The Air Force, Drones, and Broken Institutions
Don’t worry: This is actually about politics. Trust me.
Today I’m going off-the-news. We’re going to talk about the drone revolution and the Air Force. But what we’re really talking about is how institutions function—and how they can ossify and fail.
Which is also about politics! Or at least, is about how some of America’s political institutions have failed in this particular moment. Which we will talk about at the end.
It’s kind of a journey. I hope you’ll come with me.
1. The Air Force
Institutions have histories, cultures, priorities, and plans. But before an institution has any of those things, it has a mission. The history, culture, priorities, and plans of the United States Air Force are currently in conflict with its mission and this is a problem for America.
The Air Force’s challenge is that the drone revolution has created an entirely new battlespace that ranges from just overhead to a few thousand feet in the air. This space is called the air littoral and it now belongs to drones. War on the Rocks has an absolute must read on it:
The U.S. military is woefully unprepared for warfare in this newly contested subdomain of the air littoral. . . . Technologies that protect against drones have failed to keep pace with the proliferation and rapidly evolving capabilities of offensive drones (reflecting a problem that we once called the U.S. military’s protection deficit disorder). As a result, U.S. ground forces have now essentially lost the protective top cover that the Air Force provided through air superiority for decades.
It’s useful to understand why the Air Force has missed this moment, because it’s a story that’s applicable to many institutions in many contexts.
The Air Force has always been the most platform-dependent of our services. New aircraft designs take decades to develop, test, procure, and deploy. We are still in the early phases of deployment for the most recent fighter platform, the F-35, which is a multi-role aircraft slated to be in use until 2070.
That’s not a typo. 2070.
The Air Force’s platform dependence was always going to make it the least nimble of the services and the slowest to adapt to technological change. So consider this: Today we are as far away from 2070 as we are from 1978.
I want you to think about the changes in warfighting from 1978 to today. And now try to project out to how useful an F-35 might be in 2070.
This isn’t the Air Force’s fault; it’s the nature of the beast. Platform dependence is a weakness that the service must always be managing and hedging against.
But institutions are hostage to the same logical fallacies as individuals and the Air Force has a massive sunk-cost problem.
The Air Force has been planning to spend $230 billion dollars on F-35s. (They’re currently on track to acquire 1,763 of the aircraft at $130 million apiece.) The chain of planning that began the development of the F-35 started in the 1990s, when the world was a half century into the jet-propulsion revolution. But right around the same time another revolution was starting with the arrival of the early unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as the Predator.
The revolution these drones ushered in was based not on capabilities, but economics. Here’s that War on the Rocks piece again:
In a set of comments posted on LinkedIn last month, defense analyst T.X. Hammes estimated the following. The delivered cost of a single F-35A is around $130 million, but buying and operating that plane throughout its lifecycle will cost at least $460 million. He estimated that a single Chinese Sunflower suicide drone costs about $30,000—so you could purchase 16,000 Sunflowers for the cost of one F-35A. And since the full mission capable rate of the F-35A has hovered around 50 percent in recent years, you need two to ensure that all missions can be completed—for an opportunity cost of 32,000 Sunflowers. As Hammes concluded, “Which do you think creates more problems for air defense?”
And the economic advantage of drones isn’t just cost—it’s the speed of their development cycle.
You know why it takes so long to design, build, and produce a plane like the F-35? Because if the F-35 crashes, it kills a valuable (and expensive-to-train) pilot.
If a drone crashes, you’ve got 30 more of them in the truck.
Drones increase the acceptable failure rate of a military aircraft by orders of magnitude, which in turn cuts the development cycle dramatically, which in turn makes it faster (and cheaper) to design and deploy new and more effective drones.1
With manned fighters, the state of the art changes by the decade. With drones, the state of the art can change by the month.
The drone revolution confronted the Air Force with a choice: Stick with the manned-fighter program it was midway through and had already sunk billions of dollars into? Or pivot into drones? Here’s War on the Rocks:
[T]he principal service responsible for the air domain, the Air Force is arguably doing the least to address this burgeoning threat. Why? Countering inexpensive drones that can pummel U.S. forces from the air at will simply does not fit into the service’s future vision. Moreover, defeating this new aerial threat would require the service to transform much of its doctrine and platforms. Yet the Air Force remains firmly wedded to exorbitantly expensive crewed platforms that reflect its 20th-century roots and legacy . . .
