Defenses can be overwhelmed by an air force purchased from Costco.
An oil storage facility in Abu Dhabi came under drone and missile attack on January 17. The attack was launched by Houthi rebels from Yemen. The Houthis were retaliating against the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is part of a Saudi-led coalition fighting them. The Houthis are said to be financed by Iran. It’s complicated. And tragic. Three people were killed and another six were reported wounded.
How were rebels from one of the poorest countries in the world, with a ragtag military at best, able to obtain missiles and arm drones for a successful aerial attack against an (ostensibly) well-protected target? The UAE claims that it is a safe place to do business in the otherwise volatile Middle East and says it defends its oil fields, facilities and airports with “the most sophisticated air defenses in the region.”
The Houthi air force, if you will, consists of cruise missiles and drones. “The Houthis have developed the ability to build drones, short-range rockets and other weapons using materials such as engines and electronics that they buy locally or source from a complex network of intermediaries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia,” according to a confidential United Nations (UN) Security Council report viewed by the Wall Street Journal.
A number of companies worldwide offer cruise missiles for export, including Raytheon, which makes the Tomahawk in the U.S. Although we could not find a published price list of any country that might have sold a cruise missile to the Houthis, we suspect the Houthis paid less than the cost of a Tomahawk—about $2 million.
The drone attack in Abu Dhabi once again raises the specter of future wars where powerful militaries with sophisticated defenses are overwhelmed by a swarm of cheap weaponized drones.
It’s quite real, says the U.S. Navy. In July 2019, the guided missile cruiser USS Kidd was pestered for three hours by as many as six drones that were able to fly around the guided missile destroyer while it was cruising at 16 knots. This bizarre incident occurred near the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. Who controlled the drones remains a mystery.
Small drones anyone can “go out and buy at Costco right now” pose the most concerning tactical development since the rise of the improvised explosive device in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., head of U.S. Central Command, almost a year ago, speaking at the Middle East Institute.
America’s military seems to be built on the belief that we must go big or go home. The U.S. armed forces are the biggest. The country’s military spending is the biggest. Its guns are the biggest. Bigger is better is not an American invention, it goes as far back as the days of Genghis Khan and his grandson, Kublai Khan, rulers of the biggest landmass in history. Despite all their ferocity in battle, the Mongols feared the war elephant with a “castle” on its back bristling with archers. The war elephant was the biggest weapon of its time.
In the epic 1277 Battle of Ngasaunggyan (Burma), the Mongols on horseback tried to fight an army led by elephants on horseback. They were excellent horsemen. Marco Polo told of Mongol horsemen learning to ride when they were children and who as warriors could fire six arrows a minute either facing forward or backward on their horses. But their horses ran in fear from elephants. It would have been game over for the Mongols were it not for their improvisation. The Mongol warriors dismounted, tied their horses to trees and swarmed the elephants on foot. Stung by thousands of arrows, the elephants panicked and ran back over their own soldiers.
The U.S. military has huddled to construct schemes to fight off swarms, a growing threat not only from rebels and ragtag armies but also from established and formidable countries.
When China demonstrated the ability to release hundreds of drones in a coordinated attack, the threat of a swarm attack became real. In 2020, Russia conducted a massive military exercise with 80,000 personnel and a focus on using drones in warfare. An attack by as many as a million drones is being studied by the U.S. Navy, reports Forbes.
The emphasis on drones by its biggest perceived threats has forced a big U.S. response. The U.S. Army is spending billions on the Initial Maneuver Short Range Air Defense (IM-SHORAD), which is designed to shoot down all manner if aerial threat, whether it be fixed and rotary-wing aircraft or drones, with rockets and cannon—and in the future, lasers and counter-attack drones. IM-SHORAD moves to the threat on the 8-wheeled, lightly armored Stryker Infantry Carrier Vehicle (ICV).
Signal jamming is also being considered to combat such threats, although against drones on preprogrammed flight paths would be impervious to such a tactic.
Playing the Small Game
Sending a Patriot missile to counter a drone or scrambling a fighter squadron to fend off a drone swarm is economically unfeasible and logistically impossible. It would be like sending war elephants against Mongols. The U.S. has as its last line of defense shooting down a drone swarm with rapid fire cannon, but this would be like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet hundreds of times. But how many drones can an F-35B Lightning II—perhaps the most advanced and most expensive fighter jet in the world at an initial cost of almost $136 million—shoot down, and how many would still get through?
The best defense against a weaponized drone swarm may well be one that relies on microprocessor speed rather than human speed. The current process with “man-in-the-loop” threat assessment and decision-making before pulling the trigger will not be fast enough, according to AI experts.
“If you have to transmit an image of the target, let the human look at it and wait for the human to hit the ‘fire’ button, that is an eternity at machine speed,” said one scientist, speaking on condition of anonymity to Forbes. “If we slow the AI to human speed, we’re going to lose.”
But who, besides the scientist above, would trust a machine to make the initial determination that a swarm is indeed a threat, not a flock of birds, friendly drones or civilian aircraft? Certainly not the European Union (EU), which has stated quite clearly that the decision to “select a target and take lethal action using an autonomous weapon system must always be made by a human.”
The U.S., however, seems to be more sympathetic to a machine’s fire-at-will response—and has been for some time. The U.S. Navy’s Phalanx weapon system employs an automated Gatling gun, a radar and a computer that has no human in the loop. Once turned on, the self-contained system will automatically search for, detect, track and try to shoot down anything that is coming toward its ship. It is capable of firing 4,500 rounds per minute, although the magazine holds only 1,550 rounds and a typical “engagement” uses about 100 rounds. Each round is 20 mm in diameter and is made of either armor piercing tungsten or depleted uranium. Developed under contract by General Dynamics, the Phalanx was first installed on the USS Coral Sea, an aircraft carrier, in 1980, and has since been installed on many U.S. Navy ships and navy ships from foreign countries.
Without a sophistication identification systems (or IFF for identification friend or foe), the Phalanx must rely on a rather narrow set of criteria, including speed and direction of an approaching object. It is hardly foolproof. “Incidents” include shooting down an A-6 Intruder from the fleet it was protecting from the USS Independence. In the 1991 Gulf War, a Phalanx system fired at a chaff cloud released by the battleship USS Missouri that was trying to protect itself from an Iraqi-launched Chinese-manufactured sea-skimming cruise missile.