Update on drone warfare

An important opinion (not paywalled) by Raj M. Shah (managing partner of Shield Capital) and Christopher Kirchhoff (helped build the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit) the NYT published comments on the sloth-speed of innovation by America's bloated, arrogant, deceitful military:

A.I. Is Changing War. We Are Not Ready.

In the opening battle of the First Matabele War, fought between 1893 and 1894, roughly 700 soldiers, paramilitaries and African auxiliaries aligned with the British South Africa Company used five Maxim guns — the world’s first fully automatic weapon — to help repel over 5,000 Ndebele warriors, some 1,500 of whom were killed at a cost of only a handful of British soldiers. .... initial accounts of its singular effectiveness correctly foretold the end of the cavalry, a critical piece of combat arms since the Iron Age.

We stand at the precipice of an even more consequential revolution in military affairs today. A new wave of war is bearing down on us. Artificial-intelligence-powered autonomous weapons systems are going global. And the U.S. military is not ready for it

 

Weeks ago, the world experienced another Maxim gun moment: The Ukrainian military evacuated U.S.-provided M1A1 Abrams battle tanks from the front lines after many of them were reportedly destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones. The withdrawal of one of the world’s most advanced battle tanks in an A.I.-powered drone war foretells the end of a century of manned mechanized warfare as we know it.

Techno-skeptics who argue against the use of A.I. in warfare are oblivious to the reality that autonomous systems are already everywhere — and the technology is increasingly being deployed to these systems’ benefit. Hezbollah’s alleged use of explosive-laden drones has displaced at least 60,000 Israelis south of the Lebanon border. Houthi rebels are using remotely controlled sea drones to threaten the 12 percent of global shipping value that passes through the Red Sea, including the supertanker Sounion, now abandoned, adrift and aflame, with four times as much oil as was carried by the Exxon Valdez. And in the attacks of Oct. 7, Hamas used quadcopter drones — which probably used some A.I. capabilities — to disable Israeli surveillance towers along the Gaza border wall, allowing at least 1,500 fighters to pour over a modern-day Maginot line and murder over 1,000 Israelis ....

Yet as this is happening, the Pentagon still overwhelmingly spends its dollars on legacy weapons systems. It continues to rely on an outmoded and costly technical production system to buy tanks, ships and aircraft carriers that new generations of weapons — autonomous and hypersonic — can demonstrably kill.

Take for example the F-35, the apex predator of the sky. The fifth-generation stealth fighter is known as a “flying computer” for its ability to fuse sensor data with advanced weapons.

Yet this $2 trillion program has fielded fighter airplanes with less processing power than many smartphones. It’s the result of a technology production system bespoke to the military and separate from the consumer technology ecosystem. The F-35 design was largely frozen in 2001, the year the Pentagon awarded its contract to Lockheed Martin. By the time the first F-35 was rolling down the runway, technology’s state of the art had already flown far past it. This year, the iPhone 16 arrives. Today, the F-35 is slowly progressing through its third technology upgrade with newer, but far from state-of-the-art, processors. The core issue is that this slow hardware refresh cycle prevents the F-35 from fully taking advantage of the accelerating advancements in A.I.

China, of course, doesn’t need a Defense Innovation Unit; Xi Jinping and his predecessor, Hu Jintao, mandated that civilian technology be available to the People’s Liberation Army. This top-down, state-run economy is chasing quantum computers, nuclear-capable hypersonic weapons, and lofting into orbit its own 13,000-satellite equivalent to Starlink.

This is the civilizational race we’re in.

The way to win against both China and low-cost weapons in Ukraine and the Mideast is to unleash our market-based system so that scrappy, fast-moving product companies and the venture funds that back them revitalize our military’s technology pipeline. .... The question now is whether we can achieve this transformation in time to deter the next great power war and prevail in the more contained conflicts that threaten to envelop the U.S. and our allies.

“The history of failure in war can almost be summed up in two words: Too late,” Douglas MacArthur declared hauntingly in 1940. Eighty-four years later, on the eve of tensions not unlike what preceded prior great power conflict, we would do well to heed MacArthur’s warning.

There seems to be some truth in this. I'm not sure how big a deal a nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon would be, since regular-sonic nuclear weapons can do the job just fine. But the author's point about a major threat from swarms of AI drones rings true. I've posted about weaponized drones the US military is developing several times. From what limited information I looked at, the US military is trying to convert to drones. 

What I do not know is whether the US effort is too little and too slow as the authors warn. From what I can tell, there is little chance of international treaties to limit mechanized drone weapon development and deployment. The US military strongly opposes that. So, like it or not, drone warfare probably will largely replace regular weapons of war. Probably sooner than later. Who knows, maybe swarms of AI-driven drones can be produced and used to intercept nuclear tipped ICBMs. 

I do not know how this will play out. To me, this has a bad feel to it. That's just me and my early warning system (brain-mind) going off. It has not always been wrong. Is there a weapons engineer in the house? Grumble, grumble . . . . . .

Hand-held US anti-drone weapons in development use shotgun type pellets, 

nets, lasers, microwaves or rifle-mounted RF and/or GPS jammers