Worried about pervasive surveillance? About how much ammunition your 7th-grade MySpace posts and AIM logs will provide to the opposition when you run for office, or interview for a job? Check out the highly underrated The Light of Other Days, joint venture of science fiction giants Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
The armies of the American Civil War fought (mostly) with muzzle-loading rifles. The expanding Minie ball allowed muzzle-loaded rifles to fire at the same rate as smoothbore muskets. Rifled muskets had existed for hundreds of years previously, but rifling required a tight seal between bullet and bore to work and so loading a rifle meant hammering the bullets down inside instead of just dropping it. The Minie ball fell freely down a rifle barrel, then expanded against barrel grooves when fired.
This made bullets more accurate. How much did this contribute to the bloodshed? In Battle Tactics of the Civil War, Paddy Griffith proposes that it made little difference. Griffith’s overall thesis is that the Civil War was the last of the Napoleonic wars, not the first of the modern wars. Regarding the alleged impact of rifled muskets, he basically makes the following claims:
1. Increased length of battles, not improved weapon effects, drove casualty rates. Civil War soldiers didn’t die in such large numbers because rifle fire was more lethal, but because because they fought longer.
2. Documentary evidence, while sketchy, suggests that the actual engagement range of Civil War rifle infantry units was no higher than of Napoleonic smoothbore infantry, and this fire was no more effective (see above).
3. Whatever the theoretical capability of Civil War rifles, soldiers lacked either the training or experience necessary to exploit it.
Chart from Griffith’s book comparing the Civil War to the unquestionably “modern” WWI and Napoleon’s campaigns.
These assertions might be true. The rifled musket didn’t need to significantly improve the killing power of infantry fire to have a tactical effect. I believe that above any improvement in killing power, rifles enabled Civil War units to deliver suppressing fire effectively in a manner that was not possible with smoothbore muskets.
Griffith’s Assertions Are Not Ridiculous
I have this rifle, an M1903, sighted at 100 yards. I fire at a target 400 yards away. Based on intuition, how far does the bullet fall below my sight?
Just as firearms require ammunition and vehicles require fuel, small unmanned systems (SUAS, even if the “A” does stand for “air”) require electrical power. This allows us to make some predictions about the capabilities and tactics of small units with SUAS.
Tradeoffs & Alertness
SUAS and their power supplies have weight and volume. Since the capacity of any transport (including soldiers’ own two feet) is limited, either future SUAS will take up currently “extra” capacity, or they will replace something currently carried.
Soldiers can eat their boots, but tanks need gas.
General George S. Patton
Like fuel and ammunition, unit leaders must recognize SUAS operating time as a finite commodity to be expended for tactical effect. A unit equipped with multiple SUAS platforms will not have them all on at the same time for the same reason they don’t keep their soldiers awake, run vehicles, or fire machine guns 24 hours a day. Generally, a unit’s SUAS will either be “inert”, “alert”, or “engaged” — offline while the unit is either not threatened or covered by another unit, minimally operating to maintain awareness and detect threats, or at maximum capacity to neutralize a threat. This is exactly analogous to existing tactics and not difficult to understand.
The default “alert” SUAS will most likely be a fixed-wing flier, since these provide the most efficient power to operating time ratio. Ground vehicles (SUGS?) could have an even higher ratio since they wouldn’t need motor power when not moving, and might be an option for static units or to absolutely minimize aerial/EM footprints. However, they’ll be slower and easier to hide from. Note that the RQ-11 Raven is probably too large for a true light infantry platoon and certainly too large for a squad.
Get used to this thing.
Limitations
The tradeoff problem is most pronounced for light infantry. In general, these men carry as much as they can and not a pound less. Any “excess” load capacity ends up filled by extra ammunition. How much and what sort of ammunition a light infantry company, platoon, or squad ought to give up in favor of SUAS is an empirical question, but I highly doubt the answer is zero. Most likely, the lightest units will mostly use SUAS for detection and rely on external assets to kill, as they do now with artillery. Since the detection capability of SUAS-equipped units will increase, the ratio of infantry to “artillery” will likewise increase.
