Modern Military Problems

Or, how to not lose to Iran again

For the WSJ, Yaroslav Trofimov writes,

are the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested by the U.S., its allies and rivals in new tanks, planes and warships going to become the equivalent of buying horses and arrows on the eve of machine guns and howitzers?

…what used to be the safe rear hundreds of miles away from the front line is now contested…The proliferation of cheap sensors has also made any massed maneuver, such as an armored thrust akin to the U.S. assault on Iraq in 2003, much more difficult because any concentration of troops can be spotted quickly and attacked well before reaching the battlefield.

…Even a country without a conventional air force can now achieve localized air superiority thanks to drones.

One feature is the rapid pace of innovation.

what used to be cutting-edge weapons and technologies becomes outdated within months.

…the [drone] weapon becomes, in a way, a subscription service rather than an object, constantly updated and redesigned to fit changing battlefield conditions.

Similarly, in a podcast with Yascha Mounk, Arvind Narayanan says,

I think the Ukraine war has shown very clearly that the advantage now lies less in built-up capacity, and more in the speed of innovation that adversaries are able to produce during warfare on the ground. The cycles of drone and counter-drone tactics, from what I’ve seen, seem to be evolving at a pace of something like six weeks, to the point where if you’re six weeks behind the state of the art in the latest jamming technology or whatever it is, you can get overpowered by the other side’s new innovations.

…I think the answer to a lot of this kind of asymmetric potential, when it comes to terrorism, for instance, using small devices—or historically with dynamite, when that was a new technology—a lot of the time the answer has been more surveillance. With dynamite, from what I understand, for several decades anybody could just assassinate people in power; there was nothing you could do about it. The way that got mitigated was by having much more comprehensive surveillance.

I bet that we are going to have to fight the Iranian regime again. And in order to win, I think we will need at least two capabilities.

One capability is exquisite mapping. Using a combination of aerial photography and AI, we will need highly accurate estimates of likely locations of Iran’s key military personnel and sites for munitions manufacturing, munitions storage, and missile launchers.

The second capability is miniature special forces. In the war against the Taliban, our special forces infiltrated into Afghanistan and called in air strikes. For Iran, we will need many more special forces. But instead of humans, they should use very small communication devices that we can deploy, presumably by drone gliders discharged from aircraft, near suspected military installations. These devices should have sensors and AI to detect underground activity, such as missiles or drones being positioned for launch. The devices should have the means to communicate to aircraft to direct attacks against these sites.