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.

The Mythological STEM Crisis

What I'm about to write is considered rank heresy in some circles.  But at least one prominent expert has taken a similar position, and he has backed it up with extensive research.  So here goes.

If you have spent any time in engineering education, either as a student or instructor, you have probably heard about the alleged "STEM crisis."  STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math, and is the umbrella acronym for a range of academic subjects that (a) are obviously essential to the continuation of modern life as we know it and (b) are not mastered by enough students each year to ensure such continuation, at least in the U. S.  That is the story, anyway:  that we are teetering on the edge of a disaster in which our economy will crash and our technology will stagnate for lack of enough young people able to do science, technology, engineering, and math.

In a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the world's largest professional organization for engineers, author Robert Charette took issue with this claim, which he calls a "myth."  Why a myth?

A myth isn't a lie, exactly.  It's a story that may have elements of truth in it, but isn't necessarily wholly and literally true.  Nevertheless, there is usually a group of people who have a strong reason to believe in the myth, and repeat it over and over until belief in the myth spreads among the general population.  

Charette finds that, depending on your definition of what a STEM education or a STEM job is exactly, that many people holding STEM jobs do not have a bachelor's degree in STEM, or necessarily a college degree at all.  On the other hand, if you look at the pool of all graduates of STEM programs, most of them are currently working in fields other than STEM ones.  So it doesn't look like you necessarily need a STEM degree to get a STEM job.  And if you do get a STEM degree, unless you're lucky you are liable to end up in a non-STEM job anyway.

Anecdotes aren't statistics, but they make situations seem more real.  A student of mine graduated from my university a few years ago with a bachelor's degree in manufacturing engineering.  After an unsuccessful spring and summer looking for a technical job, he returned to school, attended another couple of years or so, and obtained his second B. S. degree, this time in electrical engineering.  Even with two STEM B. S. degrees, it took him over a year of looking before he finally found an engineering job last summer. 

If the STEM crisis was as severe as some would have us believe, people like my student would be snapped up before they graduate.  And average starting salaries in engineering would show a steady increase above average wages for as long as the crisis endured.  Neither of these things is the case, however. 

While some engineering students get jobs before they graduate with B. S. degrees, others, like the student I mentioned, have a lot of trouble finding suitable work.  And Charette notes that while average wages of STEM employees have risen faster than those of non-STEM employees over the last 30 years, the increase is not evenly distributed across all fields.  Engineers, it turns out, saw their wages rise slower than those of non-STEM workers. 

Charette suspects, and I agree, that the real reason the myth of a STEM shortage won't go away, is that it is in the best interests of those who employ STEM workers to have an oversupply from which to select the top echelon of graduates, while being able to let them go when business slows without concern that there will be a problem in rehiring when things turn for the better again.  Because the long-term employment model is now long gone, engineers can look forward to a series of short-term jobs with multiple employers anyway, and often the only way to get a raise in such an environment is to quit and join a different firm.  But as an employee, you always take the risk that you'll quit at the wrong time and be out of work for an unknown length of time. 

If the STEM crisis isn't all it's cracked up to be, does this mean that it is perverse and wrong to encourage more students to study STEM subjects?  Not necessarily.  For a variety of cultural and political reasons, K-12 education in the U. S. has fallen on hard times, and one way to help fix it is to encourage a renewed focus on STEM subjects.  There is little actual harm in running pre-engineering programs in high schools, and maybe some good results, although the longitudinal studies to prove whether such programs are really effective are so expensive that they are almost never done.  And other things being equal, providing more resources for students to study STEM subjects in college is a good thing too.  But overall, we might be better off leaving the system to adjust itself, rather than expecting that such programs will permanently put the alleged STEM crisis to rest.

As Charette points out, there is now a sizable educational and governmental establishment that is heavily invested in the STEM myth, and whose existence would be threatened if we all woke up one morning and had a good laugh at their expense by realizing that the STEM crisis is at least partly advertising rather than reality.  And turning such bureaucracies around is a political problem, not just an engineering problem.  But the first step in dealing with such problems is to realize that things aren't necessarily the way they are presented to us.

Politicians and governments can do only so much.  Most of the people I know who are truly content with their role in the engineering profession were not waylaid into it by a government-sponsored program.  Someone close to them, a relative or friend, got them interested in engineering, or perhaps they just discovered on their own that it is fun and (usually) remunerative to make things.  As long as a society allows enough freedom for people to choose their direction in life, and provides enough resources to educate those who can succeed in mastering the technicalities of engineering, there will be enough engineers to go around.  Maybe not as many as companies always want, but enough.  And the next time you read something about the STEM crisis, take what you read with a grain of salt.

Sources:  The article "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth" by Robert N. Charette appeared on Aug. 30, 2013 on the IEEE Spectrum website at http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth. 

Technology and Democracy—Too Much Information?

 

Here in the U. S. we are in the last three days of the 2012 election season.  At stake is the Presidency, hundreds of seats in the U. S. Congress, and thousands of state and local races.  Our question for today is this:  have advances in technology made democracy as it is practiced in the U. S. better or worse?

