My recent post about F-35s rapidly re-oriented toward the topic of “flying weapons systems that might actually work” so I’d like to speculate a bit. Any of my speculations are informed by some of the excellent SF (C. J. Cherryh, Joe Haldeman) and my experience with computer networking.
I feel like I should pull some quotes but I can’t seem to find my copy of The Forever War; it is probably in the library at the studio. And I could pull quotes from C. J. Cherryh, but those books are dense and complex and it’d be hard to find the little bits of future combat hidden in them. Probably the place to start would be Hellburner, which is part of the Downbelow Station and Rimrunners cycle. Her vision of future war is consistent through much of what she writes including the splendid Faded Sun series. I love them all.
Let me start by saying what I don’t think future warfare will be like. It might be ground combat and armored vehicles fighting insurgencies on far-away planets but my belief is that there will not be human colonies on far-away planets so that’s all irrelevant. So much for Hammer’s Slammers and all of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman space battles. If you step back from Lensman‘s space battles, it’d all be familiar to Horatio Hornblower – it’s Trafalgar in space. The Honor Harrington books try to break out of that genre by adding some overlay of strategy but I think that David Weber nearly misses the boat (so to speak) by not factoring in that eventually there is going to be no distinction between a “missile”, a “warship”, and a “drone.” Weber is having fun and trying to write interesting space pot-boilers, but it’s heavily rooted in WWII Pacific fleet battles, and he knows it (and tips his hat by having a character named Nimitz in the stories) (No Togo. Boo.)
Playing Avalon Hill’s Jutland many times on the ping-pong table with my high school gaming gang, I learned that a great deal of warfare has to do with when you detect your foe, and how you manage the range between the two of you. The canonical example of that is not Jutland as much as Tsushima Straits- Togo’s great victory. But let me assert, arguendo, that some of the dynamics of fleet warfare will not change: range, detection, and reaction. Technology affects all of those, and that’s why we’re talking about stealth and F-35s.
google image search for “drone swarm”
Hellburner is particularly dear to me, in this line of thinking, because it’s a story about an experimental mind/machine-melded strike drone/ship, when the experiment goes horribly wrong. This is not a spoiler; the rider ship is a detachable strike craft that can be locked on the outside of a capital ship prior to an inter-system hyper-jump, so when the capital ship arrives in its target system it releases the rider ship, which can attack along a different vector at a different speed. The capital ship might brake (“dump the vanes”) and start killing its velocity, while the hellburner comes in, at relativistic speeds, with a human pilot, ready to fuck some shit up. It’s an interesting vision, to me, of future fleet operations, because it takes into account relativistic effects – as a ship jumps in, the footprint of its arrival, and the sensors of the forces already in system, are shared at the speed of light, so something like the hellburner might give one side a second or two’s advantage. In warfare at relativistic speeds, a second or two is an entire major engagement.
In Cherryh’s Pride of Chanur series, we get a similar feeling: the crew jumps from one system to another, arrives, and gets to find out in a few seconds whether they made it or whether they’re a flash of light and an expanding debris-field.
The ultimate devolution of the warrior ethic is in Joe Haldeman’s brilliant The Forever War. It’s one of the most cynical books about war I have ever read, which makes sense because Haldeman was in Vietnam and saw the futility up close and personal. In The Forever War the crew of a ship climb into pressurized tanks of oxygenated floro-something to absorb the shock of their ship’s maneuvers. They lie there, with nothing to do but think, and they feel little bumps and sloshes as the ship puts itself through maneuvers that would turn the human cargo into ugly paste. And, sometimes, that’s what happens – a tank fails and a bunch of heroic war heroes get hosed out of the tank. Or, you tank up, chill out, feel some bumps and jerks, and discover that – congratulations – you have won a great victory! Implicit in all of that is the question of why humans have to be involved in this nonsense, at all. That’s a good question. Haldeman’s answer appears to be that humans just can’t let go of being involved in warfare. Cherryh’s answer appears to be that humans provide the strategic element across warp-space: someone has to figure out what to do in those fractional seconds.
