The Drones are Coming! The Drones are Coming! The Twilight of the Global Empire?

 

This clip looks like a videogame, but it is not (caution, disturbing images). You are seeing Azeri drones destroying Armenian military units during the recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Is this the harbinger of the collapse of the Global Empire?

 

Many things have been happening in 2020 that will reverberate for many years in the future. While the West is busy with its "great reset," a small war was fought in a region of the world that you probably had never heard about before: the Nagorno-Karabakh. There, the army of Azerbaijan soundly defeated the Armenian army. 

What made this campaign peculiar is that it was the first time in history that a military confrontation was decided by drones. After that the Azeris (the people of Azerbaijan) had gained control of the sky, their drones could pick the Armenian military units one by one and destroy them at ease. There are video clips all over the Web showing vehicles and other installations being destroyed, and people being shredded to pieces and tossed around like ragdolls.

No surprise: the writing was on the rotor blades. Already in 2012, I had started thinking about the consequences of the development of military robots in a chapter that I wrote for Jorgen Randers' "2052" book. I returned to the subject in 2019, noting how cheap drones would change the rules of war because they could be managed by small organizations, possibly by private military contractors. 

We don't know exactly who managed the drones used by the Azerbaijan forces, but we know that they were made in Turkey, not a major player in the world's power game. Azerbaijan, then, could afford to deploy a number of drones sufficient to overwhelm the Armenian forces even though it is a small country with a GDP of just about 44 billion dollars per year. If Bill Gates, alone, had decided to fight Azerbaijan, he could won the war just using his private financial assets, estimated at more than $100B. 

Surely, the Azeri could never dream to be able to afford even a single carrier strike group of the kind that the Western empire deploys: each group costs about 30 billion dollars and the US has 9 of them. We don't know if the Azeri drones would be able to defeat an American carrier group. But we may be reasonably sure that, in terms of kills/cost, drones greatly outperform aircraft carriers. 

So, we know that drones can fight wars and win them. And now what? Are drones going to make all other weapon systems obsolete, just like tanks did to horses? Maybe, but things are not so simple. They never are. 

At the end of the story, war is simply about control, it is not about pulverizing people to atoms. You may want to use weapons to attain control over others, but that means you have to control the weapons you use. And not all weapons are easy to control. During the 20th century, we saw the development of new weapon systems that were incredibly powerful, but difficult to control. Chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, all have a high kills/cost ratio, so much that they are called "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). But they are difficult to aim at specific targets and the very fact that they are so cheap invites retaliation even from a weaker opponent. 

For example, chemical weapons were used several times in war, but they were decisive only in one case: during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. In that case, the Italians could happily go on gassing the Ethiopians without fear of retaliation since Ethiopia had no air force. It was a different canister of chlorine when Italy decided to go bombing Britain a few years later, in 1940. In that case, the Italians didn't even dream to use chemical weapons, knowing all too well that Britain could have retaliated in kind. 

Drones are cheap enough that, if manufactured in great numbers, they can kill a sufficient number of people that you can define them as weapons of mass destruction. But they look much better than the classic WMDs in terms of control: they can be aimed at very specific targets, even single persons. That's nice (in a certain sense), but things are not so simple. They never are.

Let me state this again: wars are not about pulverizing enemies, they are about controlling them. That brings the question, who controls drones? Behind this question, there is a deeper one: who controls the people who control drones? 

And we are at the core question: the human society is a complex system, and complex systems are never easy to control. The peculiar kind of complex system that we call a "national state" is normally able to reach a condition in which it engages in a common effort, a "war," against another state. But who decides that it is a good idea to go to war? It is rarely (if ever) the result of logic and reason. 

The minds of adult human beings are hard-wired in terms of likes and dislikes and that can hardly be changed except by means of drastic and unreliable actions, torture, electroshock, de-programming, and the like. Instead, it is relatively easy is to trigger aggressive reactions which are pre-programmed inside human brains. It can be done using the technology that we call "propaganda."

