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We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today James Padden Rogers.
I should say Dr. Rogers, actually.
He holds a PhD on the history of the precision warfare from the University of Hull in the United Kingdom.
He's been a fellow at Stanford University, Yale University, the University of Oxford.
He was a visiting scholar at the United States Air Force Air Command and Staff College.
And with all that expertise, we have him on today to talk about how drones, if you will, have evolved in warfare.
And really, we're seeing them applied here in Ukraine.
And James just reminded me or told me that, don't forget, there was something similar in Vietnam.
James, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Thanks. I have a great day.
Well, as I say, you're an expert in sort of a unique area.
And you've recently issued a new book called Precision, A History of American Warfare,
being published by Manchester University Press here in 2023.
But as you've looked at and been studying and watching what's been going on in Ukraine with Russia drones and the Ukrainian drones,
give us some insight of how you see this has evolved for the use of this sort of unmanned vehicle platform.
I think that when it comes to specifically Russia's offensive war against Ukraine,
we've seen that Ukraine harness drones very early on as a way to try and hold Putin's forces back from taking the capital of Kiev in those very early days, early weeks of the war.
We know the Turkey sent over there, Bay Ractea TB2s.
These are medium altitude, long endurance systems that you would be more familiar with perhaps as a bit like the US Predators and Reapers that we know the US used during the global war on terror,
although they're slightly different systems, but they fulfill a similar role of being sent up into the air to conduct precision strikes against targets on the ground.
And also to provide that vital intelligence surveillance and target acquisition for other systems that Ukraine possessed.
Now, that started to change very quickly as Russia brought in their own air defense systems and their electronic jamming.
And what you've seen ever since then really is this cat and mouse game, this offensive, defensive game between Russia and Ukraine about who can innovate their drones faster
and who can break through each other's defenses.
And one way that Ukraine has tried to keep up with their drone innovation is not only to get supplies brought in from the international commercial market,
so they brought up around 60% of the world's supply of DJI-reduced Mavic drones, different types of Mavic drones.
These are the smaller quadcopter systems, so far different to the much larger medium-sized drones,
but also to develop their own drone industry and to invest millions, if not billions, into that to create tactical battlefield drones that help with their fight in the trenches on the front line.
And it seems like, you know, Beck, I think the last time I had somebody on talking about drones was right at the start of their use in Afghanistan.
It was all intelligence gathering, but it's really changed since then, hasn't it?
I think when we look back to, especially the Obama administration, and that administration's reliance on the use of drones,
then we can characterize that period as what we call the first drone age, the first nation, the United States,
to really take on drones as a spearhead of pushing their military force around the world.
And this was all part of Obama's promise to the American people that he would remove them from the illegal war, as it was being called in Iraq,
and win the good war in Afghanistan, and sadly we know how that all turned out.
But it was also part of reducing the cost to American military lives, as at that point, when Obama was getting elected,
you know, you had 60% of U.S. military casualties occurring as a result of the improvised explosive device.
And so as the war and terror spread globally, you wanted to reduce the footprint of American military personnel abroad, not increase it.
And so the drone became this panacea for the Obama administration to continue to hunt down, to find terrorists,
to provide intelligence on terrorist organizations, and to kill terrorists when needed all around the world.
So that's Somalia, Yemen, there were strikes even in the Philippines, we know of course about Afghanistan and Pakistan,
and a number of other countries where drones were deployed.
But this was a period where it was the United States, and core allies such as Great Britain and France,
who were provided high-tech U.S. systems, very few other nations were allowed to have these high-tech drones.
The world has changed dramatically since that time.
We live in a time now that I call the second drone age.
And here, and I've been working at this with the United Nations recently,
it comes to the conclusion that around 113 different nation states, at least 65 non-state actors,
now have access to weaponized drones all around the world, but pretty much at the point where we have the uncontrolled proliferation of military drone systems.
Now, some of these have been deliberately proliferated by hostile nation states, such as Iran,
who provide groups to the so-called Axis of Resistance across the Middle East,
a number of different actors, including Houthi terrorists, who then use those drone systems to either recast them
and make their own local drone industry, and to tap into the global commercial market of drones
and different commercial systems to then make those drone designs work for themselves.
Or they simply use the Iranian design systems to do Iran's bidding for them.
And we've seen this with attacks in the Red Sea recently, with a major impact on international shipping.
