There will be no 2nd Civil War

Warfare has moved to the Information Age

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 3

High on a hillside, the trucks are loading
Everything's ready to roll
I sleep in the daytime, I work in the nighttime
I might not ever get home
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
This ain't no fooling around
This ain't no Mudd Club, or CBGB
I ain't got time for that now
Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?
You oughta know not to stand by the window
Somebody see you up there

The Sunday Reader April 21, 2024

Consider the Bismark.

She set sail May 19, 1941, with 2,221 sailors aboard, her four turrets of gleaming 15-inch guns ready to win World War I.

Unfortunately, she was sailing into World War II.

The Bismark and her sister ship, the Tripitz, were designed to win the great naval battles of World War I. The German Navy’s U-Boats had revolutionized naval warfare with their introduction of submarine warfare, sinking more than 5,000 Allied ships and 15 million tons of shipping.

But the British Royal Navy’s surface fleet blockaded the Axis powers, leading to shortages that contributed to their defeat.

Germany was determined to prevent a repeat, and designed the Bismark and Tripitz to go toe-to-toe with any ship in the Royal Navy, which at that point had dominated the seas for centuries.

That plan didn’t last a week.

The Bismark sailed accompanied by a cruiser, three destroyers and a flotilla of minesweepers. The squadron left port and made it to the Denmark Strait before running into a Royal Navy squadron. The Bismark fought well. The HMS Hood was sunk, and the HMS Prince of Wales was badly damaged and forced to retreat. The Bismark continued on; damage had reduced its top speed to 28 knots, but that was still faster than most warships.

Then the planes came.

The battleships that ruled the oceans in World War I were reduced in World War II to aquatic artillery for amphibious assaults. The squadrons of airplanes spawning from aircraft carriers made short work of capital ships, and attacked from over the horizon. The aircraft carriers could send their planes to attack without getting within 100 miles of the battleship’s guns.

British Swordfish torpedo planes caught the Bismark and wounded her, leaving the battleship sailing in circles, unable to steer, leaking oil. The British navy caught up and finished her off. She sank on May 27.

The ship built to win World War II at sea had lasted 8 days. Which was actually better than her sister, the Tripitz, which pretty much spent the entire was hiding in port from the Royal Navy until British bombers found her and left her capsized and sinking.

The Japanese made the same mistake on an even larger scale, building the most powerful battleships ever constructed. The Yamamoto and the Musashi were each armed with nine 18-inch guns, the largest ever mounted on a warship. Neither ever really participated in a naval battle. American bombers sunk the Yamamoto off Okinawa; the Musashi was heading into the Battle of Lyte Gulf when she was spotted by American aircraft; the USS Enterprise, Essex, Lexington and the rest of the fleet sent swarms of aircraft. The Musashi was hit by 19 torpedos and 17 bombs, and sank on 24 October 1944.

It has become conventional wisdom that the United States of America is irreparably split, more divided than any time in history.

Except the Civil War.

So it’s become fashionable to talk about a second Civil War. The number one movie in America is about such a war.

There will be no such war. The American Civil War was the first great war of the Industrial Age. The industrialized Union ground down the agrarian Confederacy. Indeed, that was General Ulysses S. Grant’s winning strategy. He realized that if he lost 1,000 men and 100 cannon, and the Confederates he was fighting lost 1,000 men and 100 cannon, the battle would be a draw. But he would get replacements.

The Confederates would not.

By the time the Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at Antietam, his army was a rag-tag rabble lacking even the most basic equipment.

Such as shoes.

Another day's march brought us to Hagerstown where the cornfields and orchards furnished our meals. The situation, in a sanitary point, was deplorable. Hardly a soldier had a whole pair of shoes. Many were absolutely bare-footed, and refused to go to the rear. The ambulances were filled with the foot-sore and sick: Pvt. Alexander Hunter, Company A, 17th Virginia Infantry

The conventional wisdom is that any rebellion is doomed to the same fate. You know, I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is — you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16. You need something else than just an AR-15, President Joe Biden said at a fundraiser last year.

The thinking is that the deadly fruits of the military-industrial complex – the F-16, the F-35, the M-1 Abrams Main Battle tank – are unchallengeable.

