With good reasons, 20th century theorists of nuclear war considered the prospect of continued “broken-backed” warfare following an unrestricted nuclear exchange to be highly implausible. The combined kinetic, thermic, and electromagnetic effects of such nuclear volleys are simply too devastating for the survival of a population and industrial base capable of carrying on the precipitating war. Indeed, the assumption that no power engaged in such a conflict would be able to continue the fight the day after rests at the heart of the mutually assured destruction concept. Thanks to a commitment to this paradigm the world has enjoyed relative stability, the fruit of the apparent veracity of nuclear peace theory.
But with technological developments a new “broken-backed” war scenario is poised to emerge. The capability to produce a significant electromagnetic pulse independent of a nuclear exchange has grown rapidly, alongside reliance on increasingly complex electronic systems for the operation of both basic and critical infrastructure and weaponry. Until very recently closely tied in the popular imagination to nuclear war, electronic warfare appears to be governed by a similar dynamic to what is sometimes called the nuclear ceiling, when fear of crossing an irreversible threshold limits escalation of a conflict. But the type of destruction a massive electromagnetic pulse promises ultimately does not provide the same guarantee of a lose-lose scenario as an unrestricted nuclear exchange. While for the present, significant electronic warfare systems have only been deployed at the tactical battlefield level, basic escalation dynamics being what they are and relevant technology improving rapidly, we must expect them to become ubiquitous soon, and, eventually, for the apparent strategic ceiling to be probed and breached.
As Senior Fellow Will Thibeau demonstrated in a recent DARC publication, the democratization of precision violence presented by drone warfare characterizes the defining security problem of the early 21st century. Thibeau describes widespread adoption of unmanned systems as “a revolution in how humans apply violence not seen since the advent of the semi-automatic handgun,” which threatens or signals the end of the “the monopoly of the state over organized force.” In the near-term, responding to the inadequacy of 20th-century U.S. state-technologies like the bureaucracy of the Department of Defense to meet this challenge, Thibeau prescribes greater reliance on the speed and creativity characteristic of private corporations and initiatives by way of letters of marque and reprisal. A new breed of mercenaries can be incentivized to maintain the pace of innovation in drone and anti-drone weapons technology currently found in the warzone of Ukraine.
While this represents a tactical adaptation to new realities, it does not seek to anticipate the next-order strategic consequences of a battlefield dominated by unmanned electronic systems. The offense-defense arms race in the era of drone and electronic warfare is likely to lead to battlefields of the future that appear strikingly like those of the past. Universal reliance on complex electronic systems creates a new vector of vulnerability, as fragility increases with intricacy and entanglements form avenues of attack. In the future, wars between peer powers will be won by the side best able to impose and operate in conditions of unexpected “time travel,” or strategic anachrony, characterized not by the presence of cutting-edge technologies but the profound absence thereof. Counterintuitively, advances in the automation and technological complexity of warfare will necessarily increase the need for the naked warrior.
Electronic warfare systems capable of delivering electromagnetic pulse-like damage have evolved significantly, leveraging advances in directed energy, high-power microwaves, and electromagnetic interference technologies in order to degrade or destroy enemy electronics, such as radar, communications, navigation, and weapons systems. High-power microwave devices emit concentrated bursts of microwave energy that can overload and damage electronic circuits across a targeted area or specific system. Examples include the Air Force research concept CHAMP (Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project) and Anduril’s Leonidas system, which is a portable, ground-based “microwave ray gun” meant to disable drones, electronics, and other systems over a range of several miles. Similar, as a counter drone-swarm system, is the Tactical High-Power Operational Responder, or THOR, also a microwave pulse weapon. Other systems rely on signals jamming, such as the U.S. Army’s Terrestrial Layer System or Russia’s Krasukha series, targeting radar and communication systems, including those on drones and aircraft. While intended to be jamming platforms, some of their emissions are alleged to be powerful enough to seriously damage sensitive electronics at ranges exceeding a hundred miles.
In effect and range, these systems and others like them in operation or development fall somewhere along an electromagnetic scale; the theoretical endpoint of this scale is a cataclysmic solar event, but for practical purposes it is the atmospheric nuclear strike, or high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) attack. A series of nuclear detonations at the right height would disable satellites above and electronic systems below, semiconductors and circuitry fried in an area covering the range of a continent. Short of that are large satellite- or missile-launched non-nuclear EMP devices, which seek to recreate the geographic scale of damage to electronics of a HEMP strike with conventional explosives, electromagnetic coils, and other energy systems, acting as a kind of “e-bomb” without the radioactive fallout. Potentially similar, though not actually on our hypothetical EMP scale, is a massive cyber attack coordinated to turn off critical infrastructure of all kinds in rapid succession.
No weapon systems of this strategic scope have been publicly deployed, yet. For now, programs developing electronic warfare systems, like those listed above, continue to focus on tactical advantages such as precision and scalability, mobility and rapid deployment, absence of kinetic side-effects, and miniaturization and mass production.
But as more and more of the battle space is dominated by signals and autonomous systems, electronic warfare will continue to develop. And in the desperate effort to break a stasis between offensive and defensive capacity in the era of drone warfare, conflict will tend toward the indiscriminate elimination of such systems. The simplest and final move to be made in this game is the total removal of communications and electronics from the field of battle preemptively, repeatedly, and continuously, if not permanently, restoring an analog fighting domain in which once again only the best man, men, and unit tactics may win.
