Warfare 2.0: Drones & Trenches (Part 2)
Drone Swarms and Electronics Warfare
A Growing Threat
So it is not only that drones are endangering much more expensive weapon systems. It is also that in industrial warfare, mass production is king.
Simple and small also evades the most advanced detection systems.
For example, North Korea apparently has a massive fleet of biplane cropdusters.
The An-2 Colt is a fabric-covered flying machine that is at home muscling through the sky at very low altitudes and slow airspeed.
This translates into a small radar cross-section for its size, one that is hard to spot by fighters using their radars in look-down-shoot-down mode.
Flying at low altitude means traditional surface-to-air missile systems will have a very hard time detecting and engaging these aircraft as they plot along south, hugging the terrain.
Their slow speed also plays nasty tricks on pulse Doppler radars whose velocity gates (filters) often discount relatively slow-moving objects, especially when they are moving at oblique angles from the radar emitter.
Even Washington DC, arguably the most surveilled and highly secured airspace in the United States, along with its elaborate integrated air defense system, couldn't spot a slow-moving target with a small radar cross-section even as it flew down the National Mall and landed on the Capitol's lawn.
The same can be seen in a massive redesign of military build-up all over Eurasia.
For example, Russia seems to have essentially given up the production of its most advanced tank, the Armata, in favor of simpler, more reliable older designs that can be scaled to several hundreds per year of new build (and maybe up to 1,000 of upgrade/repair/refurbished as well).
Russia has also brought home the production of the Shahed, under the umbrella of the Kalashnikov group, famous for its cheap, rugged gun design.
Russia has also mostly stopped the production of tanks using a turbine engine, which consumes too much fuel and is too tricky to maintain. A little concerning as this design choice dominates the US Army with the Abrams tank.
But I suspect the real innovation of this decade is still to come.
Getting Weirder
A key feature of successful armies in times of military revolution is that they experiment with weird ideas AND have the political will to implement them at scale too.
Mass tank divisions for the Germans in WW2. A new division of the army battalion by Napoleon.
China is a good example with the very official push for the mass use of gyrocopters:
A gyrocopter apparently costs as little as $5,500; you don’t even get a Dacia car for that price! They are also requiring just 10 hours of training to be used proficiently. The engine is rather basic, and so are the controls and electronics. Instead, a Black Hawk costs $6-10M.
On a side note, this also means we already have flying cars, we civilians are just not authorized to have them I guess…
I can see such tools potentially replacing some infantry fighting vehicles to quickly move at once a few thousand men up, with a range of 250 miles and speed of 60-100 miles per hour.
These could work wonders in mountainous terrain (Himalayas) or have the range to bridge the gap to Taiwan. While providing them with low survivability, but high firepower capacity of flying rocket launchers and some spare gear like ammo.
They also cost x1,000 less than the obviously more capable, but also larger target combat helicopters.
So the question is not so much if this is better than a Black Hawk. The question is if x1,000 of those slightly ridiculously looking weapons are better than ONE Black Hawk?
It is x10,000-12,000 cheaper than an F35.
Can a 10,000-unit swarm of gyrocopters do the job of one fighter jet?
Frankly, I think so.
Meanwhile, Iran is looking at turning simple trucks, looking like basic trucks, into drone/missile launchers:
I do not know what the next 10 years of war will look like. But I am under the impression it might be as weird to us as the veterans of WW1 felt about Panzer divisions, mass airpower, and the effect of omnipresent radios.
A mix of high and low tech is equally possible, as long as it is small and nimble.
Trenches stormed by a pack of flamethrower robodogs is a distinct (and horrifying) possibility.
For all I know, maybe jetpack troops + gyrocopters are the new mechanized infantry.
Electronic warfare (EW)
Because drones, cheap guided munition, and other weapons are proliferating on the battlefield, a new domain is becoming increasingly vital.
Electronic warfare is the idea of using electromagnetic waves to cause damage to the enemy. This covers jamming radio or GPS signals, frying drones with directed microwaves, and so on.
This is NOT cyber warfare, which is the business of hacking or defending IT systems.
Russia is apparently a pioneer in this field according to NATO defense reports.
Moscow relies on—and has heavily invested in—EW as an asymmetrical response to NATO’s technological edge across the spectrum of conflict and as an integral part of its anti-access/area denial strategy.
If Moscow can negate NATO’s command, control, and intelligence systems, it will make the Alliance’s defense of its new members problematic and costly.
The Russians train to it. They have electronic warfare units, they have electronic warfare equipment that those trained soldiers use, and then they incorporate it into their training.
We do not have EW units, we have very little equipment, and we do very little EW training. It’s not that we could not be as good as or better than them, it’s just that right now we choose not to.
