Isegoria

The Pentagon has announced a new contract to acquire Precision Strike Indoor & Outdoor (PSIO) small Unmanned Aerial Systems from drone-maker XTEND:

The contract is with the Pentagon’s Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate, an obscure outfit which develops capabilities for the military (“and Interagency customers”) to carry out operations typically involving clandestine, asymmetric strikes against the highest value targets. In the past this might have meant a Reaper drone taking out an insurgent leader on a balcony with a six-bladed Hellfire R9X ‘Ninja’ missile without damaging the building. The new weapon takes precision strike to places which were previously out of reach.

Flying drones indoors is a major challenge, in a complex and cluttered three-dimensional space with obstacles in every direction. XTEND’s CEO Aviv Shapira previously told Forbes how the company’s XOS operating system took over the difficult work of piloting, so that even a beginner could fly like a pro, going through windows and other narrow openings with ease.

All the operator needs to do is indicate where the drone needs to go and the XOS software does the rest, plotting the optimal route and automatically avoiding obstacles while also flagging objects of interest like people or weapons seen by the drone’s camera. It also makes a map of the space as it goes so it can find its way back.

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Rotor guards mean that the drone will not be damaged by collisions with walls or other solid objects, and it is described as a being used for ‘indoor precision operations’. The Scorpio carries a one-pound payload with multiple different warhead options.

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The Scorpio’s navigation system does not rely on GPS or other satellite signals, which may be jammed or unavailable inside buildings. Its range is quoted as greater than 3 miles, with a maximum speed of 25 mph.

Apart from its smart software though, perhaps the most striking feature of Scorpio are its communications. Mesh networking allows three drones to work together, controlled by a single operator. Typically two would be positioned to guard exits while the third explores a building interior.

The specifications include an option for a fiber optic data link. This makes the drone impossible to jam , and allows it to go into spaces where no radio signal can reach, such as underground tunnels.

A Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces official recently explained that fiber-optic FPVs are already in their third generation, after just a few months:

Any FPV drone has three critical components in addition to its basic airframe, motors and propellers: a warhead, a battery and a voluminous container for a spool of thin fiber-optic cable that might be 13 miles long.

The very first generation of Ukrainian FPV drone stacked each element — the warhead, battery and spool — on top of each other in an awkward pile. It should go without saying that the stack wasn’t very aerodynamic. “We oppose three-story drones as they have low energy efficiency,” the USF official admitted.

The next two drone generations combined elements. One stuffed the warhead inside the spool. The other stuffed the battery inside the spool. Both of these combos are more aerodynamic than the triple-stack drone, but the battery-inside version is more modular: it’s easier to swap in different warhead types, such as shaped-charge warheads optimized for penetrating vehicle armor.

The Crimean War of 1853–1856 presented military leaders with multiple choices between reliable but less effective capabilities and superior ones that could fail unpredictably at critical moments:

By the 1850s, the predominant telegraph system — used to coordinate 730,000 British, French, and Russian troops across the Crimean Peninsula, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans — was not yet Samuel Morse’s electromagnetic line, but a primitive optical “semaphore.” The semaphore telegraph used a simple series of towers topped with moveable wooden arms that displayed symbols from one tower to the next like the Beacons of Gondor from The Lord of the Rings. By the outbreak of the war, even these semaphore lines were sparse on the Continent. A message from Crimea in 1854 could take anywhere from twelve days to three weeks to reach London; from Crimea to Varna by steamer, from Varna to Bucharest by courier, and from Bucharest to London or Paris by mail. Russia, which had already invested in a more robust telegraph network, could send a message to the front in only two days — a very meaningful advantage. Naturally, the Allies moved quickly to catch up. They connected British and French army headquarters by telegraph, contracted with the British Electric Telegraph Company to set up 21 miles of buried cable within Crimea, contracted R. S. Newall & Co. to connect Balaklava with Varna, and installed a 150 mile line from Varna to Istanbul. By the time they captured Sebastopol, the most serious victory of the Crimean operation, they could circulate the news of their victory across Europe in only two days.

But there is a caveat in this story of progress. While the electric telegraph was faster in theory, it proved more difficult to set up and less reliable in practice. Submarine cables, unarmored and laid with little slack, often suffered outages due to damage by ships, sabotage or otherwise. While a clumsy semaphore tower could be set up and functioning in only four hours, an electric cable could take weeks to bury in hard, cracked winter ground, and could not be easily moved as needed afterwards. War correspondent William Russell noted “it was rather singular that the French preferred the old-fashioned semaphore” throughout the conflict. Though the French had begun a transition to the electric telegraph in the 1840s, they stuck with the semaphore system for the majority of the war effort, sending over 4,500 semaphore telegraphs, only finalizing their transition to electric after the war was over and reliability less critical.

