Disruptive innovation, tiny drones, and the end of the Islamic State
Disruptive innovation, tiny drones, and the end of the Islamic State
Gunnar Counselman , the CEO of Fidelis, Inc. , and I coauthored this piece. Gunnar served as a Human Intelligence Officer in the Marine Corps and was deployed to Bosnia, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, and Central America.
Thirty-eight thousand feet over Raqqa, Syria, the C-130’s loadmaster acknowledges the command from the cockpit and executes his orders. With the flip of a switch, he deploys the three codeword-classified containers out the plane’s rear hatch. If everything goes to plan, a routine effort on his part is about to have an extraordinary impact not only on the murderous regime below, but also upon the future of human conflict. The last time a game-changing invention of this magnitude was deployed in war, the aircraft that deployed it was the Enola Gay and the target was Hiroshima. But the staff sergeant is too busy with his post-deployment checklist to wonder what controversies will accompany this moment in the history books.
Immediately after gravity pulls the containers off the rollers at the back of the cargo gate, the parachute deploys, which causes all three boxes to come apart at the seams and release its 3,000 inhabitants — top-secret miniaturized quadrocopter drones. After almost 20 minutes of slow free fall, the drones reach a height of 1,000 feet, and their tiny motors come to life. Each kamikaze aircraft, no bigger than a grasshopper, is outfitted with just enough high explosive to kill or maim a man if it lands on him, but barely enough to break an ear drum for someone standing three feet away.
As the swarm approaches the capital of the self-declared Islamic State, the President of the United States and his advisors huddle in the White House’s situation room and watch a live feed of the assault. The moment is reminiscent of the iconic photo of the same room during the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. The technology has been tested and the drills run, but the question from an earlier CIA briefing hangs over the room: In the fog of this moment, what will be the false positive rate of the bug’s friend-or-foe algorithm?
In the mind of the President, however, the question is simpler: How many innocents will die today on my order? The hope is that this will be the most surgical raid in history. The dream is that each drone’s camera and recognition software will target only people with guns, as everyone in Raqqa who has a gun is an Islamic State militant.
Down on the ground in Raqqa, spies in the audience watch as men in black pajamas and masks parade several dozen captives in cages to the center of town. The two dozen prisoners are wearing what have become fearfully recognizable orange jumpsuits. The spies’ orders are to observe and report; their smartphones are capturing everything.
As the ringleader from the Islamic State grabs the microphone, the smell of the prisoners’ gasoline-drenched cages hits the crowd, and it becomes all-too clear what abomination the Islamic State has chosen for today’s show. The speaker begins preaching about the sins of those about to be executed, but seemingly out of nowhere, his sermon is stopped short.
Without direction, 3,000 individual miniature computers begin to direct the drones to the 173 armed men visible in the square. The crowd reacts initially with curiosity. It looks like a biblical swarm of locusts, not dangerous per se, but very different from anything they have seen before.
Along with the crowd, the speaker’s gaze shifts to the cloud of bugs entering the square, his head cocked to the side. His snarled look of rage fades, replaced by pure puzzlement. His hand with the megaphone falls to his side just as the first drone finds its target and “bam,” the sound of an M80 echoes through the square, and somewhere the first casualty collapses in what may be the final stage of humanity’s last war.
A bewildering three seconds pass between the first hit and the second. Those moments feel like hours as everyone scans the swarm, their curiosity melting into confusion, then quickly transforming to fear. The second hit happens, then the third, and fourth, and…
The smell of the attack is a familiar one: gunpowder mixed with blood. But the sound is different. It’s not like the mechanical, predictable rhythm of machine gun fire. It’s chaotic, like popcorn in the microwave. It starts slow until it hits its boiling point. Then a maelstrom is unleashed as 100 kernels pop at once. Finally, the chaos subsides and the last remaining men with guns are hunted, one by one, with intervals of seconds, then minutes, in between. It doesn’t take long for the people of Raqqa to learn not to pick up weapons from dead militants.
The drones begin to patrol the city. They respond to each other’s location, enter buildings through windows and open doors, and scour every street hunting anyone who has a rifle or is sitting on a tank. Of the original 3,000 drones, only 1,367 remain active. A small percent malfunctioned, but the vast majority found targets. But 1,367 bugs are more than enough to suppress what’s left of the militant force.
Back in Washington, DC, CIA and DOD intelligence staff are using facial recognition software to identify the dead. It soon becomes clear that everything worked better than expected. Raqqa has been disarmed. Only one non-combatant appears to have been killed by a drone. But several dozen civilians were trampled to death or seriously injured during the chaos.