We can see propaganda as another kind of WMD: it has a very high kills/cost ratio, but it has control problems, too. It is relatively easy to use it to convince people to hate someone, much more difficult to convince them to stop. That's why most modern wars, dominated by propaganda, are wars of extermination. As usual, control is everything.

Of course, drones, unlike human brains, can be programmed to do exactly what their users want them to do. But that's a boon and a problem at the same time. If someone can hack into the drone's control system, the drone might well be re-programmed to attack its former owners or, simply, to fly harmlessly toward the horizon. Of course, there are ways to harden drones against this kind of attack, but no defensive system is ever perfect. At the limit, drones could be hard-wired in such a way that they would act in complete autonomy, without anyone being able to affect their behavior once they are activated. It was the way the first drones in history, the German V1s of WW2, worked: once fired, their trajectory couldn't be altered anymore. Their strength was in their stupidity: they had no "brain" whatsoever. But modern drones are supposed to be smart weapons: turning them into dumb ones would bring the same problems of the other WMDs. With this kind of drones, we would return to the "MAD" strategy, mutually assured destruction. No control, no way to win a war.

So, we return to the original point: wars are about controlling humans. Then, how do you control the people who control the drones? Would you be able to use standard propaganda techniques for that purpose? Maybe, but there is a big problem here. Modern propaganda was developed to control large masses of people and to convince them to line up on the battlefield to kill each other for the profit of people who would comfortably stay at home. Drone operators (let's call them "droners") are a different breed. They are specialists who might well decide that they won't be so easily tricked into killing people for the profit of others. It was the point I was making in my post where I compared modern droners to the European condottieri of the Renaissance, the leaders of troops of mercenaries specialized in the use of the newly developed firearms.

Controlling the condottieri was notoriously difficult: they tended to be unruly and easily switch sides. Droners might show the same tendencies. Mercenaries are like professional killers: you can hire one to kill someone you don't like, but there is no guarantee that the intended victim won't be able to pay the killer more than you do. One possible way to control droners might be returning to communication technologies developed during the Middle Ages, when the problem was how to control the most sophisticated weapon of the time: armored knights. For droners, it may be possible to develop something similar to the idea of the noble knight who fights for justice. You may object that there is nothing noble in pressing a button to kill a person, which is the job of droners. But, on the other hand, it was the same for an armored knight when he sliced in half a peasant, his main job. So, could we see in the future something like an epic of "Sir Lancelot and the droners of the round table"? Who knows? It might happen. 

A simpler solution to the drone problem would be to limit or even abolish drones by means of international treaties and straight threats to the smaller players. It was done, with a certain degree of success, with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. There are good reasons to do the same with drones: it is very much in the interest of the big powers to avoid that cheap drone technology could spread to smaller states and then challenge the top dogs of the game. So, people seem to be getting the message and there are ongoing efforts in this sense. Abolishing military drones would allow the Western Empire to keep the expensive toys its military like so much, carrier strike groups and others, at least for a while. 

Unfortunately, that would just hasten the speed at which the Empire is rushing toward disintegration. This is the way empires fall: they tend to bankrupt themselves by excessive military expenses. It is a deadly mechanism that sees empires gradually running out of resources while pollution does its damage, too. As a result, Empires become poorer but their leaders don't understand that they should cut down on military expenses. They do exactly the opposite, trying to maintain a military power they can't afford anymore. The result is well known: collapse, often in the rapid form called "Seneca Collapse". 

But, no matter how rapid collapse is, during the twilight phase that precedes it there is a phase of mayhem when the blackberry jam hits the fan. Then, the game of war follows no rules. It happened when economic decline forced the Roman Empire to abandon its expensive heavy infantry units, together with its even more expensive static defense systems: the great walls built along the Empire's borders. The old cumbersome system was replaced with nimble cavalry units, patterned on the Barbarian forces they had once despised. It was a much cheaper army, but the Empire had lost its advantage over its enemies and the result was that it lost control over much of its territory. The result was a period of continuous small scale wars that further hastened the collapse of the Empire.