In the last few months, we have seen the standardized deployment of EW systems in new tanks and vehicles by Russia.
As the technology is not really that complex, I expect everybody to play catch up and use EW massively as well.
I suspect that as EW becomes ubiquitous on the modern battlefield, with both sides jamming the other like mad, it will become quickly very hard to have any advanced guidance systems functioning.
I expect the multiplication of these systems to seriously limit the capacity of remote-controlled drones and GPS-guided systems.
Directed energy beams of electronic-destroying microwaves might also make flying drones hard to use in contested areas and frontlines.
Human First?
Now remember the cheap equipment we talked about? They are also rather unsophisticated in their targeting.
Artillery shells fall according to the laws of physics, not GPS guidance. Gyrocopters are mostly mechanical beasts, not relying on advanced electronics for stabilization, guidance, etc.
Hence it is not JUST about cost. It is also about keeping things working when the enemy jams you.
So we could see a return to not only mass production of basic cheap weapons, the equivalent of the Sherman tank and Liberty ships, simple designs of which 2,711 were built by the US during WW2.
The 250,000 parts were pre-fabricated throughout the country in 250-ton sections and (roughly) welded together in about 70 days. One Liberty ship, the SS Robert E. Peary was built in four and a half days. A Liberty cost under $2,000,000.
We might also have to rely on human presence and unguided & unjammable ammunition for targeting, because electronics, especially flying ones like drones, get fried in a 5-10km radius along the frontlines.
Naval Battles?
We have no idea how the same type of change could affect naval warfare. Mostly because Russia’s navy is mostly garbage, and the Black Sea is rather irrelevant in the war in Ukraine.
Judging from the few “cheap” hits Ukraine scored against the Russian Navy, I would not give much to too big and complex ships.
But the jury is still out on drones becoming the new game changer.
In WW2, “Big Gun” cruisers like the Bismark and the Yamato had become slow, short-range, too expensive, and too big a target, after dominating the seas for a century.
They would be outclassed by the newer, more flexible, and reactive aircraft carriers.
Could long-range drone swarms do the same?
In any case, shipbuilders are likely going to be in high demand, although maybe more the ones focused on smaller ships like Austal, which I covered in a previous report.
Industrial structure
The capacity to innovate is alive and well in the West. For example, the flamethrower robodog above is from an American company.
So why does it seem so hard to fix the ammo problem?
A big part is that the defense industry in the West is essentially so corrupt and focused on skimming the army, that it works less and less.
Consolidation, “efficiency” removing spare capacity, and monopolies are the driving forces here.
A few excerpts from BIG, a great Substack about monopolies:
Government cash goes increasingly to stock buybacks rather than actual armaments.
The Army is awarding contracts to RTX and Lockheed Martin to build new Stinger missiles, which makes sense. But the process will take.. five years.
In 2022, the DOD reported that “that consolidation of the industrial base reduces competition for DOD contracts and leads DOD to rely on a more limited number of suppliers.
The bureaucracy has made essentially no progress whatsoever. For instance, we have a trillion dollar defense budget, but there are just two people in the Department of Defense who look at mergers in the defense base.
Investing Takeaway
I would stay the hell away from white elephant defense companies.
The giant conglomerate has made a specialty of designing weapons that are increasingly complex, expensive, and in low numbers.
Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, they all developed this strategy of removing competition with acquisitions, and then scamming the Pentagon with monopoly power.
Of course, the Pentagon could do something about it easily. But it just happens that the top general always ends up on the board of Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, etc…
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
I suspect that situation can only end up one way or another.
Nothing changes, and the US suffers a military defeat as groundbreaking as Russia losing to Japan in 1905.
Monopoly power gets broken apart, which can be done in various ways:
breaking each mega-defense company into 5-20 smaller ones, finally applying anti-trust laws.
nationalization by a populist president.
every defense procurement must go to at least a smaller firm, non-affiliated to the big guys.
What I am sure of, is that it will take some time to clean up the Pentagon.
In the meantime, while a sense of urgency slowly sets in, they will look for alternative suppliers with the big defense firms become increasingly unable to deliver.
A key supplier will be non-US firms, but from NATO countries.
One option is Reinhmetall (RHM.DE), which seems a little less bloated and incompetent than the large US firms, especially in 155mm shell production.
But the stock is already up more than 3x, so I am a little concerned the boat has partially sailed on this one. At 25 P/E ratio, it is not horribly overpriced, but not great either.
So I prefer another European defense company, one often left out of the list of top defense contractors, mostly due to the pro-USA bias of most analysts and publications.
And that has various products in electronics, electronic warfare, cyberdefense, and most importantly simple and cheap anti-drone systems, which have already been validated and installed by the US Army in test capacities.
This will be the focus of my next report for subscribers.