And they are. Unless you have some spare orange PVC pipe. Or a pallet of cardboard.

It turns out those multimillion and billion-dollar weapon systems are not only not unchallengeable, they are the Bismarks and Yamamotos of the Information Age.

Analysts were puzzled for a while trying to figure out why the Ukrainian attack drones were orange. Why orange?

For the very important military reason that orange is the standard color across Europe for easily available PVC pipe used for electric cable conduits. That’s a boring story, so the Ukrainian weapons were instead dubbed drainpipe drones.

Besides the pipes, the drones are constructed out of readily available parts; for example the flight controller is often the Pixhawk PX4, which can be ordered online from AliExpress for under $100. Which means not only are such key parts easily available, they are available from China and other sources not subject to the control of the US and its allies.

Drainpipe drones can carry roughly 7 pounds of explosives, but they may also operate as giant flying Molotov cocktails. The drones carry four five-liter water bottles filled with fuel; unused fuel combined with the explosive would devastate prime targets such as Russian gas and oil storage and refineries.

Analysts estimate drainpipe drones can be built by a two-man crew out of roughly $5,000 of off-the-shelf parts.

The result is a modular weapon with similar accuracy and range to the million-dollar ATACMS missile, albeit with a smaller payload that can be built anywhere in the world by anyone.

The Russians have responded in kind with the long-range Iranian Shahed drone, dubbed the “AK-47” of Tehran because it is cheap, mass-produced and ready to be exported worldwide.

It turns out those $5,000 drones are cheap for long-range weapons, but expensive for DIY drones. There are even cardboard drones, so-called because they are mostly made of cardboard. And these cheap drones are not just a threat to infrastructure. Ukrainians are taking out $1 million Russian tanks with $400 drones.

And then there’s the war at sea. Ukraine said it sank the Russian coastal patrol ship Sergei Kotov with a swarm of high-speed marine drones.

But the real shocker has been in the Red Sea, where combined operations of the US, British, Danish, French and Italian navies have been unable to make the waterway safe for shipping from Houthi drone attacks.

The situation is so bad that American military leaders have been reduced to attributing a recent lull in attacks to the Houthis running low on drones.

Could be. Or could be the AliExpress deliveries are running late.

And it’s a mistake to think that Western tech will trump these cheap drones. Indeed, Silicon Valley sent hundreds of cutting-edge drones to Ukraine early in the war; they were glitchy and expensive. The DIY drones have replaced them.

It’s obvious why when you consider how an arms race works. One side makes a move; the other side counters. Then the first side counters that. And on and on and on.

The ability to counter depends on what tacticians call the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. The side that can run through the OODA Loop fastest generally wins; it’s called getting inside your opponents OODA Loop.

Traditional weapon development is simply too slow. Drainpipe drone development can be modified instantly. Has the enemy found a way to jam the Pixhawk PX4? Grab your smartphone and order something different from AliExpress. Choose overnight shipping, and have a surprise for the enemy in the morning.

No, there will be no 2nd Civil War, in the sense of large armies facing off at Gettysburg or Chancellorsville. There will be no desperate Picket’s Charge.

But that does not mean the United States of America will survive in its current state. That doesn’t mean there won’t be conflict. But it will be an Information Age conflict, fought with data and drones, cryptocurrencies and cyphers. If there’s a Third Battle of Bull Run, only electrons will see it.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Tuesday April 23rd - The PE Digest: The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup

Thursday April 25th - The PE Vlog: We’re continuing to build Virtual Grad Student, a Large Language Models — AI — running locally on our own curated data to form a virtual writer’s assistant. For example, to pull together a few paragraphs of background on Roman aqueduct architecture. This week we’re organizing data for our h2oGPT Large Language Model.

Friday April 26th - Foto.Feola.Friday

Sunday April 28th — Highly Granular, Loosely Coupled Entropy is the strongest force in the universe. Without the Industrial Age benefits of economies of scale, the vast edifices that powered manufacturing economies like the United States will simply break down. Without those benefits, the bonds will simply fade. States will act more and more independently, and the Federal Government will have less ability to respond.