Forged in the Heat of Battle: Drones in the Ukrainian War

 

Last December, near the Russia-Ukraine border, a group of about 100 Ukrainian soldiers from the drone-specialist Khartiia Brigade launched a massive all-drone attack on an entrenched Russian position.  No Ukrainians did anything except operate and monitor the drones and communications systems.  But ground-based drones, kamikaze drones, and even a drone with a rifle on it assaulted the Russians from multiple directions, causing chaos and leading the enemy fighters to abandon their position. 

 

The Ukrainians were expecting to lose as many as half of their drones before they reached their targets, but the operation proved to be successful beyond their hopes.  This is only one of a number of stories coming out of Ukraine that shows how drone technology is changing the face of warfare as I write.

 

The Russians have drones too, but they have relied primarily on their large advantage in the number of conventional forces and weapons they can bring to bear on Ukraine.  Both sides have advanced drone technology for military uses tremendously beyond what it was just a few years ago, but as reporter Tim Mak points out in a recent article in The Dispatch, Ukraine has three reasons why they are currently the world's leader in this field. 

 

First, desperation leads to innovation.  The Ukrainians are fighting for their own territory, towns, and loved ones.  Second, three years of war has provided them with a real-world testing ground that no amount of laboratory drills could give, and allowed them to respond to problems in real time and try new ideas to see which ones work in the battlefield.  And third, the decentralized nature of the Ukrainian military has kept bureaucratic delays and interference to a minimum, allowing different groups to try different approaches and share their successes.

 

The best drone in the world is not much good if you can't control it, and so many innovations have come in the field of communications technology and electronic warfare (EW).  EW is the suite of techniques that are used to disrupt an enemy's electronic communications and radar.  Mak turns up the surprising fact that the first country ever to use electronic warfare was Russia during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), when Russian ships attempted to interfere with Japanese radio messages to the Japanese Navy.  Russia developed "jamming" (the broadcast of interfering signals) to a fine art, and I recall as a short-wave listener in the 1960s hearing the buzz-saw sounds of USSR jamming stations scattered across the airwaves to prevent Voice of America and BBC broadcasts from reaching the USSR. 

 

But Ukrainian innovators such as "Mathematician" (a member of the Khartiia Brigade who goes by that pseudonym) have come up with clever and almost unbelievable ways of flouting Russian EW measures.  For example, one type of drone carries with it a 20-km-long reel of fiber-optic cable connected to its operator's control box.  As it flies, it simply unreels the cable over the landscape, and as long as the link remains unbroken, the operator has a completely secure and un-jammable way to communicate with the drone. 

 

Mak points out the ethical implications of a situation in which one operator might be in charge of several drones.  It is now entirely possible to program a drone to recognize the optical earmarks of, say, a Russian tank.  But Mak poses this question:  What if a Russian soldier in the tank decides to get out and surrender?  And what if the autonomous drone single-mindedly ignores him and blows up the tank anyway, killing the soldier?  Who is responsible for this incident, which could be considered as a war crime? 

 

Mak posed the question to a colleague of Mathematician, who said, "I think the end user will be to blame . . . . if you teach him badly, he will do badly."  Clearly, international agreements about what constitutes war crimes are lagging behind the technology currently in place, and such questions will arise more and more frequently in automated battlefields.

 

Reading Mak's report reminded me of how the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 provided a testing ground for many war techniques that later found application in World War II.  Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy provided air support for Franco's Nationalists, and when their bombers mounted an attack on the Spanish town of Guernica on Apr. 26, 1937, over 1,600 civilian casualties resulted.  This is considered by historians to be the first time that the Luftwaffe fielded its doctrine of "terror bombing" to demoralize civilian populations.

 

Of course, both sides in World War II adopted this doctrine, although its first use was shocking enough to inspire Picasso's famous painting Guernica, which is an attempt to portray the horrors of modern war as it was taking shape in the 1930s.  I am unaware of any great art out there which includes images of drones, but it might happen yet. 

 

More importantly, anyone preparing for a ground war now has to take into account the drone factor, and right now the world experts in that military technology are in the hundred or so companies that have sprung up in Ukraine to supply the much-needed hardware and software that is keeping the Russians at bay.  It is a sad but obvious fact that wars tend to advance technology, and not just military technology, at a greater speed than occurs in peacetime.  Mak hopes that once the Ukraine war winds down, these technological drone advances will be turned to peaceful purposes:  evacuation of wounded people from natural disasters, the shipment of essential supplies, and the demining of mine fields, for example. 

 

And some of that may happen.  But first, the Ukrainian war has to end, and while President Trump and others have been trying to broker a deal to bring peace, nothing substantive has resulted yet.  When the war is over, perhaps we can enjoy the fruits of Ukrainian drone innovations, and they can take the lead in a business that is currently dominated by China.  They certainly deserve to profit from their innovations, which have been made at a huge cost in lives as well as money.

