The Air Force, Drones, and Broken Institutions
The Air Force, Drones, and Broken Institutions
Don’t worry: This is actually about politics. Trust me.
Today I’m going off-the-news. We’re going to talk about the drone revolution and the Air Force. But what we’re really talking about is how institutions function—and how they can ossify and fail.
Which is also about politics! Or at least, is about how some of America’s political institutions have failed in this particular moment. Which we will talk about at the end.
It’s kind of a journey. I hope you’ll come with me.
1. The Air Force
Institutions have histories, cultures, priorities, and plans. But before an institution has any of those things, it has a mission. The history, culture, priorities, and plans of the United States Air Force are currently in conflict with its mission and this is a problem for America.
The Air Force’s challenge is that the drone revolution has created an entirely new battlespace that ranges from just overhead to a few thousand feet in the air. This space is called the air littoral and it now belongs to drones. War on the Rocks has an absolute must read on it:
The U.S. military is woefully unprepared for warfare in this newly contested subdomain of the air littoral. . . . Technologies that protect against drones have failed to keep pace with the proliferation and rapidly evolving capabilities of offensive drones (reflecting a problem that we once called the U.S. military’s protection deficit disorder). As a result, U.S. ground forces have now essentially lost the protective top cover that the Air Force provided through air superiority for decades.
It’s useful to understand why the Air Force has missed this moment, because it’s a story that’s applicable to many institutions in many contexts.
The Air Force has always been the most platform-dependent of our services. New aircraft designs take decades to develop, test, procure, and deploy. We are still in the early phases of deployment for the most recent fighter platform, the F-35, which is a multi-role aircraft slated to be in use until 2070.
That’s not a typo. 2070.
The Air Force’s platform dependence was always going to make it the least nimble of the services and the slowest to adapt to technological change. So consider this: Today we are as far away from 2070 as we are from 1978.
I want you to think about the changes in warfighting from 1978 to today. And now try to project out to how useful an F-35 might be in 2070.
This isn’t the Air Force’s fault; it’s the nature of the beast. Platform dependence is a weakness that the service must always be managing and hedging against.
But institutions are hostage to the same logical fallacies as individuals and the Air Force has a massive sunk-cost problem.
The Air Force has been planning to spend $230 billion dollars on F-35s. (They’re currently on track to acquire 1,763 of the aircraft at $130 million apiece.) The chain of planning that began the development of the F-35 started in the 1990s, when the world was a half century into the jet-propulsion revolution. But right around the same time another revolution was starting with the arrival of the early unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as the Predator.
The revolution these drones ushered in was based not on capabilities, but economics. Here’s that War on the Rocks piece again:
In a set of comments posted on LinkedIn last month, defense analyst T.X. Hammes estimated the following. The delivered cost of a single F-35A is around $130 million, but buying and operating that plane throughout its lifecycle will cost at least $460 million. He estimated that a single Chinese Sunflower suicide drone costs about $30,000—so you could purchase 16,000 Sunflowers for the cost of one F-35A. And since the full mission capable rate of the F-35A has hovered around 50 percent in recent years, you need two to ensure that all missions can be completed—for an opportunity cost of 32,000 Sunflowers. As Hammes concluded, “Which do you think creates more problems for air defense?”
And the economic advantage of drones isn’t just cost—it’s the speed of their development cycle.
You know why it takes so long to design, build, and produce a plane like the F-35? Because if the F-35 crashes, it kills a valuable (and expensive-to-train) pilot.
If a drone crashes, you’ve got 30 more of them in the truck.
Drones increase the acceptable failure rate of a military aircraft by orders of magnitude, which in turn cuts the development cycle dramatically, which in turn makes it faster (and cheaper) to design and deploy new and more effective drones.1
With manned fighters, the state of the art changes by the decade. With drones, the state of the art can change by the month.
The drone revolution confronted the Air Force with a choice: Stick with the manned-fighter program it was midway through and had already sunk billions of dollars into? Or pivot into drones? Here’s War on the Rocks:
[T]he principal service responsible for the air domain, the Air Force is arguably doing the least to address this burgeoning threat. Why? Countering inexpensive drones that can pummel U.S. forces from the air at will simply does not fit into the service’s future vision. Moreover, defeating this new aerial threat would require the service to transform much of its doctrine and platforms. Yet the Air Force remains firmly wedded to exorbitantly expensive crewed platforms that reflect its 20th-century roots and legacy . . .
