The Dogs of War
An eerie battle of satellites, drones and missile launchers is unfolding in Iran
It is a cliché of more that 100 years’ vintage to say that modern warfare is disturbingly impersonal, its actors far removed from the destruction they dole out. The details still matter though. The technologies of death continue their remarkable progress, and the political structures that restrain them are falling apart. How can we be confident that we will not, one day, find ourselves in the crosshairs?
I have been reading with horrible fascination about the high-tech war that the Americans and Israelis are waging in Iran. At its heart is the practice of targeting: using streams of data, from satellites and drones in particular, to identify and strike targets deep in enemy territory. Iran has, in essence, become a giant panopticon, the object of an intense, highly automated surveillance apparatus. A report in the Financial Times this week described a game of cat and mouse that is unfolding between these deadly observers and their key targets, Iranian ballistic missile launchers. These are the vehicles that position and fire the missiles with which Iran has been sowing havoc across the region.
There is a science-fiction quality to the life of the Iranian missile crews. According to a researcher quoted in the FT, there are “long stretches of profound boredom where you are sitting in a cave… then you have moments of profound stress where you [are] asked to leave the cave and set up your missile.” When the orders come through, a crew of five to ten people first “loads a missile weighing hundreds of kilos on to the rails,” then “inputs encyclopaedic amounts of data to ensure the projectile can accurately reach its target.” The crew must then make a dash for their missile firing site, trying to evade the watching eyes of the Americans and Israelis. At this point, their “tiny cabin suddenly becomes one of the world’s most perilous places. If its crews do not give the drones and satellites above them the slip, within minutes the launcher… will be hit by a missile from above, becoming a smouldering wreck.”
And if they do manage to fire their missile, the heat signatures will be picked up by a satellite instantly. To save the launcher, and their lives, they must frantically dash back to cover.
After the Second World War, the German jurist Carl Schmitt characterised America’s dawning empire as one of air power. Control of the skies marked a new kind of dominion over the ancient political elements of land and sea. Yet even Schmitt could not have foreseen how technologically sophisticated this air power would become. As the Economist reports, American strikes on Iran are coordinated from Central Command in Tampa, Florida, using a system called Maven. Designed by Palantir, this “decision-support” software weaves together data from numerous sources to prepare strikes:
If an Iranian mentions on Telegram… that they saw a missile-launcher driven past their house, Maven can correlate that snippet with data from radio-frequency satellites that detect the electronic emissions from Iranian military radios. Maven can then generate targets, work out which weapon is best placed to strike each one and assess the damage done afterwards.
In this way, warfare becomes workflow; software can find and destroy targets at a faster and faster rate. According to one general, “what would previously have taken dozens of people tens of hours… ‘That could be boiled down to two minutes.’” Another says, “We are moving from ten targets a day to 300… The aspiration is 3,000 a day.”
One of the problems of relying so heavily on technology, in war as in other domains, is the tendency to forget that it is always imperfect and prone to error. The dogs of war will not be tamed by algorithms. A preliminary enquiry by the US military has suggested that the disastrous strike on a girls’ school in Southern Iran on February 28th, which killed over 150 children, was a targeting mistake; the school had formerly been part of a naval base that came under attack from American cruise missiles. In theory, every strike is assessed and confirmed by a human being; but as the Economist article notes: “some insiders acknowledge that the increasing scale and tempo of strikes has created incentives to give computers greater latitude in actually firing on the targets that they have generated.”
Still, this remote and mediated warfare is only part of the picture, albeit an ever-increasing one. In Ukraine, drones share the battlefield with hundreds of thousands of soldiers shivering in dugouts and treelines. When I wrote in January about the dire state of the British armed forces, I found many analysts warning against the fantasy of an automated battlefield. British planners try to justify their pitiful shortages of manpower, tanks and ships by conjuring images of all-powerful, AI-enhanced targeting systems. But competent enemies will obviously be prepared for this. The digital layer of operations will be hacked, jammed, stalemated and disrupted. At that point, supposedly obsolete skills and capabilities may be decisive again. And so we read that, when Iran’s harassed missile crews cannot reach their designated launch sites, they have to improvise, “falling back on analogue methods of calculating their co-ordinates.” Since their GPS systems are often jammed, this can involve archaic methods such as maps, sextants, and observation of the stars.
It also remains the case that, however powerful long-range strikes become, their strategic usefulness is limited. Missiles and bombs can cause immense destruction, but by themselves they cannot install a new regime or – short of deploying nuclear weapons – force a people to surrender. That still requires soldiers on the ground. Therein lies the pitfall of the dazzling technology such as the US military has amassed: it is a constant source of temptation to those who wield it, promising painless victories but, just as often, delivering a big mess.
Nicely done. The seduction of technology is an old story, as you may recall from Social Thought From the Ruins. As a note: for Schmitt to focus on air power is significant, not simply because it's obviously tactically significant, but because he wrote an entire book/had a theory of history around the distinction between land and sea powers.