“Next time we can reduce civilian casualties even further,” the Pentagon General briefs the President. “Now that the world is aware of this capability, civilians will know not to run, but just to stand in place to avoid being hurt.”
“Next time,” the President whispers, with no discernable meaning. The invention of the atom bomb made total war too horrible to fathom. This invention makes insurgency futile. The drones can be deployed anywhere in the world in a day, and the operation is relatively inexpensive — not just in the blood of the nation’s soldiers, but in treasure. Each drone costs $10,000 — and they are getting cheaper. The contractor promises that the next generation will have facial recognition software on board to enable specific hunt-and-kill missions.
“If power corrupts, and ultimate power corrupts ultimately,” ponders the President, “who will we become when we wield this power?”
This story is of course fictional and impossible today, but with the events of the last several months awakening Western nations to the threat that ISIS poses worldwide, the use of a more aggressive military stance against ISIS is both inevitable and wise. On its face, a technology such as this would bring decisive hard power to not only disarm, but also deflate an enemy’s will to fight. By themselves, tiny drones would of course not solve the challenge ISIS poses, as they cannot hold ground, build infrastructure, or forge the compromises needed for a lasting peace. Treated at face value, however, drones with the capabilities described in this fictional story would be enormously attractive as instruments of hard power.
A deeper look, however, begs the question of whether their deployment would be a good thing. It suggests that how they are employed would matter greatly.
What we know from the studies of disruptive innovation is that something similar to this story will be possible in the not-too-distant future. The theory of disruptive innovation shows that although new technologies start off as relatively primitive, they improve faster than our lives change, such that at one point what is only good enough for the simplest of applications, packs in more functions and features to tackle more and more complicated challenges. From the rise of the personal computer to the mobile phone, and from the rise of TurboTax to AirBnb, this is the pattern that disruptive innovations follow.
Drones began as disruptive innovations. Primitive aircraft patrolling the sky, initially with no artillery power, the first drones have paled in comparison to the fighter jets with skilled pilots available. But they are significantly less expensive than those same jets and pilots and enable all sorts of new propositions around surveillance and targeting of specific persons or sites of interest not possible with airplanes. And they are getting better, cheaper, and more available. Fast.
If anything like the above scenario materializes in the future, the world will be ushered into a similar state of strategic uncertainty that emerged in the years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that era, the world, led by the United States and Russia, settled on MAD — mutually assured destruction — as the doctrine to guarantee the peace, albeit a tense one filled with the prospect of one mistake triggering full-scale destruction. Fractured in the 1980s by the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) that held the promise of a defense against nuclear warfare, MAD did help keep the world safe from total obliteration for roughly three decades.
On the surface, the above story has a bright beginning that bears little resemblance to the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan. The ending of brutal insurgencies that are savaging innocent civilians in a targeted manner with minimal-to-no incidental fatalities would seem to represent a stark contrast from the widespread fallout of a nuclear bomb. But just as the United States did not have a monopoly on nuclear power for long, it is folly to think it will have a monopoly on drones powered by such advanced software for long either. Already ordinary civilians own and operate drones and have accidentally flown them into public gathering spots — the USTA National Tennis Center during the U.S. Open, for example — that have set off mild panic.
The question for our time will be what will protect us from a future in which drones — controlled by both state and non-state actors — can launch precise, targeted attacks that can wreak havoc through the elimination of a people.
Will a mutually assured destruction of a different sort protect the peace? But what if non-state actors do not care about being wiped out — or, worse, we cannot trace in a timely fashion the attacks of drones to their origins, which themselves may be distributed across wide geographies with sacrificial lambs planted to absorb the counter-attacks? If we are too afraid to use the technology for fear of retribution, would insurgencies reemerge as a viable strategy?
And if we need a defense to keep the peace, what would such a defense — the SDI or ballistic missile defense equivalent — look like? Is it a defense with which we would want to live? And who would control such a defense?
If we get the answers to these questions very right, then a utopian ideal could emerge: a future of no insurgencies, no warfare, and the opportunity for people across the globe to live in prosperity and peace. If we get the answers very wrong — or are asking the wrong questions — then a very dystopian and perilous future could await us. Or there could be a dark middle ground that drives civilization underground, barricaded from the intrusion of armed and intelligent drones into our daily lives through bunkers and bubbles shutting us off from the outside world — or worse. Although the threats of cyber security loom large in the years ahead, to neglect the power drones could have to reshape the strategic order of the world would be a big mistake. Drones will improve, in unpredictable ways, with unpredictable consequences. Our leaders must prepare in an effort to bend the arc of history toward a future of peace and prosperity.