 

Sources:  Tim Mak's article "War Machines or Instruments of Peace?" appeared on Mar. 27, 2025 at https://thedispatch.com/article/ukraine-drone-warfare-automation-lethality-ethics/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the Russo-Japanese War and the Spanish Civil War.

Aristotle Questions Innovation

 

Innovation—the introduction of new technologies, systems, and ways of doing things—is such a fundamental part of modern engineering, and life in general, that we rarely stop to question it.  One person who has, however, is Gladden Pappin, a professor of political science at the University of Dallas.  In the December issue of First Things, he describes how innovation has become an automatic part of modern Western civilization, and why this is not necessarily a good thing.

 

Pappin is no Luddite (the Luddites were allegedly followers of nineteenth-century Ned Ludd, a weaver who protested job losses to factory production).  Pappin recognizes the benefits of modern sanitation, medicine, electric power, and other technologies that were largely in place by the end of the 1900s.  But he sees our continual fascination with, and enslavement to, constantly new things as unthinking and possibly harmful. 

 

He uses Uber as an example of an apparently novel enterprise which is really just a variation on the well-known theme of taxi companies.  Uber managed to outgrow conventional taxi firms by cutting pay and benefits to drivers in order to beat the established firms' prices.  As a result, you have a lot of overstressed gig workers who try to hold down two or three jobs in order to survive, and a company that has never yet made a profit.  Pappin claims that this kind of "creative destruction" (in Joseph Schumpeter's phrase) is far more destructive than creative.

 

Although Pappin doesn't mention social media in detail, it is another example of an innovation that is essentially a repackaging of a prehistoric idea:  gossip.  But social media put gossip on steroids, enabled key gossipers to gain a worldwide audience, and profits mightily thereby, but at an unknown and probably negative net cost to the body politic.

 

Pappin looks to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle for guidance about how a regime should treat innovation with a mind toward self-preservation.  It turns out that Aristotle gave a lot of thought to political change, devoting an entire chapter of his book Politics to it. 

 

As you might expect, Aristotle starts out with some common-sense notions.  Before a regime permits a change, it should consider whether the change will truly improve things, or whether it's just a change for change's sake.  Admittedly, that is sometimes hard to tell in advance.  But keeping in mind the ultimate goal—the preservation of the regime—it only stands to reason that things that might tend to harm it should be restricted, or even not allowed in the first place.

 

One of the boldest recommendations Pappin draws from this general principle is that "[w]e should, for instance, consider state actions to limit the destructive 'innovations' of modern firms."  For example, brick-and-mortar stores have suffered or disappeared as a result of online retailing.  A suitably-scaled tax on online shopping could fix that.  Social media companies have thrived by staying several steps ahead of the sluggish democratic legislative process.  An energetic legislative and executive effort to get ahead of them could work wonders in alleviating the distortions, vindictiveness, and even deaths from bullying-inspired suicide that social media now is responsible for. 

 

Pappin is rather short on ideas about how we could get from here to there.  Part of the problem is that the very innovations we would try to regulate have crippled the democratic process by which we would regulate them.  Nevertheless, there is hope in discussions about how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act could be modified or even eliminated.  Currently, it protects social media companies from being sued because of what third parties put on their websites.  As the recent success of the Texas "fetal heartbeat" law shows, passing laws allowing private citizens to effectively enforce laws rather than making the government do it can, at the least, throw a monkey wrench into corporate and governmental attempts to counter them.  So that might be one of the best methods to approach the problem of social media outlets whose operations do more harm than good.

 

There is of course the danger of going overboard with such regulation.  My standard example of overweening government control of technology is Cuba.  When Castro took over in 1959, he installed a top-down micromanaged regime that essentially froze large sectors of the economy in place.  The fact that no imports of foreign automobiles were allowed eventually made Cuba one of the largest repositories of working vintage cars in the world.  But as the former owner of a 1955 Oldsmobile, I can say that this situation is probably not what the vast majority of Cubans prefer in the way of transportation. 

 

My point is that freezing all innovation can be just as harmful, if not more harmful, that allowing all innovation.  And Aristotle himself would probably agree that the optimum situation lies somewhere between the extreme poles of total government control of anything novel coming into the economy, and complete passivity in the face of unbridled competition manipulatted by an oligarchy of the wealthiest few, which is pretty much what we have now. 

 

As a Christian, Pappin ends his piece with a call for family-friendly innovations that would go so far as to pay cash to people who want to raise larger families.  But there's nothing exclusively Christian about this idea.  In another article in the same issue, an economist points out that the West in general is entering a period of demographic decline that could be extremely destabilizing.  Again, simple common sense says you can't have a nation of urban singles forever, even if you open the immigration floodgates and hope everyone will get along. 

 

Pappin's call to take a second look at our unthinking "innovation-is-good" attitude is something that goes counter to most corporate policy statements and the can-do engineering state of mind itself.  But just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.  Asking whether an innovation is really going to help society is a different question than asking whether it will help a given company's bottom line.  But the ethical engineer considers both.

 

Sources:  Gladden J. Pappin's "Advancing in Place" appeared in the December 2021 issue of First Things on pp. 25-30, and can be viewed online at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/12/advancing-in-place.

