The Trinity of Warfare Transformation: Unmanned Systems, Digital Command Control, and Civil-Military Sensor Networks

Figure 1 Cover of the “Unmanned Systems and the Transformation of U.S. Combat Capabilities” Report

The U.S. military has long focused on reducing the risks faced by combat personnel. For decades, the U.S. military has invested significant resources in military construction, but the costs of platform-centric weapon development and production remain high, leading to insufficient investment in personnel protection. This development model has resulted in almost no consumable forces for the U.S. military in warfare, forcing them to incur high political costs to resolve wartime issues, further weakening the effectiveness of U.S. conventional deterrence.

As the U.S. military strays further down the wrong path, adversaries actively exploit the vulnerabilities of the U.S. military’s expensive weapon platforms, adopting cost-imposing strategies and developing relatively inexpensive technical means to discover and destroy the U.S. military’s sophisticated modern weapons. Among these, large-scale low-cost unmanned systems greatly change the cost calculus for both offense and defense. Once a large number of low-cost unmanned systems target the adversary’s manned platforms or more expensive unmanned systems, the adversary will be forced to choose either to use expensive weapons to intercept the cheap unmanned systems or to bear the consequences of being struck.

While focusing on the attack capabilities of unmanned systems, the U.S. military must also consider developing cost-effective defensive measures. In the Ukraine crisis and the Israel-Palestine conflict, both sides of the conflict have developed technologies to destroy drones, locate drone operators, and interfere with drone navigation systems/communication links. Among many technical means, particular attention should be paid to the role of electronic warfare in denying unmanned systems. A key lesson learned by the U.S. military from the Russia-Ukraine conflict is that the new generation of counter-unmanned systems should at least pursue costs equal to or lower than those of unmanned systems to achieve defensive superiority. In 2020, the U.S. Army established the Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, which is a good start, but due to limitations such as defense budgets and service authorities, the U.S. military has made slow progress in deploying distributed counter-unmanned systems, a situation that must change rapidly.

Almost all wars integrate new technologies and concepts based on old combat ideas, and the Ukraine crisis is no exception. The Ukrainian military has used unmanned systems to improve traditional infantry, armored, and artillery tactics. Although unmanned systems are destructive, they alone are insufficient to change the nature of warfare; only when drones are combined with digital command control systems and civil-military sensor networks can a transformative trinity of power be formed.

This trinity of power is driven by commercial technology, making new modes of warfare possible. Unmanned systems can be used for battlefield reconnaissance, artillery calibration, and have evolved into forms such as loitering munitions, first-person-view drones (FPV), and one-way attack drones, enhancing long-range strike capabilities. Digital command control allows battlefield information, which was traditionally accessible only to a few senior decision-makers, to be directly transmitted to frontline combat personnel, enabling those on the battlefield’s edge to access the same battlefield information as command center personnel, sharing the same situational awareness. Civil-military sensor networks are spread across the battlefield, capable of expanding the battlefield space to any location where commercial equipment is deployed, significantly shortening the time from sensor detection of targets to target strike through an unprecedented fusion of open-source and classified data. When these three elements come together, they provide combat forces with a rich array of options.

Personnel play a core role in promoting military capability development and are crucial to realizing the advantages of unmanned systems. When operational forces recruit personnel related to unmanned systems, they must consider factors such as recruitment, training (individual and collective), education, culture, and promotion. Currently, “first-person-view drones” still require one operator per platform, making this control structure very expensive, overly taxing on limited human resources, and tactically fragile. There should be an enhancement of individual soldier’s unmanned planning and control capabilities, developing swarm control software that allows a single operator to control multiple unmanned systems simultaneously.

An important manifestation of processes is legally granting decision-makers command authority in a particular domain, allowing higher-level forces to control lower-level forces as needed. In the next decade, the number of unmanned systems in military institutions will exceed that of humans, changing the human-machine ratio. Current human-centered organizational structures, tactical actions, training models, etc., will undergo disruptive changes. Machines will cooperate with humans rather than merely being controlled, which may require a difficult ideological struggle for people to accept.

The rapid procurement of drones is as important as industrial mobilization. In the Ukraine crisis, the Ukrainian military may lose thousands of drones weekly. By directly purchasing from commercial drone companies and shipping them to the front lines, rapid replenishment can be achieved. In March 2023, the Ukrainian government issued a decree to eliminate some bureaucratic hurdles in bidding for drone contracts for the Ukrainian armed forces, believing that “it is better to accelerate the operation, purchase, and delivery of drones to the front lines than to spend months on unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy.” Although the U.S. military is learning from the experiences of the Ukraine crisis and proposing plans like “Replicators”, large-scale procurement of drones will bring other issues, requiring a balance between complexity, capability, cost, and quantity; there is no one-size-fits-all approach for unmanned systems.