Episode 6: Autonomy Now! Ukraine, Iran, China, and the “Drone” Revolution

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Episode 6, Autonomy Now, Ukraine, Iran, China, and the Drone Revolution. The US built an expensive, exquisite and highly controlled inventory of unmanned systems for the wars on terror. But in today's world of quadcopters, cheap drones and long range missiles, does the US have the right arsenal?

>> Speaker 1: On the ground, in the air, at sea?

 

In Ukraine, drones are reshaping warfare. What Hollywood could only dream of not long ago is now reality.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Welcome to the Hand Behind Unmanned a podcast about how America fights war without human beings, told from the perspective of the human beings making those choices. I'm Jackie Schneider.

>> Julia Macdonald: And I'm Julia Macdonald.

 

In this podcast, we take you inside weapons budget lines and behind classified program doors to understand not only what unmanned technology the US Military bought, but why. For those of you who came for the technology, we hope you'll stay for the people. Because this really is a story about remarkable humans, historical junctures and our beliefs about the future of war and what that means for unmanned weapons we buy.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Along the way in our unmanned journey, we'll learn valuable lessons about how technology shapes the winners and losers in war, how humans and technology interact at a time when the march of technological progress seems inevitable, how public funds can invest in when it comes to warfare, and above all, the human hands at the heart of unmanned technology.

 

At first glance, the rise of unmanned systems seems like a simple story. These technologies make a military more capable and therefore states with more capacity will buy more and better unmanned systems. However, what this podcast and our book shows is that nothing about the United States current unmanned inventory is simple.

 

This is not a story of inevitability, but instead about contingency, where the roads not taken are as important as those traveled in explaining how we got to where we are today. It is a story that shows that beliefs about technology often matter more than the technologies themselves. Where the key protagonists are the people that advocate for different beliefs about technology and the American way of war, how military services co opt and resist these beliefs in accordance with their own entrenched identities.

 

Finally, it is a story about how shifts arising from domestic politics and exogenous shocks create windows of opportunity for these beliefs to come to the fore, to compete, and ultimately to become embedded in doctrinal and budget decisions that create path dependencies for years to come. When we started this book, the puzzle was why we had gone all in on remotely controlled unmanned aerial systems like the Predator and the Reaper.

 

And that was provocative. A few years ago when we were in the midst of the war on terror and these systems were playing a major role in American conflict, it is a less provocative question today when it is not expensive and exquisite remote control systems dominating the modern battlefield, but instead cheap quadcopters, mines and missiles.

 

In this episode, we're going to reframe a bit and look outside the United States. How the wars and technological innovation occurring in places like Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Iran and even North Korea are changing the art of the possible in unmanned technology and forcing the US to reevaluate its beliefs about how wars today are fought and won.

 

And we're going to spend most of our time in this episode in Ukraine.

>> Speaker 4: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says Russia used 93 missiles and over 200 drones to. Take down key power grids. He also said Ukrainian forces managed to shoot down 81 of those missiles using US defense equipment.

 

 

>> Speaker 5: Moscow on Tuesday saw the largest Ukrainian drone attack since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine more than three years ago. Three people were killed and more than a dozen of others were injured in the drone attack that also targeted several other Russian regions. The Russian military said 91 Ukrainian drones were downed over the Moscow region and nearly 250 others were shot down over other regions of Russia.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Both Ukraine and in invading Russia have experimented extensively with drones, missiles, mines and even unmanned surface vehicles. This is a complicated and rich story about unmanned technology. So I'm going to turn first and foremost to Michael Kaufman to help us understand what is happening.

>> Michael Kofman: I'm a senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment.

 

I've spent most of my professional life working in defense analysis, defense research with a bit of a specialization on the Russian military and more recently the Ukrainian military. So I've worked at National Defense University. I was the director for the Russian Studies program at center for Naval Analysis.

