Tech Juice 2511 Part V: The Shadow Warrior and His view on Military Capital Equipment Profiles

Introduction

1.  In the previous two Tech Juice Articles of the 2511 series, we discussed the trajectory of equipment profiles of armed forces if the Conventionalist and the Technophile had their way.  Let's examine the mind of the Shadow Warrior (a third type of General officer) of a different mettle.  

2.  Shadow warriors are generals who have risen from special forces and intelligence agencies. Just to give you a flavour of the way they think, have a look at the cover and contents of this book by Gen Sean McFate who started his life as a paratrooper and officer of the US army 82 airborne division, left the service became a defence contractor (aka mercenary company owner) and ended up as a a professor of strategy at the National Defense University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service after a PhD.   Gen Stanley McChrystal, the JSOC commander in Iraq and of Al Zarqawi fame, has written a glowing tribute to this book. 

3.  The book presents a sobering view of the nation state and the international rules-based order. The actual status of the world’s political map itself is very sobering. It is estimated that over 107 nations on the world map are nation states in name only and run by warlords, narco-syndicates, controlled dictatorships, ethnic religious groups, cyber criminal syndicates and in some cases pure mercenaries who are part of the booming international business of private armies. 

4.  Over the last two decades, we have seen extensive use of private armies.  They come in various names and forms.  For example US defence contractors,  Blackwater in Iraq, Wagner group, sea merceneries that provide support for passing cargo in troubled waters of the gulf of Aden and Malacca, firms like triple-canopy that specialise in protecting mining infra, Malhama tactical, an Uzbekistan based company that provides specialist combat services to jihadists etc. etc. I think a very effective handling of Boko Haram by the mercenaries hired by the Nigerian government shows that mercenaries have become an accepted tool for handling things that regular armies are not trained to. 

5.  Cyber mercenary companies are cropping up everywhere. If a government has a hack-back contract through these mercenaries that operate from lawless parts of the world, their networks are more likely to be spared. Opinion shaping using social media to meddle with elections, toppling governments, regime change, turning corporations against governments and most importantly, people against governments in democracies, has become an instrument of war. Such cyber capabilities are ignored at the peril of the state. 

6.  Another sobering statistic is that out of the top 100 economic entities of the world, only 29 are countries. 71 are corporations. To think that they will not have their own private armies, air forces and naval assets, through so-called defence contractors, to defend their global economic interests, is naive. The world will likely fester with a no-war-no-peace state of perpetual conflict. This will need flexibility, and nations that thrive in this uncertainty are the ones that will remain viable in an increasingly lawless world where the so-called “rules-based international order” will become less effective. I think conflicts arising from this chaos will not only be below the nuclear threshold but may even be below the conventional threshold. However, not being prepared for both will result in trouble. The book points out that traditional war is shrinking in possibility, and other types of wars have been on the rise. 

7.  It would be interesting to see what the corporate world thinks. Here is a graph of geopolitical risk on the left vertical axis and corporate attention to geopolitics. Geopolitical risk is a GDP-weighted global average of political risk from GeoQuant. Corporate attention to geo politics is the number of corporate event transcripts mentioning terms related to geopolitical risk presented as a three-month rolling average. Corporations have lowered their tensions on the matter and hopefully not converted the geopolitical risk to corporate advantage!! 

8.  Shadow warriors point out to mercenaries may be the route of choice for deniable enemy actions on expensive capital assets. USS Fitzgerald collided with a commercial container vessel ACX Crystal off the coast of Japan (June 16 2017).  Unknown underwater objects have collided with a US nuclear submarine, aircraft carrier etc. 

9.  The Arleigh Burke–class destroyer is the workhorse warship of the US Navy. Capable of operating independently or as part of a strike group, it can see everything below, on, and above the water’s surface, including objects in space — and it can kill anything it sees. There’s not a single 90-degree angle on the destroyer’s superstructure, making it stealthy and hard to observe with radar. Propelled by a whopping 100,000-shaft horsepower into two screws, the 500- foot ship can achieve speeds over 30 knots, slicing through the waves with its raked bow, and it can stop from that speed within its own length. It is one of the most powerful warships in the world, and the United States has sixty-six of them. The U.S. Navy recently accepted delivery of the future USS Charleston (LCS 18) during a ceremony at the Austal USA shipyard.   

10.  Deploying high-tech destroyers and other capital assets in the Taiwan theatre has only seen brinkmanship from the Chinese Air Force.  The Chinese have done low passes over these ships with no weaponry on them.   This brinkmanship is unique.  A fire from this ship would start a war, and holding fire risks being hit. Similar situations are being faced by long-range bombers who regularly capture footage of Chinese unarmed fighters flying very close and harassing the bombers. US keeps rethinking its deterrence while China keeps occupying more abandoned islands in the South China Sea and then never vacates them. We are seeing similar things in the Galwan heights with the Himalayan border with India.

 

Conclusion - My Thoughts

11.  So, how do you prepare? What do we contract out, and what do we invest in? 

12.  There are good points from all three types of future warriors. The threshold of conventional war has definitely increased manifold because of the loss of state monopoly over organised violence, or in other words, war. No-war-no-peace is likely to be the new normal with war-like objectives achieved without firing a single shot eg. Bangladesh. 