2. In the Army
You know who found it easier to pivot into drones? The Army. Again, War on the Rocks:
Ironically, the first service to respond decisively to the new contestation of the air littoral has been the U.S. Army. . . . [L]ast month the Army cancelled its future reconnaissance helicopter—which has already cost the service $2 billion—because fielding a costly manned reconnaissance aircraft no longer makes sense. Today, the same mission can be performed by far less expensive drones—without putting any pilots at risk. The Army also decided to retire its aging Shadow and Raven legacy drones, whose declining survivability and capabilities have rendered them obsolete, and announced a new rapid buy of 600 Coyote counter-drone drones in order to help protect its troops.
This isn’t an accident. The Army’s institutional commitment to air platforms is small; its primary mission is supporting ground forces. Which means that the Army was able to view the drone revolution not as usurper to its plans, but as a new way to serve the primary mission.2
For the Air Force, the platform was so closely tied to the mission that it became hard to disentangle the two.
Now comes the politics part:
Liberal society needs healthy institutions because they stand in the mediating space between the government and the individual. The stronger and healthier our institutions are, the freer we all are.
One of my mantras is: The plan is not the mission. The mission is the mission.3
Institutions falter for lots of reasons, but a common one is that they confuse their plans with their goals. And a lot of our institutions have fallen into that trap recently.
The Republican party came to believe that winning elections was more important than executing a governing vision. Which has led the party to be taken over—wholesale—by an authoritarian and his family.
The legacy media came to believe that “balance” and “objectivity”—which had been adopted as tools to further liberal democracy—were more important than liberal democracy, prioritizing the means over the end.
The conservative movement felt that it was unfairly disadvantaged in the cultural mainstream, so instead of working to integrate itself, it set up alternative institutions. But these institutions wound up spinning off into insanity and becoming even more distant from the mainstream.
The U.S. Supreme Court relies on popular legitimacy to provide heft for rulings that preserve liberal democracy and check the power of the other branches of government. But in the Colorado Fourteenth Amendment case, the Court chose to ignore the Constitution’s plain-text instructions in order to husband its popular legitimacy.4
As I said: I think about this a lot in the context of The Bulwark, and we’ve already confronted some changes. We founded this place to defend liberal democracy and we thought, at the start, that the best way to do this was to try to preserve a healthy version of the conservative movement.
We realized pretty quickly that this plan was a dead end: “conservatism” had already changed and whatever version of the word existed in our heads, it was no longer the ideology to which the vast majority of actual “conservatives” in the real world subscribed to. We concluded that a prolonged debate over who the Real Conservatives were wasn’t going to help the cause of liberal democracy.
Next, we thought that defending liberal democracy meant defeating Donald Trump. But by the fall of 2020 it was clear that even in defeat, Trump wasn’t going away. So beating him was a start, not the finish.
We have to beat him again, obviously. And if we’re lucky enough to get there—all of us, together—then we’ll have to see what that world looks like. Maybe the energy behind this authoritarian attempt will dissipate and America will enter a new period of rebuilding. Or maybe some portion of the country, having gotten a taste of authoritarianism, decides that it wants more.
Whatever the case, I’m determined that we won’t be the Air Force buying F-35s. We won’t ever lose sight of the fact that the plan isn’t the mission. The mission is the mission.
I hope you’ll stay on this mission—to defend liberal democracy—with us.
3. Load the Right Way
Yes, I *am* judging the way you load your dishwasher.
How you stack and load your dishwasher is extremely important. Journalists, YouTubers, and dishwasher experts have all written guides on how to do it properly. One PhD student even wrote a 300-page thesis on the science behind dishwasher loading. . . .
But for the past eight years, one corner of the internet has devoted every single day to determining the ideal method, debating the pros and cons of prerinsing, cutlery trays, dishwasher tablet brands, and whether hand washing is a crime.
Meet the Extreme Dishwasher Loading Facebook group, which currently boasts 29,000-plus members and has somewhat accidentally found itself at the center of the zeitgeist.
Unlike Fight Club, the Extreme Dishwasher Loading club doesn’t mind you talking about the Extreme Dishwasher Loading club, but it does have some very specific rules.
The first rule of the Extreme Dishwasher Loading club is “Think quality, not quantity” when inviting people to join the group. Rule two warns that any photos of objects like toilet seats, guns, cat litter trays, or sex toys in your dishwashing machine are strictly prohibited. Rule three is a mysterious “secret rule,” while rule six warns that talk of washing machines or any other white goods will be dealt with in the harshest possible terms. “Clothes folding discussion is verboten,” the rules point out. (Rules four and five are similar to other groups' prohibitions on bullying and hate speech.)
