Drone Doctrine Deficit

NATO is dangerously behind the times, America even more so.

This is going to be pretty far afield from the norm for this site, it’s an area that fascinates me, but I have no service or policy history to back my opinions, I’m just an overly curious civilian.

That being said, we’re going to have a long, meandering talk about military doctrine.

Attention Conservation Notice:

Military nerds only, the rest of you just move along …

World War II:

Our second 20th century global conflict in a mere two decades after the first was extraordinary in many ways. The first war saw the introduction of aircraft, armor, automatic weapons, and a resounding string of explosions near a place called Jutland laid bare the massive gap between navy doctrine and reality.

The second war was a period of riotous innovation. Germany gave the world combined arms, which they almost never called Blitzkrieg in their documents. Japan demonstrated that the battleship was no longer a sensible unit of naval power in the face of swarming attacks. Italy lacked the industrial base to make a long term impression but they also had great innovations that are now largely forgotten.

Despite the creation or first real use of the assault rifle, shoulder fired anti-tank weapons, shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, jet fighters, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, the Allies mopped the floor with the Werhmacht. More correctly, the marvelously isolated American economy did that, without suffering any serious attack. Head to head, the Konigstiger smashed any Allied tank. But the too narrow, too tall, too lightly armed, too lightly armored M-4 Sherman, built so that it would fit on the U.S. rail system, arrived in battalion force for every platoon of Tiger II tanks fielded.

The naval doctrine changes were the most extraordinary to my mind. We built battleships, battlecruisers, carriers, escort carriers, cruisers, destroyers, corvettes, and minesweepers. By the end of the conflict the only ships doing what their designers envisioned were the last two, with corvette sized ocean escorts tending convoys while minesweepers cleared or defended harbors, as needed.

Battleships were not the unit of firepower, that was the carrier air wing. Cruisers were not lone high speed raiders, they were anti-aircraft platforms. Destroyers didn’t have to deal with many torpedo boats, they split their time between submarines and air screen duties. We built two dozen fleet carriers for that conflict … and a hundred and fifty escort carriers. The so called “jeep carriers” are all but forgotten today, but their role as convoy escort/aircraft transports was vital, with their presence equaling the service that AEGIS cruisers and destroyers now provide.

Things change, always, just at varying rates. We get heroic historical malpractice, like the movie Fury, which makes an utter hash of what armor really did, and we forget that the system that churned out Shermans by the tens of thousands is what mattered.

There’s a lack of systems thinking among humans as a rule, and some of the worst offenders are admirals and generals past the age of fifty, who have trouble envisioning what’s next.

Ukraine Reporting:

Suchomimus provides steady coverage on interesting events with a focus on armor and aircraft losses. He’s been making fun of the Russians, who are running out of armored personnel carriers, so they’ve shifted to bicycles, motorcycles, civilian vehicles, and even small, quiet golf carts to move troops into battle.

He is still of the mind that NATO’s maneuver warfare is the pinnacle and what Russia is doing with their small equipment and human waves is an example of poor capability and poor judgment. I’d have agreed with him, until …

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Until I watched Anders Puck Nielsen review an article by Valerii Zaluzhnyi. If you’re truly interested in this area, you better watch this from end to end.

Summarizing Zaluzhnyi’s points:

• Drones at scale mean defensive warfare like WWI is the new normal.

• NATO’s focus on maneuver warfare is like the U.S. battleship obsession … right before Pearl Harbor.

• NATO’s level of drone activity is (my words) akin to prewar anti-aircraft configurations, where battleships and cruisers might have a single quad 28mm gun on a stern bandstand to fend off spotter planes.

The 28mm was objectively terrible and by the end of the war the battleship New Jersey and sixty single barrel 20mm guns and 80 40mm guns in a mix of dual and quad mounts. So that ship didn’t have an anti-aircraft gunner, it had ninety.

If Zaluzhnyi is right, and I think he is, NATO is erring badly. When Ukrainian troops got sent to the west for training early on, it was still GWOT stuff. Lots of close quarters room clearing, and maybe a single drone for recon. This evokes … ordered lines of troops from the 19th century, marching towards the first gatling guns fielded.

Conclusion:

This is bad for NATO, but it’s going to be utterly ridiculous for the United States. If you read Erratic, Kinetic America you know Peter Zeihan’s take on our “back to the 19th century” direction. We’ve been getting our asses kicked sending maneuver units into static, defensive wars of attrition in places like Afghanistan. If we pull that crap with a near peer, say China, who is BUILDING the kit used for Ukraine’s brave new war …

We might as well scuttle our Expeditionary Strike Groups while they’re still anchored at Coronado, and save our boys the pain and humiliation of being sent to play a losing hand on the wrong side of the Pacific.