Really interesting. It’s good that American (and allied) forces are awake to the need to change. The issue, like the example of the German guns, is likely to be the necessity to cope with continuous adaptations and a fail-fast approach. This is difficult in any commercial environment but even harder in a military where systems, control and centralised budgets drive behaviour. Never mind the likely challenges to logistics (printers aside) that will occur. I can just imagine the Congressional uproar when they find units have printed 10000 redundant UAVs!!
A reflection on the way that nations dealt with the development of aircraft during WW1 compared to the systemisation of these post war and why this happened, and what the consequences on development where would be a worthwhile exercise.
Ukraine has adopted this decentralised approach as a response to its existential war. It’s accelerated development as a result but it’s likely to have been expensive and chaotic at times. I don’t imagine Western militaries allowing a similar approach.
As an example, the British had the technology to build jet aircraft before WW2 but the need to manage the supply chain, avoid a huge retooling, etc, to manufacture in bulk meant that this didn’t see the light of day until the end of the war.
Unless the military is willing to accept a measure of (productive) chaos, I fear that these important developments will grind too slowly.
A 3D printer of this kind is not limited to stationary use. It only requires electricity and suitable control software, making it well-suited for mobile transporters.
In addition to a 3D printer, a drone should also be part of an infantryman's equipment. The drone's feed can be received through augmented reality (AR) glasses, enabling rapid and safe situational awareness on the battlefield.
I'm also curious about the potential for air-to-air capabilities with drones. Drones are already capable of carrying heavier payloads than previously possible. Their range is also remarkably far-reaching, which could allow friendly aircraft to keep enemy manned aircraft in check. Unfortunately, my knowledge on this topic is limited, and I'd like to better understand the technical possibilities.
Releasing a swarm of drones from an airborne helicopter would be a valuable extension of capabilities. In this scenario, multiple drones gather data and transmit it to all units, expanding the range and enabling rapid situation assessment while keeping the helicopter at a safe distance.
A drone swarm is also a topic that offers many exciting possibilities for drone operations. Navigation and movement can be coordinated with just a few commands, depending on the situation. For example: focus on a target, disperse, or surround the area to gather information.
Drones and the high-tech stuff are a bubble. They started kind of like aviation and tanks during WW1 with nobody prepared: as the surprise passed got more and more professional with countermeasures against countermeasures: got big - but after the consolidation they were no longer with that dieselpunk romaticism. Same will go for drones. Once the first pickup (or: robodog-) mountable anti-small-drone turret is out lot of things will change and go professional/mil-standard and those small playthings will phase out before it'll cool down and find the rightful place.
There are some far more mundane lessons to learn there about stocking, manufacturing capability, proxy wars with different requirements: wars against opponents too stubborn to give up despite zero chances to win and so on... I'm kind of worried that all these important lessons will be forgotten to the drone'n'tech hustle.
We see here an 'unintentional benefit' of the foot dragging, incremental supply of military aid to Ukraine - the rapid evolution of military technology in a prolonged conflict between opponents with roughly equivalent technical abilities.
As in WWII where, for example, AFV development went from the Pzkfw III armed with a 37mm gun to the Tiger II with an 88/L71 on the German side and from the Matilda II with its 2lber to the Centurion with its 17lber on the British side as well as the US advance from the M2 Combat Car to the M26 Pershing.
For 2 decades in Afghanistan the US used drones as recon and assassination tools. Israel apparently went deeper in to uses, but when Azerbaijan used those drones to smash the Armenians in 2020 it was over too quickly to do more than announce that drones had developed some new capabilities. And Nagorno-Kharabakh was just a brush fire war between minor powers.
Mitchell 'shook things up a bit' in the 20s with his demonstration of the ability of airpower to change naval combat. But it took WWII and the campaigns in the Pacific to shift from the belief that the battleship was the ultimate weapon in naval warfare to the realization that it was the aircraft carrier.
The question now though is whether the explosion of interest in developing and producing new and better drones will outpace the development of counter measures that will render them just another battlefield tool among many with greater or lesser effectiveness.
Back to my opening though - One wonders how many in the Western military R&D establishment are rooting for an extended conflict as a laboratory for 'product testing and evaluation? And lobbying their governments to provide it?
I've noted before that I was born on an air force base and didn't see how people out of the air force lived til almost done with being 9. I was appalled by the undisciplined low credibility way people outside the air force lived. But at the same time the culture of the air force was lit up with short lived egotism and hubris and the space age sales job was often a lost loose errand, accomplishing nothing more than the hypothetical. Applied war is nothing like the plans were. Again I want to emphasize deploying the high tech planes in new ways to turn situations, and then back to their invisibility. American strategies are based on having a far larger military than opponents, which isn't Ukraine's situation. Let those planes do extraordinarly helpful things by surprise. That could turn the war
TX Hammes was very prescient about this "4th industrial revolution" stuff (like 3D printing drones) in "The Sling and the Stone."
Still, I wonder to what extent Pentagon intellectuals' theories about how peer conflict would work have shaped what the Ukrainians have actually done, because US politicians under the influence of said intellectuals wouldn't give them things like enough artillery shells.
Somehow the "just in time" logistics ethos, to me it all echoes Rumsfeld's Reaganite fantasies of agile, elite "small footprint" armies working regime change miracles.
Fascinating as usual
Thank you!
As an ex-commander of an infantry company, I can imagine how sturdy those 3D printers should be...😅😅
And the Bible thick training manual!