 

I was a fellow Modern Warren Street, West Point. And I do quite a bit of field work in Ukraine and have been over the last three years of the Russia Ukraine war.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Michael has spent a lot of time on or near the front lines of battle in Ukraine and he's seen firsthand the types of unmanned technologies that are shaping that conflict.

 

 

>> Michael Kofman: If we're looking at the types of uncrewed systems, right, most of them are. Uas.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: That's Unmanned Aerial System. Michael, as the expert he is, uses a series of acronyms. We'll try and decode those for you.

>> Michael Kofman: And they're typically either very short range. Commercial isr.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: That's intelligence Surveillance and reconnaissance.

 

 

>> Michael Kofman: Bomber drones. Like pound for pound, the best drone of this war is still DJI's Mavic, particularly Mavic 3T with thermal camera. And it can be modified to be a bomber as well. It's a fairly light Quadro copter, all right? So it's the size of something that you could easily hold in your hand.

 

Most of the drone systems you see in this war they're piloted either with, let's say, either a radio, or remote type controller, or via a helmet system for FPVs.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: First person view. Think of this like radio control using a camera on the system that gives the operator a view of what the drone or the weapon is seeing real time.

 

 

>> Michael Kofman: Where the pilot is wearing a big set of what look like VR goggles and then the co pilot is looking at another screen with greater situational awareness. And the drones are themselves, they are streaming the information for example mavic via a web based interface to lots of units who can then see this information and they can interact directly with the operator.

 

They can ask them things, they can record it and they have a very simplistic views they have typically you know an anti tank or anti personal ammunition on them those different types of munitions you can attach to them and you just directly strike the target with these first person view drones.

 

Normally these are things that are being used at the range of about 15 km.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So these are the small quadcopters, sometimes equipped with small munitions, kind of like grenades, that are being used in Ukraine and by Russia to conduct battlefield intelligence, to find targets and often to attack those targets.

 

 

>> Michael Kofman: Then we have heavy multirotor drones. These are sort of derivative off of industrial drones. They're much heavier, they have greater payload, greater range, they're basically multicopters. These are not things that you can hold in your hand, right? They're about the size of your desk, let's say. And they conduct various bombing missions, particularly night bombing missions.

 

They conduct resupply. In some cases, battalion commanders maybe use heavy Multirotor drones for 50% of the logistical resupply of their troops. They're also heavily used for remote mining. Distance mining is quite prevalent on both sides, particularly on the Ukrainian side, where use drones to accurately map the battlefield and then use drones to then deploy mines defensively or offensively.

 

And you know where you put all your mines when you do it with a drone rather than scattering them out. A lot of folks don't know that. Even though most of the videos they see from the war show FPV strike drones hitting targets, probably 50% of the attrition is still being inflicted by bomber drones, Both light bomber drones and heavy multirotor drones on the bomber role, which have gotten much better at targeting and hitting things on the move.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: As Michael explained. These are like your Walmart bot quadcopter on steroids. They have much larger payloads. They can drop bigger, more lethal weapons or transport bigger equipment or supplies. The Ukrainian nickname for these type of drones is Baba Yaga, a reference to a mythical witch who flies around on a mortar and pestle, leaving havoc in her wake.

 

 

>> Michael Kofman: The last two types I'll discuss are longer range ISR drones. These are wing platforms with greater endurance. I think in the US we would consider it to be class 2 UAS. And on the Russian side this is Orlan 10, Orlon 30, Zala 416 Supercam. On the Ukrainian side, it's a whole mixture of drones like shark and similar type platforms, right?

 

So these are drones are basically providing coverage beyond 30 cam on the front line. Because what you see is that there's a big drop off in endurance and survivability for platforms kind of at the 0 to 30 kilometer mark.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: This is probably the closest we're going to get.

 

To the US MQ1, MQ9 or Global Hawk. Though these systems that Michael is talking about are generally much smaller, operate at lower altitudes and at far shorter ranges in the US's bread and butter unmanned aerial systems. These Ukrainian and Russian versions are also much, much cheaper and generally embedded with troops instead of operated from across the globe.

