12 Technology QuarterlyDefence technology TheEconomistJanuary29th 2022
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Economist.com/technology-quarterlyDividing your forces is a good way to increase the cognitive
load. A lot of small groups are harder to track and target than a few
big ones, as the commandos in Green Dagger knew. What is more,
if you take shots at one group you reveal some of your shooters to
the rest. The less valuable each individual target is, the bigger an
issue that becomes.
Decoys up the ante. During the first Gulf war Saddam Hussein
unleashed his arsenal of Scud missiles on Bahrain, Israel and Sau
di Arabia. The coalition Scud hunters responsible for finding the
small (on the scale of a vast desert) mobile missile launchers he
was using seemed to have all the technology they might wish for:
satellites that could spot the thermalinfrared signature of a rock
et launch, aircraft bristling with radar and special forces spread
over tens of thousands of square kilometres acting as spotters. Ne
vertheless an official study published two years later concluded
that there was no “indisputable” proof that America had struck
any launchers at all “as opposed to highfidelity decoys”.
One of the advantages data fusion offers seekers is that it de
mands more of decoys; in surveillance aircraft electronic emis
sions, radar returns and optical images can now be displayed on a
single screen, highlighting any discrepancies between an object’s
visual appearance and its electronic signa
ture. But decoymaking has not stood still.
Iraq’s fake Scuds looked like the real thing to
unobservers just 25 metres away; verisimili
tude has improved “immensely” since then,
particularly in the past decade, says Steen Bis
gaard, the founder of GaardTech, an Austra
lian company which builds replica vehicles to
serve as both practice targets and decoys.
Mr Bisgaard says he can sell you a very con
vincing mobile simulacrum of a British Chal
lenger II tank, one with a turret and guns that
move, the heat signature of a massive diesel
engine and a radio transmitter that works at military wavelengths,
all for less than a 20th of the £5m a real tank would set you back.
Shipped in a flat pack it can be assembledin an hour or so.
Seeing a tank suddenly appear somewhere, rather than driving
there, would be something of a giveaway. But manoeuvre can be
come part of the mimicry. Rémy Hemez, a French army officer,
imagines a future where armies deploy large “robotic decoy for
mations using aito move along and create a diversion”. Simulat
ing a build up like the one which Russia has emplaced on
Ukraine’s border is still beyond anyone’s capabilities. But decoys
and deception—in which Russia’s warriors are well versed—can
be used to confuse.
Disappearance and deception often have synergy. Stealth tech
nologies do not need to make an aircraft completely invisible. Just
making its radar crosssection small enough that a cheap little de
coy can mimic it is a real advantage. The same applies, mutatis mu-
tandis, to submarines. If you build lots of intercontinentalballis
ticmissile silos but put icbms into only a few—a tactic China may
be exploring—an enemy will have to use hundreds of its missiles
to be sure of getting a dozen or so of yours.
Shooting at decoys is not just a waste of material. It also reveals
where your shooters are. Silent Impact, a 155mm artillery shell
produced by src, an American firm, can transmit electronic sig
nals as if it were a radar or a weapons platform as it flies through
the sky and settles to the ground under a parachute. Any enemy
who takes the bait reveals the position of their guns.
The advent of ai should offer new ways of telling the real from
the fake; but it could also offer new opportunities for deception.
The things that make an aisay “Tank!” may be quite different to
what humans think of as tankiness, thus unmasking decoys that
fool humans. At the same time the ai may ignore features which
humans consider blindingly obvious. Benjamin Jensen of Ameri
can Universitytells the story of marines training against a highend sentry camera equipped with objectrecognition software.
The first marines, who tried to sneak up by crawling low, were
quickly detected. Then one of them grabbed a piece of tree bark,
placed it in front of his face and walked right up to the camera un
molested. The system saw nothing out of the ordinary about an
ambulatory plant.
The problem is that ais, and their masters, learn. In time they
will rumble such hacks. Basing a subsequent allout assault on
Birnam Wood tactics would be to risk massacre. “You can always
beat the algorithm once by radical improvisation,” says Mr Jensen.
“But it's hard to know when that will happen.” The advantages of staying put
Similar uncertainties will apply more widely. Everyone knows
that sensors and autonomous platforms can get cheaper and
cheaper, that computing at the edge can reduce strain on the ca
pacity of data systems, and that all this can make kill chains shor
ter. But the rate of progress—both your progress, and your adver
saries’—is hard to gauge. Who has the advantage will often not be
known until the forces contest the battlespace.
The unpredictability extends beyond who will win particular
fights. It spreads out to the way in which fight
ing will best be done. Over the past century
military thinking has contrasted attrition,
which wears down the opponent’s resources
in a frontal slugfest, and manoeuvre, which
seeks to use fast moving forces to disrupt an
enemy’s decisionmaking, logistics and cohe
sion. Manoeuvre offers the possibility of vic
tory without the wholesale destruction of the
enemies’ forces, and in the West it has come to
hold the upper hand, with attrition often seen
as a throwback to a more primitive age.
That is a mistake, argues FranzStefan Ga
dy of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a thinktank.
Surviving in an increasingly transparent battlespace may well be
possible. But it will take effort. Both attackers who want to take
ground and defenders who wish to hold it will need to build “com
plex multiple defensive layers” around their positions, including
air defences, electronic countermeasures and sensors of their
own. Movement will still be necessary—but it will be dispersed.
Consolidated manoeuvres big and sweeping enough to generate
“shock and awe” will be slowed down by unwieldy aerial electro
magnetic umbrellas and advertise themselves in advance, thereby
producing juicy targets.
The message of Azerbaijan’s victory is not that blitzkrieg has
been reborn and “the drone will always get through”. It is that
preparation and appropriate tactics matter as much as ever, and
you need to know what to prepare against. The new technologies
of hide and seek will sometimes—if Mr Gady is right, often—fa
vour the defence. A revolution in sensors, data and decisionmak
ing built to make targeting easier and kill chains quicker mayyet
result in a form of warfare that is slower, harder and messier.n“ You need to saturate
your adversaries’
sensors and their
situational awareness”
—Petter Bedoire