“The future of warfare: A $400 drone killing a $2M tank.” That was the headline in Politico E.U. on October 26. That header tells us that the world’s military establishments have been caught flat-footed. As one Ukrainian drone-master, Pavlo Tsybenko, explained of his anti-Russian-tank weapons, “We made ours using microchips imported from China and details we bought on AliExpress. We made the carbon frame ourselves. And, yeah, the batteries are from Tesla. One car has like 1,100 batteries that can be used to power these little guys.” The parts of the Ukrainian drones are COTS, commercial-off-the-shelf. If the goal is quick and cheap, it often helps not to have a whole huge Pentagon-type procurement system. 

And now we’re seeing the same mil-tech dynamic in Gaza. Hamas, too, has used drones to deadly effect on tanks, and the Israelis, who have even more expensive tanks than the Russians, are scrambling with the same jerry-rigged expedient, putting so-called cope cages atop their tanks, where their armor is thinnest. These hillbilly-looking contraptions seem to work against drones dropping from above, but they pose their own problem: They raise the silhouette of the vehicle, and so go against the the trend of tank design for the last century, which calls for going low to avoid more familiar direct-fire, line-of-sight anti-tank weapons. 

Oh, and the cost of a U.S. Abrams tank is about $10 million (nothing about the Pentagon is cheap). We should also mention: An Abrams has a crew of four. So even if we factor out the ethical value of human life—we are talking warfare, after all—the dollar cost of the crew is expensive: how much it costs to train them, how much it costs to replace them, how much it costs in benefits to survivors. No doubt the next time the U.S. military deploys to some hot zone—and it’s always a “when,” as opposed to an “if”—our tanks, too, will have an anti-tank countermeasure grafted on. It’ll be a great emergency cost-plus deal for some defense contractor.  

What we’ve seen here, drone vs. tank, is a case study in the never-ending revolution in military affairs—the perpetual cat-and-mouse that has, in the past, seen iron beat bronze, the musket defeat the sword, the machine gun massacre cavalry, and and on. It wasn’t that long ago that the Nazis used their tanks to blitzkrieg their way through defensive formations; now the defenders are blitzing back. 

Yet even as we allow that war is hell, and that it’s hellaciously difficult to know what a determined foe has up his sleeve, we should acknowledge that militaries have been, by their bureaucratic nature, slow to grasp technological possibility, including the possibility that a toy drone could be made as deadly as the million- or billion-dollar products of the world’s military-industrial complexes.  

Big militaries suffer a mirror-image fallacy; that is, they tend to assume that the enemy will be like them. During the Cold War, the Pentagon understandably focused on the Soviet Union, which was heavy with tanks and jets. And so Uncle Sam was unprepared for the Vietnam War, when the foe was not a mirror, but rather, was asymmetric— low-tech, swimming around the Americans like fish in the sea. American G.I.s said that they won every battle against the North Vietnamese, and that’s true; yet it’s undeniable who won the war.  And the same held true for Afghanistan and Iraq; we ran up the body count against our enemies, but today, they’re still there, and we’re all gone.  

Interestingly, it was during those last two wars that the U.S. upscaled its use of drones, most notably the Predator, which could launch Hellfire missiles. Yet if the U.S. started the drone chapter, the other team wrote its own coda. The Predator had a wingspan of 41 feet; it was, in a sense, an airplane, the sort of vehicle with which the U.S. Air Force would be fully familiar. Then, others figured out that a drone could be small and still be effective. Moreover, these microdrones could be made in the thousands and, who knows, maybe nanodrones can be made in the millions, even billions.  

Such “particle-ized” warfare has not computed well with established militaries, because it calls into question the unchallenged verities of contemporary combat: that you need a tank (or other kind of artillery), or an airplane, or a submarine, to deliver kinetic force on the target. That is, the costly big-unit idea hasn’t yet given ground to the cheap small-unit idea. What tank driver, or pilot, or ship captain, wants to think that some tiny little robot can do the same job? Is it too cynical to say that it’s the military ego that’s blocking evolution? Perhaps. So maybe we should just point to a readily observable phenomenon, the mental tyranny of legacy systems: If it was optimal yesterday, then perforce it will be optimal today—and tomorrow. Yet reality eats legacy for breakfast. Today, weeks into the 10/7 fighting, Hamas rockets are overwhelming the vaunted Iron Dome, routinely hitting a broad range of targets in Israel.

So, mass quantities of drones and low-tech projectiles threaten everyone. We all need shelter from the swarm. So how to protect? Pavlo Tsybenko, the Ukrainian drone meister, has his answer: Drones are “almost impossible to shoot down,” he told Politico E.U. “Only a net can help.  I predict that soon we will have to put up such nets above our cities, or at least government buildings, all over Europe.” Hmm. 

