People Who Can't Be Killed

Insurgency in the Age of Unmanned Weapons Systems

1st SFG at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. US Army.

As a general rule, insurgencies tend not to triumph from winning a standup military fight.

What an insurgency has to do is impose sufficient political costs on the military forces they’re fighting to convince their adversaries that the entire endeavor is no longer worth the will that is being expended. In the case of insurgencies that the United States has fought—and lost to—it has been due to domestic politics growing weary and unwilling to sustain the costs and blood lost in these contests.

The Taliban did not tactically overmatch the United States in any sense. If there was a stand-up fight we “won” it in the sense that we were the people standing on a piece of land at the end of the day. What we didn’t win—and what we didn’t win in other conflicts like Vietnam—was the political object of that combat. We never managed to actually decisively bring about a political order in a sufficiently timely manner to avoid the eventual domestic blowback of American lives being lost.

The same holds true for the partner forces in the countries we were involved in. The gradual loss of confidence in being able to successfully bring a conflict to a close erodes a fighting force’s willingness to risk death in a fight. If you believe you’re going to be taking contact with the Taliban in 20 years in the same checkpoint of the same exact village—why die today for that checkpoint?

Moreover, why would that partner government sustain the will to continue the fight when the slow daily drumbeat of blood and treasure doesn’t appear to make much of a difference?

The political economy of killing for an insurgency tends to make it difficult to sustain an asymmetry wherein they need to just survive—but every death of your own erodes your ability to sustain the fight.

Now imagine (and bear with me) that you only had to expend treasure instead of blood. The one major comparative advantage a State has over an insurgent force is that States have significant financial resources that they can leverage—and there’s no real evidence to suggest that domestic populations care if a drone is destroyed.

Let me give you an example. A Predator being downed functionally means nothing in the scope of the budget for the DoD. Assuming the cost is like 10 million dollars per unit you could lose one Predator per day for an entire year and that would add up to a total of .004% of the DoD’s overall budget. Half a percent. It’s nothing. It’s equivalent to the costs of an IED for the Taliban.

Now, with the proliferation of (cheaper) autonomous systems—there’s a case that we’re entering a period in which at least some warfighting functions in the battlespace can be replaced with these systems. A robot with a gun can’t sit down and do key leader engagements, or patrol a town to find out the local atmospherics, but I don’t see what an autonomous system with sufficient sensing capabilities couldn’t do in an overwatch position that human beings already do.

Things like providing fire support, logistics support, or ISR are all within the realm of the capabilities of what can be done right now.

If one of these systems is destroyed? Well, it doesn’t bleed. It doesn’t show up on the nighttime news. There will be no grieving friends or family. It doesn’t have a congressman representing it. Nobody will ever bring up a Predator drone being destroyed in a Presidential debate. There’s no pressure point that an insurgency can exploit outside of a spreadsheet in the Pentagon.

Setting aside the domestic political costs from the deaths of U.S. service members, insurgencies would be denied the legitimacy they get from killing American soldiers. For them, a successful attack that kills and wounds our forces is a major public relations win, it shows that they’re still there. It means the local population knows they’re still in the fight, and they can still draw American blood. It means that our local partners won’t be safe either.

As for the will to continue a fight, robots will never be dispirited that IEDs are still going off on their patrol route. They won’t think to themselves they’ve seen no progress in governance. They won’t go home from a conflict and tell their spouse that they don’t see the point of the war. There’s nothing to demoralize—maybe except for an easily replaced E4 who’s controlling the vehicle from hundreds of miles away.

This isn’t to say that insurgents can’t still target a partner force (and in America’s wars our partners often suffer much worse than we do, although that is often left off the news). But our partners tend to stay in the fight as long as we do. An insurgency almost always needs to get the United States (or whatever country is conducting COIN) to exit a conflict before it can cause the collapse of local forces.

It feels as though (probably a distant point in the future) autonomous warfare inverts the political economy of an insurgency. Rather than the insurgents being a force that merely needs to continue existing to win—State actors will be able to sustain a conflict indefinitely. Every death for an insurgent force will have a loved one at home grieving a loss, and in return, they will never be able to conduct an attack that actually means anything.

In the life of an insurgent, they’ll be the ones attacking a location day after day, only to see an easily replaced robot spring back up. In the same way that a single IED being defused means functionally nothing—so too will a low-cost autonomous system.

How could you possibly maintain some sense of inevitable victory when the creeping thought in the back of your mind is that 20 years from now I’ll still be blowing up the same robot on the same exact corner?