The future is so bright for carrying heavy shit, you don’t need eyes to see it.
Armored units also have a problem. First, the effective movement and weapon ranges of armored fighting vehicles are higher than light infantry, so their “small” unmanned systems will generally be larger. A SUAS with a 5-km range is of limited use to a tank that can already see and shoot nearly that far, and is more likely located in unrestrictive terrain.
The more critical problem is that of crew load. Fighting a tank requires all of the crew’s attention; they don’t have any to spare for SUAS. While automation and control might allow this in the future, the problem is nontrivial. These two issues have frustrated attempts to integrate SUAS into mechanized and especially tank formations so far. In the short term, any integration of unmanned systems into armored units will probably require the use of a separate, dedicated control vehicle. In the long term, designers will have to start paying as much attention to crew load and systems integration inside fighting vehicles as in aircraft.
Motor-rifle type units (such as “Stryker” brigades) are best suited to take advantage of SUAS. They have ready access to electrical power and transport. Designers clearly anticipated something like this requirement in developing modern troop carriers, which can readily serve as mobile control stations.
Tactical Electronic Warfare
EM emissions discipline will become both more important and more complex. The likelihood of initial enemy contact being made on either or both side via identification of SUAS will be high. Small-unit commanders and soldiers should know the significance of enemy small unmanned platforms just as they now know the significance of other types of enemy equipment.
A stopgap solution, gluing lots of antennas to a completely roadbound vehicle.
Mature SUAS will be well camouflaged and probably most easily identified through detecting their control and communication links. The ability to detect EM emissions across a broad spectrum will become as important even at the platoon if not the squad level as image intensifiers and near-infrared are now. Tactical electronic warfare units that specialize in detecting, spoofing, and obstructing these emissions beyond the capability of line combat units will return. The resulting arms race between tactical unmanned systems and electronic warfare will contribute to the unsuitability of amateur/civilian UAVs in combat.
Conclusion
Motorized infantry stand to gain the most from small unmanned systems because of their manpower and transport capability. Light infantry have limited payload, and current armored units are too specialized.
Officers should get used to viewing SUAS operating time as a supply constraint, and establish standard readiness postures for stand-down, baseline, and stand-to use of these devices.
Electronic warfare will become more important at all tactical levels.
John Fowles’s The Magus long ago caught my eye on some Top 100 Great Novels list because I hoped it would be about a wizard in the Gandalf sense and remained intrigued by the premise when I found out otherwise. While it is indeed a Great Novel, it’s not about the Istari. However, as many things do, it got me thinking about Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.
Warning: there is an image at the bottom of this post that spoils many things about both books
A remote-operated aircraft flown into a target while the operator watches not only isn’t something new, but it’s already been done in volume and found wanting. An apparent attempt to assassinate the President of Venezuela by such means last month didn’t work.
Some guy scraped up after an attempted murder-by-drone.
A drone that can fly at 200mph for three kilometers, operated over an ECM-hardened control link, and delivering a 5+ lb armor-piercing explosive warhead has existed for ovr fifty years now. The AT-3 Sagger came, made its impact, and we all moved on. Visually flying your remote-controlled aircraft into a target is called Manual Command Line of Sight, and it’s not used for anything important (more discussion here). Small autonomous systems will change the battlefield, but flying a much smaller payload onto a target over a less secure control channel than primitive missiles is not going to be how it happens. Hit probability and kill probability are low, with high vulnerability to electronic countermeasures. Taping a grenade to your kid’s toy helicopter won’t going to give you the edge you need to win on tomorrow’s battlefield. The characteristics of such a line-of-sight weapon compare poorly to the currently dominant line of sight personal weapon, the rifle.
Anyway, what will change? The important factors are availability & control.
