Disruption

For the Australian Defence Force (ADF), this is the first regional deployment of the F-35s, aircraft far better than anything operated by any regional air force. Initial combat air patrols out into the South China Sea, though nowhere close to the disputed territory, demonstrate F-35’s knowledge superiority.

The aircraft track People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) Chengdu J-20 aircraft conducting their own combat air patrols, monitoring and classifying their radar emissions and also those from a variety of air defence radars operating from PLA-Navy ships as well as from the island bases. That’s all without registering more than some faint returns on the PLA radars.

But undetected they aren’t. As one aircraft makes its final approach to land at Butterworth, a small quad-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) zooms into its path.

The pilot avoids a collision – just – but his wingman isn’t so fortunate. A second UAV goes straight into his engine. The pilot safely ejects but a $150 million aircraft has just fallen victim to a UAV worth at most a couple of thousand dollars.

Worse is to come. As smoke from the burning aircraft rises into the sky, dozens of small suicide UAVs rise from scattered backyards and bush clearings and converge on the base, each carrying an explosive payload about the equivalent of a hand grenade – modest but quite sufficient to damage or destroy an expensive aircraft.

These UAVs are flying autonomously in a swarm, heading to coordinates based on satellite imagery taken in the previous half-hour. Many UAVs fall to base defences – electronic jamming and good old-fashioned gunfire – but enough get through to destroy one aircraft and damage two more.

At a crucial time, a squadron of modern combat aircraft is rendered combat ineffective.

Everyone knows precisely who was responsible but the actual evidence is scanty. Recovered UAVs, readily available commercial models, don’t carry PLAAF markings and their operators, quite few in number, disappeared the moment their little aircraft were airborne.
Round one goes to the PLA – a classic case of disruptive technology where traditional exercise of air power was constrained by imaginative application of a new capability.

This scenario is wholly fictitious and it might not play out at all this way. Practically everyone is now aware of the risk of weaponised unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and much research is being devoted to counter-UAS technology.

That ranges from basic electronic counter-measures – most commercial UAVs operate with common command protocols on well-known frequency bands – through to kinetic means including net-throwers, guns, missiles and even hunter-killer UAVs and trained falcons. Directed energy weapon defences would appear to have significant potential.

But the risk of a mass UAV attack on an air base is real, as was amply demonstrated on January 6 when 13 bomb-carrying drones attacked two Russian bases in Syria. Ten headed for Russia’s main Syria base at Khmeimim in Latakia province. Another three hit the Russian naval base at nearby Tartus.

This attack, apparently launched by anti-Syrian regime rebels caused no damage or casualties, with all attackers downed, six by missiles and seven by electronic counter-measures.

Russian images of one downed drone show what appears to be a large fixed wing model aircraft powered by a small petrol engine, armed with small bomblets.

It would appear Russian forces were ready and well-prepared for such an attack – hardly surprising as the conflict in Syria and Iraq has featured extensive use of small UAVs for tactical surveillance and armed strike.

So, in any future deployment the ADF can reasonably expect to encounter hostile UAS, with the potential for them to disrupt, constrain the freedom of operations we might once have fully enjoyed.

Disruptive technology is scarcely new, although the expression in its modern guise was created by US business consultant Clayton Christensen in an article in 1995. However various iterations of this concept were articulated by earlier authors.

Disruptive technology is essentially any new technology which stuffs up an existing market or way of operating. There are abundant examples.

The introduction of the automobile in the late 19th century did not end horse-drawn transport, and all that went with it, as early cars were expensive, unreliable playthings of the rich.

What did was the introduction of the Model T Ford in 1908, an affordable and reliable vehicle which introduced motoring to the masses.

More recently, Finnish company Nokia dominated the global market for mobile phones, at one time selling more handsets than any other company. Then along came the Apple iphone. Nokia phones still exist but how many do you see these days?

People will always need to get from one place to another and how else could they do it other than aboard a taxi?

Uber showed there was another way, which was frequently cheaper and more convenient, underlining Christensen’s fundamental thesis that it wasn’t the new technology which caused the disruption – it was the underlying business model which the technology enabled.

That’s certainly apposite for civil aviation, where technological change has the potential to undermine established business models.

Short of invention of teleportation, airlines are here to stay but other technologies can nibble away at the margins.

How about autonomous vehicles, emerging and as yet unproven but developing at a frantic pace. No businessman is going to hop aboard a driverless car to get from Sydney to Adelaide or Perth but how about from Canberra to Sydney. Just hop in the car at your front door, program a destination and sit back for the three-hour journey with laptop or tablet and do some work.

UK aviation analyst Philip Butterworth-Hayes observes that for the first time taking the train might be faster than flying and high speed rail is starting to become an increasingly important competitor on longer routes and in markets which until now have been preserved for aviation.

