In a recent discussion I had with Vinay Gupta, Gupta hinted that(as I read him anyway):

1) the American corporate state’s apparent descent into lawless fascism (as evidenced by the passage of provisions for indefinite detention without trial in the NDAA and the recent seizure of MegaUpload), combined with

2) the likelihood of failed or hollowed-out states (especially those like Spain and Greece on the southern periphery of the Eurozone) succumbing to networked resistance movements like the Arab Spring and M15, or the secession of a critical number of states like Venezuela or Iceland from the neoliberal system by repudiating their debt, abandoning the dollar as reserve  currency, abrogating neoliberal “free trade” (sic) and “intellectual property” (sic) agreements, etc…

…make it quite conceivable that the American state will fight a last-ditch war against the rest of the world to preserve neoliberal capitalism via large-scale drone warfare, cyberwar, assassinations, and militarized police repression either indirectly through what remains of authoritarian U.S. client states or directly by quasi-private hired thugs like the Pinkertons and Blackwater.  The invasion of the British United Republic by remote-controlled UN teletroopers in Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction, coupled with similar actions against other “failed states” in a global full-court press, is a good fictional illustration.

Now, let’s take this and look at post-economic Greece, Spain and Italy. Italy is city states. Greece and Spain nearly went Anarchist nr WW2.  With a moral case for war in those nations, they could be the first testbeds for first world populations fighting for new politics. Shit….

Because what I’m saying here is very simple: the Americans are probably going to be the Bad Guys on the next outing….

And I think it’s important to understand their failings in Iraq and Afghanistan as being optimistic signs for global Liberty. Learn & repeat.

Conclusion of conclusion: there is a decent chance that Netwar will cripple American offensive capability in unjust wars due to moral loss….

In that case, the street fighting between Occupy protesters and heavily armed riot cops in Manhattan, Portland — and particularly Oakland in recent days — prefigure the coming war of global counterinsurgency in the same way the Spanish Civil War prefigured WWII.

In this light, John Robb’s recent commentary on drone warfare is especially troubling.  In a post announcing a prototype drone from Northrop  Grummond, he wrote:

It’s an autonomous aircraft/drone that has a full weapons bay (4,500 lbs).   Say that word again:  autonomous.   That’s the breakthrough feature.  This also means:

It can make its own “kill decision.”  Again and again and again.  That decision is going to get better and better and cheaper and cheaper (Moore’s law has made insect level intelligence available for pennies, rat intelligence is next).

It isn’t vulnerabe to a pilot in Nevada directing it to land in Iran. Oops.

It will eventually (sooner than you think) be the “Queen,” making decisions for thousands of smaller swarmed (semi-autonomous) drones it lays on a battle zone (aka “city”).

In sum:  It allows an unprecedented automation of conventional violence.

Granted, it will be possible for small groups to put together systems like this on the cheap.  For offensive or defense reasons.

However, I’m much more worried about their ability to automate repression, particularly if combined with software bots that sift/sort/monitor all of your data 24x7x365 (already going on).

He went on, in a subsequent post, to describe the implications for the future of warfare—including domestic counterinsurgency:

Gunboat diplomacy was the essence of military power projection for centuries.  Want to coerce a country?  Sail a aircraft carrier battle group into their national waters.

However, carrier battlegroups are hideously expensive, increasingly vulnerable to low cost attack, and less lethal than they appear (most of the weapons systems are used for self-defense).

What are nation-states replacing them with?  Drones.   You can already see it in action across the world as drone staging areas are replacing traditional military bases/entanglements.  Further, drones already account for the vast majority of people killed by US forces.

Of course, the reason for this is clear.  Drones are relatively cheap, don’t require many people to deploy/operate, don’t put personnel directly at risk, can be easily outsourced, can be micromanaged from Washington, and are very effective at blowing things up.

The final benefit of Drone Diplomacy:  drones make it possible to apply coercion at the individual or small group level in a way that a blunt instrument like a carrier battle group can’t.

What does this mean?

It allows truly scalable global coercion:  the automation of comply or die.

Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability—wouldn’t that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).

Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.

If they don’t do what you ask, they die soon therafter due to drone strike (unless they go into deep hiding and disconnect from the global system).

With drone costs plummeting, we could see this drop to something less than <$1000 a strike in the next half dozen years (particularly if kamikazee drones, like Switchblade, are used to reduce explosive payload requirements).

What can we look forward to?

The mid term future of a national security apparatus in secular ($$) decline?

Drones, drones, and more drones.  Shrink the headcount.  Cut training.  Put manned weapons systems in life support mode.  Cut mx.

All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on “signatures”) and drones to kill them.  When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.

