Drone Swarms, Replicator and the 3rd Offset Strategy

Has a move to smaller attritable mass been the plan all along and we are just now seeing it come to the surface?

TL;DR

Note: This week’s post will be briefer than usual since I’ve been taxed by some time critical projects this week and prepping for Passover holiday.

This has been a very exciting (albeit in a terrifying way) couple of weeks in the middle east. We’ve witnessed the largest combined drone and ballistic missile strike in history rein down on Israel and the subsequent retaliation. I took some personal pride knowing that perhaps a little bit of what I worked on early in my career radar wise may have helped contribute to the most successful defeat of a drone swarm in history, bolstered by a couple of squadrons of F-15Es the US scrambled from Europe, with close to a 99% success rate. Over 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles and 30 cruise missiles reigned down from Iran and virtually all were intercepted in the 1200 miles or so of airspace in between.

“Quantity has a quality all its own.”- Josef Stalin

Swarm warfare by aerial drones has become ubiquitous on the battlefield in the last couple years during the Ukraine war, not to mention the unmanned surface vessels chipping away at Russia’s Black Sea fleet and the Ground Drones being deployed on the eastern front to help offset the force differential. We’re also seeing it pop up on multiple fronts, including with rebels in Myanmar as shown in the video below.

Whereas in the past an air force was a luxury only afforded to governments, today it’s something you can create in your basement with 3D printers and parts from Digikey. This has changed the game substantially and left a lot of force planners a combination of flummoxed and excited by the prospects.

Whereas in the past an air force was a luxury only afforded to governments, today it’s something you can create in your basement with 3D printers and parts from Digikey.

An important distinctions has to be made between what we’ve been seeing in the Middle East and what is going on in Ukraine. Most of the Shahed-136 drones and cruise missiles we are seeing being launched in the Middle East are unguided - basically they are the 21st century analog to the V-1 missiles built by the Germans during World War II. Some of the Shaheds incorporate what’s called anti-radiation homing seekers which can home in on emissions of interest such as a radio or a radar, but the vast majority rely solely on combination of GLONASS (Russian GPS) and an INS (inertial navigation system). The Iranians launched their drones with a 1000 mile mission to Israel and would have had no way to communicate once they lost line-of-sight. This is not an actively guided system.

This is distinctly different from Ukraine, where most of the drones are commanded via line-of-sight radio links or even Starlink for over the horizon to enable First Person View (FPV) control with increasingly complex seeker software. This includes incorporating technology like AI/ML for terminal guidance with automated target recognition (ATR). These capabilities took decades to find its way into fighter aircraft like the F-15, but we are seeing them find their way into attack drones in barely two years into the war, like we see below (click on the image below to watch the video on X).

In Ukraine, at least on the Ukrainian side, the drones are basically acting as a low-altitude air force with increasing sophisticated guidance, navigation & control (GNC) albeit mostly in one on one (1v1) engagements like in the video above. Whereas we are seeing swarm tactics being used in the Middle East to overwhelm Integrated Air Defense Systems (IADS) so that a few unguided weapons can get through. The scary part will come when these two trends are merged with AI/ML for guidance and we see autonomous cooperative drone swarms emerge that are able to adapt to battlefield conditions on the fly and change tactics accordingly. Fortunately, this isn’t a new concept in our acquisition strategy as I’ll talk about below.

Acquisition Pivot

What’s been particularly interesting to watch is how the Pentagon has been pivoting to embrace the new reality. It feels like we’re long ago pivoted from the original push of the 3rd offset strategy, which was heavily based on Long Range Strike Bomber (we now call it the B-21 bomber), Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) - which we now call with a totally different and expanded set of requirements Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2). So the 3rd offset strategy is basically a dead- or is it?

As I’ve written about in a previous post, the same strategy of moving away from large exquisite systems with massive capabilities to small disaggregated platforms where cooperative networks are leveraged to make more powerful networked systems is also being applied in space via the SDA. What has changed is the public and budget emphasis on building lots of small and cheap autonomous platforms under the Replicator iniative. However, many of the elements of Replicator were already in motion long before it went public. Also bureaucratic reform, such as a Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) reporting directly into the SecDef has expanded the emphasis on alternative procurement methods and DIU has doled out almost $5B in contracts in the past 7 years. This has enabled much of the AI, robotics and autonomous systems work that was looped into the 3rd offset strategy to remain and grown.

But has there been a radical departure from our previous direction, really? Outfits like Forterra (formerly RRAI) were working on autonomous vehicles as early as 20 years ago across numerous land programs well underway when Replicator started particularly as part of the Marine Force 2030 initiative. The XLUUV underwater minelayer was programmed into the budget all the way back in 2015 and DARPA’s ACTUV program, a robotic trimaran for subhunting, started back in 2016. Airborne drones have become nearly ubiquitous at certainly at the company level down to the drone level in the army and Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) has been in development for about 20 years both out in the open and behind closed doors. We are also witnessing the advent of the era of Autonomous Dog Fighting with the DARPA ACE program, a critical technology for future cooperative swarms.