In our age, the Global Empire may soon become too weak to be able to outlaw drones or any other weapon system -- maybe it is already too weak. So, maybe drones are really coming and they will become the main tool for war, while the mighty carrier groups fall prey to rust. Think of something like the Armenia vs. Azerbaijan war that spreads all over the world (and do watch the clip above to see what it would look like, not good for humans, to say the least).

Bad times for human beings but, as usual, history marches onward and you can't stop it just by hoping things wont' change. And, who knows? Drones might turn out to be smarter than us and decide by themselves whom they want, or don't want, to kill. Pacifist drones?(*) You never know what AI could lead us to! 

(*) When we discuss these matters, we often go back to Isaac Asimov and his "three laws of robotics" which, among other things, forbid robots from harming human beings. Implementing these laws with modern AI technologies would be far from easy, as Asimov himself understood very well. Eventually, he arrived to consider the three laws as a moral code for robots that made them superior to human beings as being who could never be evil. Unfortunately, we are far away from such a thing. But, who knows?

Coal, wars, and beautiful women: why in Italy we speak Italian and not French

Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione, 1837-1899. Portrait by Michele Gordigiani. The following text is part of the talk that I gave in Paris on Feb 12, at the Momentum Institute (h/t Yves Cochet, Agnes Sinaï, and Mathilde Szuba)

In the study of history, it is fashionable to use quantitative data as much as possible. We speak of financial and economic factors, of the competition for natural resources, of population unbalances, of the effects of climate, and more. And, yet, sometimes history goes on according to the whim of one or another ruler making colossal mistakes; from Napoleon to Saddam Hussein. In that case, human factors become predominant and only in some cases we can have a glimpse of what may have passed in the mind of the people at the top. One such case may have been that of countess Virginia Oldoini, femme fatale of the 19th century, mistress of the French Emperor Napoleon III, and, perhaps, the origin of the Italian unification of 1860. Beautiful woman, indeed, and hard to describe using system dynamics models!

Let's go back to the early 19th century. At that time, the industrial revolution was in full swing; fueled by the coal mines of Northern Europe, mainly in England, France, and Germany. This revolution had created an economic unbalance, making the Northern countries much richer and more powerful than the Southern ones. It was not just a question of having or not having coal. It was a question of transporting it. Coal is heavy and bulky and, at that time, the only practical way to carry it over long distances was by the sea. Sailing ships could take coal everywhere in the world but, when it was a question of taking it inland, waterways were needed. No waterways, no coal. No coal, no industrial revolution. That was the reason of the unbalance: the Southern European countries, just as the North-African ones, could have no waterways because of the lack of water. Hence, they could not industrialize and they remained economically and militarily weak.

Here is the situation as it was in 1848.

At this date, the only Mediterranean regions that had waterways and could industrialize were France and Northern Italy, and Piedmont in particular. Of the two, France was by far the most powerful and, already in 1848, you can see how France had occupied Algeria, snatching it away from the weak Ottoman Empire. The rest of the North-African region was ripe for the taking and even the Kingdom of Naples, in Southern Italy, was militarily and industrially weak; an easy prey for any industrialized country. So, what could have stopped the French from turning the whole Mediterranean sea into a French lake? That had been, apparently, Napoleon's idea when he had invaded Egypt, in 1798. It had not worked out at that time, but it had been a good strategic intuition that later French governments could have carried out.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of the British. In the great strategic game of the 19th century, they had sighted Egypt, that they would occupy in 1882, but there was little or nothing that they could do to stop France from occupying the whole Northern African shore, all the way to Egypt and perhaps farther than that. Nothing direct, that is, but what if they could create a strategic counterweight to balance the French power? And what could that counterweight be? Italy, of course, if it could be unified and transformed into a single country, out of the plethora of statelets it was at that time.

So, in mid 19th century, the strategic pieces of the Mediterranean game were all in their places, as if on a giant chessboard. The British objective was shared by Piedmont: unify Italy as soon as possible and stop France from further expansion. On the other side of the chessboard; France's objective was also clear: avoid at all costs the unification of Italy and take as much as possible of North Africa, as soon as possible.

