In the next 5-10 years, Moore's Law will make Iraqi style insurgencies a thing of the past:
Moore's Law is the 1965 prediction by Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) that the transistor density of semiconductor chips would double roughly every 18 months.
In essence, Moore's Law and its derivatives predict that any endeavor that is based on information processing will double in speed and halve in price in ~12-18 months. This is true in computing, increasingly true in medicine, eventually will prove to be true in bio-technology, and is already proving to be true in military affairs. As soon as any endeavor becomes primarily about processing information, Moore's Law applies.
Here is my best guess on how this can work on the battlefield; it involves Smart Birds, Smart Bats, and Smart Mosquitoes along with Smart Snakes, Smart Centipedes, and Smart Cockroaches.
Consider the current Israeli incursion into Gaza in search of Gilad Shalit and to stop the launching of Hamas rockets into Southern Israel. Part of the operation involves gathering intelligence data. The Hamas leaders have gone underground (and turned off their cell phones), Hamas "militants" typically hide among the population and fight from within the human shields provided by the population, and Shalit is currently hidden somewhere within the warrens and narrow alleyways of Gazan towns. In pursuit of Hamas, the IDF is following the money trail, which leads to the Dawa charity:
IDF operation tracks Hamas money trail
"Hamas is an organization that operates terrorist activity through Dawa institutions," the lieutenant-colonel told subordinates before the raid. "We need to do everything to crack down on this organization."
As the soldiers leave the school, they spot four Palestinians hiding in a nearby hut and order them to stand facing a concrete wall outside.
An officer begins drilling 19-year-old named Ahmed regarding the location of the Dawa offices in Samua. The visibly frightened man says he works in a vegetable store and was walking home with friends after watching the France-Germany World Cup match when he saw the soldiers and decided to hide in a nearby hut.
After some coaxing, Ahmed points to a tall green-lit building. "That is the Dawa office," he says.
The troops quickly take up positions as the company commander and a few soldiers begin searching the building to ensure that Ahmed hadn't sent them into a trap. After a quick search, the soldiers begin kicking in doors and find offices filled with Hamas charity documents and computers.
Maj. Sha'adi, an officer with the Civil Administration, which supplied the intelligence for the operation, sifts through the documents and fills cardboard boxes with material to be analyzed by intelligence experts.
As the troops file back into their armored vehicles after another long night on the prowl, Didi and his men return to base, knowing it won't be long before they enter nearby villages in search of terrorists and the money that supports them.
It is clear that this is very dangerous work for the Israelis; the Palestinians can easily set up ambushes, IEDs, and other nasty surprises. Now, picture the scene 5-10 years down the road.
During the day, a flock of Smart Sparrows networked together offer daylight coverage of areas of concern; at night, they are replaced by a flock of smart bats equipped with night vision and all part of a meshed network. These flying birds and bats provide 24 hour real time coverage of whatever parts of an enemy territory you desire. They can fly high enough to be invisible from the ground and are nearly impossible to shoot down even when spotted. The Palestinians can kill all the birds they see in Gaza, but when Smart Sparrows cost a few dollars and the next generation of surveillance includes Smart Mosquitoes, their problems become exponentially greater. If they spend all their time hidden indoors, they can't fire Qassam rockets at Israel, which is one of the goals of the current Israeli incursion. Furthermore, Smart Snakes can slither into buildings, and even if they can be defended against, Smart Cockroaches and Centipedes, once cheap enough, will be ubiquitous. If necessary, it would be simple to equip such robots with reservoirs of Cyanide or some other such poison (spider venom?), at which point targeted killings and Smart bullets would take on a whole new meaning.
We lost too many soldiers and Marines re-taking Falluja; imagine a future Falluja, or Mogadishu, (or Tehran?) where we fight machine guns and IEDs with Smart Birds, Bats, Insects, Snakes, and Spiders. Our military could see the theater and manage the entire operation from safe bunkers connected by networks to the battle field, which could be an underground bunker, or an isolated field.
Two important points:
1) For the purposes of this post, it does not matter if you like the Israelis or hate them; it doesn't matter if you support the American troops and the mission in Iraq or not; it doesn't matter if you think America is a greater danger than Iran in the world. My interest is in extrapolating a highly plausible, I would suggest, probable, evolution in the art of war.
2) Everything I have described in this post is either already available as a prototype (robotic centipedes, snakes, electronically controlled flappable wings, small UAVs) or a logical extension of current developments. More fanciful weapons, like Smart Dust based on Nanotechnology, will almost certainly arrive, but their arrival is much further off than my time-line.
The key reason such technological developments will end Insurgencies is due to the inherent nature of asymmetrical warfare. The advantage of the insurgents is their knowledge of the terrain and ability to camouflage themselves among the supportive (or terrorized) local population. The use of Smart Robotic Spies will diminish and eventually negate both advantages as our information development outpaces the enemy's ability to maintain secrecy. Further, because insurgents of necessity can only use lower technology equipment than modern industrial states cutting edge equipment, they will always be stuck several generations behind our military.
The dangers to our freedoms of such technology will be of major concern, but in an unhappy paradox, as long as we remain threatened by terrorists, the development of such weapons is guaranteed. If we lose the ability to track money transactions through SWIFT because the program was exposed, we will need, and will find, other ways to track the information. It is inevitable as well as frightening.
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