I’m not into military science fiction. Hammer’s Slammers? I’ve heard of it. Honor Harrington? Never read it. Some guy named Marko Kloos got into some sort of spat. A distaste for open-ended series accounts for more than a bit of my aversion, though, so if I’m going to dip my toe into the subgenre, it’s through standalone books. The three milSF books that everyone should read, so I’m told, are Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and Armor by John Steakley.
Because decapitation strikes are too easy, or at least too dangerous. A large country can mitigate this threat through dispersal of strike/retaliation capability, and by building early warning systems. However, early warning only really works reliably when a strike can be detected a substantial amount of time (“a few minutes”) before it takes effect.
This is the logic behind bans on orbital weapons (de-orbiting weapons given less warning than ballistic weapons) and on the mutual withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Cuba and Turkey at the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is also the game theory logic behind countries like South Korea and Taiwan effectively outsourcing their nuclear deterrent to the United States. In The Dead Hand, David Hoffman quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski as saying that after detection, initial cross-checking, and message delay, the President has about seven minutes from launch to impact of a Russian (Soviet) ICBM to decide whether or not to order retaliation. That window might have gotten slightly larger since the 1980s, but not by much. The United States’ (and other existing powers’) nuclear strike capability is sufficiently dispersed not to be neutralized by local subterfuge, and highly likely to survive a a first strike. This further reduced the likelihood of a launch on false-positive early warning.
Lien-Hang Nguyen used unprecedented access to Hanoi’s governmental archives to write her 2012 book Hanoi’s War, a political history of the Vietnam War from the northern perspective focused on two powerful key figures in the North Vietnamese government, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho — the most powerful man in the northern government and his protege and chief negotiator, respectively. The book had less insight into northern military operations than I’d hoped, but it’s still an excellent if somewhat preliminary work and I eagerly await Nguyen’s next major work.
The backwater setting and approving attitude towards “frontier justice” in Jack Vance’s Araminta Station reminded me of Robert Heinlein’s Future History books, and criticisms of science fiction as authoritarian, statist, and parochial in general. While some authors do have authoritarian or anti-democratic ideas that they incorporate into their work, mostly these works express a longing to re-open the wild frontier, combined with a limited scope. As the memory of frontier exploration fades from collective memory, more stories turn inward to find a source of narrative conflict.
Default vs Doctrine
The simple reason for monarchy and other forms of personal rule recurring so often in speculative fiction is just that: simplicity. One guy is in charge because he was born that way, or might as well have been. He’s got some ministers of varying degrees of goodness and competence, and if someone wants to rearrange the org chart, the have a simple objective: the king.
Taking things a little further, history and political theory have much to say about the merits of a benevolent dictatorship — Plato’s philosopher-kings, or the enlightened monarchs of the Renaissance. Indeed the principal drawback — succession — ready-makes the story: the noble protagonist must assume his rightful place in order to assure the continuance of Good. And not every story need concern itself with the mechanics of government. A.E. van Vogt, for instance, just didn’t give much thought to the subject other than “someone in charge lives in a big castle”. Tolkien, antiquarian that he was, had philosophical and aesthetic reasons to recall the kings of yore in his stories, though his imitators again probably didn’t give the issue too much thought. Kings ruled in the Hyborian Age of Robert Howard; the Conan stories both intending to portray a vanished mythical age and not conducive to arguments before the Althing.
Some authors really do have a low opinion of the common man. The Deep State antics of the “good guys” in E.E. Smith’s Triplanetary make the quick-shooting interstellar police of Araminta look like the Warren Court. Other times the author simply wants to make a point about the relationship between government, technology, and context. Frank Herbert’s Dune portrays feudalism as an effective solution to the governance of multiple planets bound by poor communication, something Poul Anderson also did a few years prior in The High Crusade. However, the Future History & Gaean Reach settings of Heinlein & Vance respectively don’t indulge in either default or doctrinaire monarchy. Both, in fact, deal pretty extensively with the mechanics of governance & social class. Yet both exult in swift, sure enforcement of extrajudicial justice.
