Modern Warfare
Warfare has significantly changed since my beginnings as a Quaker pacifist during the Vietnam War (1960’s).
The fundamental economics and physics of warfare are shifting. Historically, technological superiority meant larger, more expensive, and heavily armored platforms (carriers, stealth bombers). Today, technology allows cheap systems of drones to challenge these massive weapons systems. As Ukraine has been doing against Russia, and Iran against the US and Israeli forces in the Middle East.
At the time of the Vietnam War every young man was faced with the possibility of being required to join the armed forces. And the possibility of being engaged in combat. Nearly 60,000 American military personnel were killed, over 150,000 were wounded.
The US Congress has abandoned the Constitutional requirement to approve acts of war.
Presidents of both parties have executed many military actions without the consent of Congress.
Civilians and civilian infrastructure have now become targets.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions on humanitarian conduct in war prohibit attacks on sites considered essential for civilians: "In no event shall actions against these objects be taken which may be expected to leave the civilian population with such inadequate food or water as to cause its starvation or force its movement."
Israel has used artificial intelligence to select targets of people and infrastructure.
Swarms of unmanned drones have been successfully used against military targets by Ukraine, and now Iran. Drones can readily be manufactures to replace those destroyed in combat. And it is economically unsustainable to use multimillion dollar weapons to destroy relatively inexpensive drones.
China's conceptual planning explores the opposite extreme to manage swarms: massive, centralized deployment platforms. The "Luanniao" represents the idea of an airborne aircraft carrier—a massive mothership designed to deploy, control, and retrieve thousands of autonomous drones from the stratosphere.
The Asymmetric Era
This is a link to an interactive web page discussing the current asymmetric era.
Economic Exhaustion: Firing a standard SM-2 missile ($2.1M) to intercept a Shahed-136 ($20k) represents a 100:1 negative cost-exchange ratio for the defender. Over a sustained campaign, this risks exhausting high-end interceptor inventories (magazine depth) before the attacker runs out of cheap drones.