It has been a banner month for the group, which describes itself as a place to “discuss the finer points and details of efficient, correct, and ingenious dishwasher loading and stacking, interesting techniques and useful tips are encouraged.” Not only did British prime minister Rishi Sunak reveal that loading the dishwasher was his favorite household chore, the group also received a boost from a post by the popular Fesshole account on X.
“I make sure I am the only person in the house who loads the dishwasher,” the anonymous confessor wrote in a post that’s been viewed almost a million times. “No one else does it right. I treat it like a game of Tetris. I'm on a Facebook dishwasher group and post photos of my work for others to enjoy.”
Look: There is a right way and a wrong way to load a dishwasher and you should start by consulting the manual for your Bosch 800 Series, which I assume is the dishwasher you own because WE HAVE MODERN TECHNOLOGY AND WHY WOULDN’T YOU TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT?
The bottom rack has specific places for dinner plates, dessert plates, rim soup bowls, and normal bowls. Handles down in the cutlery basket. Only butter knives, no kitchen knives. No pots or pans.
And for the love of all that’s holy, keep your rinse-aid full.
Don’t @ me.
Also: Just by definition, any aircraft that doesn’t have to keep a bag of meat alive can be smaller and cheaper because life support is a bitch.
It is impossible to overstate the influence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the development of drone warfare. We’ve had several years of development and advancement packed into a couple dozen months.
A character in John Scalzi’s The Consuming Fire says a version of this. It’s easily the best of Scalzi’s books. Highly recommend.
Other non-organic institutions—the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College—have seen their animating logic turned against the original intent of their creators. The Senate was supposed to preserve the rights of the minority and the Electoral College was supposed to magnify majorities. But both have wound up enabling minority rule as a viable mode of governance.
On drones, the issue here has more to do with air defense, cost-to-target ratios, and sensor saturation than it does with platforms or platform acquisition cycles. Drones actually pose more of an *air defense* problem than a platform problem--although I have some things to say about the AF/Navy's platform acquisition/retention cycles, but I'll save that for another day. Dive deeper with me here for a second (deep deep dive, but I promise it's good):
Think of drones as simply being smaller, slower, and lower-flying versions of missiles rather than as platforms themselves--we're talking the kind of small DJI-style drones being used by Russia and Ukraine right now and ISIS before them (ISIS first invented the commercial drones dropping grenades tactic in fighting Iraqi PMF). What *really* makes a drone capable--as JVL/WotR points out--is their cost-to-target ratios. The platforms these drones target and destroy cost orders of magnitude more than the drones themselves, which presents an economy-of-warfare problem for platform defenders. The same kind of thing was happening with NLAWs and Javelins at the onset of the Russian invasion, with these handheld anti-tank weapons that cost a little over $100k taking out T-90/80/70 tanks that cost multiple millions of dollars. Ukraine has gotten so good at drone employment and production that now their <$5k drones are taking out multi-million dollar Russian tanks and other vehicles and they are less reliant on the NLAWs/Javelins that are more expensive and whose stockpiles are foreign donation dependent. The problems for countries with advanced militaries like the US and Russia and others with respect to these drones are that 1) the cost of their platforms and bases are very expensive, 2) they require air defense--"layered" air defense in the case of ships and bases--to protect against an assortment of threats (including drones), and 3) these air defense platforms are vulnerable to being overwhelmed by cheap drone swarms. That's why Russia is getting its ass handed to it in the Black Sea where their ships keep sinking and in the skies where their A-50s/IL-76s keep getting shot down. The drones Ukraine employs are neutralizing or bypassing altogether Russian air defense envelopes in the Crimean peninsula and taking out platforms that cost orders of magnitude more than even the most advanced western drones being employed by Ukrainian forces.
Example: Pretend you have an air defense system that is designed to protect a ground base like Tower 22 in Jordan from drones. This air defense system is only capable of opening and tracking about 12-16 "tracking windows" on incoming projectiles like drones or missiles. This air defense system is also entirely reliant on its attached radar system--it's "eyes" if you will--to effectively track incoming projectiles. So, all the enemy has to do to knock this system out is to fire more than 16 projectiles at it, which will allow enough missiles/drones to break through and take out the radar system--especially easy if the radar system is an active-emitter system that is always "on" and can be tracked by radar-seeking missiles used in Suppression of Enemy Air Defense ("SEAD") missions. Now any further secondary or tertiary volleys will be able to pass through the air defense system--even if the air defense missile batteries are not empty--because air defense radars have been taken offline. So an enemy could fire an initial volley of 16 drones to kill the multi-million dollar air defense system, then fire a second volley of harder-hitting and faster missiles to engage the undefended targets, and then fire a third volley to kill the first responders putting out the fires. This is exactly the kind of thing we'll be seeing a lot more of over time, and Russia already employs similar strategies when it is launching mixed volleys at Ukrainian cities via sending in Iranian Shahed drones first to deplete the munitions inside of known air defense batteries before sending in S-300/400 missiles that hit the now undefended structures way harder than the drones would have. Remember: drones are limited in payload ordnance by their flight/lift capabilities that have a loitering-on-station capability requirement, whereas missiles can pack a lot more ordnance because it's just a tube being propelled by solid/liquid rocket fuel and guided with fins as a fire-and-forget weapon.
