The Situation: Has The Future of Violence Arrived?

The Situation over the weekend nailed fifteen theses to the church door objecting to the sale of indulgences.

Today, I have a few words to say about spiders—and their webs.

In response to Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb—an audacious drone attack on Russian strategic bombers widely dispersed and on the ground in the world’s largest country—analysts are declaring a revolution in warfare. My friend Max Boot writes in the Washington Post:

The Ukrainians rewrote the rules of warfare … on Sunday. The Russian high command must have been as shocked as the Americans were in 1941 when the Ukrainians carried out a surprise attack against five Russian air bases located far from the front — two of them thousands of miles away in the Russian Far North and Siberia. The Ukrainian intelligence service, known as the SBU, managed to sneak large numbers of drones deep inside Russia in wooden cabins transported by truck, then launch them by remote control.

It’s not just Russia that should be concerned, Boot argues:

[T]he Ukrainians revealed a vulnerability that should give every general in the world sleepless nights. If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases?

Militaries that thought they had secured their air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that can be easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s.

Matt Welch of Reason Magazine had a somewhat different take—one that for obvious reasons, engaged my particular interest. He tweeted the following: “Ten years ago, one of my biggest complaints about ‘The Future of Violence’ by Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum was that their scare stories about democratized violence were largely hypothetical. Less so a decade hence, that’s for sure!” The tweet links to this review that Welch wrote back in 2015 of Blum and my book about diffusion and civilianization of technologies of great destructive power.

The Ukrainian operation is, without question, an occasion for fist-pumping joy. It took the fight deep into Russia. It showed that Ukraine could hit the Russian military anywhere—even in the Arctic, even in Siberia—and that it could hit some of Russia’s most valuable weapons systems with complete surprise. And that it could do this without inflicting civilian casualties. That’s a very big deal. 

But I’m not sure this operation is quite the revolution people are proclaiming. And much as I would love to claim vindication for Blum and my thesis from a decade ago, that story is at least a little more complicated too.

Allow me, please, a note of caution on both points.

First off, it’s not quite right to say, as Boot does, that this kind of attack was completely unanticipated. Way back in 1995, the Rand Corporation wrote a report worrying about exactly this sort of attack on the U.S. Air Force. The example in the preface? An attack from the ground by the North Koreans on air bases in South Korea. The report’s authors, David A. Shlapak and Alan J. Vick, warned that:

The means, motives, and opportunity for ground attacks are converging to create a worsening ground threat to USAF air bases. Base vulnerability will be exacerbated by the kinds of expeditionary operations that are likely to be the most common military action in the future. Standoff attacks from perhaps several miles outside the base's perimeter pose the greatest danger, a danger that is amplified by the ongoing diffusion of affordable-yet-sophisticated weapon technologies and military gear.

The report did not focus on the use of drones, as this technology had not yet developed, but it did specifically contemplate their use in one passage of remarkable prescience: “We can easily imagine other weapons that would make excellent additions to the air-base-attack arsenal and that are within the bounds of current or near-term technology,” the authors write under the heading “Exotica”:

For example very small, remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) could be used to deliver guided submunitions . . . against individual targets. These “micro RPVs” . . . might be disassembled and carried by a two- or three-man team. Using a video data link for guidance, such a craft could be launched and controlled from long distances, if signal line of sight can be maintained, and would be able to deliver its payload with great precision.

This was written 30 years ago. Any general who needed the Ukrainian operation to get worried about a foreign adversary carting a bunch of drones near a U.S. air base and launching an attack hasn’t been following the drone industry very closely. 

And hasn’t been reading the news either. “Drone Swarms Pose New Threat to US Bases, Official Says,” reported Air and Space Forces Magazine on May 8 of last year. There’s also this report on CBS. There’s been a lot of coverage of this problem. 

Boot is almost certainly correct that the U.S. Air Force needs to think about how vulnerable it is to a drone attack like the one the Ukrainians pulled off in Russia this week. But assuming he is correct, the reason is negligence about the problem, not ignorance of it. America has not been without all sorts of warnings about this kind of thing—and for a long time.

I think the better way to think of the Ukrainian operation was—as air power specialist Fabian Hoffmann put it on Monday—a kind of classic commando raid, only executed with drones. Brilliantly done. Highly effective. But rewriting the rules of war? I’m not sure. Inserting people and weapons behind enemy lines to destroy the enemy’s high value equipment using trickery and disguise is as old as the Trojan Horse. The only thing new about this operation is that the weapons used were drones.

All of which brings me to “The Future of Violence.”

The Ukrainian operation was, in important respects, a case study in the thesis of Blum and my book, which was that the diffusion of technologies of mass empowerment—drones included—was leveling the playing field between states, between states and non-state groups, and between armed groups and individuals. The book opens with a near-future fantasy of—yes, really—a spider drone sent to kill the reader by … someone.

Now, barely a decade later, a militarily weaker state has sent a fleet of small drones—by truck—to destroy Russia’s most lethal nuclear-capable aircraft. The operation, at least according to pictures released by the Ukrainian government, appears to have used technology that is widely available and inexpensive. The incredible asymmetry between the Russian government’s investment in these major aviation systems and the Ukrainians’ use of quadcopters carrying small munitions to destroy them really does bring Blum and my thesis to mind.

Yet that fact notwithstanding, I’m hesitant to declare that the future of violence has arrived. The reason is that Operation Spiderweb is still state-level violence. This is not the Leviathan having to contend with a school of little fishes and being bested by them. This is one leviathan being bested by a smaller leviathan, one which has deployed and refined the power of a great many little fishes. It’s no small thing. It’s definitely a data point. And I do think the book’s thesis is aging well. But Operation Spiderweb seems to me a complicated example of our point.

The true vindication of the Future of Violence will come when individuals and small groups start flying their own drones into high-value Russian equipment—at their own initiative and without government direction. 

I doubt very much this is far off.

The Situation continues tomorrow.