I love C.J. Cherryh, but I don’t buy it for a minute. AIs would make decisions, independently, faster and would perform as well as humans. Besides, frequently nobody’d know who “won” or “lost” an engagement, anyway. I’m also afraid that the obvious answer someone would cook up would be to just destroy everything, on the principle that the survivors could re-build but anything else entails uncertain negotiations over time. “Let’s take off and nuke it from orbit” at the level of star systems. Saberhagen’s Berserker series premise this; that the universe is a really, really ugly place indeed. Eric Nylund’s Signal To Noise series, and Chixin Liu’s Three Body Problem also explore that axis of future war: all wars instantly become war to eradication. Let me posit something: AI plus rapid drone weapons equals war to eradication, perhaps because AIs will see the strategic situation as not requiring negotiation. Negotiation is inefficient; I’m too busy winning.
So, that brings me back to the question: “why does the Air Force still build manned aircraft?” That’s simple and ought to be obvious: the Air Force is stupid and has too much money. Who wouldn’t want to strap an F-15 on their ass and fly around like a god? But, if you think about missiles as particularly dumb drones, I’ll say that ship left the dock in the Vietnam War: the US lost many expensive aircraft to inexpensive missiles. As the missiles get better and better, the aircraft have to get stealthy so they have a chance of surviving. Stealth is temporary, though, so in the long run a spray of missiles is going to get you – that’s why the US’ stealth aircraft strategy is to penetrate target air-space with stealthy aircraft that can degrade air defenses, and then the regular aircraft can come in. Except for the fact that we have to share a planet, “take off and nuke it from orbit” is the only strategy that makes sense. Stealth is a side-effect of wanting to be able to “win” engagements while still having something of value left of your enemy. What’s going on, there? I think that the AIs aren’t quite good enough, yet, to be able to determine when they have “won” and stop shooting.
I find that strategy odd, because historically US strategy has been “kill them all and let god sort them out” and I’m inclined to think that it’s because the technology for a complete-kill is just not there. Yet.
What would the tech for a complete kill look like? It’d look like AI-driven independent drones that are able to hide and loiter and resume activity any time a target presents itself. Think of them as drones or as autonomous flying land-mines, or whatever – disposable munitions. A friend of mine and I were discussing this once and concluded that the thing would have to be a self-organizing system, with compute-heavy AI nodes (probably powered by small uranium plants) would direct disposable munitions that were semi-smart, while being close to the battle area to reduce signal lag. It’s kind of like Terminator‘s skynet, just field-deployable and persistent. [And, by the way, the computer security problems in building smart networked war devices are solvable, just not under the current approaches to software development] The kind of system I’m talking about would be comparable to seeding hostile terrain with some kind of nematode for a parasite that hangs out and denies the area to everyone except its friends.
The interim step, which I think is where we are headed, is for semi-independent drones that are commanded from aircraft that loiter outside the battle area (to reduce signal lag) – imagine a 737 full of comms gear and drone command consoles, and drone pilots, who can “jump into” a drone that is doing something particularly interesting, or that is running a tricky offensive maneuver. The current state of drone warfare is that the pilots are a long way from the drone, and there’s some lag to deal with – except for a small number of killer drones where the command/control nodes are situated closer to the drone. Right now, the Air Force is pretty incompetent in managing their drone command/control consoles; word I heard is that some of them were infected with basic malware that took years to clean out. That speaks, to me, of some really bad design and policy decisions, which would need to be made differently in order to move to autonomous AI drones.
By the way: there will be a market for drone operating systems that have not been tainted by governments’ intelligence services. If you’re going to fly autonomous drones against the US Empire, you can’t rely on Windows or Linux. Or Intel processors, for that matter.
So, I guess that’s my answer to “why does the Air Force still build piloted aircraft?” it’s because the drone tech is not quite “there” yet. But that’s the end-state: human pilots will experience the questionable thrill of combat only through VR headsets.
Let me wrap this with two other visions of future combat that I think were quite good: Walter Jon Williams’s Praxis books have some interesting thoughts about the danger of building space fleets that fly “by the book.” And Scott Westerfeld’s Risen Empire series has a great description of what it might be like to be in a navy space fleet ship that is fighting an AI swarm. For an encore, he treats us to a delightful description of Pvt Bassiriz, a fellow who happens to have been born with reflexes so far at the end of a bell curve that he feels the most people are basically standing still all the time. Bassiriz is a drone pilot, whose specialty is time and scale -shifted combat; Westerfeld describes a drone battle that takes place over the surface of a cup of tea. Great stuff.
