“Do not engage in military operations; that will lead to defeat. Do not take land from a peasant. Emphasize nationalism rather than communism. Do not antagonize anyone if you can avoid it. Be selective in your violence. If an assassination is necessary, use a knife, not a rifle or grenade. It is too easy to kill innocent bystanders with guns and bombs, and accidental killing of the innocent bystanders will alienate peasants from the revolution. Once an assassination has taken place, make sure peasants know why the killing occurred.” This strategy was referred to as “armed propaganda.” –Ho Chi Minh
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For this post, Doug gave me a ton of good ideas and he is certainly a contributor. I also want to thank Amos for the Elephant Chisel idea. This building snowmobiles is an ambitious exploration of drone warfare and what we think it will look like in future wars, and especially at the small unit level. The quote above is more geared towards explaining why precise targeting is so important and why collateral damage will only hurt our efforts in this war.
Let’s get started. The historical reference for this conversation, will be the “White Company“. The White Company was a 14th-Century Italian private military company of mercenary archers, led by John Hawkwood. Highly skilled archers were a hot commodity back in that time period, and were a key element to winning wars. John Hawkwood made a ton of money deploying these types of professionals, and because of these highly effective mercenary archers and their fearlessness, all the countries paid a high dollar to get those services. Matter of fact, that desire to employ the best of the best to win wars, is what would later contribute to the rising debt of countries back then and the creation of the bond in order to help pay for it all. John was also very skilled at playing both sides of the conflict, but that is a different story.
Another reason why I brought up the White Company, is that this closely mimics what is going on today. PMC’s are very important to current day drone warfare. They make the drones, they repair them, they prep them for battle and in some cases they control them. Of course we are not seeing PMC’s take part in offensive operations, where a drone pilot is actually pulling the trigger on targets, but they are certainly involved with all other aspects of supporting offensive and defensive drone warfare.
That’s not to say that a PMC wouldn’t be using drones like this in the future, but at this point, it is military drone pilots that are pulling the trigger. What is interesting today, is the close relationship that PMC’s have with the various militaries in the world, for conducting drone warfare. That is why I like using the White Company reference.
In order to staff a modern day version of the White Company or whatever unit, you need a modern version of archers, or ‘drone archers’. (that would be cool if it catches on as the vernacular for this type of drone warfare) These folks would be the guys skilled at all aspects of drone warfare and would represent the ‘knife’, as Ho Chi Minh would put it, of a unit. Drone archers would certainly give any unit the edge in future battles, much like the archers of the White Company did in the 14th century. These expert drone archers would be tasked with preparing and using drones for both offensive and defensive maneuvers, and their precision targeting would be highly valued. (collateral damage will continue to be a bad thing in the future) Think of these drone archers as snipers who attack from the sky.