The Clausewitz Bind
Force Posture in the Age of Precision Mass
Introduction
In On War, Carl von Clausewitz writes that, "in the Middle Ages, firearms were a new invention, so crude that their physical effect was much less important than today; but their psychological impact was considerably greater." In other words, to Clausewitz, the impact of a novel military capability depends as much on what people perceive it to be capable of doing as on what it can actually do. History is replete with examples of military capabilities that terrified those they were deployed against, only for their actual tactical significance to be fairly minimal, and vice versa—militaries significantly underestimating the impact of novel capabilities, in turn leading to defeat.
In recent years, militaries around the world have increasingly invested in "precision mass" weapons (PMWs), which can broadly be defined as "strike weapons capable of carrying out relatively precise attacks on targets, while being procured at a cheaper individual cost than traditional guided munitions." Examples include the American Switchblade 600, Israeli Hero-120, and Iranian Shahed-136, among others. What this article will term the "Clausewitz Bind" (the tendency for military decisionmaking to be guided by the perception of what a capability can do as opposed to what it can actually do) has important implications for the integration of precision mass weapons into future American military force structures. This article offers a preliminary examination of the current impact of PMWs on the battlefield, and then examines tradeoffs between perception and capability inherent in various different force structures. It should be taken as the starting point for further discussion, not as an absolute set of conclusions.
Precision Mass Capabilities
To begin our analysis, it is necessary to obtain some general estimates of what PMWs can actually do. This will then help us to examine tradeoffs between their actual and perceived capabilities.
Fundamentally, the goal of any PMW force package should be for a sufficient number of weapons to arrive at their intended target in order to destroy it. Assuming that all of the weapons in a given package have an independent and identical probability of arriving at the target (PA), then the lethality L of the force package can be evaluated as the probability that a sufficient number of loitering munitions to destroy the target arrive at it. The charts below were generated by an analysis run through Python, and evaluate PMW force packages containing increasingly large PA values and numbers of systems against targets with different required numbers of arrivals.
Source: Author
As can be seen, lethality increases as additional systems are introduced into the force package, but with an “upper limit” at which point additional systems stop having a significant effect (shown as the lines in each graph flatline at different thresholds). Importantly, the analysis also demonstrates that the individual PMWs in a package must have relatively high PA values to be effective against their targets. Because PMWs tend to have a lower warhead weight than conventional guided munitions, this challenge should not be understated. While PMWs do offer a very cost-effective means of delivering anti-personnel, and even anti-tank effects to the battlefield, they are not yet likely to fundamentally alter the character of warfare.
Analysis of the use of PMWs during the Russo-Ukrainian War offers some confirmation of this. Drones and missiles overall have played a major role in the conflict. However, when it comes to the more specific employment of PMWs, such as first-person view (FPV) attack drones, the results appear decidedly more mixed. For instance, one FPV operator fighting for Ukraine reports a roughly 43 percent success rate across all FPV sorties launched by his unit, but, when accounting for the number of missions that were aborted before even being launched, the figure drops to roughly between 20 and 30 percent. Assuming that similar rates of success apply across other FPV units, this limits the number of targets that can cost-effectively be engaged using FPV drones compared to more traditional forms of precision attack, which have much higher PA values. The same author notes that, while data indicating that anywhere as high as 80 percent of all casualties in Ukraine are caused by FPV drones, in many cases, these drones have struck targets that were already damaged by other systems, potentially skewing reports about the actual effectiveness of PMWs. In essence, while PMWs at their present level of technological advancement are undoubtedly important to modern ground combat, both simulation and reporting from the ground suggests that, at present, their actual capabilities do not always align with expectations.