All of this is to say that this is more about finding ways to *protect* a variety of platforms--tanks, personnel, bases, ships at sea, aircraft, etc.--from the cheap drone threat via capable air defense systems that can often have their sensors saturated by too many incoming projectiles because the projectiles are so cheap that you can send a zombie hoard of them at the air defense unit and they will get over-run as a result. This is before we talk about "layered" air defense systems and sending volleys of cheap projectiles at certain layers of the air defense profile to create openings at given altitudes (this applies more so to ships and bases than individual units or equipment pieces like tanks/planes). What will be required to solve this problem is spreading out the air defense batteries--"distributed area denial"--and doing the same with associated radar systems, making the drone hoards more difficult to overcome multiple air defense batteries and radar systems rather than just one. That means we have to make radars and air defense systems smaller, cheaper, and more spread out. "More eggs, fewer baskets" if you will. This is also particularly important offensively when we talk about a potential shooting war with China, because they have invested heavily in scattered coastal missile defense batteries that are mobile and whose missiles are very fast and evasive and are capable of sinking American ships (shit like the DF-21 missiles). That's the backbone of their "A2AD"--area defense, access denial--strategy: put enough mobile missile launchers on the Chinese coast such that they could overwhelm by volume-of-fire the SPY radar systems that are the backbone of any American naval ship's air defense envelope.
I'll end on a different note that's applicable to politics: think of repetition of message on social media in the same way we think about volume-of-fire with cheap drones. If MAGA--or the Russian IRA in their stead--flood enough of social media with disinformation, it overwhelms the truth economy via volume-of-posting, such that the truth gets stamped out by volume. That's the cost-to-target ratio of disinformation in politics, whereby the cost to present and defend the truth can easily be overwhelmed by volume-of-fire disinformation operations. That's why China's leverage over TikTok's algorithms is scary. The PRC has its hands on the algorithms that can scale up the volume-of-posting disinformation operation while scaling down the defense-of-truth posting counter-operation. That's how easy it is for disinformation to overcome the truth in the midst of the digital information age.
It seems very weird that JVL would write today's Triad specifically for me, but here we are. I appreciate it.
24 year Air Force veteran here, I served many roles, and I received a ton a professional development throughout. This is important, because I spent a lot of time researching concepts the Air Force cared a lot about.
The biggest piece of information related directly to this: thinker and writers understood the transformative nature of automous drone warfare in the mid-90, (Checks notes) nearly 30 years ago. Those thinkers envisioned motherships lauching thousand strong armada's of autonomous or semi-autonomous drones for various missions. The Air Force saw this coming. But.
A bit more context, and this is extra, but it is directly relevant. In the beginning the Air Force was run by the so-called Bomber Mafia, these generals came up during WWII, and had very specific beliefs about warfare the bombers. After Vietnam, they are replaced by the new Fighter Mafia. You can see the result in our history, the venerable B-52 still flying today, the exceptional F-16, F-15 and F-22 reflecting the philosophy, operational experience, and desires of the generals that ran the Air Force at that time. There has never been a drone mafia. Combat Air Support, the specific mission sets to support ground troops have always been red-headed stepchildren of the Air Force, something taking away from our belief in our primary mission of Air Supremacy.
Just so everyone is completely clear here, what JVL's Triad contains is the seeds of our future Pearl Harbor, and the analogy is almost too much on point. A massed, secret attack against our main fighter bases around the world that suddenly disables a large percentage of our fighter force. But unlike Pearl Harbor, you can't just replace these jets. Think about how easy it would be to move a large drone force close to our publically known fighter wings.
Having said all of this, I want to be clear, Air Superiority via large platforms like the F-35 and F-22 are not over just yet. Unfortunately, you have to have both normal combat aircraft, but also numerous, deployable drones, especially for Combat Air Support and counter drone warfare.