In August of 2023, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced
a program to produce thousands of drones.
I’ve also extensively covered the extremely limited
suitability of most drones for combat operations.
Despite all that, it appears that we’re going to go ahead
and base our war with China on the actions of a couple of militaries notable
only for their stunning degree of ineptitude.
This is the very definition of preparing to fight the last
war – one that has no relevance to a war with China.
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… Department of Defense (DoD) Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced the Replicator initiative, … fielding attritable autonomous systems in multiple thousands across multiple domains.[1]So, having seen what they believe to be the war-changing impact of drones in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the DoD is preparing to fight China using the methodology of the Ukraine-Russia war. This, despite all the warnings and signs that the Ukraine-Russia war is highly unique and not applicable to future wars, in general, and a war with China, in particular. I’ve extensively covered the reasons why this war has little bearing on, or lessons for, a China war so I won’t bother re-listing them. Suffice it to say that there are few operational or tactical lessons to be had from this. It would be like a professional boxer trying to draw lessons from a schoolyard fight between a couple of ten year old children.
https://www.diu.mil/latest/implementing-the-department-of-defense-replicator-initiative-to-accelerate
Lots of catch up need to do, this is a list from Wikipedia on Chinese UAV. It is far from what I read, for instance BZK-006A, Chinese Army brigade level equipped surveillance and attack drone. Also, heaps of civilian drones are not included. These civilian drones include not just toys but also large ones used in agriculture, shipment, ... etc.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_aerial_vehicles_of_China
BTW, a recent report on a hypersonic drone under development
https://i-hls.com/archives/123063
"Cached and hidden” were the words used by the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Christopher Mahoney when talking on Capitol Hill about how large amphibious assault ships can host, store, launch, hide and operate large numbers of drones."
ReplyDeleteSomthing about this strikes me as absurdly optimistic, as well as slightly idiotic... At what point are amphibs going to be operating within drone range of... anything?? If THEY can get that close, then cant the rest of the fleet be even closer, and using their offensive weapons?? Wheres the CONOPS for this idiocy?? Wheres the overall fleet doctrine that says this is needed or useful??
Maybe its another Marine money and power grab to take more control of the amphibs? Idk, but I think people are just saying whatever comes into their empty heads these days...
Heres the article, which also goes on to stupidly espouse how powerful the Lightning Carriers are...
https://warriormaven.com/sea/marine-corps-wants-drone-fleets-cached-hidden-on-amphibious-assault-ships
ReplyDeleteI am no fan of DIU, especially when they don't issue CONOPS, logistic plans, or Use Cases, but perhaps the way to think of these drones is as smart mines. The US Navy is terrified of mines (even though they cannot get serious about hunting/neutralizing them) and the Chinese don't have any better tech for finding and neutralizing them that we know of. As fairly recent Persian Gulf/Middle East history shows, mines can deny, or make extremely costly, operations in an area with them. Infesting the Taiwan Strait with relatively cheap (Lord only knows what the Navy will pay for each of these) smart mines could be an effective way to close the strait to amphibious ships. Again where is the CONOPS and Wargames to figure out the tactics and effectiveness?
ReplyDelete" think of these drones is as smart mines"
DeleteThat's an interesting thought. There are, however, some potential aspects that could make that problematic.
Unlike regular mines which are, essentially, a 'fire and forget' weapon and require no user control to function, a drone requires user control.
Regular mines are placed in a spot and they don't move. Thus, you can lay minefields and be assured of a uniform pattern. Drones, unless somehow anchored, would drift according to the currents.
Regular mines are very difficult to detect and this is one of their great strengths. Drones, floating on the surface, are easily spotted.
Along with the control issue, there need to be facilities and comm equipment to control drones. If you're envisioning hundreds/thousands of drones (as would be the case with mines), the control facility requirements would be enormous and that amount of control signals would lead to pinpointing the control facility(s) pretty quickly.
Mines are a good bit smaller than drones. The transportation and laying/launching assets to handle that quantity of large drones would be a challenge.
And so on.
I may be misunderstanding how you envision these being used so feel free to correct me.
So, do we perhaps have a good CONOPS to support building unmanned underwater vessels - mine laying? Couple of hundred vessels containing dozens of mines all sent out to seed the Taiwan Strait when invasion seem imminent? I'm not saying do this with surface ships.
DeleteAs of Oct 2022, the first five Orca unmanned submersibles, designed specifically for mine laying, are expected to cost a total of $621M ($124M each). You're calling for a couple hundred. That would be $24.8 BILLION dollars! Yikes!
DeleteDo you have a Plan B?
Well, my first plan B would be to look at costs and features. These could be an expendable "truck" that follows a pre-planned route carrying a tube that tosses a mine out at a way point. Should that cost $124M (plus the cost of the mines?) This would be after looking at the cost of alternatives based on per mine placed costs. Maybe plan A is still cheaper compared to other delivery methods? If so, wow to add to your yikes, but maybe this is a good deal in the grand scheme of things.
DeleteLooked further, these Orcas can carry nine of the Navy's submersible delivered mines. So, mine size, and vessel size, both need to be worked on.
Delete"alternatives based on per mine placed costs."
DeleteAs a historical data point, most maritime minefields in WWII were on the order of ten thousand mines each. Of course, if there were a narrow choke point or some such, it would not require as many but the point is that mines, when used, are used in massive quantities, as a general statement. So, multiply whatever deliver cost you come up with by 10,000x or so!
"can carry nine of the Navy's submersible delivered mines."