What I don’t think is that we’ll stop warring. And, weapons seem to keep getting more destructive. As you know, if you read this blog, I am very concerned by the US’ strategy of producing first-strike nuclear weapons. There’s no way that’s going to end well.
I’m not complaining but – it’s hard to do a post like this, with the necessary literary references, but no spoilers! I guess “stick firmly to the obvious” is the order of the day.
I think one big reason for the continued existence of manned combat aircraft and big dumb indefensible targets like supercarriers is that, while those are useless liabilities in a proper war against equivalent opposition, they are really useful in curbstomp-wars and other peacetime activities; if the US was actually seriously expecting a big fight against a great power might break out any day (like at the height of the cold war) they would probably take these problems seriously. As it is, they don’t expect to ever have to do that, and so can afford to cock about and shovel money into Lockheed Martin shareholders. I think the people in charge would sober up real fast if it got to a serious shooting war being likely.
Maybe. Or maybe they would choose to lean on their ICBMs, which would, in my thinking, be as non-sober as you can get. I honestly understand ICBMs as a deterrent in a world where other nations have ICBMs, but the fact that we build first-strike weaponry tells me that our military hasn’t yet figured out that there is no winner in a nuclear war.
The proper response to a single ICBM launched at you is to encourage people to shelter/evacuate as best as they can, then send in Spec/Ops teams to assassinate the enemy political leadership while you’re giving a speech at the UN at how inhuman the other side’s actions have been so that they (hopefully) ignore your political assassinations & focus their ire on the enemy country.
The proper response to a flood of ICBMs launched at you is to get in one more good fuck or eat one more excellent bit of food and let someone else worry about what comes next.
In neither case does launching a flood of ICBMs or even one ICBM really help you.
These decisions are made by an elite few, not a democratic mass. The effect of the retaliation should be felt by that elite few, not the democratic mass. Ultimately that is the real deterrent.
The ne plus ultra of robot/space combat sequences is surely in Iain M. Banks’s Excession.
There’s a terrific bit where the AI in control of and instantiated across a series of drones deals with some hostile activity. I can’t really describe it in more detail than that without spoilers for the exhilarating experience of reading it. The relevant point, though, is that the detailed, visceral description of the desperate, multi-threaded, tactically complex game of cat/mouse/shotgun that ensues takes up several densely printed pages, and describes an encounter that is all over, start to finish, in less than a second. It’s an amazing piece of writing.
If you haven’t read any Banks, Excession is probably not the place to start. But if you’ve read one or two and haven’t got round to Excession yet – make it the next thing you read.
I can see what you mean, but I disagree, sort of.
What you’re saying (I think) is that drone tech isn’t quite good enough yet for the US to replace their manned aircraft with UAVs. I agree with that. Where my disagreement comes from is that in my opinion, drone tech is already good enough, now, for forces opposing the US to be able to use them to make the US’s stealth manned aircraft ineffective, practically a liability. And by “forces opposing the US” I don’t just mean Russia and China.
Paul van Riper proved that even in what you think are going to be curbstomps against low-tech opposition, you can have a nasty surprise. The US likes to think of its enemies as rubes bringing a knife to a gunfight, but then turns up with a gun that requires the user to scroll to the bottom of an EULA and click “Accept” and then wait for the OS to update before it can be fired.
Though otherwise lamentable in several ways, Harry Harrison’s Starworld (3rd in his To the Stars trilogy) includes an intriguing space battle in which the tactic of surprise and the basic physics of inertia matter much more than computing power.
Catherine Asaro’s Skolian Empire series deserves mention here for sheer guts-‘n’-glory interstellar warfare melodrama, though readers of von Clausewitz may not feel it adds much to high-strategy literature.
I was going to add “mine” to your list, but you seem to have corrected the oversight later. Imagine a fleet of reasonably small drones that inserts itself into enemy territory, just beyond the end of their air base runway. It gets in by flying lower than radar, nap of the earth. It just parks there until activated. When activated, it waits for an enemy aircraft to take off, and fires a small missile at it. The missile can be small because the distance is short and the enemy will not be using counter-measures so close to their home base.
This would replace a grunt with a stinger missile, which has a high probability of being intercepted on the way in, and would be considered a suicide mission. An added bonus is that activation could occur just when you are flying an offensive mission toward the enemy, so that you would wipe out their defensive interceptors.