 

 

>> Michael Kofman: We have also long range Runway attack drones on the Russian side. It's the various modified versions of the Shahed that they're employing that they originally got from Iran, but significantly upgraded the Ukrainian side. There's a whole mixture of one way attack drone types that they've been employing against Russia in similar roles.

 

These are fairly cheap systems, but effective and when masked in significant numbers.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: As. These drones started getting bigger and longer range, the distinction between a drone and a missile, it's very blurry and you'll hear all sorts of descriptions of this category of weapons. That only increases this confusion.

 

Drone missiles, one way drones, kamikaze drones, remotely controlled missiles, attritable drones, attritable missiles. They add to this category what we traditionally understood as cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and sometimes their hypersonic cousins. And what they all have in common is that they're generally longer range than like the quadcopters and other systems we would think of as more categorically and truly a drone and not a missile hybrid.

 

They generally have larger warheads, operate at higher altitudes, and usually have some kind of late stage seeker head so that the missile or drone has some instructions about where they're going and what they're in target might be. At the beginning of the conflict, Ukraine didn't have a lot of these missiles or drones in their inventory and were therefore very dependent on long range missiles produced and given to them by the United States or the United Kingdom, often with significant caveats on what these missiles could be used to target.

 

But the Ukrainians are now producing their own cruise missiles and long range drones with ranges of up to 1,000 kilometers or approximately 600 plus miles. Ukrainians have also been very innovative about how these systems are launched by building their own trucks, adapting US and European launchers, and jimmy rigging western missiles to fire off of Russian produced fighter aircraft.

 

 

>> Speaker 7: British media are reporting that for the first time Ukraine has fired the UK supplied Storm Shadow missiles into Russia. Neither Ukraine nor Britain have confirmed those reports which say 12 of the missiles were fired into Kursk border region partially held by Ukrainian forces. Storm Shadows are long range cruise missiles developed jointly by the UK and France.

 

They're launched from fighter jets and have a range of more than 250km.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And while the Ukrainians have had to play catch up, adapting their Soviet arsenal with European and homegrown technology, the Russians started the war with one of the world's largest arsenals of long range drones, cruise and ballistic missiles.

 

They may be running through this arsenal at a remarkable pace. But they are also revitalizing their weapons stores with adaptations to their missile technology and new missiles acquired from North Korea and Iran.

>> Speaker 8: Another dangerous escalation in the Ukraine war. Russia now confirms it fired a new experimental intermediate range ballistic missile or IRBM at Ukraine.

 

The move was in response to keys use of American and British supplied launch long range missiles inside Russia. Russia says the missile moves so fast, American air defense systems are powerless to stop it.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: These Russian missiles are becoming more precise and faster. All while Russia adapts its aging nuclear unmanned force to the conventional war it is fighting with Ukraine.

 

And unmanned innovation isn't just happening in the air. The maritime domain is also experiencing extraordinary growth and tactical adaptation. Some of this is unmanned surface vehicles, especially ghost kamikaze ships, often controlled via links to commercial satellites like Elon Musk's Starlink satellite constellation. But there are also innovations occurring with unmanned, semi submersed and submerged vehicles.

 

 

>> Michael Kofman: Ukraine was very effective in using USVs to shut down the Black Sea. USVs inflicted far more damage against the Russian navy overall and where the principal factor that I think forced Russia into a de facto, let's say not agreement, but tassa understanding with Ukraine by end of 2023 not to attack each other's commercial shipping.

 

And this inflicted far more damage I think on Russian navy than traditional strike capabilities like air launch cruise missiles, atacms, what have you. If you just look at the numbers, 42% of the damage was inflicted by USVs.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: In addition, both Russia and Ukraine have mined parts of the Black Sea with rudimentary automatic sea mines.

 

For Russia, this is part of a larger attempt to blockade Ukrainian ships. While Ukraine has used naval mines as part of their asymmetric tactics to combat a larger and better equipped Russian navy. The land domain, which has been so defined by the use of drones in the air, has seen far less unmanned innovation.