DeleteWhich will require hundreds of vessels to deliver a useful minefield. Just out of curiosity, do these submersibles you're envisioning have underwater sensors to allow collision avoidance when hundreds of them converge on the same general area?
One might be quiet (electric motor, one presumes) but what happens when a couple hundred converge? Is that an easily detected event by the enemy? If so, old fashioned depth charges (or Soviet/Russian RBUs) would be ideal for disabling these submersibles.
People have a tendency to think mine laying is simple but it's not. The actual dropping of a mine over the side of a ship might be simple but the planning, logistics, cost, deconfliction, etc. are certainly not.
Virginia submarines supposedly can carry around forty mines but, again, when ten thousand or so are needed, forty at a time is negligible.
DeleteWe've forgotten the vast amounts of weapons and materials that a real war requires. We've come to think that a couple of mines constitutes mine warfare or that a couple of Burkes constitutes a carrier escort. We're going to have a rude awakening when war with China comes. Worryingly, we've consciously ceded quantity to China in favor of quality and now we're seeing that China is equaling or surpassing us in quality, too! Quantity has a quality all its own and we've ceded both to our enemy. The Navy is retiring more ships than they're building, year after year.
Unrelated news:
ReplyDeleteThird commander relieved of his duties this year, seems a lot since we only in March. Is this normal to relieve this many officers? Not sure if this is good news we getting rid of bad officers or is this bad news that so many are in charge?!? Something is off inside the USN.
https://share.newsbreak.com/6ew17h31
The lesson for a Navy from the Ukraine war and the Red Sea events is that they need to be able to counter swarms of drones, because low-end opponents will use them, and shooting them down with high-performance SAMs is too expensive.
ReplyDeleteThe way to counter lots of drones seems to be jamming their guidance, including GPS, plus guns, and just maybe lasers for the leakers. There's an interesting WWII parallel, in the German Fritz-X manually guided glide bomb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X#Electronic_countermeasures). That had 18 control channels to make jamming harder, and the answer was simply to jam all of them simultaneously. There was a vulnerability in the missile's receiver which made that easy, but a ship has the weight, space and power available to jam satellite signals within a few kilometres without such advantages.
" jam all of them"
DeleteOne of the [many] things I've called for is a dedicated electronic warfare vessel and this kind of active jamming would be ideal for such a vessel. Of course, that presupposes that there is a jammable control signal. For UAVs, there likely is. For the kind of surface drones Ukraine is using, that use satellite signals, I don't know whether those are susceptible to jamming. Do you have any idea about that?
The risk we run in drawing this kind of lesson AND THEN ACTING ON IT is that we're preparing to fight a war whose conditions won't apply to our war with China. Facing drones in a small, constrained operating area is not what we'll be facing in a war with China [unless we're stupid ... so ... maybe]. Of course we need to learn to deal with air and sea drones but we can't remake the fleet in doing so and lose sight of what a war with China will require. We failed in exactly this way with our global war on terror which decimated or military and twisted it in the wrong direction because we became myopically focused on one specific type of war and lost sight of what we needed to fight a real war.
"For the kind of surface drones Ukraine is using, that use satellite signals, I don't know whether those are susceptible to jamming."
DeleteThey are, and it's been done for decades. People tend to be cautious about doing it, because you can't jam an enemy's access to a system and retain use of it yourself. However, in a full-scale war, jamming is to be expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Military (scroll down a bit). Of course, nowadays there are four systems: US, Russian, Chinese and EU, because when there was only one, the US could turn it off regionally, and other countries didn't fancy that. The modern GPS chips in smartphones (which can be repurposed) can use all of the systems, so you have to jam all of them.
Why does the modern USN seem to ignore so much of this? I have a hypothesis, but it's a bit long for a comment.
What exactly have we been teaching at Annapolis, West Point, etc. ? Where is the push to actually think? To analyze, to break things down? It is part of the same thinking that demands every ship be do everything from AAW to ASW. Everything is generalized. Nothing specific for tech or tactics just generalities. The Pacific and European theaters were fought in entirely different ways in WW2
ReplyDeleteCopying something that works in a place that is now doing WW1 style trench warfare for much of their front line makes zero sense if we are trying to be leaders.
But that that's the problem. We don't make leaders anymore.
The military academies and the Ivy League colleges that have supplied many of our best and brightest admirals and generals no longer teach real leadership.
They don't teach how to lead, they teach how to rule.
A leader says "follow me". A ruler says "do what I say".
A leader asks "what is best for my team?" A ruler asks "what's easiest for me?"
A leader asks "what would work best for this situation." A ruler asks "whatever that that guy do, let me copy it and take credit for it."
"They don't teach how to lead"
ReplyDeleteYou can't teach how to lead. Sure, you can offer some good techniques but leaders are born, not taught. I don't think it's a case of the academies not teching leadership but, rather, a case of actively suppressing potential good leaders. From the academy on, our officers are selected for advancement based on political skills rather than leadership/combat skills. Anyone with an ounce of aggression, combativeness, and leadership is quickly identified and marginalized. The students/officers quickly get the message and the potential leaders either leave or fall into the politically correct line.
You are correct that leadership is not taught in a classroom. But you are also showing how leadership is taught at the academies, college et. al. They learn by example. And the example is putting politics above history, strategy, and practical knowledge. Do we even have officers who've seen combat or at least had long careers teaching? And a class in leadership might not be needed learning history is a part of learning leadership. By studying the great admirals and generals like Bull Halsey, Patton, and Doolittle, we gain examples of the kind of leaders we want. Those three (from differing branches) are the epitome of taking charge, taking risks, and leading from the front.
Delete