America's Big War/Small War sine wave

It's Terminator meets the Zombie Apocalypse

A slide from one of the 24 decks I generated in turning America’s New Map into a massive open online course (MOOC) through U Maryland (where I am now a lecturer in Civil and Environmental Engineering) for release soon on both edX and Coursera. The idea was to plot out the Pentagon’s tendency. to swing, pendulum-like, between the Big War and Small Wars planning paradigms.

What does this image tell us?

Are we chasing our tails? Playing whack-a-mole with the world? Constantly taking our eyes off the ball? Always in need of a transformational pivot?

As I read it, the Pentagon deeply prefers a foreseeable future — a hard and big and thus compelling “pacing threat” now defined as China but with Russia-v-Urkaine serving as the latest in a long line of Spanish Civil War-type laboratories perceived as divining the future of warfare.

The Pentagon is drinking deep from the Ukraine well right now. Check out this excellent summary of those emerging “lessons learned” in this WAPO piece. Despite the weirdly small-war nature of the tactics, tinged with high-tech magic (find a cellphone, kill a target). the conflict remains oddly attrition based.

The lessons are right out of WWI/II: “Dig or die” (foxholes, well disguised from in-the-sky surveillance, are everything), and cellphones as “the new cigarette in the foxhole.”

Let’s just say that three on a TikTok (three referring to minutes) can get you killed, recalling the old “three on a match” superstition/lesson learned all the way back in the Crimean War (1850s) pitting Russia against the Ottomans, Brits, etc.:

The superstition first arose among British troops during the Crimean War. British soldiers, entrenched against Dutch foes in the Boer War, learned by bitter experience of the danger of lighting three cigarettes from one match. When the men thriftily used one match to serve three of them, they gave the Boer Sniper time to spot the light, take aim and fire to kill ‘the third man’.

The phrase reached widespread use during WWI’s trench warfare, which the Russia-Ukraine war now resembles.

Everything old is new again!

So, whatever happened to maneuver warfare?

It seems that all this new tech is generating a back-to-the-future stalemate where infantry are almost more of a liability than an asset because they’re so incredibly targetable. See this story about how Ukrainian forces keep geolocating Russian troops when they muster for in rows for inspections.

I mean, back in the day at least you got to rush out of your trench into the teeth of the enemy position where you’d fall in a hail of bullets, only to scream out in agony, we never had a chance!

Now that outcome can be arranged back at your mustering point.

Convenient, right?

Tech can already do that one better:

In Jordan last month, three U.S. soldiers were killed after a one-way drone, which officials have said likely went undetected, crashed into their living quarters.

Now we can kill your troops while they’re still in bed — no muster required.

All this tech piling on reinforces my sense of the looming Warfare Singularity in which tech convergence reaches a point where it no longer makes any sense to actually send human troops anywhere to try and take anything. Instead, just create and enforce a no-man’s-land reality (area-denial gone MAD), or WWI updated.

We are reaching an apogee of pointlessness in warfare: my drones kill your drones and vice versa til we reach the point of … pointlessness.

Seriously, let’s break it down (from the WAPO piece):

Over the winter, the facility was occupied by the 1st Armored Division. As soldiers fought simulated battles, Taylor, the commanding general here, explained Ukraine’s transformational imprint on how the Army thinks and trains for combat. “Russian artillery has rendered maneuver difficult and command posts unsurvivable,” one of his briefing slides noted.

So tanks are becoming useless along with troops.

But let’s not stop the learning there, because the same may well turn out to be true with precision strike:

{The Ukraine conflict] also has complicated a long-held belief in the Pentagon that expensive precision weapons are central to winning America’s conflicts … GPS-guided munitions provided to Ukraine have proven vulnerable to electronic jamming. Its military has adapted by pairing older unguided artillery with sensors and drones, which can be used to spot targets and refine their shots. U.S. military commanders have almost certainly taken notice, she said.

With aerial drones doing all the damage and/or coming to the rescue, are aerial platforms the next useless capability?

… the story of an Apache helicopter pilot who successfully avoided air defense systems during a simulated attack. Personnel portraying the enemy forces were unable to determine the path the helicopter took, but after examining commercially available cellphone data, they were able to map the journey of a device traveling across the desert at 120 miles per hour. It revealed where the Apache flew to evade the defenses.

At what point do both sides realize the stalemate is enduring?

Not any time soon, my friends.

The “character of war” is changing, another official said, and the lessons taken from Ukraine stand to be “an enduring resource.”

Our military is jacked for what Ukraine spells out for Taiwan. It may all strike you as digital, but it’s really red meat:

Ukraine has demonstrated that everything U.S. troops do in the field — from planning missions and patrolling to the technology that enables virtually every military task — needs to be rethought, officials say.

Fort Irwin is home to the National Training Center, or NTC, one of two Army ranges in the United States where troops refine tactics and prepare for deployments. The training area, known to soldiers as “The Box,” is a patch of desert about the size of Rhode Island.

In years past, the facility replicated what U.S. forces could expect to face in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now trench lines zigzag across positions intended to replicate the battlespace in Ukraine.

Everything needs to be rethought. Beware those words and the ambition behind it.

I don’t know about you, but I can wait for America to get its chance at pointless, un-winnable warfare featuring nuclear superpowers on the other side of no-man’s land. The more un-winnable wars like Ukraine should drive the point home.

But that won’t stop us from spending beaucoup bucks to execute our latest pendulum swing to achieve … what exactly? Totally digital-signal-free infantry hiding in foxhole and trenches while drones circle over head?

Radios, drone controllers and vehicles all produce substantial amounts of electromagnetic activity and thermal energy that can be detected. To confuse enemy surveillance, the Army is teaching soldiers to hide in plain sight.

Instead of the old Skins versus Shirts, it’s Carbon versus Silicon and your whole mission is to hide in plain sight long enough for … I dunno.

I feel like I’ve seen this movie before.

It’s going to be awesome.

Meanwhile. MAGA America is arming itself for the Great War Against Climate Migrants (or as Trump might put it, Blood-Poisoning Vermin).

Internment camps, mass deportations, special militarized police forces running it all … I seem to remember the Final Solution beginning like that before collapsing — like a Black Hole — into the Holocaust. But, what are you going to do when “subhumans” arrive at your borders — the Zombie Apocalypse realized?

America is presently fantasizing some gonzo shit on both ends of the warfare pendulum. Both vectors invite disaster in a world where, frankly, it’s America first and foremost that’s gone crazy.