Worse — the invention of the telegraph was the invention of micromanagement.

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Europe had the material technology to enable central decision-making, but lacked the experience to apply it wisely. Disgruntled generals suffered a blow to their status from central ministers who believed themselves to be better-informed than they really were. Command suffered and the organizational disaster for which the Crimean War is best-remembered followed suit. As with all technological innovations, their invention is just the first act of innovation, the second are the changes to human social organization needed for adoption.

Modern naval warships weren’t ready, either:

The original incarnation of steam propulsion — the paddle wheel — designed in 1776 to emulate the paddling of a duck, was vulnerable to attack; one blow to the large target that was the wheel and the ship was dead in the water. Because the paddle wheel occupied such a large surface area along the hull, an early steamer could not be equipped with a full broadside. Worse, in rough seas, the wheel could become submerged or rise out of the water entirely, damaging the engines; if the boat encountered an obstacle like floating debris, the boilers of early engines could build up too much pressure and explode, causing the ship to sink. For these reasons, the steamer was not trusted in combat.

Ironclad hulls, too, had been decried. When the British Captain Henry Ducie Chads tested the resistance of 5 ? 8 ” iron plating against artillery at Portsmouth in 1850, he found that only two or three shots could cause the armor to shatter into shrapnel that would gravely endanger the crew. The cast iron armor was brittle and prone to fracture, and had not yet been replaced by wrought iron, which could withstand more deformation before breaking.

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Traditional solid shot was designed to kill the crew and take down rigging, but it could typically only inflict repairable damage to the thick oak hulls of wooden battleships, not destroy them. In 1821, French artillery officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans proposed in a seminal pamphlet Nouvelle Force Maritime that the future of naval warfare would look dramatically different. Exploding artillery shells, he proposed, which were already in use on land, could be deployed at sea to sink large wooden ships-of-the-line outright. The exploding shell gun posed a danger to the wooden ship so great, he argued in a successive pamphlet the following year, that each battleship of the future must be armored with metal. The exploding shell gun Paixhans developed had a range of up to two miles and exploded upon contact with the target, allowing battleships to pack a more destructive ordinance at a lighter weight. The French Navy began trials with this gun — the Paixhans gun — in 1824, and had adopted it throughout the fleet by 1837. The British Royal Navy followed suit the following year. Soon, in peacetime, the exploding shell spread even to Russia.

The exploding shell was deployed to resounding effect during the war’s first major naval engagement. On November 30th, 1853, Russian Admiral Pavel Nakhimov approached the Turkish fleet at Sinop Bay, hoping to take the Ottomans by surprise during the initial Russian offensive.

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Sinop proved beyond all skepticism that the Paixhans gun had made the wooden battleship obsolete. The Allies immediately took notice. Napoleon II ordered the construction of a flotilla of five armored batteries, with four-inch iron plating that could withstand shelling as well as steam propulsion. Critically, by then, Captain John Ericsson and FP Smith of London had invented the screw propeller, which sat underneath the boat where it was less vulnerable to attack, and where it could be lifted out of the water to allow the vessel to maneuver by sail if necessary. Also critically, these armoring plates could then be constructed out of wrought iron, which could withstand shelling without fragmenting, rather than the brittle cast iron of years past.

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The Western powers recognized the paradigm shift, pushed through the unpredictable growing pains of emerging technologies, and adopted proactively to win. In an age of unprecedented transformation and speed at every domain, history teaches us that to slow down change is to accept defeat.

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In eight prolific decades of Pax Americana, military technology has developed to the point of being unrecognizable from WWII. Military organization, however, remains the same, and the imaginations of procurement offices haven’t moved far either.

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The history of the Crimean War reminds us that adopting new technologies is not without challenges, but the failure to do so can be far more consequential.

The side in control of the air tends to win, Austin Vernon notes:

At a minimum, dominant air power is a massive force multiplier that allows the side wielding it to take significantly less casualties than its opponent. Aircraft can uniquely disrupt supply lines, command and control, and troop concentrations. The forces on the losing side must drastically alter their tactics to survive, limiting their ability to attack or defend.

