OGWiseman Ruminates!

Ukraine has changed warfare forever. Why is nobody noticing?

This post is 24 hours late because I almost didn’t send it at all. It’s a bit of a bummer. But I think it’s important, and so I’m sending it now, after thinking about it a while longer and making sure.

It’s a strange juxtaposition—things in my actual life, day to day, are extremely good. My family is safe and healthy, I have enough money to live comfortably, and today was one of the finest June days anyone can remember in Washington state, which puts it high in the running for finest days anywhere in the history of humankind.

And yet, the broader view seems dark to me, and not for the reasons most people seem to be talking about, either on the internet or in conversations I have. The fact that people seem so rarely to discuss the problems I think are most important is certainly frustrating to me, buts it’s secondary in terms of the actual situation. It’s the object-level developments that are so scary.

Of course the story of the week is Trump and Elon tearing off each other’s wigs, to which I can only say:

@thetnhollerAOC: “The girls are fighting, aren’t they?”

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It’s unfortunate that this extremely stupid feud is overshadowing Donald Trump’s insistence on destroying U.S. competitiveness in myriad horrifying ways while also spiking the deficit during a time of plenty when we should be tightening our belts.

And yet, the real most important story of this week, by far, is the enormous and successful attack by Ukraine on the strategic bombing capacity of Russia, using nothing but some drones they had mailed in crates to addresses near the bases using regular old mail.

Here’s another way to put that: Ukraine used 117 unmanned FPV Kamikaze drones, which cost about $100,000 combined, to attack five Russian bases simultaneously, destroying about 10% of the total force of Russian strategic bombers, inflicting damage of roughly $7,000,000,000. These are very rough numbers, but they can be quite a bit off and the point still holds—We’re entering a new level of asymmetric warfare, where damage ratios can be tens of thousands of dollars for every dollar spent on the attack.

One hundred thousand dollars to do seven billion dollars of damage, without killing a single civilian, and without risking a single soldier in combat, utilizing the existing infrastructure of Russia to infiltrate, with no exfiltration necessary or even attempted.

In my view, this attack, while of course hopeful and glorious for the beleaguered people of Ukraine, is a wake-up call to everyone else in the world that the military advantages we built to win the last war are no longer relevant, and we’re in a whole new world now.

This is as big a shift, in terms of what war is and means, as the atom bomb was. I don’t say that lightly. And this is the worst the technology is ever going to be. The A.I. guidance systems and target selection are going to improve rapidly, and they’re going to get cheaper.

How low can the cost of a devastating attack go? $10,000 in easily accessible drones to unleash enough drones to level a city? $1,000? There are a lot of people in the world (to say nothing of every single government on earth) that can afford those numbers!

This is what people miss when they talk about damage from A.I. and robotics as something that can happen if we lose control, in some sort of Terminatoresque sci fi scenario. Even if A.I. and robotics progress petered out tomorrow (and it won’t), there is still an enormous overhang of capabilities that just haven’t been fully explored yet, but are waiting there, latent, to pull rugs out from under all those who aren’t chopping their feet.

Slava Ukraini. Those people are defending their country from an unprovoked attack, and what they’ve done in terms of scientific and strategic innovation on the battlefield is nothing short of miraculous. Their enemy is much larger and richer than they are, and yet they’re dug in, defending their homeland, and taking the fight to the enemy with every iota of their vast ingenuity. But I fear they have unleashed something that will not stay in the hands of morally righteous causes.

I don’t know what this means exactly for the future of warfare. I also don’t know exactly what to do with this information. “Pretend it’s not happening” is certainly an attractive option, but it’s not one I can seem to make myself choose. We are under threat now, both unknown threats and known, targeted and vectorless, man and machine. And by the way, China currently has 90% of the total drone manufacturing capacity in the entire world. Gulp!

It’s no wonder we’ve all retreated into out screens. It’s no wonder two middle-aged drag queens slap-fighting on social media is all anyone can talk about. I can’t think about my beautiful son and about how the world will be for him in twenty years without my hands wanting to shake and needing to be manually calmed.

I hope it’s all overblown. I hope that the defense will stay ahead of the offense, the guardian drones will be faster and deadlier than the attack drones, and the center can hold a while longer.

But I worry. Heaven help us all if it doesn’t.

END

Thanks as always for reading my thoughts! I hope everyone has a great week, and I will be back next Sunday with another original story.