Visions of the Future
PSA 015.5
Had a brief DM conversation recently about PSA 015 that I want to document a bit, as I found myself describing a bit about things I see happening in the near future (arguably now).
I’m pressed for time so I’m just going to bang these out BULLET STYLE. Excuse the slopiness please, will get back to more beautiful posts in my next one.
First, commerce surveillance will make it almost impossible to disguise power projection. opening theater will be easily spotted, and for the US, vulnerable to disruption.
Second, large scale force on force maneuver operations will become impossible for the reasons you talk about in your concept of precision mass. We see this playing out in Ukraine, human bodies (particularly on the Ukrainian side) are withdrawing from the battlefield because they are just too vulnerable
Last, I think drones will shortly be autonomous. I bring this up in several of my pieces, VBATs already can operate autonomously. I see this is an inevitability to operate in increasingly denied environments. I think the EW jam/counter the EW is a cat and mouse game that will continue to be a cat and mouse game (similar to IEDs/counter IED ops in Iraq). AI is just making so many advances, I can't how this doesn't end up in all of the drones to some extent. I believe we could very likely do it with the tech we have right now, and much like the drone tech we've had for decades, it just hasn't happened yet.
I’m not talking about super intelligent terminator T-800s here, I’m talking about drones that have the ability to fly without a base station sending it commands for a limited amount of time.
DPRK had something like this back in 2014
When that last part happens, and drones capable of acting autonomously proliferate the battlefield, the code itself that governs what they do will, along with their numbers (your precision mass again), will make a large scale conflict quantifiably determined. So long as you had knowledge of what the adversary has and the code it is working with. I also think an AI could predict elements of what I just described to a tolerance that would make victory a determined prospect even if you didn't have perfect knowledge of the adversary.
Working backwards from that, the "conflict" itself actually starts well prior to what the current competition continuum spectrum would tell me. Whatever choices or decisions that can be made to feasibly impact the battle would be somewhere in the competition-crisis phase, which is happening in plain sight, undetected because very little is happening.
I see initial, smaller scale activities and decisions becoming of greater impact to the conflict phase than any decision made during the conflict phase.
This could look like street fights, assasinations, small militia activities… maybe even ambulances flooding in carrying troops who may or may not look like troops.
This is another reason I think contractors will continue to play greater and greater roles. You would need forces that can act on what basically amounts to gig jobs, free from the constraints of policy makers for something like this.
We already saw this in Ukraine with the Ukranian volunteer forces (eventually on both sides).
If I could monitor where all the drone parts are being shipped to in the world, and I see a spike in commerce, I can conceivably anticipate a conflict and prepare for it. Ukranians are naturally acting in this manner with their movement of drone construction "factories" as close to the battlezone as possible. quicker turn on resupply, but also invisible international commerce (sorta).
Anyway, that's my schizophrenic ramble. I'm not sure we're quite there yet, but I do believe we could be with how things are now, and will inevitably gravitate towards as drones and AI proliferate the field of battle.
Yo joe!
