M.9: Machine Guns and Beards

Final post in a series on the how cheap drones changed warfare.

U.S. Army 1911 maneuvers in Texas: Maxim machine gun & crew

I’m kind of astounded — sitting here in early 2025 — that I even have to argue that cheap drones are hugely impactful on the character of war. It seems painfully obvious. Unignorably so, and yet…

‘Flag officers aren't walking into those conversations blind, their opinions are informed by their experiences and their staff's prepared talking points… Every Army-wide transformation in our history met institutional resistance, and the Army has prevailed time and again in surpassing those obstacles.’

‘Be very interested to see how the US absolute combined arms dominance will go against the asymmetric drone swarms.’

That’s some of the feedback from this series. Couple that with the dismissive perspectives of senior US Army generals and our military is facing a dire outlook. We’re not talking about the drastic changes we need to make to our tactics, our equipment, or our acquisition process. Instead, we’re wasting our time talking about beards.

Beards matter more to our leadership than cheap drones. I attended three different PCCs last year. We wasted hours whinging about beards in all three. When drones were brought up, they were dismissed every time. ‘I don’t want to ever hear about a drone again,’ one fellow student decried. The new army ‘Blue Book’ makes no mention of drones. But it damn sure mentions beards. This isn’t just an Army problem. We have rooms full of leaders who think the biggest challenge facing their formations today is not the proliferation of cheap drones, but shaving profiles.

I’m not arguing beards will make us fight drones any better. I’m saying they don’t matter. What matters is we need to fundamentally reexamine how we fight, what we fight with, and how we build and buy it. We need to focus on that, and we need to start… well, years ago.

All is not lost though. Just this month, the US Army uploaded a video onto the CALL website of a general officer who gets it. MG Kline’s video is stark. It lays out just how serious the challenges are facing our army. He doesn’t mention beards once. If you have access to the CUI site, you need to watch it. Like right now. This substack can wait.

The Lesson of the Machine Gun

War’s character has always been in flux.(131) The advent of machine guns provides a comparable and illustrative example.

In the 1860s, the machine gun brought unmatched volumes of direct fire to the battlefield. It took time to refine the technology, the ammunition and logistics, and the tactics, but even from their early inception the machine gun had an outsized impact. Clever generals looked past where the technology was in the moment and saw a new future which demanded change. The middling generals were at least smart enough to notice something had just happened, but too many saw the early challenges as insurmountable. The dimmest of the generals clung to their traditions and actively fought the change. Unfortunately, the dim and middling generals won out.

In 1898, a US Army colonel observed, “Generally speaking, not one officer in a hundred has any special knowledge on the subject of machine guns, and very little is known of their construction, capabilities, or proper uses.”(132) This lack of professional curiosity left doctrine, equipment, and training stagnant. It meant even two decades later the US military still wasn’t ready for war.(133)

Close order drill was once the hallmark of a highly trained military. The Greek phalanx gave way to Roman legions, but the prestige of the close order drill held for over a thousand years. It intensified from the 16th century on, and we still revere commanders like Frederick the Great for what they accomplished with it.

But in the US Civil War it was clear something was changing. Artillery and the machine gun destroyed the supremacy of close order drill. Fancy marching was demoted to the vestigial ceremony role it still clings to today.(134) New technology required novel tactics, reformed production pipelines, and new units. But six decades later, as we prepared to fight in the fields of France, our military hadn’t made the jump.

The machine gun did not replace the rifle. In fact, formations today still have orders of magnitude more rifles than machine guns. But it changed war’s character. Meanwhile, the army refused to change.

@Democura, noting the same failure to see the obvious (to adapt to the lessons of Ukraine) recently shared a book, Strange Defeat, in one of their recent substack posts. Writing just after the German invasion of Belgium and France in 1940, a French officer describes how the French High Command simply ignored the changes in war's character that were plainly visible on their doorstep.

