The story goes that in the 1980s, NASA announced that a Space Shuttle research mission was able to detect former riverbeds under the Sahara desert using space-based radar. Fascinating to be sure, since it had long been thought that the Sahara hadn't always been a desert wasteland. But that civilian space agency doing pure research supposedly had a military audience in mind: war planners in the Kremlin.
The message was: "We have the means to find all of your missile silos and see right into them."
Sadly, an exhaustive search failed to turn up the story's origin but it was probably from an early Tom Clancy novel. The point is that seemingly innocent new civilian technology can also serve as a preview of future military applications.
With that in mind, watch this light show that recently took place in Shenzhen, China.
These drones — 8,100 of them — are neither armed nor equipped with sensors. But Ukraine has managed to add both to uncountable numbers of drones, all with a technological-industrial base that doesn't even hold a small birthday cake candle to China's. While the light show drones are flying pre-programmed patterns, adding AI control is almost child's play.
Not all the drones in an attack swarm would be armed. Some would be miniature electronic warfare platforms designed to blind our forces and prevent them from interfering with the swarm.
"Drones are infantry 'working remotely' using the same Asian-made cheap but effective batteries, wireless technology, plastic devices, etc. that already make 'working remotely' in the white-collar office possible," Marko Jukic posted. "Catching up to the military now too."
"Which will be the first country to launch a uniformed drone-pilot armed service, at scale, that recruits 17-year-old video gamers with fast reflexes and high energy to spend all day piloting disposable drones to attack the enemy, in a coordinated fashion?"
You don't even need to train them.
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The U.S. Navy's Virginia-class attack submarines save money by using a lot of commercial off-the-shelf parts (COTS). Starting with the USS Colorado, commissioned in 2018, one of those COTS is an Xbox controller for the photonics masts, which replaces the old-school periscope. Crews need literally zero training to use it — childhoods spent playing video games did that.
"Ukraine probably isn't even the first real drone war, but like the 0.1th or 0.5th drone war. The scale is nowhere near where it could be," Jukic added.
That's exactly right. Calling the Russo-Ukraine War the first drone war is like calling World War One the first tank war. Yes, Britain and France used tanks during the last two years of the war, but they were slow and delicate beasts with comparatively little firepower. It would take 20 years of technological development and the combined arms "blitzkrieg" doctrine developed in large part by German Gen. Heinz Guderian between the world wars to create tank warfare as we've known it since 1939.
The pace of technological change has increased markedly since then. Doctrine is evolving faster, too, thanks to 30-plus months of drone warfare in Ukraine.
What we've seen there is barely a teaser trailer for what's to come, as that innocent light show in Shenzhen shows. Drone warfare is a numbers game, and we don't have the numbers.
"What's the USA annual drone production?" data guy Donpaul Stephens asked. "Maybe, just maybe, we might want to consider reducing the hurdles for companies to actually build domestically."
There's no maybe about it.
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