The Economist January 29th 2022 Technology Quarterly Defence technology 11drones for the same price. And lowtech drones which can be used
as flying ieds will make things harder when fighting irregular
forces. But antidrone options should get better too. Stephen Bid
dle of Columbia University argues that the trends making drones
more capable will make antidrone systems better, too. Such sys
tems actually have an innate advantage, he suggests; they look up
into the sky, in which it is hard to hide, while drones look down at
the ground, where shelter and camouflage are more easily come
by. And small motors cannot lift much by way of armour.
Moving from cheap sensors to the most expensive, satellites
are both particularly valuable in terms of surveillance and com
munication and very vulnerable. America, China, India and Rus
sia, all of which would rely on satellites during a war, have all test
ed groundlaunched antisatellite missiles in the past two de
cades; some probably also have the ability to kill one satellite with
another. The degree to which they are ready to gouge out each oth
er’s eyes in the sky will be a crucial indicator of escalation should
any of those countries start fighting each other. Destroying satel
lites used to detect missile launches could presage a preemptive
nuclear strike—and for that very reason could bring one about.
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face
Satellites are also vulnerable to sensory overload, as are all sen
sors. Laser weapons which blind humans are outlawed by interna
tional agreement but those that blind cameras are not; nor are mi
crowave beams which fry electronics. America says that Russia
tries to dazzle its orbiting surveillance systems with lasers on a
regular basis.
The ability to jam, overload or otherwise deafen the other side’s
radar and radios is the province of electronic warfare (ew). It is a
regular part of military life to probe your adversaries’ ewcapabili
ties when you get a chance. The deployment of American and Rus
sian forces close to each other in northern Syria provided just such
an opportunity. “They are testing us every day,” General Raymond
Thomas, then head of American special forces, complained in
2018, “knocking our communications down” and going so far as
“disabling” America’s own ec-130 electronicwarfare planes.
In Green Dagger, an exercise held in California last October, an
American Marine Corps regiment was tasked with seizing a town
and two villages defended by an opposing force cobbled together
from other American marines, British and Dutch commandos and
Emirati special forces. It struggled to do so. When small teams of
British commandos attacked the regiment’s rear areas, paralysing
its advance, the marines were hard put to target them before they
moved, says Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, a
thinktank in London. One reason was the commandos’ effective
ewattacks on the marines’ command posts.
Just as what sees can be blinded and what hears, deafened,
what tries to understand can be confused. Britain’s national cyber
strategy, published in December, explicitly says that one task of
the country’s new National Cyber Force, a body staffed by spooks
and soldiers, is to “disrupt online and communications systems”.
Armies that once manoeuvred under air cover will now need to do
so under “cyberdeception cover”, says Ed Stringer, a retired air
marshal who led recent reforms in British military thinking.
“There’s a point at which the screens of the opposition need to go a
bit funny,” says Mr Stringer, “not so much that they immediately
spot what you’re doing but enough to distract and confuse.” In
time the lines between ew, cyberoffence and psychological oper
ations seem set to blur.
The ability to degrade the other side’s sensors, interrupt its
communications and mess with its head does not replace old
fashioned camouflage and newfangled stealth; they remain the
bread and butter of a modern military. Tanks are covered in fo
liage; snipers wear ghillie suits. Warplanes use radiationabsor
bent material and angled surfaces so as not to reflect radio waves
back to the radar that sent them. Russia has platoons dedicated to
spraying the air with aerosols designed to block ultraviolet, infra
red and radar waves. During their recent border standoff, India
and China both employed camouflage designed to confuse sen
sors with a broader spectral range than the human eye.
According to Mr Biddle, over the past 30 years “cover and con
cealment”, along with other tactics, have routinely allowed forces
facing American precision weapons to avoid major casualties. He
points to the examples of alQaeda at the Battle of Tora Bora in
eastern Afghanistan in 2001 and Saddam Hussein’s Republican
Guard in 2003, both of whom were overrun in close combat rather
than through longrange strikes. Weapons get more lethal, he
says, but their targets adapt.
Hiding is made easier by the fact that the seekers’ new capabili
ties, impressive as they may be, are constrained by the realities of
budgets and logistics. Not everything armies want can be afford
ed; not everything they procure can be put into the field in a timely
manner. In real operations, as opposed to PowerPoint presenta
tions, sensor coverage is never unlimited.
“There is no way that we're going to be able to see everything,
all of the time, everywhere,” says a British general. “It's just phys
ically impossible. And therefore there will always be something
that can happen without us seeing it.” In the Green Dagger exercise
the attacking marine regiment lacked thermalimaging equip
ment and did not have prompt access to satellite pictures. It was a
handicap, but a realistic one. Rounding up commandos was not
the regiment’s “main effort”, in military parlance. It might well not
have been kitted out for it.
When hiding is hard, it helps to increase the number of things
the enemy has to look at. “With modern sensors...it is really, really
difficult to avoid being detected,” says Petter Bedoire, the chief
technology officer for Saab, a Swedish arms company. “So instead
you need to saturate your adversaries’ sensors and their situation
al awareness.” A system looking at more things will make more
mistakes. Stretch it far enough and it could even collapse, as poor
ly configured servers do when hackers mount “denial of service”
attacks designed to overwhelm them with internet traffic.