In the service of the Queen
Escaping the Clutches of Civilization
The glorification of summary personal justice reflects a wish to escape civilization to conquer and settle a frontier. This latter impulse is particularly American, and in fact for a long time largely defined “American”. After the census of 1890 famously declared an end to the American frontier, the country spent several generations ruminating, reliving, and glorifying the legacy of its frontier settlement, most visibly via the genre of the Western, although it influenced early science fiction as well, with authors viewing space exploration literally as a final (and hopefully infinite) frontier.
This, but IN SPACE.
Space would provide an escape from oppressive attempts to render society “legible” to control and taxation, attempts made easier not merely by technology but by population density and sheer age. Authors like Heinlein and Frank Herbert even posited a eugenic effect: frontier settlement selected for adventure and individualism; old sedentary societies selected for conformity and stagnation.
Migration is a sorting device, a forced Darwinian selection, under which superior stock goes to the stars while culls stay home and die.This is true even for those forcibly transported (as in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth centuries), save that the sorting then takes place on the new planet. In a raw frontier weaklings and misfits die; strong stock survives. Even those who migrate voluntarily still go through this second drastic special selection.
Even authors who shied away from eugenic arguments, like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, suggested space settlement would at least spread humanity’s eggs around several baskets.
The swift, community-sanctioned and personally-dispensed justice required by the comparatively lawless frontier definitely appealed to anyone who felt the courts of settled regions to be slow, unfair, or unjust. Some of this might be naive, but to confuse it with authoritarianism or bloodlust badly misses the mark.
The Best of Both Worlds
Heinlein and Vance both took advantage of their authorial prerogative to eliminate the uglier aspects of American frontier settlement — in neither the Future History nor the Gaean Reach settings do settlers need to exterminate natives, institute repressive militarized governments, or participate in the flesh trade in order to survive and prosper. (Vance does show more cynicism here than Heinlein.) And prosperity comes easily enough — unlike the hand-to-mouth ranchers of Elmer Kelton’s Westerns, the settlers of the future want for very little. Lazarus Long decries the precarity of his existence while living in an opulent Roman villa with his harem on a virgin planet; the backwater Mircea’s Wisp of Araminta Station provides recognizably modern First World conditions to most of its inhabitants, while the government has just enough reach to keep things from getting out of hand without Glawen Clattuc having to spend the rest of the trilogy giving sworn statements and depositions about a police shooting at a remote monastery.
Not what they had in mind
Swift summary justice is not one of the aspects of frontier living that Vance or Heinlein eliminate when creating their worlds. Cutting the red tape on law enforcement isn’t an ugly aspect of the lawless frontier but one of its benefits. Even when the heroes do bother to try their enemies’ crimes in court, the proceedings run far more smoothly than their real-world counterparts. The trial portrayed in Araminta Station runs about a page.
In any case, the portrayal of summary justice in Vance’s Cadwal Chronicles, like that of Heinlein in his future history, reflects a desire to escape from oppression rather than to extend it — along with an understanding that such an escape means dispensing with certain aspects of civilization. A severance made all the easier by suspicions about whether settled definitions of due process really equated to ideal justice.
Jack Vance published Araminta Station in 1988, 38 years after his first major work, the massively influential Dying Earth. Araminta Station, the first part of the Cadwal Chronicles trilogy, narrates the adventures of Glawen Clattuc, a young man of the local gentry on a wilderness-preserve planet — Cadwal — in a distant future where mankind has settled most of the galaxy in a loosely-governed “Gaean Reach”. Vance writes in his characteristic style with the assurance and deliberation of a well-earned maturity. Do I recommend it? Absolutely, although it’s not a good place to start with the author and doesn’t quite rise to the level of Vance’s immediately preceding work, Lyonesse.