Coffee Break: Armed Madhouse – The Rise of the Drones

There is something new in the air in military affairs. Inexpensive and deadly small drone helicopters are revolutionizing conventional warfare. In a refreshing departure from journalistic malpractice, the New York Times recently ran a detailed feature article describing the growing significance of drone warfare in the fighting in Ukraine. The article reported that currently about 70% of all casualties in the Ukraine war are inflicted by drones. In this coffee break I will take a broader view of the advent of unmanned weaponry and consider its future implications.

The Drone Explosion

Drones are experiencing an evolutionary explosion as they invade every domain of military conflict. In the air, on land, at sea, and even in space, drones promise to change dramatically the character of armed conflict. I won’t try to catalog all the categories of current drone life forms, but they are clearly evolving in unexpected ways.

The Orwellian possibilities are not difficult to imagine



Enabling Technologies

The reason why drones are evolving so rapidly and unpredictably is that both microchip power and AI software technology are on exponential growth curves. The cheap and capable cameras and processors in our phones are providing the eyes and brains for inexpensive drones. At the same time, fierce competition in AI development is pushing out the frontiers of machine vision, problem solving, and adaptive behavior for drones. Weapons designers can now use COTS (commercial off the shelf) hardware and software that dramatically reduces the cost of drones. Moreover, the ability to upgrade the “intelligence” of drones via software downloads means that, unlike conventional military hardware, the capabilities of a drone arsenal can continue to grow after the hardware is deployed.

The Power of the Swarm

Quantity has a quality all its own. — Joseph Stalin

On the battlefields of Ukraine, $5,000 drones have destroyed U.S. supplied M1 Abrams tanks costing $7 million. Because a drone can attack the weakest points of a tank, where the armor is thinnest, a single drone can usually achieve a mobility kill, preventing the tank from moving. Then follow-on drone attacks can completely destroy it. Vehicles with less armor are usually destroyed by a single drone impact.



Although many measures have been taken to counter the drone threat, these have been largely ineffective. Jamming the signals controlling drones doesn’t work with drones controlled over fiber optic cables or drones using machine vision for terminal guidance. Active protection systems (APS) designed to intercept drones are costly, dangerous to friendly forces, and unreliable. Moreover it is impractical to retrofit APS to all vehicles on the battlefield. Improvised “turtle tanks” covered with external sheets of armor can survive a few drone hits, but drones can find gaps in the armor or drop mines in front of them.

The cost-effectiveness of military drones overwhelmingly favors their increasing usage. In the Ukraine war, drones are so plentiful that they are often used to attack small groups of infantry, and sometimes individual soldiers.

Here is a list of the drone types in use in this war

The OODA Loop and the Kill Chain

The great intellectual achievement of Colonel John Boyd was a universal model of competitive dynamics in armed conflict. Boyd determined that the essence of any fight was the execution by each combatant of a series of steps he called the OODA loop. Each fighter Observes the situation, Orients new information relative to his intentions, Decides on an action, and Acts on the decision. All other things being equal, the combatant who can execute the OODA loop faster than the opponent will win the fight. The genius of Boyd’s model is that it extends across the entire spectrum of conflict, irrespective or scale or complexity, from boxers in the ring to competing companies in a market, to opposing armies in the field.

When we superimpose the graphic of the OODA loop on a diagram of the current drone attack kill chain, it becomes clear that removing human decision input from the engage step of the chain accelerates the OODA loop and confers competitive advantage. This is the cause of the evolutionary pressure that will drive drone developers and operators to give engagement authority, the license to kill, to AI-guided drones.

Drones Alone (aka Skynet)

The complete replacement of human combatants by drone forces is a technologically feasible end state for the evolution of drone weaponry. There is no reason why the command hierarchy of human armed forces cannot be emulated and improved upon by appropriate software, with every level of operational units responsive to commands from above it and directing the levels below. The greater decision-making bandwidth of automated control nodes would likely result in a highly efficient and flexible organization of forces. Thus, under competitive evolutionary pressure, it is likely that the current hybrid human/drone order of battle will steadily shift its composition toward a full drone force, with considerable autonomy, operating under high-level human directives.

An obvious danger of fully automated military forces is departure from human control. The depiction of AI-directed killing machines turning against their human creators is now a staple of dystopian science fiction. Accordingly, considerable design effort will be devoted to to preventing runaway drone forces. However, given the likely self-generating and adaptive character of future AI software, the reliability of such absolute control would be uncertain.  Unfortunately, like the advent of nuclear weapons, the genie of drone warfare is out of the bottle. Civilization faces a new danger from technological innovation again outpacing the creation of the political structures required to govern it.

Conclusion

The rise of the drones conforms to a pernicious behavioral equation that threatens the modern world:

Technological Ingenuity + Organized Irresponsibility = Growing Risk of Disaster

The ingenuity of a highly trained, funded, and motivated global STEM workforce is creating a steady stream of unprecedented innovations in weaponry. Powerful corporate and government entities are funding and deploying these weapons irresponsibly, heedless of the long-term dangers. The result is unsustainable compounding of risks to the world, risks that may lead to human extinction. To paraphrase John Donne: Ask not for whom the drones swarm. They swarm for thee.