The Automated Killing Fields
Attrition warfare is back with a vengeance. Even at today's early stages of autonomy, drones are turning battlefields into automated killing fields. Let's dig in.
We’ll reach a milestone in warfare this year when the number of drones deployed on the battlefield in Ukraine will outnumber the number of soldiers and vehicles. Drones will be everywhere, turning every moment of exposed movement into a deadly game, a cross between whack-a-mole and cat-and-mouse for individual soldiers and vehicles, while deep strikes on system-critical facilities and cities hundreds of miles in the rear occur daily.
These drones will range in capability from the $2k anti-personnel kamikaze drone to deep strike and ISR drones that cost many times that (still, an order or two of magnitude less than conventional alternatives).
Most will be airborne, but an increasing number will be seaborne and land-based (inexpensive AI-run turrets that repurpose everything from rifles to sniper rifles to RPGs).
The DIY conversions of Chinese drones (DJI Maviks) that made up most of the drones deployed in the first few years will slowly give ground to systematically manufactured variants produced in bulk and made with Chinese parts.
For the people fighting this war, burrowed in the earth and constantly fearful whenever exposed, it will be a horror, one that builds on and exceeds the WW1-style trench warfare that set the previous standard. An automated killing field fueled by the advent of inexpensive autonomous weapons, which are rapidly becoming more capable by the day.
We must dig into this topic systematically to understand what this means. Let’s start with some examples;
The Houthi drone attack on the massive Ghawar oil field (specifically Abqaiq, the world’s largest oil processing facility) in Saudi Arabia (2019) and its use of drones to blockade shipping in critical sea lanes, despite US intervention.
Ukrainian (air and sea) drone attacks on Russian oil facilities, military facilities, and the Russian navy, as well as Russian drone attacks on Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure.
Decisive use on the battlefield in the wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Russia and Ukraine.
The most important aspect of these examples is that drones have been surprising (a significant departure from conventional expectations) and, in some cases, decisive. Decisive surprise is a strong indicator that drone technology, and autonomy technologies in general, will transform warfare. Let’s explore how.
(image below; this is what happens when you optimize for the last war)
How Warfare Evolves
Let’s start with a quick overview of how technology has remade warfare in the past:
Repurposing existing technology with associated organizational and methodological changes to achieve decisive results (see * below for an example).
Iterative technological improvements to existing weapons and systems to achieve tactical and strategic advantage. Transformative technologies are often deployed in this manner at first. This is where we are at with drones right now.
Transformative technology combined with new theories of use and organizational design (rare). Blitzkrieg is a classic example.
Autonomy’s Development Arc
A drone is machine intelligence that can travel by air, land, or sea (on or below the surface). The greater the autonomy this intelligence has (the ability to make effective decisions and operate independently), the more competitive it is with soldiers and manned machines (tanks, aircraft, ships, submarines). As a result, the degree of autonomy attained will determine the inflection points in its development arc. For this analysis, let’s divide autonomy into three levels of increasing capability.