Those Disagreeable Inventors

Inventors don't play much of a role on the public stage these days compared to the glory days of Marconi and Edison.  But they are nonetheless vital to modern civilization, as technical progress is the main economic engine that drives advanced industrial societies.  Martin L. Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute think tank, says in a recent issue of National Review that we ought to be careful how we treat present and future inventors, even if they prove to be rather disagreeable.  And he makes a good case that many of the best ones are just that, and their disagreeability is intrinsic to what makes them good inventors.

Citing several books about psychology, innovation, and DNA, Tupy says successful inventors tend not to care what other people think, and may even take delight in discomfiting their more powerful peers.  It's ancient history now, but the legendary 1984 Apple commercial shown during the Superbowl portrayed a young—woman—wearing bright colors—running freely—as she charges through a gray crowd of drones hypnotized by Big Brother's face on a telescreen, throws a sledgehammer into the screen, and literally busts up everything.  It has Steve Jobs' fingerprints all over it.  Numerous sources show that Jobs, who is probably the leading candidate for the most famous inventor of the latter 20th century, was not an agreeable person.

So why can't inventors just get along with people like the rest of us do?  Tupy contends that those who successfully seek innovative technical solutions to problems also tend to be loners, somewhat socially awkward, and not terribly concerned about fitting in and getting other people to help them with problems.  Rather, they prefer to work with things and ideas on their own to solve problems.  The umbrella phrase for this type of personality is autism-spectrum disorder, which of course can be crippling in its severer forms, although inventors such as Temple Grandin prove that even clinical-grade autism can be overcome.

Over my career, I have met several, and gotten to know a few, inventors who actually profited from their patents, or at least saw the companies or organizations they were associated with profit from them.  Few of them meet the classic description of an autistic personality:  intense aversion to social interaction, preference for solitude, etc.  I would say that while the autism-spectrum observation is true as far as it goes, and it may be close to necessary to some degree, it is by no means sufficient.  And for this I will turn to some history I'm very familiar with:  my own.

 When I got to college, I was surprised to see that someone had made a poster that showed me as a classic nerd.  It wasn't really mea, but it might as well have been:  plastic-framed glasses, button-down sweater, shirt pocket bulging with pens, slide-rule case hung on belt, etc.  I had spent most of my spare time growing up playing with electronics rather than football or socializing.  I never dated in high school.  And I went to college at what was then probably the West Coast's capital of nerd-dom:  Caltech.  If being on the autism spectrum was all it took to be a successful inventor, I should have done fine.

But I think most successful inventors have a drive that I mostly lacked:  a desire to show up the established order and make it look foolish, not by words, but by actions, hardware, and (nowadays) software.  That part of the successful inventor's personality is missing from my makeup.  On the contrary, I tend to revere established institutions and procedures, not delight in their ruination, even if such ruination works to my benefit.  This attitude of reverence toward existing structues is exactly what you don't want if your job is to convince others that your idea is better than theirs.  It's that simple.

My name is on a couple of patents, one of which (obtained with my Ph. D. supervisor at U. T. Austin in the 1980s) could conceivably have become quite valuable, as it anticipated the future growth of what is known as RFID technology—the little tags that set off alarms if you try to shoplift a pair of sneakers from Walmart.  But as it happened, the university that paid for the patent didn't do anything with it, and neither my supervisor nor I had the time or inclination to do the hard work of convincing people that this was the coming thing.  It would have involved starting a company, and that was not on my scope screen at the time, nor has it ever been since.

The reason Tupy wrote what he did was to make the point that societies which discourage disagreeableness of the type in question may be shortchanging themselves when it comes to innovation.  Nobody knows how to create inventive people.  It's like farming:  the farmer doesn't really grow anything.  He or she just creates conditions under which growth of desirable plants can occur.

So cultures that allow people to do things differently, to play around with ideas without having to worry about getting in trouble with their peers or the government, tend to be cultures in which innovation and invention thrive.  A good contrast here is between the U. S. in the 1950s and the old USSR (Soviet Union), where everyone had to be constantly on guard lest they be heard to say something even slightly negative about the government, at which point their neighbors might rat on them and they'd end up in the Gulag for twenty years.  The USSR was not a hotbed of technical innovation then, although it supported scientists who aided its nuclear-weapons program.  But as far as economically profitable inventions go, it was no contest, as the U. S. was far and away the best place to be for that kind of thing, even in the allegedly conformist and repressive 1950s.

By all means, let's preserve what freedoms we have, to allow those cranky inventors among us to be by their lonely selves, cooking up ideas and gizmos that will make them and others millionaires and benefit the rest of us in the bargain.  But being a nerd isn't all it takes—you have to want to make fools of the complacent powers that be, and succeed at it, too.

Sources:  Martin L. Tupy's article "Disagreeability, Mother of Invention," appeared on pp. 18-20 of the Nov. 16, 2020 print edition of National Review.  The 1984 Apple commercial, which everyone ought to see at least once, can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I.