Another feature is that air-to-air battles tend to be lopsided. It is more common to see 20:1 or 10:1 kill/loss ratios than even matches. For example, the F-15 has 104 kills and zero losses since entering service in 1976. The defining factors have been pilot quality, aircraft performance, weapon performance, and sensor capability (radar, airborne early warning aircraft, etc.).

US airpower was so dominant in the 20th century that most opponents focused on building ground-based anti-aircraft defenses. An arms race developed between these anti-aircraft missile batteries and ever more sophisticated aircraft, weapons, and tactics on the US side. Stealth to avoid detection, cruise missiles to avoid risking aircraft, and highly specialized tactics and weapons to defeat anti-aircraft batteries are an outgrowth of this competition.

Drones are not a new category but dramatically reduce the cost of some existing functions:

FPV Drones → Attack Helicopters

Advocates of rotor aircraft thought they would dominate the battlefield in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, to the detriment of traditional armor. It didn’t happen because helicopters are vulnerable to air defenses, including shoulder-fired missiles and anti-aircraft guns.

First Person View (FPV) kamikaze drones that cost <$1000 or slightly larger reusable drones are bringing this prediction back from the dead. They are still vulnerable to air defense, but it is irrelevant given their cost. Ground forces will need to make many adjustments, similar to when anti-tank guided missiles made WWII-style tanks obsolete in the 1960s and 1970s.

Bomber Drones → Attack Helicopters (pt. 2)

Some missions call for slightly larger munitions than disposable FPVs can justify, and “bomber” drones that weigh around 25-50 kg and cost $10,000 fill the void. They mostly fly at night to increase survival rates and often use satellite communications, like StarLink, to avoid jamming. Missions are attacking parked vehicles, mining roads, and dropping grenades on infantry. These drones are much more powerful than FPVs and are worth the price if they can survive a few missions.

Recon Drones → Scout Helicopters and Forward Air Control Aircraft

Scouting for artillery, ground attack aircraft, and attack helicopters has long been a scarce resource, even for the US military. Infantry and armor units still had to self-scout with limited visibility.

Small recon drones, often off-the-shelf commercial models, bring top-tier scouting down to the squad level. Their cost makes using them sustainable, while many large drones, like the US Predator, are obsolete in high-intensity battles because of their price and vulnerability to air defenses.

One-Way Attack Drones → Cruise Missiles

Cruise missiles have a unique ability to attack heavily defended targets in the opponent’s rear, but their price limits their number.

Propeller-powered one-way attack drones can cost as little as $50,000 instead of $1+ million, increasing volume. The overall impact has been much more muted than FPV and recon drones because these drones are so easy to shoot down and have small payloads that limit what targets they can be effective against. They travel slowly, roughly the same as a car on the interstate, to meet cost goals and extend range. Their utility plummets once the opponent adapts to shoot them down with cheap weapons, like guns on trucks and helicopters, cheap interceptor drones, or electronic warfare. The drones can still provide net benefits if they temporarily overwhelm air defenses, force the enemy to expend significant organizational resources to counter them, or the targets are valuable enough.

Interceptor Drones → Man Portable Anti-Aircraft Missiles

Militaries developed man-portable anti-aircraft missiles to counter helicopters and low-flying aircraft, but they are much too expensive and complex to counter drones.

Instead, small racing-style drones that cost no more than a few thousand dollars ram or explode near targets. Their prey is primarily more expensive attack drones and higher-tier recon drones that cost $30,000-$200,000.

There are some experiments with drones carrying shotguns and other air-to-air weaponry to deal with the smallest FPV and recon drones. Time will tell if these are viable.

He projects some trends:

Barbell Procurement Strategy

The battlefield is so hostile that drones must be cheap enough to be expendable or capable enough to avoid all air defenses. The somewhat fancy $100,000 recon drone is probably in no-man’s-land. Large drones without sophisticated countermeasures, like the US Global Hawk or Predator/Reaper family, are obsolete outside the most permissive airspace. Even drones that were considered cheap before the war in Ukraine, like the Turkish TB-2, have been sent to the scrap heap.

One of the only viable(?) large drones currently in use is the pricey US RQ-180 because of its size and modern stealth features. Traditional cruise missiles also continue to be viable for deep strikes.

Small Eats Large

Drones aren’t automatically cheaper than legacy systems like helicopters or strategic reconnaissance platforms. Radical reduction in size and complexity is the best way to achieve this.

Better electronics and cameras have allowed recon drones with mass measured in grams. Or a shaped charge driven by an FPV drone into the weakest part of a vehicle’s armor can be much smaller than traditional anti-tank missile warheads.