Alistair Reynolds, whose books don’t really rank all the way up to classic, had some intersting battles involving relativistc effect, too. Ships lightminutes apart would just throw slugs at each other based on the last known position (i.e. several minutes ago) and guesswork based on speed, acceleration an essentially luck. While they were doing that the combatants would themselves jink and dodge and turn to avoid being too predictable to be hit themselves. Eventually somebody would blow up or ships would close enough to start killing each other in real time.
Another scenario: Ships chasing each other at relativistic speeds. One interesting attack I recall involved the lead ship dropping off thin sheets (effectively solar sails) in the path of their pursuer, then decelerating them using lasers. The sheets would be practically invisible and moving so fast that they could kill starships despite being very light.
So Reyonolds did capture the same elements of range, detection and reaction. The light-distances make it a bit more interesting because that’s a limitation you can’t overcome with better or more equipment. Even with a perfect system and total technological superiority over your enemy you’re always working with imperfect (i.e. old) information to plan your strategy and counter-moves.
A bit more down to
EarthMars: Perserverance’s landing. As NASA has it, the landing would have been impossible before. Human operators couldn’t have reacted in time to do a precise enough landing in rough terrain because of the distances. They still had to cheat, though, by getting all their maps and other sorted out well in advance of the actual landing so the lander could be programmed accordingly.komarov@#7:
Another scenario: Ships chasing each other at relativistic speeds. One interesting attack I recall involved the lead ship dropping off thin sheets (effectively solar sails) in the path of their pursuer, then decelerating them using lasers. The sheets would be practically invisible and moving so fast that they could kill starships despite being very light.
Westerfeld’s thing is sand. It’s cheap and at any speed that a spaceship wants to be going, it’s lethal.
And then there was the great fight with the Pak protector in The Ringworld Engineers. I don’t think I should spoiler that one, so:
Gur ureb qbrf n pybfr syl-ol bs n arhgeba fgne naq qebcf n ohapu bs qvfcbfnoyr znff va, fb vg perngrf na K-enl syner gung onxrf gur perj bs gur chefhvat fuvc.
I love Alistair Reynolds’ stuff.
Another series I ought to have mentioned are the “bobverse” books, which have some pretty cool space war strategy. Dennis Taylor, We are Legion, we are bob. It’s not literature but it’s fun.
Reginald Selkirk@#6:
I was going to add “mine” to your list, but you seem to have corrected the oversight later. Imagine a fleet of reasonably small drones that inserts itself into enemy territory, just beyond the end of their air base runway. It gets in by flying lower than radar, nap of the earth. It just parks there until activated. When activated, it waits for an enemy aircraft to take off, and fires a small missile at it.
There would also be “ticks” – quiet little crawlies that are basically explosively formed penetrators on legs. Once the flying drones reported the location of something interesting to the AI, the AI might decide to start having a few of the ticks crawl over there and get ready to blow up at an inconvenient time.
I imagine there’d be a panoply of nasties. Ticks, sheaf missiles (terminally guided anti-whatever), dumbfire missiles (basically, a one-shot mortar) and incendiaries. Imagine how much it would suck to set up a forward air base and have ticks and blazebugs start stalking your POL, generators, and dormitories. If we’re talking AI that’s reasonably sophisticated, I can imagine ticks that would latch onto vehicles and ride around waiting for a great place to blow up. And, of course, if they were detected they’d go off right in your face. Composable nasties would be quite inexpensive, really. You’d want a hive mama drone to fly in, fly over, and drop them off.
There are some indications that the Chinese military are looking at swarm tech, but mostly it’s swarm missile tech. Which is totally a great idea. Apparently they are working on containerized area denial missiles, which take advantage of existing cargo container tech – you just haul them out and tip them at an angle and you have a missile battery capable of firing 4 rockets at a ship up to 1,000 miles away. “have a nice day.”
sonofrojblake@#3:
If you haven’t read any Banks, Excession is probably not the place to start. But if you’ve read one or two and haven’t got round to Excession yet – make it the next thing you read.
