Newton and Nonlinear Strategy: Examining UAVs and Military Robotics

Introduction

Isaac Newton once stated, “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” These views were echoed three centuries later by Stephen Hawking who remarked, “While mathematics and physics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve.” The respective fathers of classical and quantum mechanical theories of gravity are both left puzzled by the forces of human interaction which seem to defy mathematical expression. Despite its dynamic complexities, strategists have attempted to distill war - humanity’s most chaotic and violent endeavor - into the neat linear frames of mass, force, and friction. For if all the components of war could be measured and the sum of the forces calculated, then victory could be reduced to an algebraic equation with the same certitude that physicists can predict the motion of the stars.

The development of quantum theory in the early 20th century upended the smooth, predictable worldview of Newtonian mechanics into a universe governed by randomness and chaos at the deepest levels of reality. As Niels Bohr observed, “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” This shift to a nonlinear, probabilistic, uncertain understanding of the physical universe has begun to entangle itself with the broader dimensions of humanity. The emergence of chaos theory, as a broad construct, views the world not through the lens of calculable causal relationships but of seemingly random, disproportionate, and non-repeatable systems. The compounding entropy of complex systems once derided by the classical strategist as mere “friction” to be overcome is transformed by the nonlinear strategist who harnesses the “fog of war” as his weapon to mire and bleed elephantine adversaries.

The development of lethal military robotic systems such as UAVs represent a paradox between these two understandings of the world. A robot, which follows exact linear programming, is being utilized in the most chaotic of human environments. A robotic soldier should take all the uncertainty out of battle for it will follow its orders, its programming, to the keystroke and never deviates for it does not get scared, hungry, or tired. These drones and the larger digital infrastructure which undergirds them were predicted to ultimately lift the “fog of war” and give the commander a near certain understanding the battle-space. But the torrent of data coming off these systems is generating its own fog, that of digital bits, which overwhelm a human’s cognitive ability to effectively process and act upon. This data overload leads to computers and artificial intelligence taking over an ever increasing share of workload from imagery analysis all the way up to Big Data analytics computing entire war plans. But as humans are further removed from the carnage of combat, the visceral horror of war becomes neutered, reduced to pixels on a monitor controlled from a distant command center with a joystick, or perhaps one day, by algorithms entirely.

The Wars We Know: Newton and Classical Strategy

The publication of Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton in 1687 ushered in a new scientific understanding of the universe which was based on calculable results as opposed to, “a science which up to then had remained in the darkness of conjectures and hypotheses." Newtonian mechanics created a linear deterministic model which democratized the understanding of the world away from the supernatural and made it accessible to man. The natural force of gravity could now be expressed in the precise language of mathematics allowing it to be understood and utilized.

One of the first applications of Newton’s laws to the realm of warfare was the subsequent development of ballistics. Projectile based warfare naturally lent itself to the science of mechanics where the forces of gravity and aerodynamic drag guided masses of lead to their targets. The military academies of Enlightenment Europe drilled Newtonian Mechanics into their officer cadets as a means to “mass produce” skilled gunnery commanders who could harness the power of ballistics to accurately employ artillery with minimal practical experience. Jean-Louis Lombard, early mentor to Napoleon Bonaparte, utilized ballistic equations to compute the first gunnery tables while teaching at the Regimental Artillery Academy in Auxonne, France. These tables rapidly increased firing times under combat conditions by providing artillery officers pre-calculated tables with the necessary charge mass and elevation angle to hit targets at a given set of ranges. Lombard’s gunnery tables reflected the larger trend of the age towards “mechanizing” armed forces into following linear instructions. These procedures and drills took the conscious thought out of battle thereby reducing soldiers into simplistic “cogs in the machine” which could be more easily controlled en masse in a hierarchal command structure.

