Bespoke Sabotage: when warfare gets personal
The Rational Optimist visits the modern battlefield
Last week, we offered a reprieve from our normally grim Sunday fare with a poop puff piece about Mr. Putin’s potty habits overseas.
You’re welcome, friends, but vacation is over. Strap in, we’re going for a ride down a dark rabbit hole.
When “ideas have sex”
Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist. Published in 2010, the subtitle of this popular science book sets the tone: How Prosperity Evolves. It’s an optimistic book that argues against excessive pessimism in the face of human ingenuity over the long haul.
One of the more sticky notions in the book is the concept of “ideas having sex,” which is his shorthand for the mixing of different technologies that leads to scientific breakthroughs. These breakthroughs have led to increased standards of living across the world and better global health than our ancestors.
True, but there’s also a Dark Side: sometimes the offspring in this union of different technologies is a monster.
A real-time example? What is happening on the front lines in Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War in Ukraine. This recent article in The Rational Optimist Society (yes, that’s a thing), argues that drones are
…having their breakout moment now thanks to the combination of cheap batteries + miniaturization + AI... Drones are cheap, disposable, and devastatingly effective in war. Ukrainian soldiers duct tape grenades to $200 drones you can buy at Walmart. These drones streak across enemy lines to blow up $10 million Russian tanks.
The internet of things turns deadly
A few months ago, we published an article about Israel’s multi-year effort to infiltrate the supply chain for pagers used by Hezbollah. The devices were fitted with special batteries laced with a few grams of high-explosive PETN and a switch to detonate the rigged battery. The result was devastating and historic.
It was like something out of a spy thriller. At 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, pagers all over Lebanon started to beep. A few seconds later, they exploded, killing 12 people and wounding hundreds. The next day, it happened again, this time with walkie-talkies, killing and wounding more people. As of this writing, 37 people were killed and some 3000 injured.
That was another example of “ideas having sex.” When Hezbollah announced they were moving away from trackable mobile phones to old-school pagers, the Israelis realized that the people who would carry pagers would be those in the chain of command who needed to be informed of rapid developments.
We thought about this kind of personalized sabotage this week when we read this article in Task & Purpose: Exploding drone operator goggles show the future of sabotage.
While it’s true that drones are the game-changers in Ukraine, most drones are still driven by human operators. These operators wear first person viewer (FPV) goggles to drive the drones to their targets.
The Ukrainians realized: If you target the pilots, you stop the drones.
The plot was first reported by Russian state media and confirmed by Ukrainian officials, who also spoke about the plan to the New York Times. According to pro-war Russian Telegram channels, the goggles contained anywhere between 10-15 grams of explosive material, that would detonate when turned on.
The “beauty” of this kind of bespoke sabotage is that you don’t even have to be that successful. After the Israeli attack, for example, every Hezbollah operative ditched his pager. Similarly, if the Russian drone operators don’t trust their equipment, they will change their behavior and be less effective.
The genie is out of the bottle
It’s tough to describe just how fast these changes are happening, but we’ll give you an example from our own work. When we published Order of Battle in 2022, we almost didn’t include the scene with the pack of killer robot dogs that decimated a Russian command post. We thought it was too sci-fi to include in a near-future novel.
We were wrong.
It’s not just about the technology
As we write this, there are attempts in progress to end Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War in Ukraine. While it’s a toss-up whether the current effort will be successful, the conflict will continue long after the fighting stops.
In this episode of SpyTalk podcast, former senior CIA operations official Glenn Corn discussed his recent trip to Ukraine during this time of changing alliances. He points out a few of the ways that we will carry the impacts of Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War with us into the future.
On both sides, there are people that have been designing weapon systems that are very, very effective. Some like off-the-shelf tools…And they've been killing people with these weapons very effectively. People are going to be out there to hire them, to use them, whether it's transnational crime groups, you know, narcotics, terrorist organizations.
While it’s tempting to think of a post-war rebuilding effort as infrastructure and economic development, we’re just fooling ourselves.
Warfare just got a lot more personal.
Be happy. Stay healthy. Read (or listen to) a book.
As always, thanks for being a supporter –
David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
PS – Are you looking for the FREE download of Death of a Pawn?
PPS - This email is free, but it's not cheap. If you'd like to show your support, here's where you can find all the Two Navy Guys' books.
PPPS - If you enjoyed this post, you can get it delivered to your inbox every week for free.
After reading your book Order of Battle, my mind went back that mental scene when robot dogs were devouring their prey, I literally saw the same terror images in the faces of the unfortunate North Korean soldiers looking up at these Ukrainian drones moments before they struck…
Another eye opener about the evolution of modern warfare. Whatever happens, I know I'll read it in your books first.