Battery-electric powertrains can shrink much more than engines can, and these drones have disrupted short-range, low-speed categories much more than long-range or high-powered missions.

The success rate of these drones is often low, between 10%-50%, and many targets need multiple hits. However, the low cost of small drones means the math is favorable and similar to artillery shells.

Single Function Dominates

Drones can only be small and cheap if they are highly specialized for one task. Examples include anti-vehicle, anti-personnel, high-value targets ~30 km behind enemy lines, hitting enemy drones, dropping mines or supplies, etc. Many of these categories even have further specialization within them.

Paths with Faster Iteration Win

Things change fast since small drones are a relatively new technology. Pathways that allow quick adjustments can outcompete slow paths. Small and single-function platforms can increase iteration speed.

Slow, electric drones have massive advantages in operating footprint and costs, he notes:

Fuel

Fuel is one of the biggest concerns for modern militaries. The US military often assumes a fuel cost of hundreds or thousands of dollars per gallon to deliver to war zones for planning. The volume of demand in a high-intensity conflict could reach the level of economies like Japan. Aircraft are often the largest fuel consumers.

These drones require a fraction of the energy of high-performance aircraft and can often use electricity instead of fuel. The AEW scout battery pack would only be a few pounds and could charge with a tiny solar panel. Models like the tactical bomber, air-defense fighter, or air superiority fighter have batteries small enough to swap by hand. A few standard-size solar panels could provide enough juice for one sortie per day and don’t require vulnerable centralized infrastructure.

Infrastructure

An aircraft’s weight and stall speed plays a large part in determining runway length and quality. Small, slow drones need minimal airstrips, if they need them at all. There is no need for traditional air bases.

Parts/Maintenance

The US military prefers “module-based” maintenance. Techs change an entire radar module instead of diagnosing and fixing a certain subcomponent to reduce labor hours and the number of parts in stock.

Many drones would cost as much as a typical module, and there would be no reason to bother with parts or repairs. The need for techs and parts management would be minimal.

Battery-electric powertrains are reliable compared to jet engines and should be able to fly hundreds or thousands of hours before replacement without maintenance.

Training

Fighter pilots are the most valuable rank-adjusted human capital in any military. One great pilot can make a meaningful difference in an entire war by helping to clear the skies. Selection is intense, and training is very slow. Simulators help, but learning to fly a $100+ million fighter jet doesn’t happen overnight.

AI pilots take more effort to train initially but can replicate as needed. The burden for any human pilot/manager will be lower given the narrower mission of drones than multi-role fighters. The low cost of the platforms means both AI and humans can train constantly on real aircraft instead of using simulators. Battles can be live instead of simulated without endangering human pilots, improving the quality of training.

Sortie Rate

Most fighters need full crews to turn the aircraft around and keep it flying. Each airframe only has so many hours without full refits. Many aircraft struggle to fly one sortie per day. A low-maintenance, battery-electric drone with swappable batteries could fly 20-22 hours each day.

The sortie challenge would be especially beneficial for countries like Taiwan. China constantly flies fighters at the edge of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, which forces Taiwan to send fighters to intercept them, wearing down airframes and pilots. A constant picket of drones would negate this strategy.

Shipping

Munitions, especially bombs, are the biggest logistical challenge after fuel. Manned aircraft tend to drop large bombs that are overkill because of their limited sortie rates and the risk each mission entails. Drones with high sortie rates can use small bombs that make the drone more practical and reduce total tonnage dropped as each target gets the appropriate amount instead of a truck getting vaporized by a 2000 lb bomb.

Which branch should take on the drones?

The Air Force loathes low-performance aircraft and is skeptical of deleting human pilots. Its budget mostly goes towards capabilities that the drone air force isn’t replacing, like deep strike, high-end fighters, or the nuclear umbrella. Deleting these platforms makes little sense when they still provide key capabilities (hedging!) and are in the phase where unit cost is falling. For those reasons, the Air Force is a poor choice to raise the drone force, and its job is to ensure its aircraft are protected from small drones when parked.

Thankfully, the US has four air forces to choose from, three of which already operate high-end aviation (Air Force, Navy, Marines).

