Isegoria

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.

The Bolt-M from Anduril is, David Hambling explains, a high-end American take on the hordes of FPV kamikaze drones deployed by Ukraine and Russia:

In Ukraine, such drones are often assembled at kitchen tables from commercial components from China. Though unsophisticated, they are efficient engines of destruction, and at around $500 apiece are destroying tanks, artillery, trucks and foxholes at a high rate.

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While FPV operators need sharp reflexes and weeks of training and practice, Bolt-M removes the need for a skilled operator with a point-and-click interface to select the target. An AI pilot does all the work. (You could argue whether it even counts as FPV). Once locked on, Bolt-M will continue automatically to the target even if communications are lost, giving it a high degree of immunity to electronic warfare.

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An Anduril spokesman told Breaking Defense that “In round numbers, typical Bolt configurations are in the low tens of thousands of dollars,” depending on the exact payload and configuration.

Is a $20,000 FPV a viable weapon?

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Ukrainian journal Defence Express was quick to criticize the Bolt-M, stating that, like other American designs, it fails to incorporate the key lesson of FPV warfare “they are, first of all, cheap and produced at scale.” Instead they suggest the design might be adapted into a reusable, AI-enabled light bomber for conditions of intense jamming.

American troops will direct future war machines with familiar controllers:

Over the past several years, the US Defense Department has been gradually integrating what appear to be variants of the Freedom of Movement Control Unit (FMCU) handsets as the primary control units for a variety of advanced weapons systems, according to publicly available imagery published to the department’s Defense Visual Information Distribution System media hub.

Produced since 2008 by Measurement Systems Inc. (MSI), a subsidiary of British defense contractor Ultra that specializes in human-machine interfaces, the FMCU offers a similar form factor to the standard Xbox or PlayStation controller but with a ruggedized design intended to safeguard its sensitive electronics against whatever hostile environs American service members may find themselves in. A longtime developer of joysticks used on various US naval systems and aircraft, MSI has served as a subcontractor to major defense “primes” like General Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems to provide the handheld control units for “various aircraft and vehicle programs,” according to information compiled by federal contracting software GovTribe.

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The endlessly customizable FMCU isn’t totally new technology: According to Ultra, the system has been in use since at least 2010 to operate the now-sundowned Navy’s MQ-8 Fire Scout unmanned autonomous helicopter and the Ground Based Operational Surveillance System (GBOSS) that the Army and Marine Corps have both employed throughout the global war on terror. But the recent proliferation of the handset across sophisticated new weapon platforms reflects a growing trend in the US military towards controls that aren’t just uniquely tactile or ergonomic in their operation, but inherently familiar to the next generation of potential warfighters before they ever even sign up to serve.

The use of drones in warfare has its origins in World War II, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

Joseph Kennedy Jr., President Kennedy’s older brother, died in a secret U.S. Navy drone operation against the Germans. The covert mission, dubbed Operation Aphrodite, targeted a highly fortified Nazi missile site inside Germany. The plan was for the older Kennedy to pilot a modified B-24 bomber from England and over the English Channel while his crew armed 22,000 pounds of explosives piled high in the cargo hold. Once the explosives were wired, the crew and pilot needed to quickly bail out. Flying not far away, a mother ship would begin remotely controlling the unmanned aircraft as soon as the crew bailed out. Inside the bomber’s nose cone were two cameras that would help guide the drone into its Nazi target.

The explosive being used was called Torpex, a relatively new and extremely volatile chemical compound. Just moments before Joseph Kennedy Jr. and his crew bailed out, the Torpex caught fire, and the aircraft exploded midair, killing everyone on board. The Navy ended its drone program, but the idea of a pilotless aircraft caught the eye of general of the Army Henry “Hap” Arnold. On Victory over Japan Day, General Arnold made a bold assertion. “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he said. He was off by four wars, but otherwise he was right.

David Hambling covered the same incident in Swarm Troopers.