The idea of a mechanistic, controllable, almost “clockwork” army which could utilize scientific principles to achieve victory became the essence of linear classical strategy. As the Israeli military historian, Azar Gat, notes, “the ideal of Newtonian science excited the military thinkers of the Enlightenment and gave rise to an ever present yearning to infuse the study of war with the maximum mathematical precision and certainty possible.” This ideal of precision reflected the spirit of the age, noted by Albert Einstein in, “the belief that it [was] possible to describe all natural phenomenon in terms of simple forces between unalterable objects.” This mechanistic worldview became an ingrained dogma within strategic culture which began to describe armies and battles in the Newtonian terms of mass, force, and friction. During this era, the very notion of warfare was thought to be reducible into a precise calculated exercise if the laws and principles governing it could be derived yielding some universal formula.

Antoine-Henri Jomini, a Swiss officer on Napoleon’s staff, sought to apply the scientific methodologies of his day to the practice of war, separating it from the specific historical and social context of the moment. Making strategy scientific meant reducing it to a set of specific variables which would be universally applicable across theaters of combat. In the Treatise on Grand Military Operations, Jomini came to the conclusion that, “Strategy is the key to warfare; That all strategy is controlled by invariable scientific principles; and these principles prescribe offensive actions to mass forces against a weaker enemy at some decisive point if strategy is to lead to victory.” Jomini reduced war to a generic mass of forces which could be accelerated in an offensive action which applies the sum kinetic energy of the army’s weapons to the enemy’s weak point. While this theory may work in the abstract, Jomini derives this formula without respect to all the intangibles of war like the passion of the soldiers fighting, the commander’s charisma, or the political reasoning behind the war itself. In attempting to derive universal laws of combat, Jomini has constrained the chaotic dynamism of war to some inanimate algebraic equation divorced from the deeper human dimensions which drive the very purpose of war.

An emphasis on linear “scientific” principles leads to strategy becoming an exercise in rigid procedure which focuses on “checking boxes” on a preordained “universal” flowchart rather than a systematic evolution developed from the interaction of dynamic actors. The deterministic urge to derive universal laws of combat analogous to the laws of physics leads to the arbitrary reduction of a complex system into overly simplified linear terms, essentially making the problem fit a limited equation. Modern campaign planning tools like DIME or the more inclusive PMESII attempt to decompose the totality of war into simple devices with finite variables and dimensions. How do abstract planning tools like DIME account for intangibles like cultural tradition, human geography, or religious motivations when there is no section for them? This model can obviously incorporate new variables in an attempt to become more comprehensive but there is a fundamental flaw in the calculation of these variables. In Newtonian mechanics, each variable can be precisely measure or otherwise ordained through algebraic reasoning. When dealing with socially constructed variables like politics or information, how are these variables even defined let alone measured? A linear framework requires operating with variables which are inherently quantifiable like the range of a ballistic missile or the dispositions of a tank division. Linear conventional strategy, therefore, works best when utilized against an enemy who also adheres to same mechanistic principles of warfare. Clashing armies of men and material who are transformed into two great machines engineered to precision with a single purpose: destroy the enemy. The ideal war in Newtonian terms, therefore, is a neat, albeit complicated, set of optimization equations amongst the various units and forces employed which all must be synchronized in order to solve the “equation” better than the adversary. In this sense, making war becomes little more than a lethal game of chess on a grand scale.

Next Generation Warfare: Nonlinearity and Chaos Theory

War in the Newtonian sense can be likened to a living game of chess where there are large, yet ultimately finite, number of moves which can be made by each commander which therefore can be calculated. But in a nonlinear dynamic world, one commander who may be a chess grandmaster may have accidentally stumbled into a high stakes poker match. “Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.” In this new paradigm, precision and determinism are overwhelmed by the notion of inherent uncertainty which arises from dynamic open systems.

Two centuries after Newton bequeathed the laws for a calculable, knowable universe, the field of quantum mechanics shifted that view to a universe which was in fact random and chaotic at the atomic level. German physicist Werner Heisenberg developed a series of inequalities which became known as the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle” which showed that the more accurately one was able to determine any given particle’s position the less one knew about its momentum and vice versa. Thus one could never speak with any certainty about the disposition of an atom or its constituent parts; for it is all just a cloud of uncertain probabilities. In a marked reversal from the absolute determinism of the Newtonian paradigm, Richard Feynman, father of Quantum Electrodynamics, remarked, “It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.”

