M.8: Multi-Domain Disruption

Post 9 of 10 in a series about how cheap drones changed warfare.

Click here to for the rest of the series.

My dad was a coastie for 49 years: 30 in uniform and 19 more as a department civilian. However, I am and have always been, a land domain soldier. SF might take pride in our three lightning bolts for the three domains of land, sea, and air, but we are only transitory visitors in the other two. So now, in addition to trying to predict the future — something I already accepted was a fool’s errand — I’m going to step out of my element and try to sketch out how cheap drones impact the other four domains: Sea, Air, Space, and Cyber.

What could go wrong?

The “Mass Effect” at Sea

Cheap drones are already having a marked impact afloat. Over the last five years, both aerial and waterborne drones have struck ships in the Black and Red Seas.(114) The Russian fleet in Crimea has lost 40 percent of their naval tonnage to drones and cruise missiles. It has now been rebased out of eastern Novorossiysk as a result. Meanwhile, Ukraine doesn’t even have a recognized naval fleet.(115) There’s even a reported cross-domain drone fire: a maritime drone struck a helicopter in the air earlier this year.(116)

While the US Navy has been able to defend much of the commercial traffic in the Red Sea, it hasn’t stopped ships from sinking. Regardless, it is losing the economics by launching Ferraris at lawnmowers. The Houthi’s actually turned a profit over the last year. The navy couldn’t even pass an audit.

And yet when I talk to my US navy partners, they tend to shrug off the impact of cheap drones. This is despite the fact the single largest loss of life the US Navy suffered at sea this century came from a skiff. I recently received a skeptical reply to this series:

‘…very interested to see how the US absolute combined arms dominance will go against the asymmetric drone swarms… I wonder if this can be wargamed.’

It was. It was called Millenium Challenge. The tactics broke the wargame, and so it was reset, and the Red Team was given new rules preventing them from fighting that way. Ironically, many took the lesson that high tech wasn’t the future of war. Instead, the lesson should have been to listen to Hughes’ Salvo Equations. Sometimes, it pays to do the reading.

In deeper “blue” waters, I think naval forces are less exposed to cheap strike. At great distances, I expect ASCMs will remain the primary threat. The explosives you need to damage large ships, coupled with the large fuel reserves it takes to move it, is beyond most cheap drones.(117)

I’m not saying there’s no threat out there. Cheap sensors are already proliferating afloat. The PRC certainly isn’t the only country to have noticed sea drones are so cheap you can just dump hundreds of them at sea and not even worry if any go missing or are picked up. Undersea forces will remain harder to track than surface ships; but even here cheap sensors are proliferating. There’s certainly an interest in drones taking out undersea cables.

Perhaps the greatest growth opportunity for cheap drones at sea is in mines. Minefields have always been about dispersed mass. Cheaper sensors and manufacturing drive down some of the costs of a minefield, though dispersing the mines takes significant work.

But sea mines don’t even have to be lethal. As Colton Byers details, taking out the propulsion of a ship is a lot cheaper than sinking it.

Damn the Torpedoes: Smaller, Cost Efficient, Less-than-Lethal Systems

The approach is similar to how some Ukrainians are using some small drones to target hard to source repair parts like gun tubes. Disabling a ship can be a perfect task for a cheap (but precise) drone. It also could dramatically reduce the number of mines needed for the same effect. Of course, much like on land, the real solution will likely be a complimentary approach of using both.

When ships near land, in the reefs and shoals of the littorals, I think cheap drones are a real problem. Here all maneuver in effectively a wet gap crossing, and this has grown even deadlier.(118)

Traversing from the sea to shore is tricky. One timeless challenge is that of surprise. Any landing force has to decide the tradeoff between suppressing enemy defenses and letting the enemy know where you’re landing. As cheap sensors proliferate in the littoral, any maritime force will be challenged to push back the virtual mangroves of sensor and strike networks.

Meanwhile, landing forces are condensed into incredibly high payoff amphibious platforms. The larger the landing, the more difficult it will be for any assaulting force to clear the surf and exploit their mass ashore without being attritted. Unlike on the front of Ukraine, where Russia has absorbed drones with human waves, sinking a RoRo (roll-on-roll-off) ferry could drown an entire brigade.(119)

This has significant implications to a Taiwan fight, given the limited number of viable landing beaches — and even fewer ports.(120) I’m not naïve enough to say you can’t do forced landings anymore. History is littered with the skulls of people who boldly proclaimed, ‘they’d never come at us from that direct-’. Politicians certainly haven’t stopped sending soldiers, sailors, and marines into meat grinders. If policy demands a landing, someone is going to damn well try it. But what was already hard as hell, has gotten a hell of a lot harder.