Clear; perfectly clear. And easy for France. They had almost nothing to do; just keep Piedmont in check; which they could do easily. It is true that Piedmont was a small industrial powerhouse for its times, but it was no match for the much larger and much more powerful neighboring France. But the French president and emperor of that time, Louis Napoleon, or "Napoleon III" did exactly the opposite, even engaging the French army in support of the expansion of Piedmont in Northern Italy in a series of bloody battles against the Austrians, in 1859. Not that France helped Piedmont for nothing, of course. In exchange, the French obtained a slice of land on the Western side of the Alps, formerly part of Piedmont. It was a territorial gain but, in strategical terms, it was nothing in comparison to what France was losing.

One year later, Piedmont, with the support of the British, sent an army led by Giuseppe Garibaldi to invade the Southern Kingdom of Naples. The Neapolitans put up a spirited resistance, but, alone, they couldn't cope and Napoleon III did nothing to help them. With the collapse of the Southern Kingdom, the complete unification of Italy became unavoidable, despite a last-ditch attempt by Napoleon III in 1867, when he sent troops to Italy to stop Garibaldi from taking Rome.

So, Italy was. And it still is. The curious thing is that it had not to be. Had Napoleon III stopped Garibaldi in 1860 in the same way as he did in 1867, probably we would still have a kingdom of Naples and the country that today we call "Italy", would be mainly a French protectorate. And, most likely, French would be the dominant language in most of the country.

Instead, France had lost a historical occasion to become the dominant Mediterranean power. Later on, the Franch still managed to carve out some more pieces of North Africa, occupying Tunisia in 1881 and Morocco in 1904, but all further advances in the Mediterranean region were stopped when, in 1911, Italy claimed what Italians saw as their rightful slice of the declining Ottoman Empire: the region that we call Libya today.

So, how was it that Napoleon III made such a colossal strategic mistake? In a way, we can say that it is rather normal: Rulers of states are often awfully incompetent at their job (just think of our George W. Bush). But, for Napoleon III, there may have been a reason that goes beyond simple incompetence.

The French have invented the phrase "Cherchez la femme" ("look for the woman") as an explanation for many otherwise inexplicable events. And, in the story of the unification of Italy, there is a woman involved: Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione. She was the cousin of Count Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont at that time, and she was sent to Paris by him, it seems, with the specific idea of influencing Napoleon III. She was a faithful Italian patriot and she understood very well what was to be her role as mistress of the French president and emperor. She was to convince him to do something that the French should never have allowed: help Piedmont to invade and conquer the rest of the Italian peninsula. According to what we can often read in history books, she fulfilled her role and, from the portraits and the photographs we have of her, maybe we can also understand how.

Of course, we can legitimately think that this story is just a legend. But could it be that Virginia Oldoini really convinced Luis Napoleon to do what he did? In this case, the Countess should be considered as one of the most influential women in modern history. But we will never be able to know: by now, she is on the other side of the mirror, perhaps watching us from there and laughing at us.

For a fictional tale of what could have happened had Napoleon III been smarter (or Virginia Oldoini less beautiful) see "The Tipping points of History" on the "Chimeras" blog.

Tricking the Atomic Genie

Italian Version

This 1957 video by Walt Disney was produced in parallel with a book titled "Our friend, the atom."  It was translated into Italian and I perfectly remember having read it when I was, maybe, ten years old. Still today, half a century later, the imagery of the book is with me. When I think of atoms, electrons are blue and protons red, as they were drawn in that book.

"Our friend, the atom" was full of optimism and of hope for the wealth and prosperity that the atomic age would bring to us. It is a shock, today, to look back to those times and realize how much it had been promised and how little was actually delivered. Go to minute 4:40 of the film and watch the story of the Fisherman and the Genie. How naive it was to think that we could trick nature so easily! Our greatest mistake has always been to think that we are smarter than nature.




The clip shown here is the first of a 5-parts series. To see the whole movie, go to http://www1.teachertube.com/ and type "our friend the atom" in the search box. Clip n. 5 is especially interesting as it shows animations of what were thought to be the actual benefits that atomic energy would bring to us.