Anduril Industries is taking the reins of the United States Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program, and for Palmer Luckey this announcement is deeply personal:

Since my pre-Oculus days as a teenager who had the opportunity to do a tiny bit of work on the Army’s BRAVEMIND project, I’ve believed there would be a headset on every soldier long before there is a headset on every civilian. Given that America loses more troops in training than combat, the Squad Immersive Virtual Trainer (SiVT) side of IVAS alone has the potential to save more lives than practically anything else we can imagine building.

Tactical heads-up-displays that turn warfighters into technomancers and pair us with weaponized robotics were one of the products in the original Anduril pitch deck for a reason. The past eight years we have spent building Lattice have put Anduril in a position to make this type of thing actually useful in the way military strategists and technologists have long dreamed of, ever since Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers. Not just day and night and thermal and ultraviolet, but peering into an idealized interactive real-time composite of past, present, and future that will quickly surpass traditional senses like vision and touch. Put another way, Superman doesn’t use menus — he just sees and does.

His announcement includes a paragraph of redacted text, before getting back to his main point:

Everything I’ve done in my career — building Oculus out of a camper trailer, shipping VR to millions of consumers, getting run out of Silicon Valley by backstabbing snakes, betting that Anduril could tear people out of the bigtech megacorp matrix and put them to work on our nation’s most important problems — has led to this moment.

David Hambling points to a number of videos released by Ukrainian forces that show FPV lurk-and-strike ambush tactics in action:

The technique is used behind Russian lines to strike vehicles travelling on supply routes and seems to be used as a way to interdict logistics – and also for targeted assassinations.

This technique may have been adopted as a way to get around the short flight time of FPVs, which typically fly for 20 minutes or less and cannot wait for targets.

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What is clear from this is that all three FPVs were in the ambush area, and the operators found it worthwhile to expend three on a low-value target which was not carrying passengers or cargo. In Russia the Desertcross costs around $23,000; the FPVs are around $500 each but availability rather than cost would likely be the deciding factor. Nobody wastes ammo when it is scarce, however cheap it might be.

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These perch-and-wait ambushes are interesting for what they do not show as much as for what they do.

There is no indication how the drones reached their ambush spots. Battery life is the big issue; the drones might have flown there under their own power and counted on having enough juice left for the waiting period and the ambush. But they may have been delivered by drone. Wild Hornets Queen Hornet has been shown delivering FPVs and acting as a flying relay station to increase control range. And when British PM Keir Starmer visited Ukraine recently, he was shown two FPV carriers, one a fixed-wing drone, the other a large multicopter.

Ukrainian forces are increasingly using drones to lay anti-tank mines on roads behind Russian lines. Mines are relatively easy to remove; drones which may be some distance from the road and can be relocated (or target anyone attempting to remove them) may be more challenging.

Ukraine’s latest unmanned aerial vehicle can fly 1,200 miles, drop a 550-pound bomb and return to base, David Axe reports, making it potentially the most powerful reusable drone in the Russia-Ukraine war:

It’s unclear what airframe the Unmanned Systems Forces uses as basis for the far-flying, multi-use drone, but the scant photographic evidence points to a modified civilian sport plane. Ukrainian drone regiments have long operated propeller-driven Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes fitted with remote controls and an underbelly bomb rack.

But the A-22s have only ever been caught on video conducting one-way missions, slamming into their targets like slow cruise missiles. The new Ukrainian drone can drop its bomb and then fly back to base, meaning it can fly a few or many missions until it wears out, crashes or gets shot down.

In making its longest-range drones reusable, the drone branch could multiply the number and pace of deep strikes it conducts against targets inside Russia, which have lately included bomber bases and oil facilities. The strikes have raised the cost of Russian bomber sorties targeting Ukrainian cities, and depressed oil production in a country that utterly relies on energy exports for state revenue.

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Controlling a drone in mid air, usually through a combination of pre-set GPS-based navigation and direct human control via satellite radio, is fairly straightforward. Landing a drone is hard, however. Smaller models can cut their engines, pop a parachute and float down to the ground. Bigger models must be eased onto a runway.

Back in November, David Hambling noted that Russian Lancet strikes had fallen off:

The Lancet is a long-range killer, striking at distances of over 25 miles and with a shaped-charge warhead capable of knocking out tanks. It has been notably effective in damaging Ukrainian artillery, as the drone can pursue moving targets. But the number of strikes recorded by Russian OSINT site Lostarmour – which has a semi-official role providing data to Lancet makers ZALA – has been falling, from 180 in August to 81 in September, 100 in October and, with more than half the month gone, just 24 in November so far.

The interceptors are not bringing down many Lancets: instead they are taking out the reconnaissance and communication assets which enable them to find targets.

