hree recent developments have just given us new insight into that question:
Iran's drone swarm attack on Israel, the reported failure of some of the
ATACMS GPS guided missiles in Ukraine, and the Mossad pager attack.
In this article I'll leave the many political problems to others and discuss what new technology the military will have to develop to be prepared for these changes.
Drones and lasers
Until those three events, most people would probably have said we need to deal with “drone storms.” Iran demonstrated this strategy: send large numbers of disposable targets to deplete the defender's missile defenses. At that point a more expensive weapon, of which you might have only one or two, can easily get through. To defend against this, many smaller, less expensive missiles are needed.
To the US military, a drone is something like the Japanese kamikaze planes of WWII. But being small is a cheap form of stealth and drones are going to get smaller—a lot smaller. The current solution is to deal with drones in the same way they deal with RF jamming: to find the launch site. But that will not work forever. The best way to shoot down a drone is to use another drone, but as they get smaller, a laser will become indispensable. For military purposes, mid-infrared lasers like CO2 lasers at 10.9 μm and oxygen-iodine lasers at 1.315 μm are the most promising. In the infrared, fog and air turbulence are less of a problem. The Vienna Protocol, which bans lasers that can potentially blind, as well as power limitations, pretty much rule out visible and UV lasers.
But more R&D is needed to get high powered lasers to work. The challenge isn't just size and power; it is targeting. If an F-35 has the radar cross section of a bumblebee, what happens when an enemy builds drones the size of bumblebees with the RCS of a gnat? A fleet of a million such devices could simultaneously attack individuals, disrupt radar and comms, and paint the target for something bigger. It could never sink a carrier, but it would not need to.
For devices this small, assessing whether you've actually hit the target becomes a challenge. One possibility, suggested by Dr David H Titterton for other purposes, is remote terahertz photo-acoustic spectroscopy. A femtohertz quantum cascade laser, he says, can produce molecular vibrations (phonons) on a target at 1 THz, which can be detected optically. This means in conjunction with a high-powered laser, one could use a second laser to detect the chemical vibrational signature of RDX, the most common military explosive, from a destroyed drone.
GPS
The Ukraine war proved that we desperately need a replacement for satellite GPS. During wartime, GPS will, of course, be encrypted, but all the encryption in the world won't help if those satellites suddenly mysteriously stop working, as would surely happen in a near-peer conflict. Even if the satellites remained intact, jamming is so pervasive that even our military now knows there's a problem. Using infrared lasers for navigation and communication is one obvious choice as collimated beams are harder to jam, but they have their own technical challenges.
Frequency-agile radio is a standard commodity item these days. On a battlefield, it turns a battle into a contest to see which side can bring the most electromagnetic radiation to the front and keep it intact and powered up. That means a new, more distributed approach is needed.
Drones can play a role here. A fleet of networked drones can synthesize an RF wavefront that can handle comms in an arbitrary reconfigurable pattern and act as a distributed AESA or at least SAR radar that is more robust and more survivable and has higher resolution than any ground station.
For submarines, better technology is clearly needed for avoiding those “uncharted underwater mountains,” a euphemism for submarine traps. Maybe we should consider building a few submarine traps of our own. We need something better than sonar.
Radar encryption
As far as radar is concerned, what do people think those “flying saucers” that fly around our bases are doing? Some of them are probably targets designed to train the troops, but the rest are foreign drones. Their task is to trigger US radar and record its signal properties. There's only so much encryption you can put into a radar signal. So radar uses a series of “random” frequency jumps to avoid being jammed, by which is usually meant spoofed. The drones' task is to record those jumps so the enemy can learn to predict them. Maybe there's some reason the military isn't destroying them. But it would be nice if they'd stop insulting our intelligence by pretending they're flying saucers from outer space. They're not, and the military needs to find some way to handle them.
Supply chains
An attack is unlikely to come in the form of nukes on our cities. Civilians are a liability in a country like ours that has outsourced most of its heavy industry: civilians in our economy don't produce much other than paperwork for each other, and they need to be protected and fed. That ties up resources. Universities would probably side with the enemy, making their preservation imperative for an attacker. And the enemy must keep our bureaucrats and politicians, who are experts at cutting off funding at the moment of victory, alive at all costs.
Our news media tell us Russia is threatening to use nukes. Assuming that's true, doing that would guarantee that our politicians, who are already chomping at the bit for a war somewhere, would send in the Air Force to eliminate Russia's government (or at least, try to) with conventional weapons. Then our politicians would force our troops to surrender, leaving billions of dollars worth of advanced weaponry behind, which the Russians would have to figure out what to do with.
Some threats, like EMP, are probably exaggerated. Why set off an EMP when they control almost our entire supply chain? Israel showed how easy it is to infiltrate a supply chain for COTS devices. But there's no need to stuff our cell phones and pagers with PETN when you can disable them with a single command. It's easy enough to do that by mistake at the console when struggling with Cisco IOS. If it can be done remotely, it's certain to happen in an attack.
Pagers are still out there. They're used mainly by doctors and drug pushers, some still work in low VHF, which has many advantages, and nowadays they have strong encryption. But as Israel dramatically showed, it's “encryption shmecryption” when you control the hardware.
To counter these threats, the US needs to build up its industrial base. The side with the strongest production capacity has a nearly insurmountable advantage. Historians tell us this is why the Allies won in WWII over an enemy that was technologically superior. Now the situation is reversed. Where are all our steel plants, shipyards, and aluminum refineries? The US military is talking about switching to battery powered vehicles. How is that going to work? Are they planning to bring solar panels and windmills to the battlefield? Or are they planning to rely on an electric grid remaining intact?
There might never be a big decisive battle like Midway. One day we might wake up to discover our GPS, phones, satellites, and radios don't work. With our ships and subs out of communication range, we might not know what was happening for days. And if any recon made it to the site, they'd discover that bad things had already happened, the war is already over, and the world has changed forever.
sep 25 2024, 4:01 am. last updated sep 27 2024, 4:25 am
