Will drones change the balance of power?

If you’re trying to ship goods through the Suez Canal, they already have.  Houthi rebels using drones have effectively shut down 50 percent of commercial shipping through the Red Sea, which leads from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.  A whopping 15 percent of global maritime trade transits the Red Sea and Suez Canal each year, according to the International Monetary Fund.  As much as seven percent of all oil trade makes use of those important waters.  In short, if all trade between the Middle East, Asia and Europe were to be shut down, lights would go off in Europe and people would freeze in winter.

The Houthis have used drones to accomplish this monumental interruption of international trade.  Drones that can be used for military purposes are cheap and easily available.  The drone that killed three American service members and wounded 40 in northern Jordan recently was an Iranian Shahed that cost $20,000 and was manufactured by a company controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, according to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal authored by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis.  Stavridis is a retired Admiral and the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.  Ackerman is a Marine veteran and fellow at Yale’s School of Global Affairs.

Drones are being widely used by both sides in the war of aggression Russia launched against Ukraine two years ago.  They started out being deployed for intelligence gathering but have recently been used as attack weapons platforms against tanks and infantry.  Inexpensive commercial drones can be outfitted with mechanisms to drop small warheads on the tops of main battle tanks like the American Abrams and the British Challenger tanks.  When outfitted to carry warheads like those fired by the RPG-7 rocket launcher, which can be fitted with armor-piercing technology, the drone-dropped warheads can do so much damage to the turrets of tanks that the tanks are disabled and can be destroyed with infantry-fired anti-tank missiles.  What this amounts to is a hundred dollar warhead mounted on a $2,000 drone knocking out a $12 million tank.

The war in Ukraine has been fought with weapons systems that have been in use for decades – rifles, machine guns, mortars, large-bore artillery like the 155 mm howitzer, ground-to-ground rockets, mines, armored personnel carriers and tanks.  Drones have already changed the nature of this conventional war, especially for Ukraine, which does not have the economy, population, size and industrial base that Russia does.  Which taken along with the outsize power that drones have afforded the Houthi rebels, gives a fairly strong indication of where drones are taking us when it comes to warfare. 

Drones have already begun to give smaller countries with less well-equipped militaries a lot more power than they have had.  Houthi rebels are waging a war of terrorism against international shipping, which is to say, against the companies and countries that benefit from international trade.  This would have been largely impossible for a rebel group like the Houthis in the past.  They might have been able to disable an individual tanker or cargo ship or two by using small boats loaded with explosives on suicide missions.  But a terrorist group like the Houthis would never have been able to take out 50 percent of the commercial trade that passes through the Suez Canal without the use of drones as weapons. 

Drones give small terrorist movements a way of attacking countries, or in the case of the Houthis, freedom of international trade, that they would not have been able to do even a few years ago.  Terror has been a weapon of small rebel movements for decades.  In the Middle East, terrorist Palestinian groups launched attacks on Israel with suicide bombers, one after another, for years.  A terrorist wearing a vest fitted with grenades or other kinds of explosives would get on a bus or enter a movie theater in Israel and blow himself up, killing at most a dozen or so and wounding several dozen more.  One of the biggest problems faced by terrorist movements was recruiting young men willing to give up their lives as terrorist bombers, which at least in part accounts for the sporadic nature of terror attacks on countries like Israel, or in the case of al Qaeda, on the United States. 

But terrorists don’t need human volunteers to attack their perceived enemies using drones.  There is an increasing international arms market of weaponized drones. Countries like Iran and China have gone into the business of armed drone manufacturing and are selling them on the open market.  Russia is manufacturing weaponized drones and is using them in its war on Ukraine.  When that war is over, no matter how it comes out, you can count on Russia to go into the weaponized drone export business.

Admiral Stavridis and his co-author Ackerman wrote in the Wall Street Journal about a new form of drone warfare that they see on the immediate horizon:  drone swarms powered by AI technology.  Already, Russia has used some drone swarms to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses around Kyiv and other population centers.  The drones they are using are cheaper to manufacture than ground-to-ground ballistic missiles, and flown at a target like Kyiv in sufficient numbers, the drones can confuse defensive radars and make the anti-aircraft weapons they serve to less effective.

But what the Wall Street Journal article foresees is a future where swarms of inexpensive kamikaze-style armed helicopter drones are employed against enemies on the battlefield in sufficient numbers that they overwhelm defenses in the same way Russia is using drones to attack Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.  Stavridis, a retired admiral, uses an American aircraft carrier as an example of a target that could be attacked and sunk by a swarm of drones.  The most recent American aircraft carrier to enter the naval arsenal is the USS Gerald Ford.  It cost $13 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.  “For that same sum, a nation could purchase 650,000 Shahed drones. It would only take a few of those drones finding their target to cripple and perhaps sink the Ford,” according to the Stavridis scenario. 

Right now, U.S. warships have adequate anti-aircraft systems to knock out attacks by Shahed drones, even if several are launched at once.  But put a hundred of them in the air against a warship and the equation changes.  The advantage goes to the drones, not the defensive anti-aircraft systems.

The same would be true on a land battlefield.  A swarm of inexpensive drones could one day overwhelm the defensive capability of even a big-power army like that of the United States or NATO.  Advances in artificial intelligence might make it possible for radar systems to sort through drone swarms and target individual anti-aircraft guns or missiles on individual attacking drones.  But you can see where this is going:  an AI arms race between attackers and defenders.  The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter how good the AI gets, some drones will get through, and the terror of that happening will affect soldiers on the ground.

Armies and navies like those of the United States have for decades had a massive advantage against smaller militaries with fewer and less deadly weapons systems.  That advantage is going out the window with the advent of drone warfare.  The low cost of drones is where the advantage is, which is why Houthi rebels are using them in the Red Sea.  They don’t have aircraft carriers or jet aircraft or long-range bombers or a navy.  The Houthis don’t even have much money.  But with drones they have been able to force half the world’s commercial shipping that would ordinarily go through the Suez Canal to detour around the southern tip of Africa adding immense cost and delay to the trade in international goods.  

The advantage the Houthis have gained using drones in the Red Sea will soon change warfare in general.  Whether this will lead to more wars or fewer is a question that cannot be answered now, but the way artificial intelligence and drone design and manufacturing is going, we will probably get that answer in our lifetime.