I live not far from the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Va. The Marines, on occasion, like to have fun and pop off their artillery. This is to the delight of the officer trainees there but much to the detriment of my neighbors, who do not appreciate the soothing melodies of freedom perhaps as much as they should.
Artillery is loud, and the sound carries quite a distance. Enough, as it is, to set off my smart doorbell, which is maddeningly sound-sensitive. On one such day, I was sitting behind the dais during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing only to have my phone start buzzing with doorbell noise alerts. The jarheads were busy pouring liberty out of their long 155mm tubes, and I had several smart devices intent on telling me about it.
I leaned over to a colleague and remarked, “I have no idea what this means for war, but it probably means something.”
There is a superb column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, The Future of Warfare is Electronic, that assigns precise meaning to my idle thoughts.
Connectivity has become as important to war as supply lines. Three decades of innovation have transformed cell phones from a luxury to some 15 billion internet-linked devices today. War zones are jam-packed with electronic brains. Unlike Cold War jets, tanks and ships, each system is primarily controlled by software and relies on the same connectivity found in doorbell security cameras, electric vehicles and consumer mobile apps. The value of a smartphone isn’t necessarily the aluminum rectangle in your hand, but the software it contains and the network to which it’s connected. This is also now true of military devices.
The battlefield is today saturated with all sorts of whiz-bang thingamajigs and whatchamacallits; the Ukrainians are demonstrating this in Russia. There, the authors note, the Ukrainians created a series of electronic force fields where signals and connectivity were denied. It meant Ivan couldn’t send his nosy drones near the force fields. With the enemy blinded, the Ukrainian army pushed a huge mechanized and armored force over the border and into the Kursk region of Russia. We are very dumb if we are not learning to do this ourselves. Most of our electronic warfare kit is exquisite — expensive jets shooting expensive missiles and the like. We are good at building big, complicated things. We are bad at building small things at scale. Except maybe munitions. But even there we have a lot of catching up to do.
Electronic warfare is now the base layer for all modern conflict. It is a very good column written by two very smart guys. Nathan Mintz started a couple of defense companies, and Porter Smith flew attack and special-operations helicopters. You should read the whole thing.