Riding the Red Horse (22 page)

If history teaches us anything about military technology, it's that cheap systems scale up faster than expensive ones do. It is already easy to imagine an up-gunned version of Rodriguez's laser pointer slaved to a radar with a couple of bog-standard servomotors. Off-the-shelf parts, incremental cost less than $3K each, with most of it the development budget going for the targeting firmware. Cost per shot, effectively free.

Call it the PlaneZapper. You could sit it on a roof, power it off wall current, and it would blind every pilot it can see. Including drone pilots; even if there's a peak-clipping filter between a drone's sensors and its pilot's screen, the effect will be like whiteout. Altitude and cloudy skies might save pilots from the early versions of the PlaneZapper, but for anything that has to fly low and slow this could already be a death knell. Close air support and medevac are obvious vulnerabilities.

Protocol IV of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, adopted by the United Nations on 13 October 1995, has been signed by 102 states as of mid-2014. It forbids weapons designed to permanently blind combatants, but not weapons designed to induce temporary (reversible) blindness, or weapons which blind as an “incidental or collateral effect” of attacks on otherwise legitimate targets or optical sensors.

It is unclear how much practical impact Protocol IV will have on the development of PlaneZapper-like devices. The wording is such as to make allegations that a weapon is designed to cause permanent rather than temporary blindness very disputable. Terrorists and non-state actors are unlikely to feel bound by it. Nevertheless, there is certainly possibility of attempts by lawfare to hinder the deployment of laser point defence by invoking Protocol IV.

Looking up from the present high end, someday soon we'll know how to build a truck- or tank-mounted version of a LaWS that can run off portable generators. It won't come within an order of magnitude of the power output of a ship-mounted LaWS, but it won't have to because it won't be designed to kill missiles. It will be an area-denial weapon for slower-moving man-rated aircraft and drones. Because it is designed for vehicle mission kills, Protocol IV should not apply to it.

Someday? Actually, something almost like this has existed since the late 1990s. It's called an MTHEL (Mobile Tactical High-Energy Laser) and the MTHEL demonstrator was a deuterium-fluoride pulsed infrared laser jointly developed by Israel and the U.S.

The MTHEL is not quite good enough for battlefield deployment yet; we need better laser physics to improve conversion efficiency. The choice of wavelength means clouds do little to inhibit it, but altitude limitations remain a significant problem. The LaWS has a reported range of about a mile (5,000 feet and change). There is reason to suspect the Navy is lowballing this figure for public consumption, but probably not by more than a factor of two or three. Strategic bombers in the B-2 class top out at about 50,000 feet. That's a big difference.

But time is not on the side of the flyboys. The kinds of advances in physics required to give the MTHEL real teeth aren't predictable, but have a strong tendency to happen exactly when military planners counting on them not to happen have settled into complacency. Also, weapons platforms that have to move themselves around at high speed are intrinsically much more expensive than counterweapons that can track them by slewing a lens.

Now consider the difference between destroying a fast mover and blinding its sensors. Both are mission kills, but while destruction would take a LaWS-class weapon, sensor-blinding would require only a Rodriguez-class weapon. That would be good enough to take out anything that relies on optical sensors for navigation (manned air, drones) though not dumb ballistic shells or GPS-guided missiles.

(GPS systems have their own problems. They are ridiculously easy to locally jam by spoofing the timing signals emitted by the GPS satellite constellation, and though illegal for civilian consumers in the U.S. and many other countries this is in fact routinely done around very high-value fixed locations such as national command authorities. There is no way to fix this other than by lofting another set of navsats with encrypted signals, which is impractical because key distribution to the huge number of client installations would inevitably be fragile and leaky. However, it may sometimes be possible to avoid GPS dependence in daytime over land by taking bearings on pairs or triples of waypoints with known geodetic locations.)

Lasers, promising as they look, may not even be the most serious near-term threat to expensive airplanes. In the Middle East, the Israelis are reliably taking down Qassam rockets and even artillery shells with Iron Dome interceptor missiles. Systems like that will become cheaper and more effective too.

