The 2024 election is irrelevant

You may not be interested in Information Age warfare. Pray Information Age warfare is not interested in you

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 18

Pushing through the market square
So many mothers sighing (sighing)
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in (cry in)
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying (dying)
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying (lying)

We've got five years, what a surprise
We've got five years, stuck on my eyes
We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, that's all we've got

The Sunday Reader, Sept. 22, 2024

Politicians are surfers; they ride history’s waves without affecting them in any way.

Marcus Antonius Gordianus Sempronianus Romanus II was 46 years old when he became Ceasar, the ruler of the entire known world. For 21 days his word was law from Egypt to Rome to Britain, from Spain to Constantinople.

On the 22^nd day he was killed in battle outside Carthage. His father, Marcus Antonius Gordianus Sempronianus Romanus I, who had been appointed coregent by the Senate on the same April day as his son, killed himself upon hearing the news.

Father and son had been elevated by the Senate as part of a revolt against Maximinus, who had been Ceasar for a solid three years after the previous ruler was murdered. Maximinus, who had been wintering with his army in Germany after battling tribes along the frontiers, was unamused by the Senate’s antics and began marching his army south toward the Rubicon and Rome in order to teach those politicians a lesson in steel and blood.

The Senate responded in May by elevating two more Ceasars: Marcus Clodius Pupienus Maximus, and Decimus Caelius Calvinus Balbinus. Maximinus and his army reached Rome and settled in for a siege, but soon ran out of food. In June Maximinus’ starving soldiers murdered the Ceasar and his senior staff.

With Maximinus out of the way, the rule of the two new Ceasars lasted all the way until…August, when the Praetorian Guard – Ancient Rome’s Secret Service – tortured and killed both of them.

So for those of you keeping score at home, that’s one Ceaser killed in battle, one suicide, one murdered, and two tortured and killed between April and August of one year.

So that must have been the end of the Roman Empire, right?

Nope. The Empire would continue in the West for another two and a half centuries – about as long as the entire history of the United States. Meanwhile, the real power was migrating east to Constantinople, where the Roman Empire would continue for more than 1,000 years after The Year of Six Emperors. (They anointed a sixth guy in August; he lasted 6 years before being murdered.)  

Sometimes the tides of history are too strong to be influenced by any leader.

The 2024 election is irrelevant because this is one of those times. Consider the events of just the past week.

On Tuesday, 9 Hezbollah members were killed and 2,700 were injured when their pagers started exploding all across Lebanon and Syria. Hezbollah blamed Israel, which declined to comment.

On Wednesday an additional 14 Hezbollah members were killed and 450 injured when their walkie-talkies exploded, including some attending funerals of those killed the previous day. Hezbollah blamed Israel, which declined to comment.

Hezbollah had switched to pagers and walkie-talkies to thwart the Israeli hackers who had been penetrating their computer and smartphone networks. After Tuesday and Wednesday’s attacks they apparently gave up on electronics altogether and decided to have their leadership meet in person on Friday.

Israel promptly blew up that meeting, killing Hezbollah's head of military operations Ibrahim Aqil wiping out his staff. The attack left between an additional 12 to 20 dead, depending on who is counting, plus another dozen wounded.

Meanwhile, Beirut was terrorized by reports of exploding batteries in pretty much every device that uses from motorcycles to scooters to solar panels on roofs.

How many things with batteries are in the room with you?

Meanwhile, a half a world away, the United States announced that during Operation Pacific Dragon it had successfully launched cutting-edge missiles out of a shipping container.

A US Navy Ticonderoga class missile cruiser is 567 feet long and weighs just under 10,000 long tons fully loaded. So they are not hard to spot.

Shipping containers, on the other hand, can be on ships or trains or trucks or piled up in depots. They are so generic that the estimates of how many there are worldwide range from 5 million to 170 million. Which is quite a range! And now any one of them could be used to launch the most advanced missiles.

From the Pacific the news takes us to Russia, which saw an explosion so huge it was seen from space and registered as seismic activity measuring 2.8 points on the Richter scale.

But this was no temblor. A Ukrainian drone swarm had penetrated 300 miles into Russia and destroyed a large ammunition storage facility near the city of Toropets in an explosion that left a mushroom cloud rising over the instruction from a blast estimated at 1.8 kilotons.

