9 Military Technology
Smith
Military technology is a hugely important area of innovation, and yet it generally results in things getting blown up and society going to hell for a while. Also worrying is how many of the new military technologies are specialized for use off the battlefield.
In 2014, I wrote a post in which I argued that drone dominance of the battlefield would change human society forever:
[I]magine yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries before it), the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse archer—a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life training in the ways of war. Imagine that guy’s surprise when he was shot off his horse by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long metal tube and just two weeks’ worth of training. Just a regular guy with a gun.
That day was the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity. For centuries after that fateful day, gun-toting infantry ruled the battlefield. Military success depended more and more on being able to motivate large groups of (gun-wielding) humans, instead of on winning the loyalty of the highly trained warrior-noblemen. But sometime in the near future, the autonomous, weaponized drone may replace the human infantryman as the dominant battlefield technology. And as always, that shift in military technology will cause huge social upheaval.Six years later, I watched my vision come true. In the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, Azerbaijan used drones — purchased cheaply and easily from Turkey and Israel — to crush the vaunted Armenian army in a short space of time. Armenian troops were renowned as masters of infantry warfare and heavy weaponry, but their tanks, missile launchers, artillery, and transport vehicles were sitting ducks for their foes’ cheap disposable drones. No matter how well they concealed their vehicles, the drones could easily spot and destroy them. You can see the incredible toll catalogued at the blog Oryx, with full documentation of each destroyed vehicle.
This should be as big a wakeup call as the Battle of Taranto or the firebombing of Guernica. Drones have changed warfare.
Unless electronic countermeasures or directed energy weapons become very good, very fast, drones will scour the battlefield of human-controlled heavy weaponry at a very low cost, with little risk of life. And they create another battlespace to be fought over — the low-altitude air, where traditional piloted aircraft no longer go (for fear of being shot down), where radars have trouble spotting threats.
Already countries are racing to build or buy cutting-edge drone systems; this is a true arms race. But we won’t know who wins that race unless and until there is a major war.
But the real transformative drone technology might still be in its infancy.
The drones that won the war for Azerbaijan are traditional fossil fuel powered aircraft. Advances in Li-ion batteries have given rise to small, cheap, difficult-to-see, difficult-to-shoot quadcopters. Already, militaries are finding creative uses for these: The IDF (Israel Army) has been using drones to drop tear gas on protesters in Ramallah and the West Bank.
Another example is the UK, whose air force is testing networked swarms of drones to overwhelm radar systems.
The disturbing possibility is that nations might simply exist in a state of low-grade cyberwarfare at all times, attempting to disable each other’s infrastructure.
What COVID-19 made people realize was that you don’t need to create some super-deadly virus in order to severely disrupt a society. All you need is a very contagious disease with a mortality rate high enough to scare people. If you’re a very very unscrupulous country, you could surreptitiously vaccinate most of your population against this disease and then unleash it on the world.
Crispr technology and DNA synthesis, which are increasingly available to the public, might conceivably create a lot of weird bioweapons that act very differently to the viruses we’re used to.
Most of the modern military technologies led themselves to a very different kind of great-power war — a war of constant sniping and harassment. Assassin drones, cyberattacks, info ops, and bioweapons raise the possibility of never-ending low-grade attacks that are below the threshold of massive retaliation.
To forestall this, military strategists should try very hard to think of new, robust, sophisticated methods of deterrence. Deterrence is the key to peace; it’s risky, but when it’s successful, it makes military technology act as a protector of human life rather than a destroyer of it. If new technology makes deterrence impossible, it might condemn us to a future where everyone is always on the offense.