 

But that doesn't mean that unmanned weapons aren't shaping the battlefields.

>> Michael Kofman: A lot less is known about that because both sides have not invested that much into UGVs, and it's only sort of coming more to the fore. I think this year.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: There may not. Be significant unmanned ground vehicles, but there are landmines all over this war.

 

An estimated 30% of Ukraine's territory has been mined. That's approximately the size of the state of Florida. And while we would hope that some of these innovations in autonomy and control and safety that we've seen in the aerial domain would lead to safer, smarter minds, most of these mines are still relying on crude automation.

 

In fact, many of the innovations we've witnessed are not to make landmines more discriminate and more humane, but instead to use sensors to make them more dangerous and gruesome.

>> Speaker 9: They will make a difference, but I think we need to be careful to assume they are necessarily going to transform Ukraine's war effort.

 

What it does enable them to do is to attack targets within Russia itself. Now, certainly Storm Shadow and the French version, Scalp, has been used against Russian targets in occupied territories, and also that includes, for example, the area of Crimea, which Russia occupied in 2014.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: It is important to understand that the unmanned war in Ukraine and Russia isn't stagnant.

 

Instead, it is a story of intense and rapid experimentation and innovation on the battlefield. Michael Kofman, again.

>> Michael Kofman: And what I've seen in the Russia, Ukraine war is that cycles of innovation, tactical adaptation, tend to proceed along a timeline of about three to four months. Usually maybe one side innovates with a particular technology or tactic.

 

If it's successful, they start to deploy that scale, then the other side sees that it's successful and begins to copy that approach. And then before you know it, about five, six months down the line, it begins to affect the character of the fight between the two of them.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: One of those big experimentation stories is the tit for tat of remote control drones, which are dependent on wi fi and other in air transmission methods to both control the systems and to receive information from the systems.

>> Michael Kofman: The development of FPVs and all these strike drones also led both sides, particularly Russians and then Ukrainian forces, to heavily invest in electronic warfare.

 

Electronic warfare proliferated across both forces that then led both sides to substantially modify Upgrade and adapt the drones they were using.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Or in what has been the most recent tit for tat, between electromagnetic warfare and drones, militaries are starting to use fiber optic cable to negate jamming, taking a autonomous weapon and making it highly remote controlled.

 

 

>> Michael Kofman: And in 2024, you increasingly saw that drones were starting to counter other drones and that there were several contests you could see at the tactical level between drone systems increasingly being optimized and modified to counter other drone systems.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: For those of you trying to keep up, we've listed quite a few unmanned innovations over the last three years of war in Ukraine.

 

FPVs, heavier bomber drones, longer range ISR drones, one way drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, unmanned surface and subsurface vehicles, naval and landmines. And these technologies have been instrumental to a host of different missions. Battlefield reconnaissance, long range reconnaissance, air defense, mining, counter mining, logistics, close range and long range strike.

 

But how have they changed the conduct of warfare? Well, they've made it closer, less platform focused, slower. All the opposite of the wars of maneuver envisioned by military revolutions. They've also made war bloodier, more lethal, less like the ways that the US envisioned unmanned as a substitution for human risk on the battlefield.

 

Perhaps most resoundingly, they've demonstrated how much stuff, manned and unmanned, any military needs in order to fight these new modern wars. And in order to keep with this quantity of drones, missiles and mines, countries have to build domestic industries, carve out international and local supply lines, and build economies that can handle the sheer costs of sustaining these inventories.

 

As Michael Kaufman explains, this is a problem of both bottom up innovation on the battlefield and top down investment within the economy in production.

>> Michael Kofman: They have to be cheap enough to be procured in large numbers, because drones by both sides are produced now at the range of maybe 1.5 million per year.

 

But more than that, you're essentially producing drones as you would produce artillery ammo. You have to come up with munitions for them too. So to some extent, you also have a real evolution in munitions. It's still a challenge because when things kind of branch very quickly, it takes other supporting parts of the defense industrial chain a while to catch up.