If a city of nets seems unlikely, we can recall that 9/11 seemed unlikely—until it happened. On that day, of course, three hijacked jets crashed into three buildings, killing nearly 3,000. Yet we can’t say that we weren’t warned. As far back as 1974, a domestic terrorist committed murder as part of his plot to hijack a civilian passenger jet and crash it into the White House. In 1994, Tom Clancy wrote a best-selling novel about crashing a 747 into the Capitol, and that same year, a crazy man actually crashed a Cessna into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (And yes, there were more proximate warnings, too, also ignored.) 

So 9/11 took the Bush administration by surprise; it had been busy planning for missile defense, as well as, of course, for democracy in the Middle East. Belatedly, the White House and the Pentagon, as well as a few other potential targets, are now protected by anti-aircraft weapons and air patrols—at least against kamikaze airplanes. Yet a high-rise in any city in the country is no better protected than it was 22 years ago. And one wonders if the U.S. Secret Service really knows how to stop a bird-sized drone from flying into Marine One—or into the West Wing.  

Nevertheless, even as the threat from drones has become obvious, it can be argued that a small drone can carry only a small payload. And that’s true, although we’re only beginning to grasp just how many drones can be launched at once. Little things can add up when there are a lot of them. Moreover, we’re always learning about new miracles of miniaturization, aren’t we? 

So are we back to the idea of nets for buildings? For sure, we’re back to the need to start thinking. If nets aren’t a good idea, what is a good idea? Air defense is good, so long as we internalize that the attacking aerial vehicle might not be a bomber, or an ICBM, but rather, a man on a paraglider (as happened in Gaza), or a drone mimicking a sparrow—or maybe a bumblebee. Or it might just be a low-tech mortar round, or a bullet.  

If we can’t imagine those things happening to the local skyline, then, well, we aren’t very good at imagining. And that’s okay—so long as any potential attacker is also not good at imagining. 

But if we assume that there’s a kind of permanent tech arms race—involving not just nation states, but paramilitaries, narcogangs, terrorists, criminals, and geekily skilled psycho-thrillseekers—then we need to think about building up building defenses. Once again, it may seem improbable that anyone is going to attack a random condo or office tower, but the same can be said about high-rise fires—they’re rare, but structures have fire extinguishers and sprinklers anyway.   

So other than nets, what might building defense look like?  One can think of some broad categories: 1) forbidding drone flights—or even drones themselves—in certain areas; 2) jamming drone signals; 3) camouflage, including digital obscuring; 4) hardening the target; 5) shooting down drones as they approach, or blocking them, as with a force field.

To be sure, all of these expedients seem to sit somewhere between “daunting” and “ridiculous.” And so we might pray for 6) spiritual renewal that makes us less avid about innovative killing. But then we remember that the country is too diverse to permit that sort of shared goodness. And so we should mention 7) dispersion; and 8) bunkers—maybe the people building underground homes are thinking ahead. 

So as we assess our list, we might see that 5), drone defense, has the most potential, at least for extant structures we’re attached to. In fact, one benefit of drone defense is that if we could master the technology, it would pay spinoff dividends all over. That is, defensive shields—defined as a directed-energy wall of electrons, or as a wall of copper, as in a hail of cheap projectiles, or whatever else an X-Prize might summon up—can be used in many different circumstances. Do we wish to defend ourselves against drones? Or sniper bullets  Or carjackers?  Or human intruders in our homes or across our borders? Against all these threats, there’s a common point: It helps to have a shield. Good fences make for good neighbors.   

Subscribe Today

Get daily emails in your inbox

Email Address:

To be sure, the energy amounts required for such defenses are enormous; physicists debate exactly how much, but one estimate suggests that if the kinetic energy of a bullet is one kilojoule, it would take 175 kilowatts of force to stop it. That’s about 235 horsepower. So we’re talking a lot more energy than we’ll get from local windmills and solar panels. Fortunately, micro nuclear reactors are now a thing, and we’re also discovering white hydrogen everywhere. So the energy is there if we want it. We just need to ditch low-tech Luddism. If there’s one steady rule of civilization, it’s this: Every advance is a new kind of energy hog.  

Moreover, if we start thinking about defense in new ways, we’ll reap a big upside: With enough substrate thinking about hearth and home, the superstructure of our national strategy might change. That is, if we start focusing on defense, there could be less focus on offense. As we know to our sorrow, for many decades, the U.S. military and its sidecar of armchair imperialists have been preoccupied with “force projection.” The mega-question they always seek to answer with their PowerPoints: How will Uncle Sam sally forth into the world to liberate, democratize and otherwise improve foreign peoples?  

But the rest have learned two things: First, coercive Kantianism doesn’t achieve its stated objectives; and second, salivating about outbound “opportunities” comes at the expense of assessing inbound threats. So if we, the American people, were to demand more defensive thinking—against drones, of course, and while we’re at it, against other kinds of invaders, too—we might actually get to a consistent ethic of America First.