In the most recent post in the series, he argued that the only real defenses against drones are to harden targets and thereby raise the average cost of attacks relative to target value, or to develop a counter-offensive drone capability.  Drones, like nukes, shift the advantage almost entirely to the offensive.

Drones tip the scales of conflict in favor of offense.  All of the technological trends in motion will only increase the offensive tilt:
* Smarts + + +
* Numbers + + +
* Cost – – –
* Maneuverability + + +
* Range + + +
* Payload + + +

Frankly, against a foe this maneuverable, numerous, and smart/crafty the ability to physically defend against an attack from a distance is nearly nil.  This is the same problem the USSR ran into when cruise missiles (early, but very expensive, drones) were deployed in the 80’s.  The cost of an air defense system necessary to protect against cruise missiles was beyond their means.  Some more detail:

* Missile Defense?  Radar, missiles, etc.  The cost of a missile that has the capacity to intercept a swarm of drones flying evasively is prohibitively expensive.
* EMP/HERFs/Lasers.  Power and range problems.
* Kinetic weapons.  Again, the range is too short.  These point defenses would overwhelmed.
In reality, all you can do is armor/bunker up and make the attack expensive in material as you can.

– or –

Have a similar offensive capacity.

This means one thing:  drones of your own.

Drones that can do damage to a foe that is at least equivalent to the value of you as a target.

Robb’s category of hardening against attack would probably include encryption and anonymizing technologies of all kinds, and open-source alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, in order to reduce the transparency of social media as a source of targeting information.  The development of such alternatives is already well underway, and the first drone kills based on social media profiles will hasten the development mightily.

His reference to the availability of drone technologies on the cheap, combined with the primacy of the offense, is also suggestive.  Some of Robb’s readers, in the comments to his posts, were quick to connect the dots:

Why only nation states?
What is it in dronetech that cannot be open sourced and turned against the oppression? If I was a dronemaker, at least a clandestine one, I’d want one of my drones on the news for whacking someone newsworthy, not some noname schlub whose only crime is being too clever to be duped into believing nation states are somehow worthy of preservation.
The combination of anonymous communications (TOR++), anonymous currency (Bitcoin) and dronetech, at least as far as I can tell, should go some ways of evening the playing field between oppressive governments and their citizens.
Most governments can already whack pretty much any subject they care to. But the reverse is not true. With widely available enough drones, some symmetry might again be restored….
—Stuki

What are the weaknesses of drone support crews, drone manufacturers and their employees?
—Craig

…you  could characterize drones as elements in a network and attack/subvert/co-opt critical nodes in that network just the same as you could do when attacking anything else. (And who knows what those may be?)
—Mercutio

You defeat drones by killing its tail, the US has these things all over the world, but operating out in the open to a great extent, would not take much ground work to find out where they are flying from and the operational crew, find their base, and kill them on the ground, and kill there ground crews too….  Kill the guys who send the drones, they are findable and hittable, equalize the kill zones, bullets and bombs travel both ways.
—The Black

It seems to me that one defense would be to “grab the belt,” in various ways. I would go after the personnel involved, from leadership and their families to the operators. The air force, and their dependents, have escaped conflict for far too long.
—EN

It will also inspire asymmetric attacks we cannot handle. Rule 1 in reality-based warfare is “don’t throw stones when you live in a glass house.” What is actually happening is that Somali pirates, to take one example, now gain an incentive for mobilizing random pieces of the Somali diaspora to do incalculable damage to local – global infrastructure. This has not been thought through. It is typical ideological idiocy run amok.
—Robert David STEELE Vivas

Attacking the drones themselves is far far more difficult than neutralizing the C&C structure behind them. ) As ‘The Black’ mentioned above find the guys with the joysticks and their chain of command.
—Sam

On the kinetic level, drones work both ways. When an insurgent can cheaply print a few dozen with small explosive warheads and swarm them at an enemy airfield, the playing field is a bit leveled. Paddy Moyne and the rest of the SAS were able to take out hundreds of Axis planes on their African airfields using very small charges. Do I need to expound?
—B
Look at the numbers of contractors that supported the war in Iraq/ are supporting the war in Afghanistan. Contractors quit EASY. Pick a company, and I’m not dog piling, but for example Blackwater/XE.  How long would their contractors have worked protecting Dept. of State if a family a month was being murdered stateside?
Fill in the blank. Contractors are mission critical and can quit on a moments notice.
—matt

This all stands to reason, as far as I can tell.  If drone technology favors the offensive over the defensive, but an implosion in the cost of acquiring it erases the advantage of states over networked actors, then the disadvantage would seem to lie with the side which has the most centralized economic and communications systems and the most concentrated target profile.