Really interesting. It’s good that American (and allied) forces are awake to the need to change. The issue, like the example of the German guns, is likely to be the necessity to cope with continuous adaptations and a fail-fast approach. This is difficult in any commercial environment but even harder in a military where systems, control and centralised budgets drive behaviour. Never mind the likely challenges to logistics (printers aside) that will occur. I can just imagine the Congressional uproar when they find units have printed 10000 redundant UAVs!!
A reflection on the way that nations dealt with the development of aircraft during WW1 compared to the systemisation of these post war and why this happened, and what the consequences on development where would be a worthwhile exercise.
Ukraine has adopted this decentralised approach as a response to its existential war. It’s accelerated development as a result but it’s likely to have been expensive and chaotic at times. I don’t imagine Western militaries allowing a similar approach.
As an example, the British had the technology to build jet aircraft before WW2 but the need to manage the supply chain, avoid a huge retooling, etc, to manufacture in bulk meant that this didn’t see the light of day until the end of the war.
Unless the military is willing to accept a measure of (productive) chaos, I fear that these important developments will grind too slowly.
A 3D printer of this kind is not limited to stationary use. It only requires electricity and suitable control software, making it well-suited for mobile transporters.
In addition to a 3D printer, a drone should also be part of an infantryman's equipment. The drone's feed can be received through augmented reality (AR) glasses, enabling rapid and safe situational awareness on the battlefield.
I'm also curious about the potential for air-to-air capabilities with drones. Drones are already capable of carrying heavier payloads than previously possible. Their range is also remarkably far-reaching, which could allow friendly aircraft to keep enemy manned aircraft in check. Unfortunately, my knowledge on this topic is limited, and I'd like to better understand the technical possibilities.
Releasing a swarm of drones from an airborne helicopter would be a valuable extension of capabilities. In this scenario, multiple drones gather data and transmit it to all units, expanding the range and enabling rapid situation assessment while keeping the helicopter at a safe distance.
A drone swarm is also a topic that offers many exciting possibilities for drone operations. Navigation and movement can be coordinated with just a few commands, depending on the situation. For example: focus on a target, disperse, or surround the area to gather information.
Drones and the high-tech stuff are a bubble. They started kind of like aviation and tanks during WW1 with nobody prepared: as the surprise passed got more and more professional with countermeasures against countermeasures: got big - but after the consolidation they were no longer with that dieselpunk romaticism. Same will go for drones. Once the first pickup (or: robodog-) mountable anti-small-drone turret is out lot of things will change and go professional/mil-standard and those small playthings will phase out before it'll cool down and find the rightful place.
There are some far more mundane lessons to learn there about stocking, manufacturing capability, proxy wars with different requirements: wars against opponents too stubborn to give up despite zero chances to win and so on... I'm kind of worried that all these important lessons will be forgotten to the drone'n'tech hustle.
We see here an 'unintentional benefit' of the foot dragging, incremental supply of military aid to Ukraine - the rapid evolution of military technology in a prolonged conflict between opponents with roughly equivalent technical abilities.
As in WWII where, for example, AFV development went from the Pzkfw III armed with a 37mm gun to the Tiger II with an 88/L71 on the German side and from the Matilda II with its 2lber to the Centurion with its 17lber on the British side as well as the US advance from the M2 Combat Car to the M26 Pershing.
For 2 decades in Afghanistan the US used drones as recon and assassination tools. Israel apparently went deeper in to uses, but when Azerbaijan used those drones to smash the Armenians in 2020 it was over too quickly to do more than announce that drones had developed some new capabilities. And Nagorno-Kharabakh was just a brush fire war between minor powers.
Mitchell 'shook things up a bit' in the 20s with his demonstration of the ability of airpower to change naval combat. But it took WWII and the campaigns in the Pacific to shift from the belief that the battleship was the ultimate weapon in naval warfare to the realization that it was the aircraft carrier.
The question now though is whether the explosion of interest in developing and producing new and better drones will outpace the development of counter measures that will render them just another battlefield tool among many with greater or lesser effectiveness.
Back to my opening though - One wonders how many in the Western military R&D establishment are rooting for an extended conflict as a laboratory for 'product testing and evaluation? And lobbying their governments to provide it?
Using 3D printers on the battlefield sounds quite an adventure (it's already a fiddly thing and slow when doing it in the basement).
A suitable machine for use by the grunts will be a quite different animal, I guess
I've noted before that I was born on an air force base and didn't see how people out of the air force lived til almost done with being 9. I was appalled by the undisciplined low credibility way people outside the air force lived. But at the same time the culture of the air force was lit up with short lived egotism and hubris and the space age sales job was often a lost loose errand, accomplishing nothing more than the hypothetical. Applied war is nothing like the plans were. Again I want to emphasize deploying the high tech planes in new ways to turn situations, and then back to their invisibility. American strategies are based on having a far larger military than opponents, which isn't Ukraine's situation. Let those planes do extraordinarly helpful things by surprise. That could turn the war
Thanks for this interesting report Benjamin, lets hope the US can keep it simple and evolve battlefield drones to $10000 each
TX Hammes was very prescient about this "4th industrial revolution" stuff (like 3D printing drones) in "The Sling and the Stone."
Still, I wonder to what extent Pentagon intellectuals' theories about how peer conflict would work have shaped what the Ukrainians have actually done, because US politicians under the influence of said intellectuals wouldn't give them things like enough artillery shells.
Somehow the "just in time" logistics ethos, to me it all echoes Rumsfeld's Reaganite fantasies of agile, elite "small footprint" armies working regime change miracles.