Feynman’s Theory of Quantum Electrodynamics provided a detailed understanding of electrons in terms of individual particles or “quanta” which allowed for their manipulation through semiconductor circuits and transistors. These semiconductors gave rise to development of modern digital computers which register open or closed transistors in the binary language of 0s and 1s. This binary logic has permeated the popular lexicon like the mechanistic frameworks which came to the fore during the Enlightenment. The rhetoric of wars are reduced to a binary exercise. In the words of Clausewitz, wars are “nothing but a duel on an extensive scale.” A duel between allies and axis powers, the free world and communism, the liberal democratic west and Islamic extremism. A more accurate framework from the language of computers, however, would be the quantum mechanical concept of a qubit which represents neither 0 nor 1 but all possible states between these two values, simultaneously.

In classical linear terms, the current civil war in Syria is a simplistic duel between the government of Bashar al-Assad and a monochromatic grouping of rebel forces led by the FSA. But a nonlinear view provides a more nuanced interpretation. This civil war to remove Bashar al-Assad has drawn in foreign fighters of all stripes from Jabhat al-Nusra to Hezbollah to ISIS. Jabhat al-Nusra is nominally fighting to unseat Assad and his Shiite allies while it is simultaneously engaged against their erstwhile cousins of ISIS. The Kurds of northern Syria are fighting against ISIS while intermittently allying themselves with Assad’s army or the FSA as it suits them. Constantly shifting allegiances, goals, and actors obfuscate the conflict such that no party can truly have a clear understanding of its present position or future trajectory in the midst of such chaos. This uncertainty arises from the flowing, dynamic nature of chaotic systems which are born from the multitude of interactions amongst numerous independent actors which evolve in unique and inexplicable ways.

The seemingly random actions within large scale systems like a war have the tendency to develop their own sense of order which is only perceptible in hindsight. This phenomenon of self-emergent order is a central concept of Chaos Theory. A more common expression of this phenomenon is seen in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in which he describes what he terms the “Invisible Hand” whereby, “pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” When humans in a capitalist economy purchase goods and services for their own satisfaction it drives employment which allows more people to buy goods, causing a cascading effect which lifts the wellbeing of the overall economy. Large scale chaotic systems such as nations and their economies also exhibit a property known as “self-organizing criticality” where all these minute actions build up inexorably and uncontrollably to a single cataclysmic point which is set off by a seemingly minor yet disproportionate event. This small tactical event causes the entire system to erupt in chaos but then eventually resettles into a new semi-stable order, resetting the clock until the next crisis. In economics, this is reflected in the perennial cycle between bull and bear markets with the decisive point marked by a widespread financial crisis and recession like the Lehman Brothers collapse precipitating the 2008 Great Recession. The economy eventually reset itself and it has returned to its growth path, building to the next collapse.

In the natural world, thunderstorms are normally taught to be the result of the linear collision of a cold front pushing up under a warm front. But in terms of Chaos theory, a thunderstorm is the culmination of numerous individual yet interconnected atmospheric variables like the temperature and pressure over large tracts of territory. Solar energy is absorbed across countless air molecules which builds until the system snaps in a storm of rain, hail, and lightning. War, therefore, can be viewed in this construct as the product of numerous independent human interactions which build to a violent cataclysm which is set off by some tactical event which has disproportionate effect. These small tactical events like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the attack on Pearl Harbor, or 9/11 are seared into our collective memory as the trigger for specific conflicts for the human brain almost naturally seeks a definitive answer in the midst of such chaos. This leads to a tendency to overlook the larger structural and generally intangible realities of the day which precipitated the conflict.