2. In the Army
You know who found it easier to pivot into drones? The Army. Again, War on the Rocks:
Ironically, the first service to respond decisively to the new contestation of the air littoral has been the U.S. Army. . . . [L]ast month the Army cancelled its future reconnaissance helicopter—which has already cost the service $2 billion—because fielding a costly manned reconnaissance aircraft no longer makes sense. Today, the same mission can be performed by far less expensive drones—without putting any pilots at risk. The Army also decided to retire its aging Shadow and Raven legacy drones, whose declining survivability and capabilities have rendered them obsolete, and announced a new rapid buy of 600 Coyote counter-drone drones in order to help protect its troops.
This isn’t an accident. The Army’s institutional commitment to air platforms is small; its primary mission is supporting ground forces. Which means that the Army was able to view the drone revolution not as usurper to its plans, but as a new way to serve the primary mission.2
For the Air Force, the platform was so closely tied to the mission that it became hard to disentangle the two.
Now comes the politics part:
Liberal society needs healthy institutions because they stand in the mediating space between the government and the individual. The stronger and healthier our institutions are, the freer we all are.
One of my mantras is: The plan is not the mission. The mission is the mission.3
Institutions falter for lots of reasons, but a common one is that they confuse their plans with their goals. And a lot of our institutions have fallen into that trap recently.
The Republican party came to believe that winning elections was more important than executing a governing vision. Which has led the party to be taken over—wholesale—by an authoritarian and his family.
The legacy media came to believe that “balance” and “objectivity”—which had been adopted as tools to further liberal democracy—were more important than liberal democracy, prioritizing the means over the end.
The conservative movement felt that it was unfairly disadvantaged in the cultural mainstream, so instead of working to integrate itself, it set up alternative institutions. But these institutions wound up spinning off into insanity and becoming even more distant from the mainstream.
The U.S. Supreme Court relies on popular legitimacy to provide heft for rulings that preserve liberal democracy and check the power of the other branches of government. But in the Colorado Fourteenth Amendment case, the Court chose to ignore the Constitution’s plain-text instructions in order to husband its popular legitimacy.4
As I said: I think about this a lot in the context of The Bulwark, and we’ve already confronted some changes. We founded this place to defend liberal democracy and we thought, at the start, that the best way to do this was to try to preserve a healthy version of the conservative movement.
We realized pretty quickly that this plan was a dead end: “conservatism” had already changed and whatever version of the word existed in our heads, it was no longer the ideology to which the vast majority of actual “conservatives” in the real world subscribed to. We concluded that a prolonged debate over who the Real Conservatives were wasn’t going to help the cause of liberal democracy.
Next, we thought that defending liberal democracy meant defeating Donald Trump. But by the fall of 2020 it was clear that even in defeat, Trump wasn’t going away. So beating him was a start, not the finish.
We have to beat him again, obviously. And if we’re lucky enough to get there—all of us, together—then we’ll have to see what that world looks like. Maybe the energy behind this authoritarian attempt will dissipate and America will enter a new period of rebuilding. Or maybe some portion of the country, having gotten a taste of authoritarianism, decides that it wants more.
Whatever the case, I’m determined that we won’t be the Air Force buying F-35s. We won’t ever lose sight of the fact that the plan isn’t the mission. The mission is the mission.
I hope you’ll stay on this mission—to defend liberal democracy—with us.
3. Load the Right Way
Yes, I *am* judging the way you load your dishwasher.
How you stack and load your dishwasher is extremely important. Journalists, YouTubers, and dishwasher experts have all written guides on how to do it properly. One PhD student even wrote a 300-page thesis on the science behind dishwasher loading. . . .
But for the past eight years, one corner of the internet has devoted every single day to determining the ideal method, debating the pros and cons of prerinsing, cutlery trays, dishwasher tablet brands, and whether hand washing is a crime.
