Technology in the Strait of Hormuz Closure

  

As I write, Iran continues its effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter to a third of the world's petroleum traffic normally passes.  Though opposed by most other countries including the U. S., Iran has succeeded both in surprising the rest of the world with its blockade and in maintaining it in the face of fierce though intermittent opposition.  Modern technologies play a not insignificant role in this blockade, and examining that role can tell us something about how technological advances have affected modern warfare.

 

As an oil-industry newsletter pointed out, Iran has had the capability of blockading the Strait for decades.  Their navy includes numerous small attack boats and thousands of mines, both of which would probably be enough to shut off the Strait to commercial traffic.  In the early stages of the war, Iran announced the Strait's closure on Mar. 4, and proceeded to make good its decision with numerous attacks on tankers and other ships.  Wikipedia lists 40 ships that Iran has attacked, six of which were abandoned with some loss of life. 

 

No commercial insurer is going to let a ship go anywhere near a place where things like that happen.  So within a few days, traffic of ships that were not deemed by Iran "friendly" to the regime crashed to zero. 

 

In addition to the traditional means of attack boats and mines, Iran has also used shore-launched missiles, drones, and electronic warfare in the shape of jamming GPS and satellite signals in the Strait.  In a crowded sea lane, loss of electronic navigational ability can be just as dangerous as a minefield or a drone attack.  So even if GPS spoofing was the only thing Iran was doing, the blockade would be effective in terms of creating hazards that are unacceptable to insurers.

 

Iran has truck-mounted missiles that can be launched from virtually any location accessible by truck.  That makes it very easy for them to attack ships, and very hard for anyone trying to defend the ships.  The same goes for drones, which are turning out to be a true game-changer in recent conflicts.  As Ukraine has shown with its homegrown drone industry, inexpensive drones costing anywhere from a few thousand dollars up to $50,000 or so (the cost of Iran's most frequently used drones) can be effective countermeasures that work as well in some cases as U. S. stealth missiles costing millions of dollars. 

 

Mines are a particularly nasty thing to deploy in a commercial shipping lane.  As the oil-industry newsletter pointed out, after the Persian Gulf War it took the U. S. 51 days to find and disable 907 mines off the coast of Kuwait.  So even if Iran was neutralized somehow and agreed to cease hostile activity tomorrow, it would still take more than a month to clear the Strait of mines, assuming the U. S. has retained its former minesweeping ability, which is not clear.

 

In the long story of technology applied to warfare, progress is measured by victory.  And victory doesn't always go to the good guys, while "good" often depends on whose side you are on.  One of the unstated assumptions of engineering ethics is a background of peacetime.  When such a background is no longer the case, things can get murky quickly. 

 

Judging the ethics of war is way beyond the scope of a single article, and I'm not going to try to do that here.  One can question the justice of the way the current conflict started, with pre-emptive strikes by the U. S. and Israel.  From Iran's point of view, closing the Strait of Hormuz in response was probably one of the smartest and most effective things they could do.  In retaliation, the U. S. has announced a blockade of oil shipments from Iran, which depend largely on ports to the east of the Strait.  Whether this retaliatory blockade has the desired effect of making Iran back down from its own blockade is unclear at this point.

 

One problem to avoid with every advance in military technology is that a country finds itself preparing for the last war, not for the next one.  This problem has become obvious for the U. S., whose military procurement process has become hidebound and overly complex, with the result that it mainly served to enrich defense contractors rather than producing the kind of inexpensive but effective weaponry that Ukraine is currently making. 

 

Could the U. S. or allied countries come up with something clever and cheap to end the Strait blockade?  I'm sure people a lot smarter than I am are working on that right now.  But considering the mixture of traditional and novel technologies that Iran is bringing to bear on the blockade, it's hard to imagine how such technologies would work. 

 

If all restrictions on U. S. military actions were lifted and the President ordered his generals and admirals to open the Strait by any means, I'm sure it could happen.  But that would almost certainly involve a land invasion of the regions of Iran closest to the Strait.  And that would be opposed by a contingent of the 190,000 or so troops in Iran, leading straight to a bad old-fashioned land war with significant casualties on both sides. 

 

The last time a Middle Eastern country tried to take over an internationally important waterway, the U. S. took the side of the country against the then-global powers that wanted to oppose it.  The 1959 Suez crisis found President Eisenhower exerting financial pressure on England to let go of the Suez Canal, when Nasser of Egypt tried to take it over.  Eisenhower knew war inside and out, and while he employed lots of diplomacy and jawboning in foreign affairs, he managed to keep the U. S. out of actual fighting wars almost completely during his tenure from 1952 to 1960.

 

The world was a very different place then, and the current U. S. leader has no personal experience with war.  Perhaps the old-fashioned approach of blockading Iran's ports will have the desired effect without leading to further bloodshed.  If the U. S. had some undreamed-of technology that would end the crisis, I suspect we would have used it by now.  But I might be wrong.  It's happened before.

 

Sources:  I referred to the online newsletter https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-Military-Force-May-Not-Be-Enough-to-Reopen-the-Strait-of-Hormuz.html and the Wikipedia article "2026 Strait of Hormuz Crisis." 