A nonlinear framework for war shifts the understanding away from some inanimate mass, a tectonic plate, marching towards its rival with calculable precision to a more primordial oozing of magma just under the surface waiting for the right tremor to unleash an eruption. The linear conventional commander seeks to solidify his forces into a deliberate mechanistic mass which can be wielded with synchronized unity of effort. This is seen in the conventional combined arms formations of tanks and soldiers supported by artillery and airpower coordinated  by a central headquarters along axes of advance towards definite objectives like the 2003 Coalition march to Baghdad. The nonlinear commander, by contrast, operates in a decentralized fashion utilizing loosely controlled forces which operate mostly autonomously against a set of general goals. Throughout the Iraqi insurgency, a constellation of independent actors self organized to bleed coalition forces through simple, cheap attacks which compounded into the chaotic crescendo seen from 2007-2008. These disparate insurgent groups generically referred to as “Anti-Coalition Forces” or “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” utilized swift, small unit ambushes and raids against lumbering mechanized forces while presenting little, if any, formal command and control infrastructure to be retaliated against. These fluid nonlinear, unstructured forces were therefore able to outmaneuver superior conventional forces who were mired in the “fog of war” unable to precisely determine who or what they were actually fighting beyond the tactical engagement.

In the classical understanding, “war is an act of violence pushed to its upmost bounds… which logically must lead to an extreme.” War here is the terminal cataclysm of the interaction between parties. War, in the nonlinear sense, however, transcends pure kinetic force and incorporates a panoply of dimensions for confrontation from psychological operations to economic sanctions, all of which operate towards a unified strategic objective. This broader comprehensive approach to conflict has recently been labeled as “hybrid war” as practiced by Russia against Ukraine and the West. In this construct, the actual kinetic component known as “war” is no longer the terminal or even the most important phase. It becomes simply one segment in the overall effort, the “mere continuation of politics by other means.” Nonlinear war becomes the fusion of all the levers of power, both kinetic and intangible, applied across all possible domains. The interaction therefore is elevated beyond the binary states of war or peace to a complex superposition of all possible states between these poles.

Military Robots: Brave New World or Continuation of War by Other Means

Nearly two hundred years prior to Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking research, Leonard Da Vinci developed designs for one of the first humanoid robots, a mechanical knight. Da Vinci’s simplistic robot utilized pulleys and gears to automate the movements of knight which ticked along in a clockwork fashion, essentially a life-size wind-up toy. Today’s digital robots allow for far more dynamic movement but are still constrained to the linearity of Boolean logic of “If-Then” statements. As described in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, they are “nothing but lights and clockwork” which tick perennially along to the cold logic of their programming, blind to any larger implications of their actions.

The robot would in theory be the ultimate expression of linear Newtonian combat. The ideal of “mechanizing” armed forces into a synchronous “clockwork” formation would be realized by substituting the fallible human with the “perfect” logical execution of a robot. “Boot camps” spend weeks drilling conscious thought out of soldiers to respond like machines, until they build such muscle memory that they respond to orders on instinct. Drones in contrast would execute their orders without question “off the shelf” and only stop if they ran out of power or bullets. But herein lies the most fundamental advantage of humans over drones of any shape: they can adapt. Humans can push themselves beyond their ordinary capacities, fueled by adrenaline and sheer willpower if the situation requires. If a human soldier’s weapon jams, he knows to switch weapons or take the enemy’s. A robot requires all of these “common sense” steps to explicitly be programmed in otherwise it is liable to march forward oblivious to the malfunction.

In the 1990s, just as the internet was beginning to metastasize, the centuries old ideal of precise command and control of the battlefield was rebranded as “Network Centric Warfare” within the corridors of the Pentagon. The development of digital computers, the internet, and derivative technologies like GPS, UAVs, and miniaturized sensors was promised to finally sweep away the “fog of war” by linking every soldier and vehicle in a distributed battlefield network. In this schema, every soldier and vehicle would act as a node in a larger mesh network feeding realtime information up to command which would then be processed and pushed back down to the warfighter. Proponents of “Net Centric Warfare” like, Naval War College President Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, argued that, “technological innovation, particularly in information technology, will purge the conduct of war of the uncertainties and ambiguities of the past. For those happy powers that set the technological pace, war will become an essentially frictionless engineering exercise.”