And so we live in a dramatically different world, a world of proliferated drone threats,
where when I do my interviews with military personnel from the United States and from our allies,
we've reached a point where we've lost that tactical air superiority.
And we have, for the first time in maybe two generations now,
this very potent, increasingly lethal and powerful threat from the air against U.S. military lives
and the lives of U.S. allies.
And we saw that most tragically and most recently with the death of three U.S. military personnel at Tower 22.
It is really amazing how, and to me at least, how quickly the world caught up on this.
And we're talking to Dr. James Padden Rogers, he's the executive director of the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.
Is it because the hardware became so available around the world or the software became so available?
How did this explode so fast?
Yeah, it's a really good question.
I mean, I would say it's a combination of the innovations in commercial drone technologies.
So let's pick at that point first.
We of course know that these have been used en masse.
The Think Tank in the UK, the Royal United Service Institute says that Ukraine is losing up to 10,000 of these commercial drones each month.
And it's these systems that have been designed by a number of different commercial drone manufacturers
to make it easy for even simpletons like me to get their drone license and to use these systems.
And for them to be used by real estate agents, wedding photographers, agriculture, all of these different drone systems
that have been incredibly useful for different industries.
The trouble is that those technologies are also dual use.
And when taken up by militaries or terrorist groups, they can be put to nefarious ends.
So let's think about ISIS.
ISIS would be first terrorist group to be able to link into this commercial drone market,
smuggling thousands of drones over the border, buying them up through shell companies around the world.
I'm talking about shell companies in Britain, in Spain, in Sri Lanka and in Denmark actually,
and smuggling them over across the border so that they could work on their drones and create an effective ISIS drone force or an air force for ISIS.
And they would use these en masse against US and Allied forces during Operation Inherent Resolve.
I mean, when I was conducting my research back then, you know, there's as many as 83 drones in the sky within a 24-hour period.
And if anything, it's only got worse since then because drone companies have made their drones much more high-tech.
They can fly further. They can shift frequencies. They can carry heavier payloads.
And now these drones, of course, are being utilized by a number of different terrorist groups around the world.
And let me have you expand on that because this idea that you can have an army of drones up in the air at the same time,
networked and operating in concert is sort of an amazing thing to think about.
And if you're a military planner and you got to defend against it, it's got to be quite harrowing to think about these networked armies of drones.
And I think they've been used in the Ukraine-Russian conflict.
Yeah, so there is a kind of a technical definition of what we might call this network of drones in the sky.
This would be a true drone swarm. And any engineer that's listening or any computer scientist listening will know that we're not quite there yet in terms of a true drone swarm.
This is, you know, think of a flock of birds in the sky, like a murmuration of starlings that are being attacked by an eagle, let's say.
They will work together, all that wants to move in synchronization to make sure they keep together as that giant flock to increase their security.
They communicate with one another and they become almost one symbiotic life form in the sky.
Now, we've not reached the point where we have individual drones that have that sort of connectivity and the ability to react to external stimuli.
We will do, and the US is investing very heavily in that, and that's deeply worrying as well into the future because China's doing the same.
And so we will have drone-v drone swarms and likely thousands of drones in the sky above zones of active conflict.
What we have at the moment is we have these more rudimentary drone swarms where drones are sent in in their multiples.
So these are multi-drone deployments, tens, maybe 20s max at a target to saturate their enemy's air defense systems or to use up their enemy's air defense systems so that when they then do send other systems in,
maybe rockets or missiles, they will have more chance of breaking through and hitting the target.
And so when I mentioned the fact that ISIS had these multiple drone systems in the sky, we're looking at maybe 10 at a time, but 83 over that 24-hour period.
And as I say, it's all about trying to overwhelm air defenses.
Interesting. I like this concept, your outline of sort of the first drone age, the second drone age.
You've clearly thought about what the third or the fourth drone age might look like. Give us from your expert viewpoint, Dr. Rogers, where does the next drone age take us?
Well, I've just written a piece on this called the third drone age visions out to 2040.
I think that some of the things we're looking for here, and I should also recognize the fact that we've just been funded by NATO, SBS to work on this idea of full spectrum drone warfare and what threats might occur from the use of drones,
not only in the air, but also on the ground at sea, under the surface of the water, and also underground.