Well before World War 2, Jacobsen notes, a few visionaries saw the potential of drones:

Nikola Tesla mastered wireless communication in 1893, years before any of his fellow scientists were even considering such a thing. At the Electrical Exhibition in Madison Square Garden in 1898, Tesla gave a demonstration in which he directed a four-foot-long steel boat using radio remote control. Audiences were flabbergasted. Tesla’s pilotless boat seemed to many to be more a magic act than the scientific breakthrough it was. Ever a visionary, Tesla also foresaw a military application for his invention. “I called an official in Washington with a view of offering him the information to the government and he burst out laughing upon telling him what I had accomplished,” Tesla wrote. This made unfortunate sense—the military was still using horses for transport at the time. Tesla’s friend writer Mark Twain also envisioned a military future in remote control and offered to act as Tesla’s agent in peddling the “destructive terror which you have been inventing.” Twain suggested the Germans might be good clients, considering that, at the time, they were the most scientifically advanced country in the world. In the end, no government bought Tesla’s invention or paid for his patents. The great inventor died penniless in a New York hotel room in 1943, and by then, the Germans had developed remote control on their own and were wreaking havoc on ground forces across Europe. The Germans’ first war robot was a remote-controlled minitank called Goliath, and it was about the size of a bobsled. Goliath carried 132 pounds of explosives, which the Nazis drove into enemy bunkers and tanks using remote control. Eight thousand Goliaths were built and used in battle by the Germans, mostly on the Eastern Front, where Russian soldiers outnumbered German soldiers nearly three to one. With no soldiers to spare, the Germans needed to keep the ones they had out of harm’s way.

In America, the Army Air Forces developed its first official drone wing after the war, for use during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946. There, drones were sent through the mushroom cloud, their operators flying them by remote control from an airborne mother ship called Marmalade flying nearby. To collect radioactive samples, the drones had been equipped with air-collection bags and boxlike filter-paper holders. Controlling the drones in such conditions was difficult. Inside the mushroom cloud, one drone, code-named Fox, was blasted “sixty feet higher than its flight path,” according to declassified memos about the drone wing’s performance there. Fox’s “bomb doors warped, all the cushions inside the aircraft burst and its inspection plates and escape hatch blew off.” Remarkably, the drone pilot maintained control from several miles away. Had he witnessed such a thing, Nikola Tesla might have smiled.

During the second set of atomic tests, called Operation Sandstone, in April of 1948, the drones were again used in a job deemed too dangerous for airmen. During an eighteen-kiloton atomic blast called Zebra, however, a manned aircraft accidentally flew through a mushroom cloud, and after this, the Air Force made the decision that because the pilot and crew inside the aircraft had “suffered no ill effects,” pilots should be flying atomic-sampling missions, not drones.

Again, Hambling goes over some of the same history.

The combat UGV might be the modern equivalent of the war elephant in classical armies, David Hambling notes, a strange, terrifying presence which causes enemies to flee even though it has limited military effectiveness:

A fighting robot is inherently scary. Robot dogs with weapons will be even worse, even if they are clumsier and less capable than human footsoldiers. An opponent that feels no pain or fear, and who is immune to gunfire, is not like one made of flesh and blood.

But the UGV may be much more than an effective psychological weapon. Unlike aerial drones, the UGV can threaten an enemy position. Driving up and parking a remote-controlled machinegun turret next to them means the enemy have to either destroy the UGV or retreat. This makes it something quite new, an uncrewed weapon able to take ground, and potentially to hold that ground.

At a cost of around $16,000 per unit — as much as six artillery rounds, or a tenth of a Javelin missile — the Ukrainian Lyut UGV is, he explains, entirely expendable.

Anduril has unveiled its Barracuda family of cruise missiles — or “air-breathing, software-defined expendable Autonomous Air Vehicles (AAVs)” — that are optimized for “affordable, hyper-scale production”:

The United States and our allies and partners do not have enough missiles to credibly deter conflict with a near-peer adversary. Our existing arsenals of precision-guided munitions would be exhausted in a matter of days in a high-end fight. The problem extends beyond inventory alone, however: existing cruise missiles are defined by limited production capacity, nonexistent on-call surge capacity, and minimal upgradeability when technology and mission needs inevitably change. That is because existing missile designs are highly complex, require thousands of unique tools to produce, demand highly-specialized labor and materials, and are built on the backs of tenuous, brittle, and defense-specific supply chains. We need an order of magnitude more weapons, and we need them to be more producible, intelligent, upgradeable, and flexible.