 

They have to be modified pretty quickly so you can evolve them fast. And they have to be manufactured fairly quickly as well. There's always, for lack of a better term, a Hegelian dialectic between the small, expensive and complex, which are few. Right, the few, expensive and complex versus the many, simple systems.

 

And this war had given much greater emphasis towards the many, and the simple, and the attribute, and replaceable.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So more stuff that creates the need for more munitions, all of which need to be changed and produced quickly. There are other lessons for the US in particular, that true autonomy or swarms of AI enabled machine warfare is still far from a reality.

 

 

>> Michael Kofman: There's not much autonomy in this war. Autonomy is still fairly nascent. There's not much AI either. Most articles I read on autonomy and AI in the Russia Ukraine war are just plain and correct from my point of view. Autonomy is coming around as sort of terminal guidance for drones and ways to get around signal propagation problems or electronic warfare.

 

But it's definitely still quite nascent. Pretty much everything in this war is piloted by somebody.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And that's significant because these unmanned technologies need a lot of people to make them useful on the battlefield. That means you can't just invent the technologies, produce the technologies, adapt the technologies.

 

You also need to build a force and training and communications in order to use them effectively.

>> Michael Kofman: What most folks don't appreciate is that the use of unmanned uncrewed systems actually is very manpower intensive to fight this way. For example, looking at the Ukraine military, a typical brigade will have a drone battalion and it will have one to two drone platoons per maneuver battalion.

 

And this is quite a few people because when you think about fighting this way, you need a lot of folks allocated to the mission. You need at least a company that's focused on longer range ISR for the brigade as well. You need US companies the way you would have a mortar platoon in the maneuver battalion, all right?

 

So you need a US platoon there as well in the maneuver battalion, at least one or two in a squad. You need several individuals because this is pretty intensive. When you're operating a drone, you're on the whole time. So you need several people, maybe three for like an FPV team.

 

Plus you need a driver, you need people to get there, supply them. They're working during the day. Then you need a night shift for that same job. That pervasive isr, right? Remember, humans have to be looking at this, they have to be flying it, so they need a night shift.

 

And then behind the brigades you have drone regiments. And now you have Ukraine actually expanding to drone brigades. This information with thousands of men dedicated to holding a large piece of the front and supporting it the way, let's say several artillery brigades might support a part of the front.

 

So you have big changes to kind of force design. You have brigade commanders that have to allocate a chunk of their personnel to this mission. You have the creation of drone forces which is trying to do doctrinal development, train man and equip for the drone components of the force on the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side.

 

And lastly, you have the organizational capacity, right? You have the big CP's with screens. I'm using this glibly, but try to describe the folks, so you have web based interfaces, you have all the software that needs to go, and all the folks that have experience on how they're gonna deconflict EW with drone strike.

 

With other operations, you have battle captains, you have fairly tight run ships across these brigades that have constant shifts of situational awareness on their battlefield. Running the fight and looking at, you know, countless screens, whether it's incoming enemy drones, whether it's their own drone operations, what's happening on the battlefield, what's happening in electromagnetic spectrum.

 

And this is kind of took some time to put together, but it's much more integrated fight. So I'm trying to paint a picture to get folks beyond the, you know, I just see drones striking things and I see nice videos. But what's really behind it is a lot more complicated than.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Perhaps the largest lesson of this war is that while these technologies have fundamentally changed how the war is fought, so far it has not brought either side to surrender or to victory. Whereas the early days of the precision guided munition revolution suggested that wars could be won at long distances with cruise missiles and precision guided bombs, today's wars demonstrate the difficulty that these weapons have in shifting the balance of power.

 

In a grueling war of attrition, it's not just Ukraine or Russia that is experimenting with unmanned arsenals. North Korea, Iran, even Houthi rebels are all leaning into missiles and drones. North Korea has been developing short range, intermediate range and intercontinental missiles since the early 2000s in conjunction with its nuclear weapons program.

