Regarding U.S. defense planning, as Chinese military analysts remind us, Americans too often operate on the basis that technology drives strategy, not the reverse. The Manhattan Project that developed nuclear weapons, the antiballistic missile Strategic Defense Initiative, and stealth aircraft are prominent examples. And, so far, the same observation could apply to unmanned vehicles operating in all domains.
The use of unmanned vehicles dates to World Wars I and II. Pilotless aircraft were employed in both, and German V-1 and V-2 rockets were quite effective and destructive. Japan dispatched unmanned balloons to strike the U.S. West Coast. One started a small forest fire. But that was the extent of the damage.
In Vietnam, unmanned reconnaissance drones were deployed with marginal effect. I recall too many (worrying) hours lingering off the North Vietnamese coast in a Swift Boat waiting to recover one of those drones. In the 1960s, the U.S. Navy relied on DASH—an unmanned Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter that was highly unreliable—to drop torpedoes on enemy submarines. I also recall serving in a destroyer escort that lost control of its DASH and engaged her three-inch guns (with no success) as the unguided drone repeatedly buzzed the ship.
From the Predator to smaller battlefield systems, drones came of age after 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq. Other states—including Israel, Russia, and Turkey—likewise have made excellent use of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). Most militaries deploy them. And the Chinese company DJI is the largest producer of UAVs for commercial use.
The Navy is embarked on a major effort to field unmanned vehicles in the air, surface, and subsurface domains. The effort is laid out in the 16 March 2021 document, Department of the Navy: Unmanned Campaign Framework. Unfortunately, the document is not a strategy, and the word is not mentioned in the table of contents. The framework has three parts: “Why unmanned?” “Where are we now?” and “How will we get there?” meaning how to build a credible campaign plan.
Nowhere does the document propose a strategy to achieve those aims. The closest it comes is evaluating its plan against the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which currently is under review and conceivably could be changed. As Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday wrote at the front of the Unmanned Campaign Framework:
. . . the campaign plan will serve as the comprehensive strategy for realizing a future in which unmanned systems are an integral part of the Navy’s warfighting team. It will be a living, iterative document that articulates a vision for a more ready, lethal, and capable fleet through accelerating critical enablers in technology, processes, and partnerships.
How can a campaign plan become a comprehensive strategy when, as Clausewitz argued, policy and not tactics must drive strategy? This mismatch suggests the larger problem of technology driving strategy. Despite the Unmanned Campaign Framework, the Navy’s general approach is like Mao Zedong’s famous “Let 100 flowers blossom” campaign, meaning that the best of breed will emerge and be applied to tactical, operational, and strategic use.
The Navy relies on distributed maritime operations (DMO) for much of its planning. DMO aims to reduce vulnerability by geographically dispersing forces to complicate targeting problems for adversaries. But this is not a strategy. It is an operational concept and tactic. And DMO must be incorporated once the strategy is determined, not before.
Strategy Precedes Technology
For the drone effort to succeed, developing a strategy must be the first step—to drive the technology by specifying the outcomes and tasks unmanned vehicles must achieve, rather than developing strategy to fit the technology. This effort should draw heavily on an effort cochaired by the then–Under Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly and then–Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William Moran called “Breaking the Mold (BTM),” a study undertaken at the Naval War College from 2017 to 2018.
BTM offered a strategy tailored for Europe and NATO and for the Pacific. In Europe, the strategy was called a porcupine defense. In the Pacific it was termed “a mobile maritime line of defense.” Both strategies are predicated on exploiting advanced kinetic and nonkinetic technologies to defeat or contain an adversary geographically by raising the costs of any attack to levels that would be too expensive to undertake. Unmanned vehicles were critical to these strategies.
Imagine, for example, hundreds or thousands of drones operating in swarms, threatening or overwhelming a land or naval surface force, like the 1945 Japanese kamikaze attacks. In Okinawa, kamikazes struck more than 340 ships, even though fewer than 10 percent hit their targets. Suppose half did? The invasion force could have been put out of action.
As China is regarded as the pacing threat, developing a guiding strategy for drones should focus on that region. The aim of the BTM mobile maritime defense strategy was to prevent China from breaking out of the first island chain, which presumably is one of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy’s missions. At the same time, friendly forces would attack Chinese overseas facilities obtained through the Belt and Road Initiative. In other words, as Japan had been isolated in World War II and cut off from overseas resources, so too China would be contained to its land mass.
For this strategy to work, drones would be vital in a variety of missions, including search and destroy against PLA assets; surveillance and reconnaissance; command and control; targeting; electronic and psychological warfare; deception; and logistics support beyond refueling and rearming manned units. Given PLA advantages in weaponry range, particularly with antiship ballistic missiles, drones would operate inside this danger zone.
Two factors are central in the research and development phase. First, the platforms in the three domains must be configured for the vastness of the Pacific, the challenging maritime environment, and the lack of bases in proximity to China. Second, payloads must be configured for each mission and made compatible with the surface, air, and subsurface unmanned platforms.
As Sun Tzu argued, deception is warfare. To complicate and confuse PLA planning, several unmanned surface drones could be configured as decoy carrier strike groups and amphibious readiness groups. Radar reflectors and electronic transmission would simulate large surface forces. While visual identification would expose these drones as decoys, deception could be preserved by deploying relatively large numbers and alternating between radio silence and electronic emissions control.
Indeed, if these drones were semi-submersibles, some form of invisibility would be maintained. These unmanned vehicles would have to be seaworthy. Here, SWATH (small water plane area twin hull) would seem ideal and need not be larger than 1,000 tons.
Obviously, undersea vehicles carrying mines and torpedoes are vital. The concept could be a mobile version of the Mk 60 Captor mine, deployed to deny transit and to blockade. Like decoy surface vehicles, unmanned subsurface drones could simulate submarines and perform reconnaissance and surveillance. Deception also could be used in aerial vehicles.
Aligning technology with a specific strategy is critical. These illustrations are examples. More cases will be needed to cover several wartime contingencies.
In addition, having a strategy can assist in dealing with fundamental issues of how much authority can be delegated to unmanned vehicles. What happens if command, control, and communication is severed, and the unmanned vehicles must be redirected for different missions? How vulnerable are unmanned surface vehicles to being seized by boarding parties? These and other questions require careful analysis. However, the capture option can be eliminated by having a self-destruction system requiring a password or other means to defuse it.
Further recommendations could be generated at a series of conferences, possibly under the auspices of the Naval War College, to match technology with strategy and produce options that can drive the unmanned vehicle programs. Extensive wargaming and operational analyses, including fleet exercises, are likewise important. Otherwise, the reverse of technology driving strategy is likely to be far less productive and more expensive than if strategy is in charge.