But not all is lost. The main challenge with taking a beach is in keeping it. But if you have no plans to shore up a lodgment, then the frictions drop dramatically. Raiding, long a favorite past time of our saltiest sea heroes, benefits greatly from cheap drones. The Somali pirates’ operations weren’t terribly dissimilar to ‘cutting out operations’, and cheap drones enable opportunities here. I look forward to seeing the mischief a 21st century Thomas Cochrane can get up to.

The Air Domain

Much like the large naval ships far out to sea, cheap drones are not the primary threat to most high-end air platforms. These jets fly at faster speeds and higher altitudes than most drones could dream of. However, cheap sense has dramatically complicated traditional ideas of air superiority. While air forces have prioritized countering active air defense, cheap passive sensors can “…leverage infrared, acoustic, and electromagnetic sensors as well as other advanced techniques... These sensors detect heat, noise, and electronic signals emitted by aircraft.”(121)

These passive networks can integrate everything from the disturbances in civilian signals such as radio and television to civilian air traffic control radars into a clearer picture of the airspace. Targeting and disrupting these networks can be incredibly difficult. “An infrared camera placed on a residential rooftop, or an acoustic sensor hidden in a civilian vehicle is far more challenging to locate than a traditional radar site”.(122) Some sensors cannot be detected at all.

But regardless of how fast and high air power can fly, they have to land somewhere. Cheap precision mass has slipped into a seam between the US Army’s and the US Air Force's understanding of air defense, delineated over 70 years ago in the 1948 Key West agreements. The army has focused on downing long-range precision-guided missiles and regarded the maneuverable drones as an air force responsibility. The Air Force disagrees.

Regardless, as the US air force pursues its Agile Combat Employment concept, spreading out to smaller more remote airfields, the army simply cannot support.(123) The seams are multiplying, and are exactly the sort of attack surface people like me live for.

As the US Air Force disperses to mitigate the risk of high-end precision missiles, they are creating greater attack surface for cheap precision mass. Drones don’t even have to conduct high visibility strikes against jets or fuel and ammo to have significant effect. Cheap “fists full of FOD” (Foreign Object Damage) drones can surreptitiously sow airfields with chaff. This sort of attack can be manufactured and executed locally.(124) Free range 100% organic cheap drones.

Fixed sites like airfields can benefit from directed energy and auto-turrets as they come online. However, this will make those same systems high payoff targets for initial salvos. As sensors and strike continues to get cheaper, the only constraint is an adversary’s imagination.

When Jevon Goes to Space

Space is an unusual domain. Unlike air, land, and sea, in space one can quickly calculate mass from an object’s orbit. Sensors were some of the first things we put into space, but the sheer number of satellites has exploded in the last decade.

This has been overwhelmingly due to the plunging costs per kilogram of launch into space. Once highly bespoke and incredibly expensive, most of today’s satellites are cheap disposable varieties. You can buy near real-time imagery of anywhere on the globe with your credit card.(125) There will be even more sensors in space, both in number and variety, each year. These sensors cross all domains, providing sense capabilities unimagined just a few decades ago.

Charts were created on https://ourworldindata.org/. Data sources listed below each.

I don’t think everything we’re going to be launching will be sensors though. The restrictions on military uses of space were set out in the Outer Space Treaty back in 1967.(126) But that was before the cost per kilogram plunged to just $2,720 in 2024.(127) Those costs are already relatively low but are projected to decline further. The pressure of Jevon’s paradox will likely further drive the weaponization of mass in space.

20th century legal frameworks need an update to account for AI and cheap mass, but laws also require enforcement. In a world of apogees and delta-vs, I’m not certain the law of courts will trump the law of the jungle. The future probably looks more like The Expanse than Star Trek.

The Electron’s Mass

The cyber domain has long been rife with digital sensors, while simultaneously enabling greater and sometimes surreptitious access to real world ones. Today something normally invisible, like a spike in energy consumption, can be exploited by an adversary. The principal cost of cyber surveillance is not in dollars, but in time.(128) Cheap drones like these can be completely invisible to you.

Additionally, like the air domain, it still matters where on the real earth data lands. At the outset of the Russian offensive in 2022, civilian firms like Amazon rushed to secure and exfiltrate Ukraine’s data.(129) In examining lessons learned from Ukraine, Microsoft concluded, “defense against a military invasion now requires for most countries the ability to disburse and distribute digital operations and data assets across borders and into other countries.”(130) While edge computing capabilities bring virtual connectivity forward, cloud servers still need to be placed somewhere. However, greater distances add potential frictions that can be disruptive. Deciding where to locate servers and data must be a risk-informed decision, subject to the same “mass effect” calculus.

~ ~ ~

No domain can ignore the impact of cheap drones. There are already millions of them swimming, flying, orbiting, and silently monitoring across the globe. The tech is not waiting for us to catch up, nor will it. What we need most critically is leadership to drive the change. And the first step needs to be admitting we have a problem.