 

Pyongyang has relied on these missile capabilities to deter a far more capable US And South Korean allied force. Over the last three years. This missile development significantly accelerated with more provocative missile tests.

>> Speaker 10: North Korea fired multiple ballistic missiles into the sea today, hours after South Korea kicked off its annual joint military drills with the U.S. now, the north warned the drills could trigger a conflict and called it a Quote, aggressive and confrontational.

 

War rehearsal.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Long range intercontinental ballistic missile development. North Korea has test fired a suspected intercontinental ballistic missile which came down in the sea off the coast of Japan. And even supposed hypersonic missile tests.

>> Speaker 11: North Korea on Monday claimed it successfully launched a new hypersonic ballistic missile.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Many of these technologies are proliferating to bad guys across the globe. With sightings of North Korea derived missile technology in Syria and now in Russian attacks on Ukraine. North Korea is also leaning into what they call AI. Suicide attack drones look remarkably akin to the US MQ1 or MQ9 drones.

 

Meanwhile, North Korean troops assigned to Russian front lines in Ukraine are learning from battlefield small drone tactics, ostensibly bringing both the technology and the battlefield how to back to the Korean peninsula. In the Middle East, Iran has turned to drones and missiles as a way to spar with Israel and Iraq, signaling will and capability while playing a dangerous game of escalation control with unmanned weapon volleys.

 

 

>> Speaker 12: Good evening and welcome. It was Iran who struck tonight in the ever spiraling cycle of violence in the Middle East. The US says around 200 Iranian ballistic missiles launched from Iran rained down across Israel this evening, sending people running for cover.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: The real revolution in these Iranian missiles and drones is not their range, precision or lethality.

 

All of which have improved dramatically over the last two decades. It's their cost. Iran has figured out how to make its Shahad drones far cheaper than the US alternatives with versions of the Shahad costing between 20 and 50,000. Compare that to US cruise missiles like the Alkam or air to air missiles like the Amraam which cost upwards of a million per munition.

 

And Iran is happy to sell these technologies to whomever wants the purchase, whether that be Russia to use against Ukraine, Hamas or Houthi rebels shutting down shipping lanes in the Red Sea.

>> Speaker 13: Iranian backed Houthi rebels are claiming responsibility for a missile attack on a U. S owned cargo ship today.

 

The US military says the ship sustained minor damage, there were no injuries on board. You have to hear. While the US and UK bombed dozens of Houthi targets in Yemen last week in response response to repeated attacks on international shipping.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: It's not just that the US is watching what is happening in Ukraine, Israel, Iran or the Red Sea and making decisions about their weapons inventories, it's also China.

 

And China's response to these technologies has extremely important implications for the United States. Because according to the last two national security and defense strategies, China is the pacing challenge, the great power competition the US is preparing for. And ostensibly the most likely country that the US would go to war against.

 

So what is China up to? Well, China is proliferating an inventory of nuclear and conventional cruise and ballistic missiles. Some launch from aircraft, others from submarines, and finally some from fixed and mobile ground launchers. This wide array of launch options makes these systems increasingly survivable. Meanwhile, advances in end stage targeting, new seeker heads and cueing have made them more precise.

 

So precise and dynamic that they now threaten US ships at sea, including the US's premier aircraft carriers. In addition to developing offensive attack unmanned systems, they've also created remarkable air defense missiles with ranges of hundreds of miles. These air defense systems can be forward deployed on islands the Chinese have repurposed as regional military outposts, as well as on destroyers and other naval vessels that patrol the Pacific Ocean and the seas surrounding East Asia.

 

The Chinese are also experimenting with unmanned aerial systems. Here's Stacy Pettyjohn, senior fellow and Director of the Defense Program at the center for a New American Security.

>> Stacie Pettyjohn: Hard to know exactly what China's doing because they're pretty unwilling to share a lot of what's going on. Like they have copied Most of the US's unmanned systems and have their own variants of it which they've been exporting.

