Have Drones (and Cyber) Revolutionized Warfare? (Part 1)

Tim Hsia and Jared Sperli, Army reservists and ROTC instructors, wrote an interesting piece in The New York Times Monday suggesting that cyberwarfare and drones represent a revolution in in military affairs similar to what the aircraft carrier meant to naval warfare. “Historians,” they write, “will look back and see advancements in cyberwarfare and robotics as the first two revolutions in military affairs of the 21st century.”

Are they correct?

In his classic work, Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling argued that the basic nature of warfare in the civilized world has remained constant. Roughly speaking, two adversaries deploy forces against one another with the implied threat of targeting the others’ civilian population and engage in combat/deadly force. Once one side’s forces are either sufficiently weakened through attrition or outmaneuvered so that they unable to protect their noncombatants, that side surrenders on the political question at stake that Clausewitz argues is at the root of all wars. (Or something like that . . . it has been a long time since comps back in grad school).

Thus, whether the killing is done with clubs and spears or tanks and bombers, the nature of war remains essentially unchanged, only the means of gaining the strategic leverage to threaten the other side’s population evolves. (i.e. Tanks using blitzkrieg tactics could initially get behind enemy lines faster than any operational counterstroke; Planes from aircraft carriers could threaten to decimate an enemy fleet without facing return fire; Nuclear ICBMs could eliminate entire civilian populations without having to first defeat the adversary’s intervening military forces). If we strictly interpret Schelling's thesis (with which, granted, not everyone may agree) then tanks and carriers represent evolutions rather than revolutions, since they could be eventually countered by anti-tank weapons/defenses, or by other carriers. Conversely, since strategic defenses against nuclear weapons have yet to be perfected (other than deterrence through an assured second-strike capability), this is arguably the only truly revolutionary weapon-to-date. . .

. . . until cyberwarfare, that is.

But first, let’s consider UAVs/drones. Here, it is important to distinguish the technology itself from their current operational/strategic use. I (and others) have argued that properly understood, UAVs are best understood as an evolutionary leap in the technology of conducting air strikes, wherein their size allows them greater loiter time than conventional bombers, and thus both greater discrimination and precision in target selection (as well as not putting human pilots at risk). Theoretically, however, they are susceptible to the same countermeasures as manned crafts, only we are using them against adversaries lacking sophisticated air defenses or technology to jam a sustained drone campaign. If we attempted to use drones on a massive scale against a more capable conventional enemy (i.e. Iran, for example), it is unclear whether they would achieve the same effects. (We could obviously jam enemy air defenses, as we did in Iraq 2003, or as the Israelis did before bombing Syria's nuclear weapons site in 2007, but that further emphasizes the similarity to manned aircraft). This is not to say they would not be extremely useful in such conflicts and reduce airman casualties significantly, but the presence of large numbers of UAVs would not necessarily revolutionize the fundamental tenets of close air support or strategic bombing.

However, UAVs do provide the perfect operational capability for a sustained targeted killing campaign against al-Qa’ida and its affiliates. Two U.S. administrations have chosen a decapitation strategy because the jihadists who comprise the terror network have a such a fanatical belief in the righteousness of their cause that – in Schelling’s terms – there is no civilian population we could sufficiently threaten or conduct punitive strikes against that would dissuade them from their course, as they would merely shrug these fatalities off as “martyrs” for the holy cause. Thus, even if you believe that we are more likely to be militarily engaged with groups of supranational non-state actors - or even superempowered individuals than conventionally armed nation-states in the future - then it is the nature of the adversary that is driving the anti-Schelling/anti-Clausewitzian nature of the Drone War, not the nature of the technology.

Now, if we fought an adversary with its own drone capability (or robot battalions, if you will), and the primary battles were drone-versus-drone with the loser surrendering on the political question as soon as its drones were defeated in order to avoid human casualties (sort of like the original Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon,” only without the disintegration booths), that would be revolutionary. This is exactly what true cyberwar would look like, as theoretically cyberweapons could be used to attack an adversary’s civilian population by devastating their infrastructure through cyberattacks on dams, electrical grids, air traffic control, etc, without ever having to defeat their tanks, bombers, or massed infantry. Worse, such an attack could theoretically be conducted by non-state actors (i.e. al-Qa’ida investing in computer engineers rather than chemical/biological weapons experts; or a completely nihilist offshoot of a group akin to Anonymous or LulzSec), could be conducted in milliseconds rather than even the half-hour it takes for a missile’s intercontinental flight, and in theory could significantly degrade the ability to conduct a retaliatory strike (presuming there is a reasonable certainty of attribution, which is far from a given).

That is a revolution in warfare.

Fortunately, thus far only a few actors (i.e. the United States, Russia, China, and maybe Israel, to name a few) possess the resources/capability to launch such an attack. This not only makes attribution (and consequently deterrence) easier, it also means that -- as was the case during the Cold War -- the political questions in dispute are less likely to rise to the level requiring full-scale conflict. This is a good thing, to be sure.

But I don’t think there are any security experts out there who believe that if the political tensions were elevated enough to justify military conflict (i.e. a full-scale Chinese invasion of Taiwan or another American ally in Asia) that the conflict wouldn’t first erupt as a cyberwar before American and Chinese aircraft ever came within sight of one another.

The soldiers on Eminiar VII (or was it Vendikar?) knew about revolutions in military affairs . . . not so much about stylish headgear.