In the present, as under previous technological conditions, this kind of electronic-warfare Samson option is unnecessary, as even slight superiorities in technical competence and equipment can prove decisive. But as drones continue to democratize highly precise operational capacities, and control more of the battlespace, the temptation to break deadlock with their mutual denial will grow. Thus the offensive case for continued and concentrated U.S. investment in the maintenance of purely human and simply mechanical warfighting ability: the soldier trained in anachronisms will find no disadvantage in being denied use of his electronic equipment, and so can use preparatory blackouts to shape the operational environment to his advantage.
The largest and simplest point is that, in a genuine act of war, it cannot be assumed that our complex systems will survive contact with the enemy—indeed, every piece of available evidence suggests they will increasingly not—and to the degree that conflict remains territorial, operations must be maintained regardless of the functioning of the computer-organized or even simply electronic weapons, equipment, and transportation we now rely on in every part of daily life. We have declined to invest in updated survivability post-Cold War because of the assumption that any future war of scale would necessarily be nuclear, presenting the prospect of mutually assured destruction. This has blinded us to the prospect of a long war that significantly escalates without breaching the nuclear ceiling. As electronic weapons and cyber attack abilities have improved, it should be clear that the potential avenues leading to a situation analogous to a full HEMP attack at various scales have also increased.
What would a war of strategic anachrony look like? Let us briefly sketch a number of points of interest and scenarios suggested by the above observations and predictions, but first recognize the fact that this kind of war exists in fledgling form today. Turn your mind’s eye to the thin blue skies and dusty cliffs of the cold, high Galwan Valley; to a stretch of the Line of Actual Control along the India-China border. The proud sons of two nuclear powers face off to preserve their territorial integrity and national honor. The escalation ladder must not be climbed, not even a single rung, and so since 1996 no soldier has carried firearms within two kilometers of the LAC. But man can fight without guns, and has all along the line. In this section of eastern Ladakh the duelists meet on the field of honor on June 15, 2020, grappling hand to hand and bludgeoning each other with crude melée weapons. When the havoc is leashed again a day later there are scores of casualties on both sides, though exact figures are disputed.
The above illustrates the principle of time travel by revolution in military affairs. This episode of stone-age violence was the product of a distinctive nuclear peace. An electronic war would of course not prohibit standard firearms, and so it might be expected to produce conditions more similar to World War I. Indeed, those are the very conditions to which the war in Ukraine, with the heavy use of drones and autonomous weapons systems and electronic warfare countermeasures, has tended for more than a year now to much comment. It remains a high-tech war, a 21st-century theater, with satellite communications and AI-assisted targeting; but along the front, where the drones fly fast and thickest and microwaves fry the air, the last century encroaches in mud and trenches.
Facing the prospect of such a stalemate, a future tactician may be tempted to commit to the historical bit. If both sides are stuck hunkering down in foxholes anyway, after armored vehicles and tanks and planes have been made little more than expensive targets for drones, then why not embrace the return to the First World War? The electronic warfare devices do not need to be sophisticated; they just need to be powerful. Enough of them, fired often enough, changes the battlefield back into a world of ranged artillery and heavy mechanical armor leading desperate men over the top across no-man’s land.
We can imagine, then, a future war in which invisible fences encircle ranges of various size for varying periods of time, first denying the enemy use of his complex electronics and then, countered in turn, demarking a kind of chronological patchwork map superimposed upon the conflicted territory. Over here, all the information that characterizes next-generation warfare sits displayed on a screen at the operator’s fingertips, dealing death and destruction at mediated remove. Over there, only wired drones with their long spools of fiber optic cables leaving trails through the trees tell the observer this is the 21st century, as fear of becoming a target suppresses use of every other signal-emitting device. And there, in a blurred part of this map—hic sunt dracones—nothing is known clearly; electronics enter and die as warriors on horseback and motorcycle seek high ground and cover in turn, their mission perhaps to take and hold what they can, or to destroy the machines that hem their forces in and keep their airpower here grounded.
At this late point in our proceedings, the red-blooded American patriot and discerning reader of DARC blackpapers should have images of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the climactic battle of Predator flashing through his mind. Stripped of everything, against all this alien and unseen technology, in the end there is only the strength of a man.
And for the policy-minded professional, scrolling X under fluorescent lights in a beige office somewhere near the Potomac, let us turn to consider the national security. If, God forbid, the first sign of global war in this century is not the conquest of Taipei but a flash in the sky and the mass of North America going dark, what then? Who knows what to do if America finds itself suddenly thrust back into the Gilded Age? The Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, and other parts of government should work with Congress and state governors to develop essential no-electronics operational capabilities and lay the groundwork for quick repair of basic communications systems under conditions of widespread electronics collapse.
But the material preparations and technological hardening—shielded transformers, purely mechanical vehicles, analog management of pipelines and reservoirs—are insufficient in themselves. Planning is crucial but people are everything. The maintenance of core competencies is far more important than the maintenance of equipment. Military operations at scale, social organization, and disaster relief efforts, must all continue even should authorities find themselves without a working cell phone or computer. If not an entire field army, then surely a corps drawn from across the country should regularly practice and drill without recourse to information and communications technology, acting as a reserve of craft and tacit knowledge. With experience, their best can wargame against conventional units suddenly told their gear does not work, and show them how the naked soldier fights. In the event, they will be the guides to towns and cities and counties and states as they seek to restore some semblance of order to the days after.
The revolution in military affairs unveiled in the Ukraine war with the advent of drone warfare is proceeding too quickly to track in real time. But its trajectory is known, and man finds in human history an azimuth, and so perhaps the observer can anticipate its course and chart a way.