The Barracuda family of AAVs is designed to rebuild America’s arsenal of air-breathing precision-guided munitions and air vehicles. Barracuda features advanced autonomous behaviors and other software-defined capabilities, and it is available in configurations offering 500+ nautical miles of range, 100+ pounds of payload capacity, 5 Gs of maneuverability, and more than 120 minutes of loitering time. The vehicle’s fast speeds, high maneuverability, and extended ranges are made possible by Barracuda’s turbojets, air-breathing engines that take in air to combust their fuel. The result is a highly intelligent, low-cost weapon system that is capable of direct, stand-in, or stand-off strike missions in line with existing requirements but rapidly adaptable to future mission needs due to its high degree of modularity and upgradeability.

Barracuda-100M, Barracuda-250M, and Barracuda-500M are the most producible cruise missiles on the market today. A single Barracuda takes 50 percent less time to produce, requires 95 percent fewer tools, and 50 percent fewer parts than competing solutions on the market today. As a result, the Barracuda family of AAVs is 30 percent cheaper on average than other solutions, enabling affordable mass and cost-effective, large-scale employment.

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Barracuda can be produced by the broad commercial automotive and consumer electronics workforce, rather than relying exclusively on the much smaller, over-stretched, highly-specialized, defense-specific manufacturing labor pool required to produce existing solutions.

Every Barracuda variant is made up of a handful of common subsystems to ensure that the missiles can be rapidly optimized based on changing mission needs. New subsystems can be rapidly swapped into live production lines when threats evolve and new technologies emerge, providing warfighters with the agility required to adapt at mission speed. And unlike existing solutions that leverage brittle, defense-specific supply chains, Barracuda’s subsystems are made up of commercially derived and widely-available components that provide supply chain resiliency, redundancy, and surge capacity.

Russia is striking back against the Kursk offensive with new drones guided by fiber optics which are immune to radio jamming:

FPV drones generally require a radio link to the operator. This transmits a video signal from the drone, and command signals to the drone on another channel. Loss of either signal usually means an instant crash.

This is why we have seen a profusion of trench jammers, suitcase jammers and vehicle -mounted jammers on the front lines, blasting out radio noise on selected frequencies. If effective they create a bubble of protection reaching out fifty or a hundred yards. This will generally keep FPVs away, although skilled FPV operators approach at a steep angle so their drone gets through on sheer momentum.

Drones keep changing their operating frequencies and jammers keep being updated to stop them in an unending cat-and-mouse game. This is why it takes a blitz like the one in Kursk, with a prolonged period of preparation to identify all the frequencies in use and the concentration enough jammers to block everything in a given area to strop all drones for a time.

Drones can also lose their link for other reasons. The radio link essentially requires over line of sight. This is fine when the drone is well above ground, but as soon as it dips low, communication starts to break up. Flying relays help, but FPVs have to dive low during the final attack, and there is almost always interference in the video signal in the last second which impair the view at the critical moment.

If you’ve watched a few FPV drone videos, you’ve seen the static right before impact. (They’re analog feeds, typically.)

When I first learned about TOW missiles — “Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided” — I was incredulous that a missile spooled out a wire along the way, a three kilometer-long wire. The design goes back a ways:

Late in World War II, the German Army began experimenting with modified versions of the Ruhrstahl X-4 wire-guided missile. Originally developed for the Luftwaffe as an anti-bomber weapon, by changing the warhead to one using a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) design, the new X-7 version made an effective anti-armor weapon with a range of hundreds of metres. This would greatly improve the effectiveness of infantry anti-tank operations, which at that time were generally based on smaller weapons like the Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck, limited in the best case to ranges on the order of 150 metres (490 ft). X-7 was never fully developed before the war ended.

These newer FPV drones spool out fiber-optic cable, which carries a high-resolution video signal:

On August 12th videos on social media showed what were claimed to be attacks Ukrainian BTR-4 reconnaissance vehicles in Giri with fiber-optic FPV drones. While this is impossible to confirm, the video show an unusual lack of interference.

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The company Skywalker Technology is now offering fiber-optic drone controllers on the open market. The company website gives a contact address in Singapore, although ClashReport describe them as Chinese.

Skywalker sell a number of drones with military applications including one armed with rockets and another kamikaze type, plus devices to convert consumer quadcopters into bombers. Their latest offering is a fiber-optic guidance set to replace radio control. As with previous designs, it comes with a considerable weight penalty; a 5 km/ 3 miles cable reel weighs about two and a half pounds. Maximum range is six miles, HIGHCAT offers twice that.