 

These have not proven to be particularly good, but it looks like China's military has really looked at what's going on in Ukraine and is learning from it and is investing in a more varied sort of fleet of uncrewed systems to include more loitering munitions or kamikaze type drones of various ranges.

 

They had purchased the Israeli made Harpy decades ago I think now, and reverse engineered it, and it seems like there's more attention paid to that. They also have been fielding a bunch of different unmanned systems with their navy, with basically every service. And you can see how the Chinese military in a Taiwan invasion scenario could make use of all these systems in.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Order to network all these unmanned systems together. The Chinese have also invested in their own navigation, intelligence and communications satellites. While China still has far less satellites than the US, it has plans to launch up to 20,000 satellites over the next few years. And perhaps most dangerously, China built and demonstrated an anti satellite missile that could attack satellites in low earth orbit, putting many of the US's satellite inventory at risk.

 

This is a clip from a congressional hearing in 2015 when Maryland Congressman Ruppersberger voiced alarm to the US intelligence community about Chinese anti satellite missiles.

>> Speaker 14: I'm very concerned that China has been conducting tests and they conducted a destructive anti satellite test against its own satellite.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: As Stacey alluded to in her discussion of unmanned aerial systems, the challenge deciphering China's unmanned arsenal is trying to understand what is experimentation and demonstration versus combat ready.

 

Or conversely, what is civilian as advertised versus military as it could possibly be used. For instance, we know that the Chinese have built a series of autonomous seaborne technologies ostensibly for research and civilian purposes. They have, for example, a research ship that carries a series of unmanned systems for underwater surface and aerial research.

 

However, in reality, this drone mothership seems to have a complicated, if not completely entangled relationship with the Chinese military. Further, Chinese scientists and state operated news agencies have announced a series of unmanned technologies robots, surface drones, unmanned drone landing ships, and even an unmanned combat vessel. But it's all still too early to tell how integral these unmanned systems will be to any future Chinese campaign.

 

War is always an exogenous shock to technology, and the war in Ukraine, as well as the missile and drone proliferation in the Middle east and Asia, will likely have as large an influence on the future US unmanned trajectory as the Arab Israeli wars did in the 1970s. Most importantly, these conflicts directly question both of the beliefs about warfare that have shaped contemporary US investment in unmanned systems.

 

According to the military revolution theory of war, unmanned technology should enable rapid offensives and quick and decisive campaigns. However, what we've seen in Ukraine is how these systems have slowed down warfare drones are combated with mesh netting over trenches and electromagnetic jamming. Offensives are stymied by low tech landmines.

 

Aircraft and naval vessels are destroyed by drones and swarms of cheap munitions. In short, the tit for tat of unmanned systems and counter unmanned systems has incentivized bloody wars of attrition and not the short contests of technological overmatch foreshadowed by early believers in the information technology military revolution.

 

Meanwhile, the proliferation of cheap missiles and drones to countries like Iran, North Korea, Hamas or Houthi rebels that would otherwise be deterred by US conventional and nuclear superiority has led to increasingly expensive tit for tat missile and drone exchanges that flirt dangerously close with large scale violence. All of this is happening as China, ostensibly the U.S. s greatest competition and pacing challenger, is experimenting and expanding its own unmanned arsenal with long range missiles, satellites, and a host of unmanned aerial, surface, subsurface and ground platforms.

 

The question is, with everything that's happening in this world, does the US have the right arsenal of unmanned weapons? Can the lessons from Ukraine inform what we develop and field? Or is the American way of war one that requires a different arsenal of unmanned technologies? In the next and final episode, we look at how the US Is responding to unmanned innovation around the world, talk with the New idea entrepreneurs, and finally weigh in ourselves on what our research suggests the US should do in order to best build its future unmanned arsenal.

 

Join us then for the conclusion of the Hand Behind Unmanned.

>> Julia Macdonald: I'm Julia.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I'm Jackie.

>> Julia Macdonald: This is the Hand Behind Unmanned podcast. If you liked it, buy the book. It's by Oxford University Press and available on Amazon.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Thanks for listening.