometer shot is likely within 50 meters of the target. Unless the target is a hardened revetment or silo, that's likely a kill with 250-300 lbs of high explosive.
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