The gap between the expected and actual capabilities of PMWs (and in turn the bind such expectations would have on military decision making) would likely be even more pronounced in a naval conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Surface warships tend to require significantly more ordnance to catastrophically kill than ground targets, such as individual soldiers or tanks, which in turn requires either significantly greater numbers of systems to reasonably expect a successful mission. The "cube root rule" is a general rule of thumb which holds that the number of thousand-pound bomb equivalents needed to catastrophically kill a warship is equal to the cube root of 1/1000th of the ship's displacement in tons. For example, if a ship displaces 5,000 tons, roughly 1.7 1,000-pound bombs, or 1,700 pounds of ordnance, would be needed to kill the warship.
The following charts represent separate simulations of various numbers of PMWs, each with a 30 percent PA value, employed against warships whose displacements ranged from as low as 2,000 tons (i.e. requiring at least thirty-seven PMWs with 35 lb warheads to achieve a successful kill) to as high as 10,000 tons (i.e. sixty-two PMWs with 35 lb warheads to kill). Each simulation was run 1,000 times.
Source: Author
The dashed red lines represent the number of simulations where a sufficient number of munitions arrived at their targets to achieve a successful kill. As can be seen, with 100 PMWs, only the first warship type (2000 ton displacement) was actually killed during any of the simulations. With 150 PMWs, the odds of consistently obtaining a successful kill improve, particularly against warships with lower threshold requirements, though results taper off when PMWs are employed against more advanced warships. At 200 and 250, the odds significantly improve, with the vast majority of simulations across all thresholds resulting in successful kills. With 300, none of the simulations resulted in a failure against any of the warships. This suggests that very large numbers of PMWs would be needed in a maritime conflict for the U.S. military to comfortably be sure that PMWs would be able to achieve the same effects of anti-ship missiles. The cost-savings would, in turn, diminish, since larger numbers of PMWs would be needed to achieve the same effects as a smaller handful of ASMs, given the differences in warhead weights.
Contextualizing the Bind
Having sketched a general view of what precision mass weapons are capable of doing, the Clausewitz Bind can now be examined in greater detail, and even be broadened beyond Clausewitz's exclusive focus on firearms to gunpowder weapons as a whole. The introduction, and development of these weapons within European armies across several centuries provides a strong lens from which to examine the impact that perceptions of novel military capabilities had on decisionmaking. This will then enable us to better understand the inherent force structure tradeoffs that arise between how precision mass weapons are perceived versus what they are actually capable of doing.
Although Clausewitz's comment in On War was limited to firearms, gunpowder weapons were broadly viewed as a frightening new instrument of war when they were first introduced to European armies during the Middle Ages. During the Battle of Crècy in 1346, the English "struck terror into the French Army with five or six pieces of cannon, it being the first time they had seen such thunderous machines." However, the actual tactical utility of cannons was fairly limited when they were originally introduced. Their large size and heavy weight made transporting them difficult, while the cannon itself exploding when firing was a very real possibility. In addition, they were mostly effective as siege engines, not in open fields, where infantry and cavalry had greater space in which to maneuver around cannon fire. Similarly, as Clausewitz notes, handheld firearms initially terrified armies upon their introduction, but had severe tactical limitations, being wildly inaccurate, and cumbersome to carry.
Ironically, as Clausewitz also notes, firearms were gradually normalized, to the point that soldiers of his era had a far less visceral reaction to them than soldiers of the Medieval period, despite 19th century firearms and cannons being far more lethal than Medieval ones. In other words, Clausewitz implicitly argues that his contemporaries have more to fear from gunpowder weapons than any soldier in the Middle Ages, and yet, they actually fear them less, because of their common use in warfare.
Clausewitz's observation that soldiers of his era feared gunpowder weapons less than Medieval soldiers, despite their increased lethality, provides a basis for another issue that should be noted about the effect that perceptions of capabilities have on military decisionmaking: the tendency for tactics and operational concepts to remain fairly rigid once they have been developed, even as capabilities improve. This is particularly true in the case of firearms. By Clausewitz's time, firearms had improved to the point that smoothbore muskets were the primary weapon used by infantry. Because these weapons were still quite inaccurate, line tactics became the doctrinal norm. Soldiers would line up in tightly-packed formations of infantry, and send volleys of musket fire into the approaching enemy line. The need to maintain such dense formations, combined with the limits of communications technology at the time (essentially just bugles, flags, runners, and shouting), meant that battles were confined to several miles at most. For instance, the Battle of Austerlitz, where Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the combined armies of Russia and Austria, involved about 158,000 troops, fighting across a roughly 7-mile wide frontage.
