It was then that Marine Corps special operations commander, Major General James Glynn, chimed in to agree with Admiral Howard. He said:
“The choices that we’re having to determine right now is what of the counterterrorism skill set, the stuff that we’ve invested in and developed very well over the last 20 years, how much of it translates? How well does it translate? And what else do we need to be able to do?”
Drones: The Future of Modern Warfare
The truth is that special operators are learning in Ukraine what the future non-counterterrorism battlefield may look like, and a lot of that is not on the ground. General Braga clearly explained this fact to the gathered lawmakers. “It’s impressive to see the impact that manned and unmanned drones are having,” he said. While drones were already part of the Army’s modernization effort, he said, their impact in Ukraine has led USASOC to consider creating a military occupational specialty or branch within special operations dedicated to manned and unmanned drones so that it’s “not just an additional duty, it’s an actual specialty.”
He continued, “I cannot envision a future battlefield without ever-increasing manned and unmanned robotics and the application of AI to maximize their effect and impact across all warfighting functions.”
And so…the second lesson learned by SOCOM is, “we have seen the future of warfare, and it is drones.”
The third lesson maybe “Have Secure Communications.” SOFREP Editor in Chief, Sean Spoonts recently returned from the Special Operations Forces Industry Convention(SOFIC) in Tampa. This is a kind of technology expo of manufacturers wanting to do business with SOCOM and the military. He told me that while drone tech was certainly on display in abundance(including autonomous underwater vehicles) communications technology seemed dominant on the convention floor.
In Ukraine, the Russians have been plagued with communications problems. In the first days of the war, we noted that Russian tanks, vehicles, and even helicopters were carrying markings to visually identify their own vehicles which told us that the Russian army did not have radio ID systems installed that allowed them to electronically keep track of units and their locations on the field.
The Russians had an encrypted battlefield communications system that used cellular signals(We use satellite-based systems) but they destroyed the cel-phone towers to limit Ukraine’s communications and crippled their own comms in the process. As a result, they were using off-the-shelf UHF/VHF radios and talking in the clear. The Ukrainians could not only intercept those signals but triangulate their source and bring artillery down on them. We also think the success of Ukraine in bumping off so many high-ranking Russian officers has to do with being able to track their use of cell phones to talk and text. It is almost unimaginable to us that they did not realize how dangerous it is on a modern battlefield to carry on your person a uniquely identifiable radio transceiver that is constantly emitting a radio signal to update its own location.
We have also seen Russian helicopters and aircraft with commercially available Garmin GPS navigation systems taped into their cockpits. The Russians have their own global positioning satellite system that Ukraine was also using and of course, this means the Russians shut them off which probably did them more harm than it did to Ukraine. We also wondered if perhaps the satellites they had were all working? About two weeks ago the Russians fired off a rocket to boost several military satellites into orbit. The rocket got up there all right, but none of the satellites it deployed returned a signal, they were all dead on arrival.
In 2018 we reported on Raytheon’s $2.5 Billion dollar OCX system for the Air Force. We were in such a hurry to launch this constellation of 34 GPS satellites hardened against hacking and with better positional accuracy that we got them up and deployed before the ground system for tracking them was even online. This tells you something about how serious secure communications are to battlefield success.
Sean said that he saw various and sundry radion communications devices for Special Operations Forces that all touted their compact design, high transmitting power, and encryption capabilities, not from giant telecom companies but from small and medium-sized suppliers. The tech to do this is not in the exclusive hands of the government but in the R&D departments of these small private tech companies. Some of them even offered encrypted personal devices that would allow commanders to know the location of each of their troops in real-time and displayed over a photorealistic map of the battlefield in color on a tablet device. At resolutions much higher than Google Earth gives you.
So, we can go much further now than just identifying individual tanks and vehicles on a battlefield. We can keep track of individual soldiers on that battlefield. Some may think we go overboard on spending for this stuff, but the 30,000 dead Russians on the field in Ukraine ought to inform us of the cost in blood you pay when you try to go cheap on military technology and think lots of warm bodies with rifles will win the day.
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