Gaza and the Future of Urban War
Gaza and the Future of Urban War
Armor and drones
Israel controls Gaza’s power supply, its water supply, and even its supply of food. Israel’s military has access to the best technology. Its population is 3x larger than that of Gaza. Its economy is 20x larger than that of Gaza at its height (2022).
Despite all of these advantages, the Associated Press is now claiming that at the conclusion of the war, there is a possibility that “Hamas might even claim victory.” How is this possible?
Without rehashing the reasons stated in the AP article, they are mostly concerned with the political and geopolitical complications of the region. Israel needs regional partners to help it govern Gaza — whether that partner is Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, a Palestinian state, the PLO, or Hamas itself.
Yet at the same time, Israel’s conduct in this war, from a purely military point of view, ignoring all moral and political considerations, is not self-evidently going to plan. Israel has destroyed a huge number of residential structures. Even if the goal was to expel the Palestinians and rebuild with Israeli settlement, there is no logic to destroying billions of apartment buildings, from an economic standpoint.
Furthermore, the destruction of residential structures does not disable Hamas, but only radicalizes the civilian population. In fact, killing civilians makes life easier for Hamas, since it now has less mouths to feed. Destroying residential buildings has diminishing returns. If Israel wants to destroy Hamas, it must attack the human resources and capital of Hamas, not the civilian structures which are essentially irrelevant to it (or which benefit Hamas through their destruction).
Pursuit to understanding Israel’s many strategic and tactical flaws, it may be useful to consider the problem of offensive urban warfare as a result of the problems of offensive armor. Then, we will consider possible solutions enabled by emerging technology.
Armor and Weight
The ultimate cost of armor is weight. The thicker the armor, the heavier it is.
The Nazis built incredibly thick and heavy bunkers during WWII, which are so resistant to explosives that the German government has been unable to remove them. Such structures, like the acropolis and colosseum, may persist for thousands of years. In fact, the easiest way to hide them from sight is not to explode them, but actually to build on top of them by covering them up with dirt and starting over.
The German bunkers prove that it is possible to build effective defenses against conventional weapons. Nuclear weapons are more effective, but are expensive to make — probably $5 million per warhead. For $5 million, you can build a very effective bunker. Therefore, in terms of stationary bunkers, the cost of defense and the cost of offense are almost at parity. Any future nuclear war would likely see entire underground cities constructed in Switzerland, Colorado, the Urals, and Tibet.
By utilizing natural mountains, and simply digging a tunnel at the base toward the middle or deepest part, building bunkers becomes unnecessary. Mount Everest would likely require 20,000 nuclear bombs to destroy its innermost layer above sea level, about 5 miles of rock. Humans have dug even deeper below sea level, about 7 miles — so it is possible to create “Everest-like” defenses anywhere in the world, even without natural mountains.
Since there are only 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world, our stationary defenses currently outstrip our offensive capacities. This is historically the case. Castles were built because it was much more difficult to destroy a castle than it was to build one. Instead, sieges were laid, with the intention of surrounding a castle and starving its population for months.
In terms of mobile units, especially those launching an attack, the problem of armor is much more complicated.
Porklion’s System
Porklion’s proposed system1 features a few elements:
Fast, lightweight vehicles, such as motorcycles, dirt bikes, or ATVs;
Utilization of new armors, such as silkworm;
Replaceable armor, which can be damaged and then switched out.
The fastest tank in the world only goes 51 mph, and most tanks have top speeds of 40 mph. At these speeds, it is relatively easy to target tanks with armor-piercing weapons. ATVs can travel at 80 mph, and dirt bikes at 123 mph, almost twice or even three times as fast.
Additionally, the average length of a tank is over 30 ft, while the average length of a dirt bike or ATV is under 10 ft. If we assume that the effects of size and speed are multiplicative on the accuracy of armor-piercing weapons, then we could say that a dirt bike or ATV would be at least 6x or even 9x as difficult to hit as a tank.
These figures ignore the possibility of exponential effects. For example, take a basketball hoop, and increase the diameter of the hoop by 2x, or even 3x. This will likely increase the accuracy of baskets by a much higher rate than 2x or 3x. To demonstrate this, find the distance at which you can only make 10% of the shots (depending on your skill, this may be 10ft or 100ft). Then, see how often you can hit the backboard or rim, instead of just counting your number of baskets. Even people who can only make a basket 1/10 times may find that they can accurately hit the rim or backboard 90% of the time — a 9x increase in accuracy, despite the size of the backboard not being 9x that of the basket (in terms of diameter). Therefore, increases in surface area do not lead to linear increases in accuracy, but exponential increases.
As a result, it is possible to imagine that anti-tank weapons would be rendered relatively useless against small and speedy fleets of ATVs or dirt bikes. These vehicles would then need to focus on armor which could defend against small arms fire (machine guns) rather than missiles and RPGs.
Drones
Oftentimes, when discussing war from an aesthetic standpoint, there is a bias against drones. Drones are seen as an inhumane feature of modern warfare. Therefore, there is an inherent bias in trying to discount or dismiss the applications of drones.