“In a head-to-head fight on an even playing field HSR train companies and airlines tend to be fairly evenly matched on distances of around 400 miles (640 kilometres), with rail companies dominating shorter routes and airlines starting to pull ahead once distances go beyond 500 miles (800 kilometres),” he wrote in a prescient article titled Disruptive Aviation Technology 2013-2022.

That already applies to Japan and much of Europe, plus plenty of other short well-travelled routes.

How about Australia? High speed rail linking Sydney to Canberra to Melbourne has long been considered and routinely deferred. The business model is based on providing an appealing economic alternative to flying on these routes. One day it may happen.

Butterworth-Hayes says most of the key drivers in the aviation market for the next decade appear to be known and understood. Air travel is expected to continue to rise, as it has steadily for the last couple of decades.

He said the world needed more airliners but they had to be 15-20 per cent cheaper to operate and that meant more fuel efficient engines, more onboard electric rather than hydraulic systems, better aerodynamics, lighter airframes and interiors, more efficient routing and lower maintenance costs.

“If fuel efficiency is the prime driver in the market, then Airbus and Boeing have done almost everything they can to ensure mastery over the current and future technologies which drive increasing fuel efficiency,” he said.

It’s hard to imagine what could disrupt this trajectory, outside science fiction technology such as teleportation or a reactionless drive.
What could are social events of the type which have occurred before – the 1973 oil shocks, which drove up global oil prices around 400 per cent, and the 9/11 terror attacks in the US.

In just about every industry sector on earth and especially in defence, smart people are paid to think hard about future trends. Alas, their success rate is pretty ordinary, even by people who you’d think should know better.

How’s this gem, cited by Forbes magazine in a 2015 article, from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in 2007: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”

With the rise of a professional military class, there have long been predictions as to how some new technology will revolutionise warfare.
In 1921 Italian air power theorist Giulio Douhet published his treatise on air power, arguing that the bomber would always get past defences and that strategic bombing of a city and its industry would so erode the population’s will to resist that capitulation would speedily follow.
With the experience of strategic bombing from World War I and the expectation that future bombers could deliver a far greater weight of bombs, his theory provided highly influential.

The next war proved he was mostly wrong. The RAF discovered early its bombers couldn’t always get through and even when they did, they couldn’t reliably strike a target even as large as a city. Bombing of cities in the UK and Germany if anything boosted the population’s will to resist.

So strategic bombing wasn’t the disruptive technology it was pitched to be. But there were other disruptive technologies which affected the outcome and had a marked impact on what came later.

Think radar, the jet engine, strategic rockets and first generation precision weapons.

In the 1991 Iraq war, precision weapons came of age and US air power dominated the battlefield, so completely that it seemed US dominance over traditional adversaries such as the former Soviet Union was assured almost indefinitely.

Yet, as air power analyst Dr Alan Stephen of the Williams Foundation observed, Israel also believed it had absolute air supremacy over its Arab neighbours following its stunning victory in the 1967 Six Day War.

In what’s been described as one of the most brilliant aerial victories in history, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike, completely destroying the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air forces on the ground.

It was all over in six hours with minimal Israeli losses. This remain the gold standard for pre-emptive strikes to destroy enemy air power.
Unsurprisingly this one-sided victory led Israel to believe its air power would always triumph. Six years later in the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, Egypt launched its assault over the Suez Canal and Syria into the Golan Heights under an effective ground-based air defence (GBAD) system.

That comprised multiple Soviet SA-6 and SA-7 missiles and their radars plus ZSU-23-4 AAA systems – quad- mount 23-millimetre radar directed guns on a tracked chassis.

Although the Israeli Air Force had developed its ability to suppress enemy air defences (SEAD) and provide close air support to ground forces, GBAD of the attacking Arab forces proved formidable.

In a single action, Egyptian ZSU-23-4s shot down three Israeli F-4 Phantoms and damaged two more. In the opening days, Israeli losses were unsustainably high and total aircraft losses for the war exceeded a quarter of their combat fleet of almost 400 aircraft.

In straight air-to-air combat Israeli aircraft, pilots and tactics proved vastly superior and aircraft losses on the Arab side were much higher.

Ultimately Israel won, with a combination of improved SEAD and fast-moving ground forces which overran Egyptian and Syrian GBAD.

The lesson from this is that for all the superiority of Western air forces, with their advanced aircraft, well-trained pilots, knowledge advantage and effective command, control and support, enemy GBAD may again turn out to be shockingly good.

How good? Until there’s an actual conflict which pits western air power against Russian GBAD, we won’t really know. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets talked up their capabilities (well they would, wouldn’t they?) as did many in the West, as they really didn’t know about Russian capabilities and weren’t about to make any claims which could have reduced their budgets for new equipment.

Eastern Bloc GBAD worked OK in Vietnam but was well outclassed in later conflicts such as the 1991 Iraq war.

More recently Russia has used the Syrian conflict to combat prove some of its newer equipment, including a pair of S-400 Triumf anti-aircraft missile systems.

Russia has been quite happy to sell these to anyone with the cash, including India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and also China, where deliveries started in January. There’s rising prospects that these will be encountered in some future conflict.