During the Iraq War, these ideas were fielded in the form of Blue Force Tracker, which tracks friendlies via GPS and displayed their positions on satellite maps; and the Distributed Common Ground System which takes in various signals intelligence feeds like UAV footage and distributes it from the divisional headquarters down to the company commander. Generals utilizing modern communications technologies can watch events over Afghanistan using a MQ-1 Predator while sitting at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida and then reach out with a “5,000 mile screwdriver” to issue orders directly to ground forces. Major Louis Bello of the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division, in an interview for the book Wired for War, recalled that he had generals in command posts back in the United States overriding his commands as the ground forces commander while in the middle of a firefight in Shah-i-Khot valley of Afghanistan during Operation Anaconda in 2002. Major Bello describes that generals got “seduced” by what they could see, thinking that the entire battle was reduced to the two dimensional projection on their monitor and thus missed the larger context. In the words of Major Bello, “It’s sometimes what you can’t see which actually the most important.” It is ironic, therefore, that UAVs and the larger IT networks which enabled them which were supposed to lead to near perfect clarity in fact augmented the overall “fog of war.”

The development of drones, whether on air, sea, or land, have generally focused on substituting unmanned platforms for once manned systems. This linear schedule leads to attack gunships being replaced by UCAVs or transport trucks for UGVs but the overall structure and functionality of the force remains unchanged. These drones are intended to provide “force multiplication" effects by adding robotic “wingmen" to assist a shrinking number of expensive manned platforms. DARPA is currently experimenting with the concept of having each F-35 become the commander of its own small squadron of UCAVs. This in theory would allow a single F-35 to complete the mission of 4 or 6 aircraft, a major incentive in light of current budget realities. Extrapolating upon this operational concept, there is no real need for a manned fighter at all. An E-3 AWACs or the flight bridge of a carrier could become the control point for a wing of UCAVs, with each squadron directed by a human officer, realizing an ideal of remote “push-button” warfare as seen in works such as Ender’s Game. In fact, even unmanned fighter jets or bombers could become superfluous as these are just “weapons trucks” which could be superseded by long-loiter intelligent cruise missiles controlled from afar. Instead of spending hundreds of millions or even billions on a single platform, a military could purchase hundreds of relatively cheap, disposable cruise missiles equipped with mission specific submunitions like the Brimstone missile or electronic warfare jammers. If such intelligent cruise missiles were deployed upon attack submarines then they could become de facto stealth aircraft carriers cruising the depths with hundreds of UCAVs onboard able to swarm an enemy’s airspace without notice. If drones are truly to have a “revolutionary” nonlinear impact on warfare, they will need to be utilized not just as mere substitutions for existing systems but in such a way which changes the very character of war.

The first threads of such a revolution at the strategic level can be seen in the extraterritorial drone program run by the CIA to neutralize suspected terrorist targets. The ease at which targets can be eliminated in secret, outside of Congressional or public scrutiny, allow the US President to sidestep constitutional limits on his war powers. The ability to reach out and smite any potential threat, anywhere in the globe provides a seductive tactical solution with minimal political or human cost, at least on one side. This use of drones blurs the distinction between peace and war into a state of “persistent conflict;” a global robotic game of “whack-a-mole” without end. Drones make it easier for any actor, government or otherwise, to engage in deniable operations while still achieving their objectives. A growing number of countries, up to 87 as of 2013, and a number of non-state actors like Hezbollah make active use of drones. If all of these actors followed American precedent and started conducting extraterritorial strikes against their respective adversaries, it would create a cacophony of conflict without any single point of origin. The state of international affairs in such a world would be reduced to the chaotic Hobbesian state of man, “a war of all against all”; enabled by the perfect linearity of robotic warriors.

Conclusions

War is a fundamentally chaotic enterprise. It is expressed as the tumultuous interactions of man and machine on the battlefield born from the very psyche of populations. Humanity’s attempts to reduce war to the neat linear perfection of the natural world simplifies this dynamic leviathan into an abstract engineering problem. The introduction of robotic systems onto modern battlefields was supposed to harken the days of neat frictionless conflicts free of risk. But by reducing the friction to committing an act of violence to a push button exercise, it severs the visceral costs of combat. Without this, war becomes a passionless exercise; an algorithmic solution being applied to complex human problems which defy mathematical expression.