Now ignore lasers and Iron Dome for a moment. Just think about drones, which don't have the range/altitude limits of the MTHEL or LaWS and are still thousands of times cheaper than manned aircraft, and how very rapidly they are evolving. Now consider how little work it would take to mount sensor- or pilot-blinding lasers on a drone.

The conclusion is inescapable. Manned airpower is dying. Soon it will be dead. In an unknown but possibly rather short amount of time after that, the mission lifetime of anything in a war zone that flies and is neither very effectively stealthed nor moving too fast to track will be measured in minutes, at most.

People who do military futurology, whether they're war planners or SF authors, need to start thinking seriously about the consequences. Because a very large portion of the last century's military doctrine is about to land in the dustbin of history. The most immediately pressing question is: what happens to combined-arms tactics when close air support is no more?

In 2014, an A-10 can still laugh at ground-based lasers. Mostly. A really lucky shot could cause a fuel-tank fire. If you miss, a pissed-off Warthog pilot will shortly be explaining the error of your ways with all the eloquence of a 30mm autocannon. But this is almost certain not to remain the case indefinitely. It may not even remain the case through another full cycle of military procurement.

Beyond that, what happens when any gun drone loitering long enough to fill in for that A-10 is a big fat target that might as well have a sign on it reading “KILL ME!” Or, just as good and requiring orders of magnitude less laser output power, “BLIND MY SENSORS!”

Worst case, what happens when high-altitude heavy bombers are too expensive to risk against any target with even the budget of a small nation-state or equivalent behind it?

Some possibilities that should be good for a few SF stories follow:

Fixed infrastructure becomes impractical to take out with theater air because it is too easily defended by drones and lasers much less expensive than attack aircraft. In the extreme case, even strategic bombing stops working; superlasers or many cheap drones chasing a few hyperexpensive heavy bombers is unlikely to end well for the nation paying for the bombers.

Infantry increases in importance. Not because you can't kill a troop with a battlefield laser, but because the implied cost ratio drops to the point where you can afford to flood defensive positions with shooters. Automatically targeting human beings against dynamic and cluttered backgrounds is much more difficult than targeting flying objects in the sky.

Paratroopers, not rejoicing in the complicated earth-bound background that makes infantry tricky to target automatically, are toast. Quite literally, if anyone tries to deploy them within a laser's operating range.

Conventional artillery is in deep trouble. Especially if it uses smart munitions, which are catnip for Iron-Dome style systems that rely on emissions tracking. But the more general problem is that, near the peak of its trajectory and during its ballistic-descent phase, an artillery shell moves relatively slowly and predictably. With LaWS-class weapons, that pesky cost ratio per shot may well relegate cannon to the status of museum pieces.

Armor also rises in importance. Their guns, or in the future, lasers, direct-fire at high velocity; there is no ballistic descent phase for a laser's tracking systems to exploit. Because tanks don't have to fly, they have a much bigger weight budget to spend on ablative armor and projectors for opaque aerosols. At the extreme, land leviathans like the Nazi “Maus” super-heavy tank might look viable again. They'd still have a serious ground-pressure problem; the real reason main battle tanks topped out at about 70 tons and have gotten a bit lighter in recent decades is due to the load limits of roads and bridges. With enough military incentive this might change; the largest tracked vehicle in the world—the giant Bagger 288 strip-mining machine—can roll over grass without killing it.

Roads and bridges aren't the only way to move. Armored trains and shallow-draft river monitors might make a comeback. Or maybe not: unlike a tank, which can move to within direct-fire range of its target, these need to lob shells on trajectories that would make them relatively easy targets for lasers.

At sea, the changes will be even more dizzying. Aircraft carriers, obsolete. Conventional battleships won't come back because artillery shells will be too easy to shoot down. Lasers will quickly broaden their role from anti-air and anti-artillery to being the only viable ship-to-ship weapons. Submarines, shooting torpedoes a laser can't reach, will increase in importance.