The Lancet operates in a hunter-killer team with ZALA reconnaissance drones. These with survey an area and identify and locate a target. Once this is confirmed, the Lancet is launched. The reconnaissance drone may also act as a flying radio relay, making the Lancet more resistant to jamming. It will observe the strike, and carry out post-strike damage assessment to determine whether to send a follow-up attack. In many cases the LostArmour videos include multiple strikes against the same target until it is destroyed.

General Atomics’ Long Range Maneuvering Projectile is a 155-mm artillery round with wings — that the company claims can hit a moving target 120 kilometers away, in a GPS-denied environment:

To strike targets at ranges over double, and in some cases triple, of existing base bleed and rocket-assisted projectiles, LRMP will deploy wings. According to Forney, using existing propulsion methods would “make it too complex,” so the design examined General Atomics’ prior work designing the MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-1C Grey Eagle drones. LRMP’s sensors and electronics were also derived from the company’s hypersonics and railgun programs.

“Where we ended up was, let’s develop a projectile that will launch out of a barrel, a standard 155 mm, No separate gunpowder, whatever bag of gunpowder there is, we’ll use that as an explosive to launch the system,” said Forney. General Atomics’ experiences in designing electronics to withstand the forces sustained by hypersonics and railgun projectiles.

Encased within a discarding sabot to protect LRMP’s wings and internals during firing, the round will reach its apogee of around 40,000 to 45,000 feet and deploy its wings. From there, the round will glide, and maneuver, to its target. From a 2023 interview, Naval News understands that this maneuvering capability could be used to conduct “endgame maneuvers” in its terminal engagement phase.

Regarding the unusual shape of LRMP, the company claimed that the design enhances the round’s precision and range. “Our projectile is not round. As you can see, it’s what’s called a rouleaux triangle, very close to a rule of triangle. So those triangular edges allow us to have more controllability and more lift to help us achieve that 120-kilometer range,” said Forney.

With recent lessons from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in mind, Forney highlighted that LRMP does not rely on Global Positioning System guidance. Instead, the company is currently developing an “alternate guidance system” that relies on machine learning and camera systems within the projectile. The model of LRMP displayed at AUSA contains two lenses, one on the nose and another oriented downward. “We have multiple seekers, camera systems on the projectile so that we can see ahead, we can see down, and we’ll get to target,” said Forney. He also claimed that the seeker would draw on lessons from the company’s work on the Vintage Racer program, which supposedly looked to deploy a loitering system from a hypersonic missile over a target area.

John Antal opens Next War with a look at the failure of imagination that left America vulnerable to Imperial Japan’s surprise attack and the imaginative planning that went into it — as well as some imaginative planning that did not:

With his usual thoroughness, Genda reported the highest dive-bombing hit rates in the past seven months of practice, by the Japanese Navy’s best carrier pilots, is only 40 percent.

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“There is more than one path to get to the top of the mountain,” Yamamoto replies.

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“The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win. Here, the path of life and death, victory and defeat, is clear.”

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“It will take only six days to adjust the aircraft and we can do this while we are underway. With this new means, we will destroy the four American aircraft carriers, eight battleships, two heavy cruisers and the six light cruisers in the first wave. Conventional attacks will focus on attacking enemy airfields and destroying American planes on the ground. The second wave will target the dockyards and oil facilities. The third wave will involve conventional bombing and will hit any remaining targets.”

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“We will lose 80 of our 353 aircraft through direct strikes,” Genda replies. “Ten percent more if the enemy antiaircraft and their pursuit planes are alert … but I believe we will achieve surprise, so I estimate our losses at 107 aircraft.”

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“Yes, it is the only way to annihilate our enemy with one swift blow. It is a hard choice, I know, but these strikes will be like a Divine Wind that will blow the Americans from the Pacific.”

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“Put your new plan into motion. We will hit the Americans and destroy their power in the Pacific with one strike of the sword. We will use your 80 kamikaze aircraft to change the face of war.”

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The Japanese would only resort to kamikaze attacks in 1944, when their strategic military situation was dire, as they grasped for any means to strike back and delay the inevitable tide of defeat.

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But what if Yamamoto’s forces had conducted the kamikaze strike strategy at Pearl Harbor in 1941, when the US Navy was much smaller and unprepared for such a ferocious assault? What if the Japanese had realized they had to play their one roll of the dice differently?

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The next Pearl Harbor attack will most likely involve long-range precision fires: missiles, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, and loitering munitions.