However, the widespread adoption of rifled muskets, which allowed for more accurate gunfire, in the mid 19th century, meant that the lethality of the individual infantryman on the battlefield increased dramatically. This only became even more true when the machine gun was introduced during the early 20th century. Nonetheless, infantry tactics and doctrine continued to largely follow Napoleonic-era practices for decades. The American Civil War and Crimean War both saw commanders continuing to employ closely packed columns of infantry, who were now capable of inflicting far more casualties against their opponents than ever before, using only their rifles. The machine gun similarly exposed the gap between doctrine and new tactical realities. By the end of that conflict, infantry had begun adopting modern small unit tactics, with squads and platoons advancing in dispersed formations, and maintaining cover and concealment, rather than battalions or regiments advancing together, where they would be gunned down.
The gap between doctrine and tactical reality is important, because it illustrates the other side of the bind that novel capabilities have on military decisionmaking. As noted above, when new capabilities manifest as improvements to existing ones, tactical doctrine, and in turn military decisions, tend to be influenced by a belief that the new capabilities will be similar to the existing ones. As with entirely novel capabilities, it is not until they are actually employed that doctrine is able to catch up to reality. A similar trend seems to be emerging with precision mass weapons, in which they actually possess a fairly limited tactical value, but are perceived as fundamentally altering the character of war.
Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind the observation under the Bind that technology tends to eventually reach a point where it does pose a very direct battlefield threat, even if doctrine and tactics have become locked in. In the case of gunpowder weapons, this maturation took a very long time. In the case of precision mass weapons, the pace at which developments will occur remains very uncertain. Ukraine, for example, has already seen an immense level of innovation in the FPV marketplace, representing a speed of technological progress that firearms simply did not have. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (crucial for improvements in the autonomy of precision mass weapons) has also progressed at a rapid pace over the past several years. However, whether these trends continue is uncertain. It is very possible that precision mass innovation stagnates, leading to a situation like that of firearms in the Middle Ages, where militaries overestimate their effectiveness on the battlefield.
In such a case of stagnated development, but exaggerated perception, an important paradox occurs because PMWs may have an outsized "deterrent" effect (being seen as a new and dangerous threat to military forces), but a more limited battlefield one. In such a scenario, the U.S. would likely need to carefully structure a future force to maximize the capabilities of PMWs, making them a visible part of regional posture, but also continuing to hedge on traditional guided munitions to actually play the decisive strike role. Alternatively, stagnated development may itself lead to an alignment between the perception of PMWs and their actual capabilities. However, even in such a scenario, a "mixed" force structure would likely be optimal, as PMWs would continue to have some value on the battlefield (as described above), just not a decisive one.
On the other hand, innovation could rapidly accelerate the development of AI and autonomy, leading to significantly more capable PMWs. Under such a scenario, force structure would have to quickly adapt to the changing operational requirements, or the U.S. military would risk obsolescence, or worse, an outcome like that which awaited those who faced rifled muskets and machine guns while still fighting in tightly packed line formations.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the key takeaway for policymakers should be the need for very close and constant studying of developments in AI, autonomy, and precision mass weapons. Overcoming the temptation to put too much emphasis on a potential revolution in military affairs brought on by precision mass weapons is key. It is equally as important to not dismiss the possibility that such a revolution could indeed occur in the near future. Unmanned systems overall are fundamentally altering previous military dynamics on the ground, and will likely bring about corresponding changes in military force posture around the world. The precise role that PMWs could play in such a structure remains uncertain as of now, and will require careful analysis in the immediate term to ensure the U.S. remains prepared to exploit the advantages offered by such capabilities.