Another element we are seeing is the first experimentation with drone aircraft carriers in the sky under the DARPA Gremlins program, with some initial testing shown in this video:

The reason I bring this up: it’s very easy to think that our industrial base has we’ve been caught off guard by new developments on the battlefields of the world. But the reality is often more complicated: many of these concepts of autonomous swarm warfare with netted sensors have been in discussion for at least 10 years, if not longer. The difference was that it wasn’t in the public conscience. The fact that so many alternatives are coming out of the woodwork so quickly now that public attention is focused on drone swarms is because much of the thought and R&D started years ago.

Another thing we are seeing is that programs that were long in motion, which make less sense in the new paradigm of autonomous low cost swarms are now possibly sunsetting production sooner to enable diversification and reprogramming of funding to other assets. The Chief of Staff of the USAF General David Allvin recently created a stir by saying that the Air Force may not have plans to build out the B-21 line beyond 100 bombers. This is a result of evolving thinking that is putting less emphasis on these strategic platforms for conventional warfighting use, but keeping them around to maintain capabilities like nuclear deterrence that must be reserved exclusively for manned platforms.

I spend a lot of time beating a drum on the need for making our acquisition framework more agile, of opening up competition and increasing the cycle of new technology development and introduction, but I think it’s important to occasionally give credit where its due and recognize the Pentagon is not sitting on it’s laurels and folks have indeed been thinking and planning for this day for years, even if it hasn’t precisely predicted the future we are living in today and has had to pivot a bit along the way.

A couple books to read on this topic

I’ll finish up with a couple of books I’ve read that have really influenced my thinking on military acquisition and its interplay with tactics, politics and technology:

I recently finished Andrew Krepinevich’s “The Origins of Victory” which is a great read if you want to understand how military technology revolutions happen and what the political elements are for a military technological revolution to take place (hint: change agents with long tenures of 5-7 years or more really helps) and the people who changed it in the last 150 years. He starts with the Fisher Revolution within the Royal Navy which gave us the Dreadnought battleship and the Torpedo boat. He then moves on to the Mitchell revolution within the US Navy and Air Force which gave us the Air Craft Carrier and finally finishes up with Electronic Warfare, Networking and the Stealth Revolution that emerged during the tail end of Vietnam and leading into the 80s, culminating in our outsized victory during the Gulf War. Its a dense but great read for those who want to understand the mechanics of evolving military technology within large militaries. My only crack on it would be that he’s a harsh (and in my mind unnecessary) critic of John Boyd and the Fighter Mafia (who he accuses of stifling innovation by forcing us towards smaller, more agile fighter aircraft and away from ISR systems and electronic warfare - even though the strategy that Boyd worked to implement in Gulf War I heavily leaned on EW), but otherwise a good read.

Paul Scharre’s Army of None is also a great read which gets into the technological, tactical and ethical elements of battlefield autonomy. He gets into the various architectures (Human-in, Human-on and Human-out of the Loop) and the history of these systems, along with the ethical implications of a robot pulling a trigger without a human being there to make the final decision. Great read on background and very engaging.

Finally, an older read on what was arguably the most influential military mind of the 20th (and some would even say the 21st) century: John Boyd. Boyd was a Korea era fighter pilot turned engineer who became the dean of what later became called “the Fighter mafia” - a group of defense reformers who changed the paradigm of how fighter aircraft were designed - taking us from the long slender dart-looking F-106 type of aircraft designed for interception speed during the 60s to maneuverable aircraft such as the F-16. This revolution was rooted in Energy-Maneuverability theory, with an emphasis on building planes that could generate, discharge and regenerate potential energy through larger surface area wings and control surface also gave the pilot greater visibility through bubble canopy cockpits. Along with this came a change in training to dog-fighting in real world scenarios with dissimilar aircraft in exercises like Red Flag and training courses like Top Gun. This paradigm shift in tactics and technology helped take us from the nearly 1:1 exchange ratios the Air Force was experiencing during the lowpoint of Vietnam to the 33:1 ratio we achieved during the first Gulf war.

After E-M theory shaped 4th generation fighter design, giving us the F-15, the F-16, the F-18 and the A-10, Boyd went on to create his magnum opus, the OODA loop and his slide deck/lecture on the history of military conflict known as Patterns of Conflict, which has become the foundation for most military thinking in the last 40 years. Indeed, the OODA loop itself (short for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) has found it’s way into everything from control theory to business schools since he conceived it. Another less known fact revealed in the book is about how Boyd was dragged out of retirement to help conceive the infamous “left hook” strategy that gave us the decisive victory during Gulf War I.

If you want the really long biography you can also read Robert Coram’s Boyd but Hammond’s shorter read (which I picked up in the Smithsonian bookstore about 10 years ago) covers the salient points.

More to Come…

A happy Passover to those celebrating this week, along with our family. If you have a particular topic you are interested in or would like to have me double click on from previous Substack posts, please feel free to write more in the comments.