As with other FPV components which are commonly sourced from Far Eastern suppliers, this opens up an instant supply of new technology to both parties in the Ukraine conflict. Whereas previously military technology went through a process of evaluation, specification, testing, approval and acquisition taking years, independent drone makers can now buy off the shelf and ship drones to the front in weeks.

The most commonly raised objections – snagging on obstacles, the cable breaking, leaving a trail back to the operator – do not appear to be real issues, but fiber-optic control does have downsides as previously discussed and is unlikely replace radio control entirely. This type will be effective in situations of intense jamming though and might be used in the first wave of an attack.

Near the end of his 2015 book Swarm Troopers, David Hambling notes that “there has been conflict in the east of Ukraine since 2014”:

Militias in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, apparently with covert backing from Russia, have been fighting against government forces. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has not always been efficient in providing the best equipment; critics say that the procurement process is managed badly and undermined by corruption. Ukrainian forces needed drones for reconnaissance and surveillance on the front line. When they could not get them through official channels, they took procurement into their own hands.

The Aerorozvidka project and the People’s Project are both devoted to making up the Ukrainian drone shortfall. Using private money — and in the case of the People’s Project, crowdfunding — they have adapted commercial drones for battlefield operations. At the larger end of the scale, the PD-1 “People’s Drone” is a fixed-wing craft with a ten-foot wingspan and a pusher propeller. Many of the other drones are simply commercial models like the DJI Phantom supplied by supporters in the US.

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The Ukrainians fit their drones with improved communications, as their opponents have access to effective Russian jammers and have jammed both drone communications and GPS navigation signals. They have also learned to be careful about placement of communication antennas when controlling the drones, and the need for controllers to keep moving. On two occasions, their drone operators have been hit by mortar fire when the Russians pinpointed them by their radio signals.

The Ukrainian drones can find and track the enemy and direct artillery fire in real time. Aerorozvidka even claims to be working on drones armed with homemade missiles.

Any Western soldier who has to expose themselves to enemy fire during reconnaissance may well wonder why they do not have access to the same small drones as the Ukrainians.

Ever since radios have been used in warfare, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), there have been efforts to interfere with them:

Britain’s Royal Navy experimented with broadcasting signals to interfere with enemy communication as far back as 1902, just five years after the first radios were installed on ships. By WWI, the use of radio was more sophisticated, and so were countermeasures. The German Zeppelins used fixes from radio stations to navigate; so on the night of 19 October 1917, the French switched radio broadcasts from the Eiffel Tower to another station to send the airships off course. When the Germans started using their own transmitters for navigation, the Allies drowned these out with louder transmissions on the same wavelength, possibly the first attempt to deliberately jam radio reception.

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The first radio-guided weapon to see action was the German FS-1400 or Fritz-X developed in WWII. This was a three-thousand-pound glide bomb designed to attack heavily armored battleships and cruisers. It was a simple bomb fitted with small fins worked by radio control. A flare on the tail of the bomb allowed the bomb aimer to follow its progress and adjust its course with simple up-down, left-right corrections.

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The Allies captured Fritz-X missiles and control equipment, and had developed effective countermeasures within a matter of months.

The British Type 650 Transmitter, and jammers from the US Naval Research Laboratory and Harvard’s Radio Research Laboratory, nullified the Fritz-X. The jammer steered the bomb as far over in one direction as possible, overriding the operator’s commands. From being a guaranteed hit, it became a guaranteed miss. The Germans dropped the idea of radio guidance, and the next version of the Fritz-X was guided via a wire spooling out of the back of the missile.

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At its simplest, jamming may simply mean broadcasting noise in the frequency band that the receiver is operating in. This sort of brute force jamming is rare in military circles, where communications tend to hop from one frequency to another at rapid intervals, and it is difficult to jam the entire spectrum with enough power. Smart jammers detect and analyze an opponent’s communications and can selectively jam only in the ranges where needed. Jammers are also likely to be directional, rather than blasting out noise in all directions.

In the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, tactical jamming took on a new urgency. Insurgents had started triggering bombs using cheap cell phones. Special countermeasures were fielded to block the signals; the Pentagon spent some $17 billion on electronic countermeasures with some fifty thousand jamming units being issued. These included portable Warlock Green units for foot soldiers, which are credited with saving many lives.

