I think I mentioned as a joke last week that I would blog this week about using UAVs/drones to conduct strikes since other bloggers were blogging about it, but that I am about a week behind.
Well, what the hell. I haven't written anything for a few days and I am currently reading Wired For War by P.W. Singer which is about the use of unmanned vehicles in the current conflicts. This has gotten me interested in the future of warfare as well as the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing unmanned vehicles in a COIN fight.
The use of these vehicles has me torn...although I will admit one reason I am against them is a pretty stupid reason: the machines may eventually rise up and destroy us all.
I'll come back to that point.
One of the greatest feelings I had in my last deployment was knowing I had a Predator UAV with hellfires flying over Baqubah in support of my battalion. That is power at your fingertips right there. I've used Shadow UAVs to get field grades out of sticky situations. EOD robots used to disarm IEDs are possibly the greatest thing since the bomb suit.
But the things can't conduct COIN.
Prior t0 9/11 Congress mandated that 50% of all future vehicles the Army developed/bought would have to be unmanned. Unmanned transportation trucks, unmanned tanks, unmanned artillery. The deadline for this was 2015 I believe, but I also believe that date has been pushed back due to the little adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. An unmanned tank is super for a conventional fight and an unmanned aircraft flying on its own sending back imagery and video feed is great, but that tank can't conduct a leader engagement with a Muhktar or a Mayor and that aircraft still needs to be told where it needs to look and can't help rebuild a well or school. Most of counterinsurgency isn't killing a bunch of people or capturing enemy bad guys, it's getting out amongst the population and listening to their grievances and doing your best to assist them so that Al Qaida, the Irish Republican Army, or those crazy American colonists don't move in and start providing their own services and getting the population on their side.
Last I checked a Terminater wasn't very people friendly.
My point is that while a drone strike against an Al Qaida safehouse in Pakistan will lead to short term goals of decreasing the effectiveness of that organization, the long term goals of eliminating Al Qaida are most likely hampered because you probably killed some civilians as well with your hellfire missiles and the negative press leads to more individuals joining Al Qaida. Not to mention, there is rarely anyone on the ground to explain to the locals why this attack occured and to address any compensation concerns for colateral damage to buildings and loss of life of innocent people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The era of tank on tank battles where unmanned vehicles would keep many American soldiers/Marines out of harms way has passed us by. It has become clear that the way to defeat a superior enemy using modern weaponry is not to throw whatever you have back at them, or even create a complex defensive position utilizing similar weapons, but to create complex defensive positions utilizing unconventional forces and material such as EFP type IEDs, anti armor rockets, and sniper attacks in urban areas. The Israelis faced this in Lebanon in 2006; the Americans are seeing it in Iraq and Afghanistan; and I'm shocked the Georgians didn't attempt to do this against Russia in 2008.
An army of unmanned vehicles and soldiers blasting through an urban defense and then occupying the area will just turn what could be a potentially friendly local population into a fiercely hostile population openly supporting your enemy. At the risk of sounding absolutely batshit crazy...what happens when those same vehicles and soldiers decide the threat isn't some backwater country with a despotic maniac, but is the people giving the orders to attack that country? The use and development of unmanned vehicles, I admit, is not only advantageous, but necessary to stay ahead in the weapon technology race. We just need to be very careful how far we go down the rabbit hole.
Armed Predators are still cool though.
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