Firstly, drones are not inherently aerial. A drone system is simply any computer system which allows for an object to move without synlocational piloting. Synlocation means that the pilot has to be directly within the object — the captain of a boat, the driver of a car, the pilot of a plane. Drones use either remote piloting or AI systems which pilot autonomously.
The suggestion that ATVs and dirt bikes could reduce the effectiveness of anti-tank weapons and be utilized in Blitzkrieg-style offensives is not without merit. However, we should also consider that these vehicles could, at times, benefit from drone technology.
An autonomous ATV with a machine gun mount could act as a shock-troop, or cannon fodder, with front-line offensive capacity. Once this first line of autonomous vehicles began to overwhelm the defense capacities of the line, a second line of manned vehicles could follow, with infantry which could then dismount and fight on foot (possibly in street-to-street combat).
Alternatively, autonomous vehicles could bolster and fight alongside manned vehicles. For a fantasy analogy, think of the wargs of Isengard in Lord of the Rings. The wargs are ridden by orc riders, but if an orc is killed, the warg can continue the attack autonomously.
Utilizing autonomous vehicles alongside manned vehicles makes sense if there are very few soldiers and many vehicles. Assuming that an army has access to the most high-tech silkworm factories, it could probably also mass produce thousands of autonomous ATVs and dirt bikes. Soldiers cost, at minimum, $100k, while ATVs and dirt bikes can be produced for less. The current cost of military drones exceeds $700k, but this is partially because they are aerial drones, and partially because new technology always emerges as a luxury item. As the technology becomes older and more refined, we can expect the price of autonomous terrestrial vehicles to be cheaper than the cost of soldier’s lives.
Robocop
Building “robocop,” that is, a robot which can conduct street-to-street fighting in urban environments, is theoretically possible, but prohibitively expensive. Even if a robot could be built which emulated or exceeded human speed and strength, such robots also need a power source. We are discovering that lithium ion batteries are incredibly expensive, slow to charge, and last at most 10 years. Although the technology of lithium ion is well-understood, the cost does not come from the “newness” of the technology, but from the raw materials which constitute its components, which are rare, limited, and difficult to obtain.
An electric vehicle can travel 300 miles before totally breaking down, at which point it needs access to a stationary charging station. By contrast, a human being can march 20 miles a day on a few pounds of pasta and steak. The difference between an EV charging station and 4lbs of food is that food can be carried in a backpack, while an EV charging station is a sensitive piece of infrastructure which is subject to centralized sabotage. It requires electrical lines, cables, substations, all of which will likely go down or be unreliable during periods of urban warfare.
Oil is not a solution to this problem of the “robocop.” The average human being has 1.76 cubic feet of volume, and weighs 150lbs. 10 gallons of gasoline weighs 60lbs and has a volume of 1.34 cubic feet. If you wanted to power “robocop” with gasoline, you would have to increase his weight by 40%, and his volume by 76%.
One of the reasons why human food is much more efficient in terms of volume and weight than “robocop” fuel is that biological systems are incredibly efficient at “idling.” Most cars that get 40 mpg still use 0.5 gallons of fuel per hour when idling. In a 24 hour period, an “idling” robotcop would use 12 gallons of fuel, which would require a fuel tank as big as his own body. This is why Boston dynamics has not produced any humanoid models with hydrocarbon fuel. Batteries are the best means of powering humanoid robots, but batteries cannot be recharged on enemy territory. Food sources, on the other hand, are lighter weight, denser, and more ubiquitous, even in post-apocalyptic scenarios. It is easier to air-drop food on an army to resupply it than to “air drop” an EV charging station. “Air dropping” lithium ion batteries is unfeasible, given the value and rareness of each battery.
As a result, in terms of urban warfare, robocop is simply not practical — not from a technological standpoint, but from a purely energetic-resource standpoint. To overcome these problems and approach the energy efficiency of biological systems, it would be much quicker to re-utilize biological systems. In other words, if you want to make a humanoid soldier, it is easier to simply breed athletic human beings than to reinvent humans from the ground up.
Conclusions
Since 1945, the ability of tanks to resist anti-tank weapons has decreased. This is due to the fact that armor piercing weapons have become cheaper, more lightweight, and more accurate. For an offensive army attempting to break through enemy lines and occupy urban areas, tanks are increasingly useless for these reasons.
Therefore, utilizing new technologies, it is possible to conceive of a solution: lighter, faster, cheaper, and smaller vehicles, which are more difficult to target with artillery, but still capable of transporting troops. Given the high cost of troops, it is also possible to imagine that some of these vehicles could be “dummies” or cannon fodder: autonomous vehicles meant to act as “shadow clones” and absorb enemy fire, to allow the manned vehicles a better chance of survival to break through the enemy perimeter and enter the urban zone. At that point, soldiers would dismount and begin street-to-street, door-to-door fighting. As demonstrated in the siege of Stalingrad, some of this fighting might even involve bayonets or knives, since at very close quarters, bladed weapons are often faster than guns.