And so we're looking at this multi-domain drone use, this full spectrum drone use, and I think this is one of the things that's going to characterize the third drone age.
Now, let's couple that with the fact that it's not just going to be those systems being controlled by human operators.
Instead, you're going to have the human on the loop of control or completely outside the loop of control of these systems. What do I mean by that?
Well, I mean that you can have these drones operating autonomously, picking out targets, and then sending that target data back to a human pilot or a human operator who might be controlling, let's say, 10, 20, or 100 of these systems at different points around the active zone of conflict.
And then that operator will decide whether or not the data is getting from the drone is correct and can approve that strike.
Now, the next level of that, the outside the loop of control, is the one that I think that we're reaching very quickly.
And this is the one where the drone system, be it used at sea, under water, in the air, on the ground, or indeed underground, is able to choose off a preset list of targets built within its algorithm.
So it's able to identify certain targets and then choose to take that strike on the target without the human being in the loop of control.
So we're delegating, we're moving, we're placing into the hands of machines, into the minds of machines, that decision about whether or not another human lives or dies.
We're delegating death to robots and machines. And this is the future of war. This is what is going to define the third drone edge.
Well, you're scaring the hell out of me. So, you know, that's why guys like you have to think about this. So guys like me don't have to.
You keep referring to drones in the sea, on the ground, and underground. And I'm only thinking about drones in the air.
What am I not thinking about in terms of drones in the sea, ground, and underground?
Well, you think of the ability of the drone in the third dimension, that is the sky, the ability to move quite freely at different altitudes, to evade air defense systems, and to take out targets.
So let's think about that in the third dimension. That is the water, the sea, the ocean.
And you start to see how they become harder to detect, harder to track, and can be autonomously to monitor, gather intelligence surveillance, and to take strikes on naval targets, or perhaps, you know, low and behold,
undersea pipelines or vital interconnected wires that connect the internet around the world.
We have a lot of very sensitive infrastructure under the sea, and it's those sort of systems that can be used to defend that infrastructure, but also to attack it.
Now, on the surface of the water, this has become one of the latest major innovations of the war in Ukraine.
And this is the use of drone boats to take out Russian military shipping.
And we've seen this happen, the sinking of these ships from these comparatively much, much cheaper drone boat systems.
Now, that's just the maritime domain. Let's talk about on the ground.
We've seen the drones being introduced to Medevac, to be able to place people on these drone structures that have tank tracks, so they can just take them straight off the battlefield as quickly as possible.
We're also looking at these remote controlled tank systems, which can be sent underneath other tanks or sent under armoured vehicles and explode underneath them.
That's something that's been around since the Cold War, if not actually the Second World War.
There might have been experimentation with those sort of remote control systems in the First World War.
So that's not a new innovation, but it's something we're certainly seeing being put to use.
And then underground, I only mentioned that because that's something we've seen with the war between Israel and Gaza, the war between Israel and Hamas.
What we've seen there is the use of Israeli drones to be sent underground.
These are drones that were designed initially for mining operations or perhaps for humanitarian release operations to go and to survey those tunnels to make sure there's no hostiles down there and to collect that surveillance and intelligence for Israeli forces.
So we really are seeing drones being used in every facet of war.
And this is why the British government today, the Defence Minister, has announced £4.5 billion, so that's well over $5 billion investment in the innovation of drones for the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force and the British Army.
We'll see if that happens or if it's just an election pledge in an election year to try and grant it.
Which I suspect it probably is, but either way the attention and the intent is there from a number of nations around the world that the future of war is drone war.
I've got two more areas I want to cover before we run out of time, but I want to back up.
You mentioned you recently wrote on the third drone age. Can you identify where that's at? Because I think there's probably veteran radio listeners who are going, hey, Dr. Rogers has really thought about this. I want to know more.
So where might we find such an article?
Well, I do mention it in the final chapters of my new book, Precision, A History of American Warfare. And if you go to Manchester University Press and if you use the code Warfare 30, you can get 30% off and that takes it down to about $20.
Fantastic.
So you can open up the book online for the same price, it's about $20. But you can find that particular article for free online under the CIGI Institute. If you just type in the third drone age into Google, I think I might be the only person that's written on it so far.
You may have, I hope you coined it because it's going to stick. Now, the two other things I want to touch on is drone defense, right? So you've just outlined an incredible new area of warfare, but there's always, you know, everything's got a reaction to the action, right?
