M.1: The Parable of Ed Gruberman
Post 2 of 10 in a series about how cheap drones changed warfare.
Click here to for the rest of the series.
Every fall, in living rooms and bars all across America, in-between quaffing pints of beer and mouthfuls of spicy chicken wings, thousands of fans rehash the eternal debate: Which wins more games, offense or defense? The answer is annoyingly — like with any data question — ‘Well, it depends’. Over time, as rules changed and strategies evolved, the balance between the value of offensive playmakers and dominant defensive walls has waffled back and forth.
It should come as little surprise that in real warfare, where gridiron borrows so much of its lexicon, there is a similar history. Walls were one of civilization’s first inventions, appearing roughly 4,000 years before we adopted wheels. Over the next 12,000 years, as warfare evolved and adapted, the relative strength of offense and defense has fluctuated.
Writing between 1816 and 1832, Marie and Carl Clausewitz argued ‘…that the defensive form of war is in itself stronger than the offensive.’ (6)1 In their moment in history, they were probably right. If they’d been writing four centuries earlier, they might not have been. Just a century later they’d be momentarily right again, but also on the cusp of being wrong.
This to-and-fro is due to a concept I first learned about while in grad school at the London School of Economics back in 2013.2 Since I learned it in school over a decade ago, I have wrongly assumed the “Red Queen Effect” was more commonly understood. But apparently it is not widely known, so we’re going to take a brief, but necessary, detour.
The ‘Red Queen Effect’
Also called The Red Queen’s ‘race’ or ‘problem’, the name comes from Lewis Carrol’s ‘Through the Looking-Glass’:
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
With applications to evolution and the physics of light, for our purposes The Red Queens is about technological innovation for war. While combat has driven the birth and development of some technologies, it has also taken advantage of almost every other thing humans can invent. While ‘War never changes’, it sure does like to try on new outfits all the time.
Whenever we figure out how to use a new tech to fight or defend better, it quickly gets adopted and then improved. As soon as that new tool gets entrenched and doctrine becomes restabilized, someone finds a new or better way to exploit some vulnerability and the race sprints off again.
Those walls around Jericho from 10,000 years ago were a technological invention. They were different from the walls Achilles and Agamemnon assaulted some 9,000 years later. These were in turn different than the walls around Rome when it was sacked in 387 BCE.3 These were different than the walls around Constantinople which failed to withstand Sultan Mehmed the Second’s cannon fire in 1453. And those walls were different than the angular walls of the bastion forts that followed in the century after that.
The tech behind these defensive walls changed because the tech of offense changed too. Battering rams, towers, mangonels, ballistae, catapults, trebuchets, mortars, cannons, howitzers, and even sappers; war is a relentless Red Queen’s race where both sides are forever running at full tilt just to keep the advantages they have.
In a particularly ironic twist, the more a strategy or tech becomes dominant, the greater the rewards are for finding some novel way around or under it. Military equipment and doctrine can take decades to change. Sadly, it’s usually faster to change equipment than mental paradigms.
‘The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind, is getting the old one out.’ - B H Liddell Hart
Now change in the military can actually be very fast and very easy. Tragically, it too often takes a couple thousand body bags to get started.
Combat’s Golden Ratio
4From a purely mathematical lens, offense is inferior to defense, since it takes more forces. The ratio of three attackers to every one defender, ‘3:1’, is taught to every US army officer in their basic course. ‘3:1’ has also long been taught in our allies' and our adversaries’ war colleges.(7) ‘3:1’ has been backed up by Lanchester’s Equations — more on these next week. (8)
The reason it takes more forces to fight offense than defense is because the defense gets to prepare the terrain. The art of defense is to compel your opponent to amass their forces in a time, space, and manner of your choosing, and then to slaughter them. Defense knows the ground, and can build defensive works like walls, obstacles, and traps for their advantage. While both are critical to attrition — the dominant way to win wars throughout history — defense tends to have advantage here.(9)
But it’s not just about headcount. Neither offense nor defense are inherently superior but are both tools necessary to achieve outcomes.(10) It is their ability to achieve these outcomes that gives one or the other advantage. In a simplistic sense, offense takes objectives and defense keeps them. Offense gives initiative but demands a higher cost of forces, that canonical ‘3:1’. Defense demands fewer forces but secures less ambitious objectives.