I have to apologize to all and sundry for not mentioning Banks, and not mentioning why I did not mention Banks. He’s still one of my favorite writers. But, I think he plays a trick (William Gibson being the champion of this trick) which is to cleverly dupe the ready with a bunch of complex description, into thinking they have read about a complex event. Canonical example, in Surface Detail the reader experiences Demeisen engaging in a massive space battle (and apparently winning it pretty handily) but what we have is a description of lights moving and things happening and, um, what? There’s not even as much of a description of what as C.J. Cherryh or Westerfeld or others. In that particular scene, I remember closing the book and thinking “Demeisen is scary bad-ass” and then realizing that I didn’t actually know much about that, at all.
[William Gibson: again, I’m quite the fan. But if you notice his way of dealing with future tech is in glittering generalities, which make it sort of plausible because he omits the details of how it works. Cyberspace is a “consensual hallucination” What? OK, what’s that? He never says. But we think, “damn that sounds cool.” Here’s the thing: sit down and try to think how Gibsonian cyberspace would be useful, and you’ll come up dry. He’s just talking about a fast user interface and that some people learned how to handle large data-rates. Tell that to any of the Fuel Rats, or someone who tanks World of Warcraft raids – complexity management is the issue, and Gibson brilliantly skates right by it by asserting his characters are just too cool to have that problem. But if you haven’t read Neuromancer damn is it good,]
Plus cargo containers are pretty ubiquitous. good urban camouflage.
I think Ian Banks has the answer to the question of why humans are involved. If humans aren’t involved in the feedback loop somewhere then the conflict is not really about them. We might have set them off, but the conflict will resolve according to their goals.
Banks is a bit more explicit about space warfare tactics in The Algebraist… It’s not in the Culture universe, and there’s no hyperspace or any kind of FTL (except wormholes, which mostly aren’t relevant even though they’re central to the plot). Inter-ship combat mostly comes down to strategists arguing about the relative probabilities of running into stuff at relativistic velocities in different formations, and if someone is coming to wage war on your system, you get to spend a few years analysing their deceleration burn signatures to try and figure what their fleet looks like, whilst wondering what percentage of their force isn’t decelerating, and is going to tear through your system at 99% c shedding munitions as it goes.
That’s a pretty much constant sub-theme running through all the Culture books – to what extent do the humans actually have a meaningful role in the Culture? Are they partners, or are they just pets? And can you really trust anything the Minds have to say on the matter? (Or any other matter?)
So… paperclips!
I was going to come here and mention The Algebraist but Dunc said it all. (Favourite scene: the one where the Dwellers are openly baffled at the Archimandrite’s negotiating tactics, then entertaingly demonstrate their tactical/tech superiority.)
The issue of trusting Minds is what makes Excession the best, imo.
Great victory?
Have you ever seen Drachinfel’s youtube clip of the Russian fleets … unhappy .. voyage to that battle?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mdi_Fh9_Ag
With the sequel here :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXpj6nK5ylo
Seeming kinda inevitable..(tho’ hindsight and all I guess but..)
Plus a coda (?) of sorts here :
I have not read Excession since it came out. I’ll remedy that!
SteveOr@#14:
Great victory?
Yes. Granted the Russians were in terrible shape and experienced some truly horrible travails to get to Tsushima to get their asses kicked, Togo still gets points in my book for correctly understanding the situation and using his superior gunnery, speed, and range to wipe out what amounted to a bunch of sitting ducks. The trick was that Togo realized they were sitting ducks.
I’m somewhat familiar with the Russian fleet’s horrible experience, which culminated in a supremely horrible experience – but I haven’t watched that particular documentary. I’ll check it out! [ooh on youtube I see it’s sub-titled “voyage of the damned” – great, yes, that’s right.]
PS – Massie’s Castles of Steel is a really excellent book about naval warfare during the time of “peak navy” – it’s where I got my information about Tsushima, FWIW.
Well, there’a a movie which describes more or less what you suggest: “Screamers” (1995), not really great but showing pretty well what could happen when your autonomous weapons become a bit too… ambitious.
It’s taken from a Philip K.Dick story, but I’ve never read that; as for lightspeed battles I’d like to mention the brouhaha in the second part of Niven’s “Protector”, nicely done and properly sciencey.
I also would suggest Iain Banks’ “Look to Windward”, not necessarily for the tech but for the general atmosphere – and the humour. Look just at the list of ship’s names!
Also, did you have to mention Drach? Addictive, that one is. And the craving grows.