“Our leaders, or those who acted for them, were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war. In other words, the German triumph was, essentially, a triumph of intellect, and it is that which makes it so peculiarly serious.”

Strange Defeat

Just like with machine guns, institutional ignorance and inertia about cheap drones is stalling much needed change. Look at the plight of the “high-end” Excalibur artillery round. It took less than four weeks for the Russians to render the US-made “precision” artillery obsolete with fairly standard EW kit.(135) Meanwhile, Ukraine’s homegrown drone program is continuing to deliver pinpoint precision death under an evolving EW threat. Today the average Ukrainian line platoons have vastly more experience with cheap “precision mass” than any unit in the US Army.(136) So do the Russian platoons.

This change in character is more than hardware. The battlefield needs a new style of leadership. MG Kline talks about it a little, as does Jack Watling. But Democura spells it out directly:

The point here is, if we want to prepare our troops mentally for war, we should not only focus on the troops doing the fighting. Those in the rear will possibly have more difficulty in adapting than those in at the frontline. This may even be more applicable than ever, when you consider that the war in Ukraine shows us that there is practically no safe rear area anymore due to the increased range of weapons and transparency of the battlefield.(137)

You Can’t Outrun the Red Queen.

It’s not just about being faster. We can’t just cut the current seven-to-ten-year acquisition pipeline to two years and solve this problem. Cheap drones demand a fundamentally different process.

Shein didn't kill Gucci. They're working in different markets. But they both move a ton of capital. They just do it in very different ways. We’ll still need a process to build complex weapons like naval ships, army fighting vehicles, and air force jets.

But we also need a separate process to build cheap and fast. To iterate on weapons inside a single quarter. Upgrades can’t be an afterthought for another POM cycle. They need to be built in, configurable, and adaptable. Our space program already does something like this with microsats. We need to do this with weapons.

The money for this, while cheap, will add up. We’re going to have to give up some prestige platforms to pay for it. And what we’re building won’t always work. Right now, that’s anathema to our defense industry primes and our acquisition professionals.

And we need to find a way to safely allow units to experiment and solve this on their own. This is going to be difficult, and it’s also going to be dangerous. Some of the innovation is likely going to be restricted to units with advanced training. SOF units, which already have training pipelines that cover improvised munitions, are a natural test bed for this. Which is why it is welcome to see ARSOF already advocating for a ‘robotics MOS’.¹

We need to catch up to the innovative culture the Ukrainians have built all on their own. If we don’t develop our own skunkworks approach, and the requisite tactical and technical knowledge of how to fight against and with cheap drones, then we won’t be much value to our partners and allies. In SOF in particular, where ‘by, with, and through’ is our DNA, we need to become the masters of this new style of warfare. If we want to have an impact on a Taiwan fight, we need DIY Hellscape.

Once More For The Cheap Seats

Cheap “precision mass” drones are at least as impactful as a machinegun on today's battlefield. They will be there in larger droves tomorrow. They range further and kill cheaper, and they combine with existing platforms in novel and deadly ways. They need to be adopted by more, probably all, of our formations. Urban warfare expert John Spencer ended 2024 with a call for every infantry squad in the army to have access to at a minimum 10 disposable drones to start training with.

The trend lines that produced cheap “precision mass” show no signs of reversing, as data storage and processing continue to get cheaper and lighter. “The global proliferation of precision strike means we now live in an era of ‘precise mass,’ where comparatively cheap uncrewed systems — that can be deployed at scale — are also highly advanced and deadly accurate.”(138)

Adapting to this new character of war requires not just new tactics, but entire defense industries to adjust their requirements and procurement process. It will impact how the US deploys its forces strategically. It will change the way we fight and lead.

Failing to adapt will leave the US sustaining an expensive force that cannot expect to fight and win. For a military that tends to obsess about “centers of gravity,” the US needs to start examining how to survive and exploit the “mass effect.”

1. Military Occupational Specialty, or your job in the Army, consisting of two or three numbers and one letter. There are hundreds of codes.