Palmer Lucky recently made a bunch of comments about subterranean warfare and everyone snarked, Object Zero notes, all the tools to do it already exist today:
It’s an oil rig of course. But rather a directional drilling rig with a heavy duty derrick and a travelling block suitable for getting the full tensile capacity out of 6-5/8 drill pipe. This already exists.
When you drill an oil well you drill 30ft at a time, every time you drill 30ft, you stop and screw another 30ft length of drill pipe to the drill string and then keep turning to the right.
Oil wells always used to be vertical, but as oil reservoirs are usually pancake shaped drillers figured out how to drill a bend radius in the well so that the well bore could run a long horizontal length through more of the oil reservoir, as this allows more oil to flow into the well (well has more wall area in contact with the oil bearing rock).
These days, a good driller can keep the drill bit within about +/-0.5m of where they want it to be. You can steer the drill “bottom hole assembly” that drills the well using some clever motors and hydraulic signals.
This is essentially a subterranean precision strike. It already exists. It’s like fly by wire, but a mile underground travelling through rock.
Now what about weapons, explosives, munitions, etc. obviously for military applications you want some sort of explosive and the oil industry doesn’t do explosives.
Au contraire, have you heard of perforation guns?
Perforation guns are used on every oil well. Once the well has been drilled you case the walls with steel casing pipe (slide a big pipe into the well to stop the walls collapsing) and then run a production tube into the casing pipe. Production tubing is just another very long steel pipe but one that comes off a coil.
The problem is that oil cannot flow into the well, because the walls are cased with steel casing pipe, so the driller attaches a perforation gun to the bottom of the production tubing and fires the gun in the bottom of the well.
The perforation gun is a long heavy mandrel with 100s of guns all pointing radially. These guns shoot holes in the steel casing pipe so that the well can start to flow. The whole system delivers 100s of armour piecing guns via the subterranean domain.
Maybe Schlumberger is a stealth defence prime?
Anyway, it’s possible to drill your well maybe a mile deep then to turn horizontal and drill many many miles toward some target (10 miles is the record for commercial applications, but a lot more is possible before you hit technical maximums).
You can then steer the drill bit back up toward the surface and even out of the ground, delivering a 30ft rod that pierces up out of the ground and blasts 100s of armour piercing rounds in a 360 degree zone from ground level to 30ft elevation.
Think how scary this would be (I’ll post a video below).
Delivering perf guns via a surfacing long horizontal leg seems like a certain way to level a building including heavily reinforced or bunkered facilities.
This is all doable today, it’s just expensive compared to other options.
Sappers finally making a comeback? Sounds like a nightmare, but I’m here for it.
If the enemy has an OODA loop measured in weeks…
On the other hand, there were reports of Israel installing a seismic anti-tunnelling screen even before the Oct 7 attack. Adding offensive tooling to the screen makes sense. But explosive sludge feels like a better payload.
Directional drills are visible from space, and the spy agencies have been recording and analyzing seismic activity with ever-increasing granularity for decades and decades. Hawaiian Shirt Man should stick to Haskell-based killbots.