Image by DigitalMuses
So, the new paradigm for war is: if you can see it, you can kill it.
And drones all over the battlefield mean you can see it.
This has lead to a strategy of dispersal. Until the artillery, air and attack drones are neutralized troops need to avoid massing, because masses get taken out fast. The use of motorcycle infantry is one example of this: move fast, stay dispersed, and swarm.
This has particularly been the case in the Ukrainian war, but it’s also made Hezbollah’s guerilla tactics less effective and forced them to use their tunnels far more.
But forget all that. What happens in war, comes home. Combined with modern surveillance tech, by which I mean various recognition systems, including facial, gait, body and IR, not to mention the tracking devices known as phones everyone insists on carrying, this means that governments which are willing to invest in the necessary hardware and software (AI seems to be good for this), can easily track individuals.
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And once they’ve tracked you, they don’t need to send cops: they can just send drones.
What I expect, and not too far in the future, is for this paradigm to spread to domestic law enforcement. Lots of drones keeping an eye on everything, and drones being used to take out whomever they want. I’d also expect ground drones to be used far more for crowd control and suppression.
The great thing, if you weren’t a government, about pre-internet/cell-phone tech combined with huge cities was genuine anonymity most of the time. People could fade in the masses, and if they were able to break contact with internal security forces (that’s what cops are), you stood a good chance of not being identified, and even if identified, finding you wasn’t easy.
That era has been passing for some time: the ubiquitous security cameras, often with listening devices attached were the first step.
But what’s coming down the line is going to allow for some truly dystopian levels of control and scary levels of individual targeting.
And remember, drones can be very cheap.
We’ll talk a little about the weaknesses of current internal security regimes, and how to stay ahead. But for now, to start, if you’re doing something the government doesn’t like (perhaps demonstrating against a certain genocide) don’t carry a phone, even one that’s “turned off” and wear a mask. If you need to break contact, get inside a building and merge with a crowd, then find some simple way to change your clothing profile and ideally your IR profile.
Don’t, at least, make it easy for them.
What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.
I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.
But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.
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In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.
This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!
The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.