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It is notable that the 2014 Black Dart exercise included an EA-18 Growler, the most modern electronic warfare aircraft in the Air Force’s inventory, equipped with a range of powerful jammers. When the radio signal to a drone is jammed, it is usually programmed to return to the last point where it could communicate or simply return to base.

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There is a growing interest in free-space optical communications, sometimes described as “like broadband over optical fiber, but without the fiber.” The laser signal is beamed through the air to the receiver. This method only works over line of sight (obviously enough) and, because of atmospheric effects, the range tends to be limited to a mile or so. It can carry as much data as a broadband fiber optic cable and would be ideal for a swarm of drones forming a mesh network. Because it does not rely on radio waves, optical communication cannot be jammed or hacked into.

In a more low-tech version of optical communication, researchers at the Postgraduate Naval Center in Monterey have looked at communicating via QR codes as a form of “digital semaphore.”

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The team found that QR codes could be read from over five hundred feet away. A swarm could pass messages between members to coordinate its actions.

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An artillery shell is out of control as soon as it leaves the barrel, as is a heat-seeking missile when it leaves the rails. Some missiles, designed to target air defense radar, already pick their own targets. The distinction between controlled and uncontrolled is subtler than you might expect.

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If blocking communications does not work, we can try another weak point, navigation. A human pilot has many ways of finding their way around, but most drones only have GPS. The power of the Global Positioning System’s signal has been compared to a car headlight over ten thousand miles away, making it an easy signal to jam.

However, anti-jamming measures are getting better. Raytheon has developed a sophisticated anti-jam device for GPS called Landshield built around a controlled pattern reception antenna. This has an array of receiving elements that combine to cancel out the jamming from any given direction. When a jamming signal is detected, the array automatically nulls it out. It is like looking through a cardboard tube so you can see a faint light in the distance without being dazzled by lights nearby.

Raytheon’s previous generation of anti-jam GPS was the Advanced Digital Antenna Platform, which weighed about ten pounds and was the size of a telephone directory. The new Landshield fits on a silicon chip and may be integrated with military GPS devices, from portable units used by individual soldiers to the GPS-guided Paveway bomb and, of course, drones.

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On Monday, 22 January 2007, an electronic warfare exercise being carried out in San Diego harbor accidentally jammed GPS signals across the city. Disruption started almost immediately. The emergency paging system at a hospital stopped functioning. The automated harbor traffic management system stopped working, threatening to throw the port into chaos. Air traffic control at San Diego airport reported problems with their system for tracking incoming aircraft. Some bank ATMs reportedly stopped giving out money.

The reason for this disruption is that many modern systems use the precision time signal from GPS satellites. In some cell phone networks the signal is used to give each mast a unique identity; if it is lost, the mast drops off the network. GPS timing signals time-stamp financial transactions to prevent fraud, and this may be why the cash machines stopped working. Power utilities use the GPS time signal to keep alternating current from different power plants in phase across the grid. If this is lost, then attempts to switch power supplies to channel power to where it is needed become inefficient as the out-of-phase currents clash. This may ultimately produce blackouts.

GPS jamming looks more like a weapon for a swarm attacking an urban target rather than as a way of stopping a swarm.

This vulnerability is one reason why alternatives to GPS are a hot topic. One such is the system developed by Australian company Locata. This uses a network of ground-based ‘pseudo-satellites’ which give a more accurate fix and would require vastly more powerful jammers to block.

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You can already navigate urban areas without GPS thanks to Wi-Fi. Each Wi-Fi hotspot has its own fingerprint, including a Service Set ID and Media Access Control address, and transmits them continuously. Service providers including Google and Navizon map out the location of each node; by identifying those closest to you, you can pinpoint your location within less than a hundred feet.

Other researchers are navigating using “signals of opportunity,” including not only Wi-Fi but cell phone signals, radio and television transmitters, and other sources of radio waves. These may not be as accurate as GPS, but they can be used indoors as well as out, and cannot be stopped except by jamming absolutely everything.

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Tomahawk cruise missiles were originally equipped with terrain-matching radar to compare the scenery with an electronic landscape map to determine their location. The difference now is that every smartphone has the storage and processing power to scan the scenery and find out where it is.