S-400 features an AESA radar and four different missiles with various ranges out to a maximum 400-kilometres. Russia claims they can hit anything in the US inventory, including F-22, F-35, B-1 and B-2, plus Tomahawk and ballistic missiles. A single battalion carries more than 100 missiles, which is a lot of air defence.

In an article last May about Turkey’s proposed acquisition of S-400, the Economist magazine described S-400 as one of the best air defence systems currently made.

US commentator Scott Wolff went further.

“Simply stated, of all the surface-to-air threats being faced by coalition airpower over Syria, the Russian S-400 SAM, known as the Triumf at home and better known to NATO as the SA-21 Growler is the most capable and lethal long-range air defense missile system on the planet,” he wrote on the fightersweep.com website.

Carlo Kopp on the Air Power Australia website said S-400 was often termed Russia’s Patriot but it was in many ways more capable.
“From an Australian perspective the deployment of large numbers of the S-300P/S-400 family in Asia is of major concern. Rapidly deployable, highly survivable and highly lethal these weapons are especially difficult to counter and require significant capabilities to robustly defeat,” her wrote.

“The US Air Force currently envisages the F-22A Raptor as the primary weapon used to defeat these capable systems.”
Dr Kopp said no Hornet variant or F-35 was designed to penetrate S-400 coverage and their survivability would be no better than legacy combat aircraft.

So Russian GBAD could be the disruptive technology of the next conflict but there are other possibilities.

On the plus side, North Korea – the most likely venue for a major conflict – doesn’t have S-400 but it does have a very comprehensive GBAD based around a domestic missile system similar to the older S-300.

It’s not just GBAD. US power projection capabilities are based on its carrier battle groups and China has developed a series of weapons with no role other than to kill US carriers.

That’s the DF-21D, a ground-launched ballistic missile intended to target a moving aircraft carrier at a range of more than 1500-kilometres, penetrating air defences at hypersonic speed and obliterating the target with either a conventional or nuclear warhead.
Beijing was apparently stung to develop this weapon system following the 1995 Taiwan crisis, when China reacted badly to prospects that the island nation would elect a pro-independence president.

To defuse the crisis, the US sailed carrier USS Nimitz and its battlegroup through the Taiwan Strait in an effective show of force.
Would DF-21D work as claimed – we just don’t know. Would Washington take a gamble and sail a carrier battlegroup through the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea next time a spot of sabre-rattling is needed? Again we don’t know. Whether this works or not, China still has a very significant anti-ship cruise missile capability.

It could be that China has mostly achieved its aim of denying free use of these seas to the US Navy.

Since we don’t know what we don’t know, science fiction provides some thoughts on the disruptive technology of the future, in particular the novel Ghost Fleet by Peter Singer and August Cole.

The premise is a future war between China and the US, which opens with a massive cyber attack which cripples many vital US systems. The advantage of US submarines is eliminated as China has developed a means of detection based on their reactor emissions of Cherenkov radiation.

F-35s are blown out of the sky – compromised microchips start emitting a radio signal as a beacon for Chinese missiles. Chinese anti-satellite weapons destroy US surveillance and GPS capabilities.

The novel also features UAV swarms and naval railguns. Ultimately the US wins, sort of. The book comes highly recommended as a primer on future war.

US private sector intelligence group Stratfor says as the power competition between Russia, China and the US intensifies, the emergence of disruptive weapons technologies will drive them deeper into a destabilising arms race.

Increasingly capable missile defence systems will contribute, specifically anti-ballistic missiles.

That goes both ways. Russia views the SM-3 – likely to be eventually acquired by Australia – with grave suspicion, along with the US THAAD and Ground Based Interceptor, as potentially neutralising their nuclear arsenals.

Add to that the new US super fuze installed on nuclear warheads of submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles under the decade-long nuclear weapon modernisation program.

This doesn’t make the missile itself any more accurate. The fuze detonates the missile warhead at the optimum location to cause most damage to a target such as a missile silo. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says that boosts the killing power of US nuclear warheads by a factor of around three.

“Because the innovations in the super-fuze appear, to the non-technical eye, to be minor, policymakers outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed its revolutionary impact on military capabilities and its important implications for global security,” it said in an article in March 2017.

But there’s more. The US is looking to field more of what are termed low-yield nuclear weapons, with explosive power of less than 20 kilotons. These are also termed tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons.

By nuclear standards their yield is modest but at the upper end it’s still equivalent to the bomb that devastated Hiroshima.

The logic is that large bombs, in the megaton range, would be so catastrophic that their use would be unthinkable and so they pose no effective deterrent, unlike smaller bombs. It’s not just the US – both India and Pakistan possess low-yield bombs as do other nuclear powers.

Any use of any nuclear weapon by anyone would be profoundly disruptive to the human race. If it didn’t lead to immediate escalation, it would have the effect of lowering the nuclear threshold for next time.