Finding Drones in Peace and War

 

DJI, the world's largest drone maker, has announced that it is stopping all shipments of new products to both Ukraine and Russia.  The Verge reported this on Apr. 27 following earlier stories that Russian troops were using a drone-tracking technology called AeroScope to locate Ukrainian drone pilots flying commercial drones that had been converted to combat use.  And last week, the White House announced that it was asking Congress to pass laws making it easier for government agencies to detect and track drones.

 

Drones, more formally known as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), have changed from super-expensive military-only devices a couple of decades ago into popular consumer and professional products today.  Advances in software and hardware have led to over two million drone users in the U. S. alone, and the repurposing of consumer drones for military uses both by guerilla groups and defenders of the Ukraine. 

 

Most drones are not autonomous, but controlled from the ground by means of a radio link.  The radio link is the means by which both the controller and other parties can locate and track the drone.  In anticipation of the time when radio identification of drones would become a government requirement, in 2017 DJI began to include a signal broadcast from every drone they made which provides the drone's "position, altitude, speed, direction, serial number, and the location of the pilot."  This data is unencrypted, meaning that anyone with the proper receiver can pick it up. 

 

DJI also conveniently made available a system called AeroScope, which can receive this data and provide a readout of all drone locations within distances of a few kilometers, depending on the type of system.  Up to now, DJI has sold AeroScope only to law-enforcement agencies and other entities that it deems appropriate for the technology. 

 

Confirming DJI's intuition, in 2020 the U. S. FAA issued regulations that make it mandatory for any drone weighing more than 0.25 kilograms (about half a pound) to broadcast its location, the operator's location, and an identifying number by 2023.  So by next year, all drones big enough to do anything other than entertain the owner will have to have such radio identification means, whether they are new or old.

 

As an ethics issue, the question of drone identification and location technology has a number of ramifications.  From the Wild-West days when consumer drones were too rare for the FAA to have made detailed regulations, we have now reached the point that drones of any size must be trackable by authorities. 

 

If drone users aren't doing anything nefarious, it's hard to imagine why they would object to the requirement that drones must broadcast their identity and location.  A useful comparison might be made to automobile license plates.  The first state to issue state-made automotive license plates was Massachusetts, back in 1910.  Most automobile owners back then were glad that the states began to register and license their vehicles, because it freed them from having to follow a hodge-podge of local regulations that often put them at a disadvantage with respect to horse-drawn vehicles legally.  Massachusetts started their early license-plate numbers with 1 and went up from there.  I don't know if this is still the case today, but up to 1999 (the last year I lived in the state), it was possible to will one's legacy two-to-four-digit license plate to one's heirs, so that your low license-plate number let everybody know that your ancestors were among the first thousand or so people to own a car in Massachusetts. 

 

I doubt that any drone owners are going to get so attached to their drone ID numbers.  But there are real privacy and security issues in the question of who can access the drone ID signals.  Because DJI has not encrypted the data up to now, the company's AeroScope is simply a convenient way for a law-enforcement agency to get into the business.  I suspect that any well-informed engineer could come up with a similar system by combining the suitable microwave receivers with decoding equipment that would not have to be fancy at all. 

 

The White House's initiative seems aimed at giving more government entities permission to do this kind of snooping, and providing them with a list of approved equipment that does so.  There is an opportunity here for entrepreneurs to get in on the ground floor of drone-detection equipment, assuming that Congress responds, but that is an open question.

 

What is not in question anymore is whether a drone operator can fly with the assurance that nobody can find out whose drone it is or where he is.  That assurance, if it was ever present, is now gone.  And in the vast majority of legitimate-use cases, this can only be an asset to the situation.

 

As for Ukrainian drones, one must applaud the ingenuity of those who repurposed commercial and amateur drones for military purposes, either for surveillance or actual delivery of weapons.  At the same time, it's not at all surprising that the Russians would use AeroScope or something similar to track down the drone operators and attack them, although at this writing it is not clear whether this has actually happened.  One does not see license plates on tanks, and so the requirements of wartime use for drones are very different. 

 

Drones originated to meet wartime needs, and it's likely that the U. S. or other allied countries can supply Ukraine with military-type drones that will be far more effective than repurposed hobby-type units. 

 

Whenever I bring up the subject of engineering ethics in a discussion, if it goes on long enough sooner or later someone will come up with the bromide, "Technology is neutral—it's only how it's used that's good or bad." 

 

Like many sayings, this one has an element of truth in it.  But anonymized drones are obviously more suited to warlike uses than ones that constantly announce both their position and the position of the operator.  So the cases of drone identification in peace and war shows that this saying is limited in its applicability, to say the least. 

 

Sources:  The Verge carried articles I referred to on various aspects of drones and AeroScope at https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23041869/white-house-biden-admin-counter-drone-legislation-plan-tracking and https://www.theverge.com/22985101/dji-aeroscope-ukraine-russia-drone-tracking.   A summary of the White House initiative is at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/04/25/fact-sheet-the-domestic-counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems-national-action-plan/.  The FAA's new drone ID requirements are found at https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/28/22203398/faa-remote-id-rules-location-night-over-people.  And the story about the first automotive license plates in the U. S. is from https://time.com/4301055/license-plate-history/.