So how is drone defense developing?
Slowly. And at a pace that concerns me. It's something that I've been warning about for a long time now, before I've been working on drones now for well over 10 years. And it was a warning sign that we put out because we were worried about ISIS, because we were worried about the earlier Houthi attacks from 2018-2019 onwards.
And the key thing and the key fact is, is that actually when it comes to the US, its allies and Western militaries more broadly, there's just been a neglect of air defense for two generations.
I mean, you look at the official statistics, officially the last member of the US military that was killed by hostile enemy air power was in the Korean War in 1953.
And so when it comes to investing in air defense systems for such attacks, there isn't the impetus to put the money into it because there really wasn't the threat.
What we were warning about was that this threat is returning. You look at the conflicts in which the US has been fighting and it's usually, if not completely, comprehensively had command of the air.
At the end of the time, if you want air defense is perhaps to, you know, pot-shot some rockets or maybe, you know, most importantly, and where the money has been is to stop intercontinental ballistic missiles to make sure you've got a really potent and powerful nuclear deterrence capability
and air defense to make sure you can stop any incoming nuclear attacks. When it comes down to trying to target smaller systems and varied systems that are flown in deliberately to evade our technologies of radar, so they're flown in low, they're flown in slow,
they have a smaller electronic signature, all of this is deliberately designed to evade the latest technologies of high-tech radar. When you've got an enemy that's clever enough to do that and can innovate in a low-tech way to get around your defenses,
it still takes some time to catch up in terms of air defense. And so that's what's happening right now. And you can see some big-ticking items put into place, like, you know, high-intensity lasers.
A lot of money is being invested in that to literally burn drones out of the sky and to make sure you've got this endless amount of munitions, this capacity to take the drones out.
But it comes down, really, to a layered defense system and to try and detect these drones before they attack your ships, before they attack your sites.
And sadly, that's just something that didn't happen with the latest attacks on Tower 22. What we think happened there was a Reaper drone, I think it was, a US Reaper drone that was returning back to that base.
The hostile drone was sent to follow that in, perhaps mimic its signature, and then to breach those air defenses. So a lot still to be done in terms of air defense.
Well, one last area I'd like to touch on, and that is, there isn't a lot of ethics in war, but are people out there, maybe it's the United Nations, maybe it's NATO, maybe it's somebody else, is there an effort being put at to think about, okay, as these advances occur, is there some set of ethics that ought to apply?
I certainly think so, and this is something I've been working with the United Nations Security Council and previously the United Nations Special Rapporteur and Exhibition, Summary and Arbitrary Executions to try and develop such guidelines.
For me, some of the most concerning issues are how, as drones are proliferating to a number of states with perhaps not the best human rights record, those drones are being used to target civilians in brutal civil wars.
These nation states are finding it suspiciously difficult to differentiate between certain ethnic groups that perhaps are involved in a broader civil war and those who are active combatants.
And I'd point any of your listeners out there to recent events that have been happening in the DR Congo, in Burkina Faso, and in Nigeria, deeply concerning attacks.
There are hundreds of civilian casualties, and then when it comes down to the future of drone warfare, I'm sure that your listeners will agree that the process of delegating that decision about whether or not a human lives or dies to a machine is something that should never be allowed to happen.
And this is something that President Biden and President Xi say that they agree on, that China and the US are working towards this, but then at the same time they're both developing these systems as well.
And there's a lot of talks happening at the UN and one of the first resolutions to work on a resolution, so nothing solid was passed just at the turn of the new year to try and work on these issues.
And I just hope that the policy can keep up with the technical developments.
Well, we really appreciate your expertise and spend some time today with the veteran radio listeners, Dr. James Padden Rogers, Executive Director of the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.
You've really run us around the whole world here on what's going on in drone technology and as we move from the first to the second drone age and on to the third is pretty scary.
So we're glad, guys, like you are out there thinking about this and working with folks such as the United Nations Security Council to come up maybe with some appropriate protocols.
And we didn't even use the word artificial intelligence, but that's another whole scary rap of if these drones start making all their decisions with AI as you say with no human involvement.
Boy oh boy, we're really heading into uncharted waters.
Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. Thank you for having me on and thank you for your service.
You got it, James. Thank you.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today. I am Jim Fausone. It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at 800-69-348-00 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web.
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