Why Do Cheap Drones Matter?
The two months of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War caught a lot of people's attention, with outside focus on how the Bayraktar TB2 had impacted the conflict. While the Bayraktar is not markedly cheaper than a MQ-1 Predator, it is a lot cheaper than most jet fighters, which both sides didn’t have a lot of. Footage of tanks, artillery, and even troops in trenches being wiped out by Bayraktars spread quickly on the internet, highlighting the challenge of hiding on today’s battlefield.
Debates quickly sparked over how impactful the ‘new’ technology was, which is how I stumbled onto Jack Watling’s prescient quote I cited last week. He certainly wasn’t the first researcher to write about drones though.
Perhaps one of the most widely read anthologies is Paul Scharre’s Army of none: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, which I do recommend. There are plenty of scholarly articles on the US use of high-end drones, in particular those focused on the ethics of drones strikes. Less attention has been paid to the tactical and strategic impact of a proliferation of cheap drones. In fact, most of the attention paid to cheap drones has been their use by non-state actors, such as in Kerry Chávez and Ori Swed’s research or in the work done by Open Briefing in ‘Hostile Drones’. Bernatskyi, Lukashenko, Siora, and Sokolovsky cited the proliferation of cheap drones in their counter-drone technology study. But while their work looks at defending against the threat, it doesn’t expand much on how cheap drones have impacted the way armies fight. Jack Watling’s Arms of the Future talks extensively about how drones are changing tactics and strategy, but my best source for the impact of cheap drones has been War Quants.(11)
The Turkish-made Bayaktars had only a brief impact in the Ukraine conflict. In the end, the Red Queen outran them; as both sides adapted their EW and air defense capabilities, the Bayaktars turned out to be too expensive and ineffective to survive. But this was not just another turn of the wheel in the offense versus defense to-and-fro. Because the Bayaktars were just iPhone 1s. They were rapidly replaced by a lot more smaller, deadlier, and cheaper drones.
By framing the impact of drones as just another page in the annals of an old book, pundits have been able to downplay what has changed.(12) This has stymied much needed paradigm shifts in the way we think about combat.
The rapid spread of cheap precision strike and sensor tools on today’s battlefield has made mass both a critical strength and a vulnerability. This ‘mass effect’ double-edged sword cuts in both offense as well as defense. ‘Precision mass’ tools have changed war’s character.(13)
Over the last couple hundred years, technology like rifling and explosives gave combatants ever greater destructive power, allowing them to disperse and take or hold ever greater ground. I saw this firsthand during a staff ride to the Battle of Perryville, Kentucky. A couple hilltops that took an entire regiment to defend in 1860 can be held today by a light infantry company.
But the dispersion we’re seeing on today’s battlefield is less about offensive capability than it is a protective measure. The ‘mass effect’ means ‘An infantry company will be successful in the attack and then catastrophically unsuccessful as they are defeated in detail after.’(14) Nuclear weapons briefly led to a similar dispersion effect, but after it turned out nukes were hard to actually use, doctrine reversed.(15)
The Ukrainian forces fighting today to preserve their country are stuck in a dilemma:
‘Should the AFU hold and invest in static defensive positions to reduce attrition from FPVs and drone-enabled artillery, or retain mobility to avoid destruction from glide bomb strikes, which have the explosive yield to demolish or bury even well-prepared fortifications?’(15)
The trends toward more and cheaper mass aren’t showing any signs of going away. We’ll discuss these trends in greater detail soon; but first, we’re going to need a refresh on some underlying math.
Before the Clausewitz apologists come after me, the pair did also concede that offense has its role, and that defense cannot disarm your enemy. But the couple did say defense was stronger, right there in Book 6, Chapter 1, paragraph 5. On War contains multitudes.
Their Executive MSc International Strategy and Diplomacy is a truly exceptional program. Well worth a look if you’re in London for a year.
And 410, 455, 546, 1084, and 1527 (all CE).
Ed Gruberman and Mel are clearly on the same team.