That question immediately leads to another:  by what standard are we to judge improvements in democracy?  Unlike technical concepts such as ideal 100% efficiency, it’s hard to imagine what an ideal democracy would look like.  Just imagining ideal people running it doesn’t do any good.  It was James Madison who pointed out, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”  So to my mind, at least, an ideal democracy would allow real fallible people to govern themselves to the best of their abilities.

That being said, we must distinguish between direct democracy and representative democracy.  An old-fashioned New England town meeting where the citizens simply represent themselves is a direct democracy, but obviously such a method gets impractical as the size of the political entity becomes larger than a few thousand people.  So what we are discussing is an ideal representative democracy:  one in which people elect representatives periodically to embody their interests and judgments in the operation of government.

In such a situation, we can assess how accurately the elected representatives really mirror the inclinations of their constituents, and how effective this representation is in running the government.  By this standard, technological advances have helped matters in some ways, but have led to big distortions and injustices in other ways.

The good news is that, for example, ballot-counting is a lot faster, and probably more accurate overall, with electronic voting machines and computer networks to handle the math and presentation of election returns.  Electronic news media allows interested parties to learn a great deal of more diverse information than was provided in the old days when there were at most two or three TV networks, as many radio networks, and a couple of daily newspapers in most major media outlets, but no Internet or social media.

What about the negatives?  One serious problem I have seen is the way that computer-intensive calculations have been employed in demographic analyses to gerrymander U. S. House of Representatives districts.  “Gerrymandering” is a term that comes from an odd-shaped Massachusetts congressional district drawn by Governor Elbridge Gerry to benefit his political party in 1812.  The odd shape basically divided his opponents’ constituents and united his own, but one resulting district looked like a salamander and was satirized in a political cartoon that labeled it a “gerrymander.”  The term caught on as a way of criticizing the drawing of voting districts so as to favor one party or another.

Unfortunately, gerrymandering has become a way of life, and it is a routine thing for the party in power in a state to take advantage of every U. S. Census to push the gerrymandering art to new highs.  With computer-intensive analysis of election returns, this process has become one that often guarantees the outcome of an election in a given district.  One adverse consequence is a complete reversal of the original intent of the Founders as to the different purposes of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Senators, with their revolving six-year terms, were intended to be a steady, long-term, stabilizing influence on government, while representatives, all of whom are elected every two years, were meant to reflect rapidly changing constituent opinion.  The gerrymandering of House districts has turned this intention on its head.  With computer-aided gerrymandering, many representatives enjoy fifteen, twenty, and even thirty-year tenures in their House seats.  But because Senators by law are elected from an entire state (and so far, no one has seriously contemplated gerrymandering state borders yet), they are the ones who can be turned out after a single term, and often are.

I haven’t even mentioned such things as targeted campaign ads aimed at specific demographic groups, the overwhelming power of electronic media and its crippling expense that leads to the exclusion of all but the best-funded candidates (which means that no one without rich friends or wealthy corporations on their side can do much of anything nationally), and the handing over of Congressional authority to unelected bureaucrats, which while not directly aided by technological advances, seems to have become more popular as technology has advanced.  And there are now instant polls conducted daily if not more frequently, with dozens of places online to see the poll results almost minute by minute—or instantly in the case of those public-opinion meters displayed on some TV channels during the Presidential debates.  Just about the only thing that hasn’t changed is the formal mechanism of voting and what it means.

The optimist in me says not to worry too much—perhaps the modern voter really takes advantage of the superabundance of information and delivers a more informed decision than those in the past whose media sources were so much more limited.  But the pessimist in me thinks that technologized democracy tends to pander to the worst and the simplest arguments and procedures:  mass-media scare tactics, reducing voters to a single demographic characteristic (e. g. poor, black, Hispanic, working class, etc.) and manipulating voters based on that characteristic, and other techniques that tend to remove power as a practical matter from the average non-politician citizen, and concentrate it into the hands of the few elite who operate the handles of the analysis and publicity machines.

I recently read a book that pointed out many of these flaws and recommended some radical changes that might move the situation back closer to where it was a few decades ago.  Arnold Kling’s Unchecked and Unbalanced is primarily an analysis of the 2008 financial crisis, but along the way he shows how un-representative our U. S. government has become.  One main takeaway from the book is the fact that while the current system of constituting the House and Senate was set up back when the population was only a few million, it has not undergone any basic change since that time, and now our population is more than 300 million.  In order to get back to the point that a single congressperson represents about the same number of people that he or she did in 1800, say, we would have to have perhaps 5,350 of them rather than the 535 that we do now.  As things are, there is simply too much power and money concentrated in the hands of too few people, and the great mass of voters go largely unrepresented.

Largely, but not completely.  It still means something to vote, and I hope all of my U. S. readers with that privilege will go out and exercise it on Tuesday.  And we will all have to abide by the outcome, so you better vote wisely.

Sources:  Arnold Kling’s book Unchecked and unbalanced : how the discrepancy between knowledge and power caused the financial crisis and threatens democracy was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2010.  I found the James Madison quote from one of his Federalist Papers at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/70829-if-men-were-angels-no-government-would-be-necessary-if, and used the Wikipedia articles describing “U. S. population”, “democracy”, “gerrymander,” and “republic.”