Dr. Paul Schwennesen, Co-Director of the Global Strategy Decisions Group, testifies on December 10, 2024 at the hearing “Safeguarding the Homeland from Unmanned Aerial Systems” held by the House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittees on Transportation & Maritime Security and Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, & Intelligence.
The problem. We have a real train wreck coming. I
think it goes a little bit unsaid. I think we lack a lot of the technical know-how on how to deal
with this, on how to assess and neutralize these threats. But there is somebody who does know, and
that’s the Ukrainians, having recently observed firsthand the astonishing evolution in drone
operations in Ukrainian-occupied Kursk. I think the message for me, at least, has finally sunk
home. Unmanned systems are not just an iteration. They are indeed a revolution in the application
of lethal force. The world’s most advanced weapons and tactics are being developed and deployed at
scale in the Ukraine-Russian front at remarkably low cost and without central direction, and
these facts hold radical implications for the next major shooting war between great powers.
We need to learn from the Ukrainians. The United States is rapidly losing its strategic military
advantage in this new technical environment. There can be little doubt that China, North
Korea, Iran, and other emergent powers are eagerly sending observers and technicians to the
front lines in occupied Ukraine to very carefully note the revolution in weapons delivery and to
adopt it into doctrines which seek to invert the military strengths of their larger, better
equipped, better trained Western geopolitical adversaries. We need to learn from Ukraine.
In short, the rules of the arms race have been fundamentally rewritten to favor small, cheap,
easily-mastered weapon systems. More important still, these disproportionate advantages
are not a one time effect. They amplify in a positive feedback loop through each iteration
cycle, new tech gets better exponentially faster and is deployed far more quickly than legacy
countermeasures. In Ukraine, the source of this immense innovation reservoir is the highly
adaptable, highly diffuse, emerging engineering base of Ukrainian technicians. Uncountable tech
workers routinely work full days in their civilian capacity, then leave their jobs to go work in
pop-up tech facilities until late at night, the whole country is on deck. They have created
an ecosystem of invention, a web only loosely coordinated through the Ministry of Defense. The
advances in hardware and software they produce are channeled into a robust system of decentralized
training facilities, and in less than three weeks, an FPV drone operator can be mission-ready.
Operators with no previous battlefield experience have been credited with as many as
1,500 confirmed kills. The disproportionality is vast. This is perhaps the main takeaway
in a total war peer-to-peer scenario. If technology allows one side of a conflict to
impose extraordinary damage on the exquisite, expensive, difficult-to-master weapon systems of
their adversary, and can do so at a fraction of the cost expended by their enemy. It doesn’t
require an economist to see where that leads. It is easy to be a critic, but I am convinced
the United States and its NATO allies have a very narrow window of opportunity to address
this major shift in comparative advantage.