Small-machine Warfare
Trying to extrapolate
In the recently-passed House Armed Services Committee draft of the National Defense Authorization Act, members supported the creation of a new branch in the US Army, one specifically dedicated to drones. According to congressional language, this new Drone Corps would be responsible for projects, programs, and activities dealing with small and medium unmanned aircraft, systems that support these aircraft, and counter-UAS systems among other duties.
In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicted that in the year 2019,
Most flying weapons are tiny—some as small as insects—with microscopic flying weapons being researched.
Like many of Kurzweil’s predictions, this was too aggressive in terms of timeline. Flying weapons did not shrink to the size of insects by 2019. Drones, which he predicted for 2009, are only now coming into their own.
But directionally his predictions seem correct to me. I find it plausible that warfare will be changed on land, sea, and air by small machines. That means tiny drones in the air, tiny submarines at sea, and tiny robots on land.
Your guess is as good as mine about how this will play out. But for what it’s worth, here are my speculations.
Proximity matters
The big disadvantage of small machines is that they cannot travel very far very fast. Today, the United States can project power anywhere in the world with its aircraft carrier task forces and its missiles. Small machines cannot do that.
To use small machines effectively, you will have to move them close to the enemy. For example, suppose that we think of the conflict in the Middle East as one between Iran and Israel. Iran, via its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, can use small machines, notably rockets, against Israel. But Israel cannot use small machines against Iran.
As weapons get smaller, countries may be able to infiltrate weapons inside enemy countries. Then any country might be vulnerable to attacks from small machines.
Location Awareness matters
The rockets used by Iran’s proxies seem to lack location awareness. That makes them inaccurate. If they were accurate, they would be much more powerful.
In warfare, it is advantageous if you can see the enemy but the enemy cannot see you. This is especially the case with small machines. In order to be effective, they need to be able to see but not be seen. They have to know where they are relative to targets. But if their own location is known to the enemy, they can be easily destroyed.
An implication is that it would be really helpful to be able to jam or penetrate the guidance systems of an enemy’s small machines. And it will be important to protect the guidance systems of your own small machines.
Redundancy matters
In order to attack large machines, small machines will need to have overwhelming numbers. A few tiny submarines will not be much use against an aircraft carrier task force. But hundreds of tiny submarines might be more of a threat.
Another form of redundancy is decoys. If you launch a hundred decoy drones for every armed drone, the enemy will waste effort shooting down decoys.
Drone swarms represent a possible breakthrough in many aspects of warfighting. Manipulating drone swarms requires fast downloading of massive amounts of information, fast computation of alternatives, and fast response to new instructions, all on secure communications with secure geo-positioning.
This seems to combine the ideas of location awareness and redundancy.
Small vs. Large
One risk of using small machines to attack an enemy that has large machines is that the enemy could respond with massive retaliation. This could make the attack self-defeating, like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Hamas and Hezbollah have used the approach of shooting rockets while mobilizing world opinion against massive retaliation. But it is not clear that Israel will bow to world opinion.
The other approach is to try to make attacks by small machines decisive. This would mean trying to take the enemy by surprise and destroying its large machines. I do not believe that small machines have this capability yet. But it is something that requires watching.
Again, I am not an expert on this. Comments from readers, experts or not, are welcome.
Very interesting speculation. For what it's worth, here's my comment. You said "Another form of redundancy is decoys. If you launch a hundred decoy drones for every armed drone, the enemy will waste effort shooting down decoys." This reminds me of one of the steps in ballistic missile development. American designers thought it would be useful to add decoy warheads to missiles, in order to frustrate anti-ballistic missile defenses. In order to make the decoys work, they would have to mimic real warheads - similar size, mass, etc. But, if you were going to make something that looked like a warhead and had the same mass as a warhead, you might as well make it a warhead. Thus was born the MIRV - Multiple Independently targeted Re-entry Vehicles. In the same way, I expect that it won't be cost-effective to build decoy drones - just build more and more.
Drones are absolutely the new thing.
I wrote a thing shortly after the Ukraine invasion started where I noted the importance of drones and earlier this year I wrote a follow up - https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/attack-of-the-drones-revisited
One of the things I would note is that drone motherships carrying other drones is absolutely a thing. As is the potential at least for drones to be launched from something apparently innocuous like a shipping container. If Israel wanted to attack Iran with drones the obvious thing to do would be to send a container ship to somewhere apparently innocuous like Mumbai and launch many many drones from it as it got close to Iran. A drone fishing boat that had drones in the holds where there used to be fish would also work for this kind of thing. That's maybe not as relevant for Israel vs Iran but it absolutely is something that countries in the vicinity of West Taiwan ought to be looking at