In effect, navies will lose reliable use of their fast movers and over-the-horizon weapons. We won't quite be back to the Battle of Jutland, as increasing access to satellite surveillance will make fleets-in-being difficult to conceal - but actually forcing an engagement will become more difficult. Perhaps more importantly, power projection onto even near-shore targets will become much less effective and much more risky.

Another kind of power projection—expeditionary troop deployments—will also get much riskier. Without reliable flying platforms for anti-submarine warfare, protecting large high-value targets like troop transports in the open ocean may become impractical.

Humans being the ingenious monkeys that they are, countermeasures against laser anti-air will be tried. One already mentioned is stealthing; a laser can't kill what it can't acquire. One problem with this is that jet or rocket exhaust is necessarily an IR hotspot. Another is that gun drones necessarily de-stealth themselves when they fire. Still, stealthing and nap-of-the-earth flying habits may preserve a useful combat lifetime for reconnaissance drones.

Another counter mentioned previously is moving fast enough that laser turrets cannot combine the angular velocity and precision required to maintain lock, or can't get the dwell time required to do damage. Manned air, drones and cruise missiles in general won't be able to reach a velocity regime where this is an issue; ballistic missiles, rocket-assisted shells and railgun shells might. There will be a significant capability race here.

A third counter is to move from smart projectiles with rocket or jet fuel on board to inert ones. This eliminates an important prompt-kill mechanism, which is laser-induced heating of unexpended fuel until it cooks off explosively. Unlike surface damage, this can't be prevented by spinning the projectile.

Railguns are worth particular note here as a future possibility. They fire inert slugs at very high velocities and might eventually fill in the artillery role in an otherwise laser-dominated sky. The U.S.'s prototype railgun at Dahlgren can throw a projectile at ~2.4-2.7 km/sec, which is just below the 3.0km/sec threshold at which the kinetic energy at impact roughly equals the yield of an explosive shell and suggests an effective range of over 150km.

But, while there has been some speculation about fielding railguns on the upcoming Zumwalt-class destroyer, these systems are currently further from a deployable state than the MTHEL. Peak power output required to drive the projectile would be much, much higher. And, at present, the induction forces are so powerful that railguns tend to self-destruct on first firing. Some major advances in materials science will be needed to overcome the latter problem.

Now let's consider us to the
strategic
consequences of the death of airpower, and, more generally, of the neutralization of standoff weapons by laser point defence. Most obviously, this shift in cost ratios favors the defence. But we can be more specific than that.

The kinds of weapons these developments put the most terminal pressure on are the most expensive, complex ones—aircraft carriers and man-rated aircraft being the extreme examples. Cheap, dispersible weapons systems like infantry and direct-fire armor will become more important even as expeditionary deployment of them gets riskier.

Together, these trends can be expected to reduce the capital-concentration advantages of large nations. Major conventional wars will become more difficult even against second-string militaries; likely there will never be another walkover like the First and Second Iraq Wars.

This in turn implies that smaller nations—and possibly non-state actors such as separatist groups, back-country warlords, or Islamic terror organizations backed by oil money—will become more difficult to suppress. The U.S. and regional hegemonic powers will face increasing difficulties in force projection. The implied future is one of fewer large wars, but more small ones.

Steve Rzasa and Vox Day, both of whom are introduced elsewhere in this collection with individually crafted stories, also collaborate in the QUANTUM MORTIS series. That series, QM for short, features a former Marine turned military cop, Chief Warrant Officer Graven Tower of the Military Crimes Investigation Division-Xenocriminology and Alien Relations department (MCID-XAR), and the cybernetic essence of his late wife. Tower, at first glance, appears strange, and occasionally displays less humanity than that spousal cybernetic essence. As the man said, “You are what you were back when.” This is that “back when”, a tale from Chief Tower's past as a member of the Duke of Rhysalan's Marines, and of his first encounter with the posthumans of the Man-Machine Unity.