In the worst-case scenario where tensions between China and the United States escalate into conflict, the first hours of war could well resemble a science fiction film.
Thousands of drones operating in a coordinated “swarm” could be deployed over China, gathering information on targeting US heavy weapons.
The scenario was outlined in a recent paper published by the RAND Corporation, an American think tank.
Autonomous drones would use AI to inform U.S. officials as they search for targets for precision missile strikes.
Although the scenario is speculative and far from official U.S. military doctrine, it is a glimpse of a plausible future that other countries are also considering.
In China, Israel and Europe, military experts are developing plans for drone swarms that could transform the nature of the conflict.
Drone swarms use cutting-edge technology from the study of flocks of birds and schools of fish to coordinate their movements over a potentially large area.
They could allow the military to not only monitor the enemy, but also be used as weapons to launch huge, coordinated bombing raids. But more work remains to be done to identify their most effective use.
“Drone swarms are useful for a wide range of military operations, from searching and destroying submarines to exploding tanks and mopping up enemy air defenses,” said Zak Kallenborn, an analyst specializing in drones and weapons of mass destruction.
Kellenborn is the principal researcher at Looking Glass USA, a counter-drone consultancy, and is also affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It’s unclear exactly what mission drone swarms are best suited for, but their potential is enormous,” he said. “The challenge is separating the areas where drone swarms are really important from those where they are mostly cool sci-fi stuff.”
The threat they pose to the military is so intense that military experts are already working on ways to counter their capabilities.
Ukraine steps up drone fight
The invasion of Ukraine transformed the way drones are used in war. In the conflict, inexpensive airborne drones have been deployed for tasks ranging from surveillance to bombing and even directing the surrender of enemy soldiers.
Drones have also proven themselves at sea and on land.
U.S. military planners are studying the conflict for clues about how to deploy drones for future wars.
“Everyone in Western military institutions is struggling to understand and assimilate the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine,” said David Ochmanek, an analyst at the RAND Corporation.
“It sounds horrible that way, but we don’t have many opportunities to learn from actual large-scale combat,” he told BI.
Until recently, some military experts argued that drones were too easy to shoot down and would likely only be used in wars between poorer nations without the resources to counter them.
But the lesson from Ukraine, Ochmanek believes, is that drones will be present in conflicts involving even the most powerful nations – and on an even larger scale in Ukraine.
Instead of deploying individual drones, each controlled by a single human operator, as in Ukraine, the United States could deploy massive swarms of drones operating autonomously.
In the early hours of a conflict with a great power, like China, they could help the United States gain a key advantage, Ochmanek said.
“We need to find a way, from the earliest hours of a conflict with China, not weeks or days, but hours, to characterize what is happening in that battle space, to identify the most interesting, to track these targets and engage them to destroy them,” Ochmanek said.
China seeks to neutralize US war plans
For years, a problem has plagued American military planners.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the United States developed tactics to quickly wipe out enemy command systems and air defenses using a combination of satellite surveillance and precision-guided missiles.
These tactics were deployed to devastating effect by the United States against Iraq in 1991 and 2003. The United States destroyed Iraqi air defenses within hours, giving it control of the battlefield and the ‘airspace.
China, which was rapidly gaining economic and military power, observed the situation and urgently modernized its military and refined its tactics.
They have found ways to move or conceal their air defense systems and other potential targets, making them difficult for the United States to locate and potentially destroy, Ochmanek said. It has also developed technology to protect weapons locations and other key sites from satellites by “dazzling” them, US military analysts say.
The United States was sent back to the drawing board, looking to regain its advantage. And that’s where, Ochmanek says, drones could come in.
A drone swarm offers key advantages for identifying targets in the early hours of a conflict.
They can be deployed in such large numbers that they overwhelm air defense systems. Once there, they can transmit live data to human operators who will use it to guide precision missile attacks.
Although the United States uses drones that are much more expensive than Ukraine’s, they are still very cheap compared to many military equipment, such as fighter jets.
“The drone swarm appears to us to be an effective way to do what we need to do to get the information we need so that the limited lethality that we can generate during these open hours and these days of war is applied from effective and efficient manner,” Ochmanek said.
Killer robots
But critics warn that drone swarms could pave the way for a terrifying future.
Under drone swarm plans envisioned by military experts, the machines rely on humans as decision-makers before actual attacks are launched. Drones only provide information.
It would not be a great technological advancement to give drones the power to make these decisions themselves.
But the prospect of crossing this moral boundary rings alarm bells.
At the United Nations last year, several countries called for restrictions on the development and use of autonomous drones capable of making life-or-death decisions.
Both the United States and China opposed the plan, arguing that current restrictions on the use of weapons to indiscriminately target civilians were enough to rule out a future of killer robots.
Kallenborn, the analyst, supports more explicit restrictions, arguing that drone swarms could be considered weapons of mass destruction and therefore should be banned.
A key problem, he said, is that technology can make mistakes. And since drones communicate with each other, an error could quickly propagate and multiply.
“Autonomous and weaponized drone swarms should have restrictions on their use, especially drone swarms targeting humans. We know that autonomous weapons are prone to error; a drone swarm can increase the risks a thousandfold.” , Kallenborn said.
“One sensor drone could misidentify a school bus as a tank and ask 10 other drones to blow it up as well,” he said.
Ochmanek emphasized that targeting decisions for drone swarms should still be made by humans, with AI only synthesizing the data.
“As long as there is a communications link between the mesh and the human operators behind it, humans will evaluate for themselves how well the mesh is making accurate assessments,” he said.
Countering swarms
In addition to developing plans to deploy swarms of drones, defense companies are working on a playbook for countering them.
Research is underway into how to eliminate them using lasers or microwaves, although both approaches have their own drawbacks.
Another possibility, Ochmanek said, is that drone swarms could be programmed to target other drone swarms.
So far, he added, no silver bullet has been found to counter the swarms. And despite fears about their autonomy, they appear poised to play a central role in the wars of the future.
businessinsider