13.  Non-state actors are no longer the gun-toting small-group 'terrorists' as governments would like to call them. They are corporate warriors fully equipped with ships and aircraft and capable of war at a scale that may look like a conventional war with lower tech kit. National armies will be increasingly unfit to wage wars with non-state actors due to the saddle of the so-called self-imposed rules-based order and the wonderful COIN phrase called “winning hearts and minds”, which has never worked. 

14.  Non-state actors will breed the business for more non-state actors, and national militaries will need to learn to factor them into their war plans in the future. Famously, a mercenary was being blessed by a priest who said “Peace be with you” in the usual manner. The mercenary replied, “May alms abandon you” because the mercenary depends on no peace for his existence, and the pastor depends on alms for his existence. 

15.  We should robotise/automate most conventional capabilities, contractorize sub-conventional warfare and focus our human resources on intelligence, cyber and special forces for all three services. I think the high-value conventional kill capabilities will be the reserve force of the future, while other forms of so-called sub-conventional warfare will become mainstream. 

16. Let's examine the possible developmental trajectory of conventional capabilities with high-value capital assets such as fighters, attack helicopters, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers and tanks. We should not look at their capabilities in isolation and build the best platform that will survive in a conventional war.  If I have a dwindling population, a very low appetite for physical risk, and wish to eliminate expensive training infrastructure for human pilots,  combat cloud technology options such as swarm UCAVs or swarm underwater drones or robotised swarm tanks would be the direction to take. 

17.  Conscript induction with low training levels would be adequate, and the revenue cost load can be optimised.  These technologies can further reduce our revenue load as we can project much greater power with the same manpower. 

18.  We have to constantly re-imagine our inventory mix, which is evolving more rapidly than we can keep up with. I quote from Ref 1: “The F-35 fighter jet is awesome. It looks like a spaceship, has 43,000 pounds of thrust, a top speed of Mach 1.6, and can perform instantaneous high-g turns. One model of the F-35 can even take off and land vertically, like a helicopter. But this fighter is no flyweight; it can drop nine tons of smart bombs into a shoebox. Enemies will never know what hit them, because the F-35 is invisible to radar. It is the stealthiest war machine ever made, able to see without being seen. Anyone taking on an F-35, said one pilot, would be like jumping into a boxing ring “to fight an invisible Muhammad Ali.” The F-35 also gives its pilot X-ray vision. The helmet visor allows the pilot to “see through” the aircraft, using remote sensors on the fuselage, for next-generation dogfights. It may also be the smartest weapon ever made, running on eight million lines of computer code, more than the space shuttle. When the F-35 flies, its silicon brain can see the entire battle space, automatically select targets for the pilot, and link to other friendlies—tanks, destroyers, drones, missiles, launchers—for cooperative targeting. The F-35 is a technological marvel, one that drives fighter pilots gaga with Top Gun lust. Even better, the plane practically flies itself. There are few gauges, buttons, or knobs in the cockpit. “What you have in front of you is a big touchscreen display—it’s an interface for the iPad generation,” said one test pilot. Move over Maverick and Goose, the F-35 is the future. Or, as another pilot said, it is “a needed aircraft to get us to where we need to be for the future of warfare.” 

19.  Should we build a fighter like this? Of course, we should. Should it be paired with robotic fighter aircraft with the same or even better capabilities, that will collaborate with our 6th-generation fighter and project the power of an entire fighter squadron in contested airspace, while the manned platform operates in safer airspace. Certainly, we should. All existing fighter upgrade projects should also be manned-unmanned teaming projects to build an air force for the future. Unmanned fighters also give us deniability, which is essential in the brinkmanship of the future. This argument can now be extended to nuclear submarines, surface ships and tanks. 

20.  We can draw some lessons from non-state actors who had overwhelmed the air defences of Israel's Iron Dome system with cheap rockets. The one thing that every aircraft or cruise missile needs to avoid is birds. We can have cheap robotic explosive bird swarms with impact explosives on them around our airfields, aircraft carriers and installations, which will act as obstructions to incoming aircraft and missiles. Similar explosive fish swarms will act as a good defence when in formation with a submarine or an expensive marine asset. These are not technologies of the future but are already available. We probably just need to get out of our cockpits, tanks, submarines and ships and think like our mercenary friends to build this inventory. 

21.  Investment in C4ISR and cyber needs to increase multifold. We must have the capability to manipulate populations to rise against their leaders, achieve regime change and also close the media campaign and the uprising as well. A cyber game is the only thing that can drive usurped territories back to where they belong. I don’t think saturation strikes and using a thousand tanks to take over this territory would be effective in the long run. We need to learn to have deniability while dealing with non-state actors who fester wounds of established governments, as draining the swamp and the elimination of entire communities is not something that national armed forces can do. Are these capabilities appropriate for national armed forces to do? I am not sure. But if armed forces do not integrate these capabilities into their existing capabilities, including achieving war-like objectives for the country without firing a single shot, they would look increasingly irrelevant in national life.