Meet the Extreme Dishwasher Loading Facebook group, which currently boasts 29,000-plus members and has somewhat accidentally found itself at the center of the zeitgeist.
Unlike Fight Club, the Extreme Dishwasher Loading club doesn’t mind you talking about the Extreme Dishwasher Loading club, but it does have some very specific rules.
The first rule of the Extreme Dishwasher Loading club is “Think quality, not quantity” when inviting people to join the group. Rule two warns that any photos of objects like toilet seats, guns, cat litter trays, or sex toys in your dishwashing machine are strictly prohibited. Rule three is a mysterious “secret rule,” while rule six warns that talk of washing machines or any other white goods will be dealt with in the harshest possible terms. “Clothes folding discussion is verboten,” the rules point out. (Rules four and five are similar to other groups' prohibitions on bullying and hate speech.)
It has been a banner month for the group, which describes itself as a place to “discuss the finer points and details of efficient, correct, and ingenious dishwasher loading and stacking, interesting techniques and useful tips are encouraged.” Not only did British prime minister Rishi Sunak reveal that loading the dishwasher was his favorite household chore, the group also received a boost from a post by the popular Fesshole account on X.
“I make sure I am the only person in the house who loads the dishwasher,” the anonymous confessor wrote in a post that’s been viewed almost a million times. “No one else does it right. I treat it like a game of Tetris. I'm on a Facebook dishwasher group and post photos of my work for others to enjoy.”
Look: There is a right way and a wrong way to load a dishwasher and you should start by consulting the manual for your Bosch 800 Series, which I assume is the dishwasher you own because WE HAVE MODERN TECHNOLOGY AND WHY WOULDN’T YOU TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT?
The bottom rack has specific places for dinner plates, dessert plates, rim soup bowls, and normal bowls. Handles down in the cutlery basket. Only butter knives, no kitchen knives. No pots or pans.
And for the love of all that’s holy, keep your rinse-aid full.
Don’t @ me.
Also: Just by definition, any aircraft that doesn’t have to keep a bag of meat alive can be smaller and cheaper because life support is a bitch.
It is impossible to overstate the influence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the development of drone warfare. We’ve had several years of development and advancement packed into a couple dozen months.
A character in John Scalzi’s The Consuming Fire says a version of this. It’s easily the best of Scalzi’s books. Highly recommend.
Other non-organic institutions—the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College—have seen their animating logic turned against the original intent of their creators. The Senate was supposed to preserve the rights of the minority and the Electoral College was supposed to magnify majorities. But both have wound up enabling minority rule as a viable mode of governance.
Technological advances quickly outdate training, tactics, logistics and strategy. Civil War generals fought battles the way they were taught at West Point; with Antoine-Henri Jomini's "Theories of War." Jomini was a Swiss officer in Napoleon's army, and he emphasized "mass." So masses of soldiers marched to within one hundred yards of each other, fired their muskets, and charged with bayonets through the smoke.
One little problem: in 1846 a French inventor and military instructor came up with the rifled bullet, or Minie ball, greatly increasing the accuracy, range, and destructive power of the muskets then in general use (Springfield and Enfield). The shocking casualties of the Civil War were directly because technological change had been ignored. It took the troops themselves more than three years in to dig in: the siege of Petersburg looked a lot more like 1915 than 1862.
The unmanned revolution has changed the way of war. When I was a unmanned platform manager from 2005-2011, I met constant resistance from people with wings on their uniforms--every block they could muster was used against the program. Now, platoons don't go on patrol without small drones in support. The Ukrainian War has turned drones, which were considered reconnaissance assets, into suicide killers, and they fly in swarms. There is no human limitation (think G-force) on a drone: an F-35 can't outturn one and even if it gets lucky, there are ten more waiting for it.
In nearly every aspect of my life, I'm old school, and washing dishes is no exception. I wash everything by hand right after every meal and leave it in the drainer to dry. I live alone, so I usually don't have a lot of dishes to wash.
I have a dishwasher (it came with the house), but I've only used it about half a dozen times in as many years. It would take me a few days to use enough dishes to fill it, by which time I would already have wanted to use some of them again. Also, my pans are not dishwasher safe, so I would have to hand wash them anyway.