Drones: Barrage Balloons of the Future

Matt Hipple, recent author of Cloud Combat: Thinking Machines in Future Wars for this month's Proceedings, and I have been tossing around innovative tactical uses for drones in our spare time.  Long story short, new technologies require new tactics.  This is our projection of a possible future.

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circa 2035...

The American carrier battle group had been identified.   Although masterfully concealed in a shifting sea of phantom targets and spurious electro-magnetic signals, the Chinese systems had found their prey.  The screen showed a swarm of old PLANAF airplanes refitted as drones interspersed with manned modern fighter/attack aircraft converging on the American vessels.

Occasionally, red trackfiles, denoting the attacking aircraft, disappeared from the screen.  The Chinese commander had practiced the operation thousands of times before.  The American defensive screen was eliminating the aggressors at a prodigious rate, but this was a battle of numbers rather than maneuver.  Most of those downed aircraft were merely the refitted drones programmed as mindless missile sponges. As the attackers reached their air to surface launch ranges,  the missiles were released.  Up to that moment, all had gone according to plan. Then all hell broke loose.

The manned aircraft started reporting a progressive blooming on both their air to surface and air to air sensor suites.  One contact became three.  Three became nine.  Nine became a field of dispersed and re-forming shapes.  And then the contacts merely disappeared.  Chinese sensors were not being jammed; they were working perfectly: detecting something very real, something very wrong.

Pilots started declaring emergencies – engines catching on fire, stalling, sputtering.  The red blips, manned and unmanned disappeared one by one.  The American fighters, tracked by long range radar, had retired to re-arm but aircraft were being lost by the dozen. Whole formations were lost in flitting clouds of radar scatter in and amongst the clouds, fiery explosions occasionally visible as Chinese fighters were swatted out of the sky by… something.

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Drones had certainly caught the public’s eye over the past two decades: high profile assassinations initially made the news more frequently before fading into the commonplace. Meanwhile,  tacticians were quietly looking for ways to employ them more subversively.

Planners came to the critical realization that radically new technologies allowed for radically new tactics.  Microdrones had been the plaything of amateur aviation hackers for years – and their experimentation, subtly observed, became a tool of crowdsourced tactical free-play by forward-thinking military tacticians.

A subculture of primarily civilian amateur swarm warfare competitions arose.  The advent of cheap, 3D printing had allowed anyone with a few thousand spare dollars to create entire fleets, and for those with less cash, experiment on online forums that leveraged a gamification of the American culture.  A series of competetive robot battle brackets assured wide-spread and rigorous testing of new concepts and technologies at minimal cost.

The possibilities became apparent as the tacticians noticed hobbyists weren’t using the drones as manned aircraft were used -- huge unitary craft carrying massive payloads of weapons.  The drones were optimized  for specific situations, and got increasingly smaller, often doubling as weapons themselves.  They would mesh, forming large targets, only to disappear into many autonomous constituent parts.  Almost all were of the quadrotor design, and hardly any sported expensive avionics or complex propulsion systems.

Soon, four junior officer innovation fellows at the Naval Warfare Development Command got ahold of this idea, and received $10 million from the newly created Disruptive Tactics Fund.  What they created would change naval warfare forever.

They were given free reign to spend the money as they saw fit, buying whatever technology they determined would be useful within their designated funds.  As they experimented, blending open crowd-sourced technology and expertise with in-house proprietary technology, they created a three step tactical paradigm for employing their new systems:

First, Obfuscate.  The modern enemy had learned to deploy overwhelming numbers to overload the advanced defenses of capitol ships. However, advances in software and miniaturization allowed blue forces the opportunity to do the same to the enemy.  If an adversary could send 100 platforms, each costing $250,000 at a capital ship, then the defender would deploy 1000 assets costing $1,000 each.   These drones would be both collaboratively cooperative and individually autonomous, depending on the situation's requirements.  They would appear to radars and far-away observers as one entity, then at the appropriate time, split into a haze of autonomous units.  Their formations would be fluid, and seemingly random.  They could create large radar cross section entities at will, then disperse to become virtually  invisible.  Indeed, their dispersal looked to the enemy as the destruction of a target – yet, it was anything but.

Next, Obliterate.  Once directed by the Air Defense Coordinator, these drones would transition to a suicidal mindset.  These obfuscators turned into microkillers intent on fouling aircraft engines or detonating as aircraft approached.  Like an airborne, maneuverable minefield, the drones would disperse into clouds of floating debris.  They could rapidly ascend and hover for extended periods of time, maneuvering at will, either en masse, or individually, to preplanned or real time defensive locations.  When an enemy airframe was identified, the drones would explode, throwing tiny titanium pellets in a small, but devastating radius.  Radars would lose the drones in the ambient returns or ignore them while attuned to cross sections much larger.

Visual pickups were nearly impossible on 12 inch quadrotors while moving at high speeds.  Even the small explosions that threw the killer shrapnel into the sky were hard to see.  The only indications were severe engine problems as drones were sucked into intakes, or titanium pellets ripped through compressor blades.

Finally, Overwhelm.  The loss of so many drones was problematic, as only finite numbers could be carried and maintained before deployment.  The answer was off the shelf 3-D printing, which could quickly produce the majority of drone parts using cheaply obtained raw materials.  Deployed aboard ships, these printers saved space and time, producing fleets of drones on demand.  If a design modification needed to be made, changes were simply uploaded to the CAD database, and a new batch was printed from raw materials gathered and previously stored. No changes in supplier, supply chain, or vast administrative system were necessary.

While deployed in a combat zone, an entire part of a carrier’s hangar deck was devoted to the production of these defensive drones.  When the loss of one was detected, another was automatically created to replace it.  A mobile, persistent chaff cloud able to wreak havoc could be produced at will.  No en route maintenance was necessary, aside from ensuring there was an available supply of silicon, carbon, titanium, and other assorted raw minerals.

Furthermore, any ship in the fleet could be outfitted with printers capable of producing these drones.  Detached from a combined fleet, individual ships assigned to anti-piracy or counter-drug operations could deploy their own fleets of swarming, easily replaceable air assets.

An additional benefit of these drone swarms was persistent, over-the-horizon surveillance provided by evenly deployed networks.  Much as radio telescopes used in detecting the farthest reaches of the universe had been linked across the globe to create physically impossible aperture sizes, so too did evenly distributed drones emanating micro-bursts of energy allow for the world’s largest radar.   The persistent, energy saving hover mode could transform hunter-killers into passive collection platforms.

When these were first deployed in wargames, fleet commanders accustomed to traditional formations and manned aircraft tactics were incredulous.  But soon they came to appreciate the effect these utterly unorthodox tactics were having on their $450 million stealth platforms.  The most traditional ignored the results, knowing that such applications could "never happen" in the real world.  A number of curious few, however, asked to further develop the tactics and integrate them into their battle plans. They understood the disruptive effect it would have on American adversaries, and that new technologies required entirely new applications.

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What the Chinese commander encountered was the first application in the next evolution of warfare.  Expecting the tried-and-true tactics of a change-wary institution, they encountered a decentralized, highly resilient system using readily available technology developed by an innovative cell of junior tacticians.  Bypassing normal vetting processes the navy was able to quickly harness advances in technology, processor speed, and miniaturization. By embracing risk, rather than managing it, the Navy stole a march on its opponents by deploying the tactics of tomorrow on today’s battlefield.