But isn’t this all indicative that the old order holds? Israel and the United States are powerful countries with cutting-edge technology. And the Ukraine is a nation that has been receiving vast influxes of military technology from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

It’s not like collections of random fighters have a chance, is it? If you don’t have F-16s you are Straight Out of Luck – SOL, as soldiers say. You cannot compete with some AR-15s and cardboard drones!

Can you?

Let’s ask the crews of the MT Sounion and the Galaxy Leader.

The MT Sounion has been burning in the Red Sea since August 21 when it was attacked by the Houthis. The group has attacked more than 80 commercial ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden since November, leaving two ships sunk, four crew dead and the car carrier Galaxy Leader and its crew of 25 held captive.

Well it’s been almost a year, but this has to come to a screeching halt as soon as the US Navy shows up, right?

Right?

Actually, the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier group is in the Gulf of Oman. The USS Wasp, carrying F-35 fighter jets, is in the Mediterranean Sea. And the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group is en route to the Red Sea.

It’s an impressive display. Just as impressive as the German battleship Bismark sailing out to confront the British Royal Navy in World War II.

And just as futile.

And just as the outmoded Bismark was hounded to death by swarms of new, cheap airplanes, today’s mighty naval ships and planes are eclipsed by swarms of cheap drones.

And the same thing is happening on land, where tanks are now about as effective as horse cavalry.

Let’s look at the Ukraine. After years of warfare and Russian missile attacks have ground down an infrastructure that wasn’t exactly cutting edge to start with, how is Ukrainian drone production?

They are on pace to produce 1 million drones in 2024.

But surely we have lots and lots of tanks, right?

Well…

The US currently produces about 140 M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks a year. The M1’s production peak was 1986-1992, when 5,000 were built. That’s about 700 a year.

So even the M1 was at peak production, that’s 1,429 drones per tank.  That’s pretty much the definition of overwhelming odds. Which is why the few tanks remaining in the Russian-Ukrainian war pretty much spend all their time hiding.

But the Russian and Ukrainian militaries are far from cutting edge. What about the leaders such as the Israeli Defense Force with its vaunted Iron Dome anti-missile system. Didn’t Hezbollah fire 150 missiles into northern Israel this week with no reported casualties?

IRON DOME, the most deployed air defense system, has intercepted 5000+ rockets with an over 90% success rate – saving lives since 2011, says system maker Rafael.

It’s a fine record. That means that on average Iron Dome faced 450 plus missiles a year and knocked down more than 400 of them.

Ukraine is building 1,000,000 drones this year. That means it could burn through 2,740 drones a day without falling behind. They could send 2,700 drones to attack, lose 90 percent to Iron Dome – 2,430 – leaving 270 to hit the target, and start the next day with 2,780 drones.

Even worse for those wielding Iron Dome, it’s interceptor missiles cost way more than the drones they are intercepting and take longer to build. So even if Iron Dome was 100 percent effective, each day of operation against thousands of drones would drain ammo supplies faster than they can be replaced and be ruinously expensive.

Does a 2,700 drone attack swarm sound impossible? Does it sound like science fiction?

It’s already happened, and more. On Sept. 12 a new record was set in Shenzhen, China, when a swarm of 8,100 drones performed a synchronized light show in the night sky.

Now imagine 8,100 synchronized drones loaded with improvised explosives instead of lights swarming an aircraft carrier.

That’s the problem facing the US Navy and NATO in the Red Sea. How many multimillion-dollar missiles can you spend taking out little sheds where a couple of guys are building drones out of cardboard and parts from Ali Express?

The Iron Law of Cheap Tech has come to 21^st-Century warfare.

When I say the 2024 election is irrelevant, am I trolling? A bit. But not much. Regardless of who is elected, the world is undergoing the same sort of convulsion that it did a century ago. As the summer of 1914 waned 110 years ago, the Royal Navy and its battleships ruled the seven seas and the sun never set on the British Empire. 25 years later battleships were anachronisms useful only as ocean-going artillery for land forces, the Empire had shrunk to a few islands in the Atlantic, and air power was the military order of the say – long-range bombers, missiles, aircraft carriers and fighter planes.  

How will things change over the next four years? Where will we be in 25 years? Aircraft carriers will be museums. Warfare will be drones in the air and on the ground and under the sea, while electronic warfare rages, jamming and hacking and misdirecting those digital warriors while they battle.

Look around. How many battery-operated devices are currently in your room?

You may not be interested in Information Age warfare.

Pray Information Age warfare is not interested in you.