Absentee Warfare

May 21, 2026 Merri

November 2. I took an entrenching party from the Altenburg Redoubt to C sector. One of them, Landstrumsman Diener, climbed on to a ledge in the side of the trench to shovel earth over the top. He was scarce up when a shot fired from the sap got him in the skull and laid him dead on the floor of the trench. He was married and had four children. His comrades lay in wait a long while behind the parapet to take vengeance. They sobbed with rage. It is remarkable how little they grasp the war as an objective thing. They seemed to regard the Englishman who fired the fatal shot as a personal enemy. I can understand it.¹

–Trench Warfare Day by Day
The Storm of Steel
Ernst Junger

More than a century ago, the major powers of the world witnessed the martial fruits of the industrial revolution. Mass produced weaponry, self-loading machine guns, smokeless powder, brass casings, and more sinisterly, toxic poisonous gases proliferated, exploded, and rained down across fortified entrenchments that stretched from the Alps to the North Sea. The Great War was not the first military engagement to feature any of this equipment, but it was certainly the largest.

Industrialism had allowed for more and more impersonal, automated methods for men to kill each other. Advances in machining and production lines allowed mass production of bolt operated rifles, as well as automatic pistols, submachine guns, emplaced heavy machine guns, and soon enough, machine guns wieldy enough to be fired from the hip or the shoulder. Artillery improved such that guns could be miles away from their targets, and rounds were produced in such quantity that saturation shelling quickly became the norm. And the most impersonal methods of dispensing death did not involve firearms at all, but canisters of mustard gas from which even the crude gas masks of the day offered little protection.

Death could come as quickly and unpredictably as a stray bullet while out on a watch, or as agonizingly as the explosion of blisters throughout one’s bronchioles from a direct gas attack. As such, to stay sane, the soldiers of the Great War had to depersonalize themselves, both their experiences and the conflict itself. Ernst Junger remarks at length about this throughout his early writings and journals, referring to war as “an objective thing.” He considered war as a state of existence that man enters into in order to discover life: a state of conditions in the world that, by man’s cooperation and experience of it, turns him into his perfect self. It could almost be considered something that comes to posses men like a spirit, galvanizes them, strips away all that is unnecessary before sending them charging at each other and into machine gun fire, arcing grenades, swarms of bullets and pointed bayonets.

This is no romance for a period when war was something of a more aesthetically chaotic affair. Junger makes this quite clear both in The Storm of Steel and in his other writings. Rather, it is an effort to internalize what is an otherwise incomprehensible experience. In the pitch of battle, every man must undergo an interior transformation:

One feels consciously how the escaping life rushes into the sea of eternity; I have already stood sometimes at the border. It is a slow, deep sinking, with a ringing in the ear, peaceful and familiar like the sound of Easter bells. One should not brood like that and always jump against riddles that one will never solve.²

Such an interior observations are by no means limited to the battlefield of automatic firearms and artillery saturation; one will find it too, in Shakespeare, as King Henry rallies his troops before Harfleur: Once more unto the breach, dear friends! To use this to return to the earlier passage above, Junger recognizes that the death of Landstrumsman Diener was not, realistically, the fulfillment of a personal grievance carried out in personal hatred. His fellow infantrymen, his friends and comrades, perhaps, may not, but the hatred that stirred within them was a broad hatred, a generalized hatred, one projected out across the English lines as a poisonous blanket rather than a spear intended for a single man. War, then, is simultaneously a struggle more personal than any other experience and a state of affairs that carves away whatever individuality lay within a given man.

This, however, only seems to hold true for those immediately subjected to the chaos of the battlefield.

Drones, Avionics, and Hypersonics

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 showcased what the next world war is going to look like, presuming either that one happens or that it hasn’t already started. And, like the deployment of automatic artillery and machine guns in 1914, the use of drone warfare has similarly required a radical reorientation of both strategic and tactical military thought.

Part of this reorientation is at the ground level. Cheap drones guided by fiber optic cable have turned into the sorts of threats that saturation artillery posed, but at fractions of the cost and the magnitude of deployment. Now drones can pinpoint enemy emplacements and bomb them with small explosives, or otherwise hover over dying men pleading for their lives and drop grenades on them.

But this is already outdated use of drone technology. Properly speaking, men have been operating drones for a couple of decades; the first drone strike took place in October of 2001. Operators remotely piloting unmanned vehicles, be they large crafts carrying missiles or the smaller, quadcopter styled assets more familiar to the civilian market are not the future of warfare, aerial or otherwise, but rather the present day. The future is the automation of these vehicles: drone swarms, wherein a single operator can manage tens, hundreds, possibly thousands of such devices.

Swarms operate through a fusion of AI processing orders from operators and coordinating drone movement accordingly. This coordination can take various patterns as necessary for the nature of the mission, to be determined either by the operator or by the machine itself. More interestingly, present technology already has research and development looking to fully automate ³ drone swarm technologies, removing the need for a human operator over a given swarm’s operation entirely, save perhaps to issue a deployment order. But the ramifications of swarm autonomy extend well beyond organized mobs of quadcopters. Consider avionics.

Development of the sixth generation air fighter has been well underway in America, and was officially announced by the President last year. The Next Generation Air Dominance platform, NGAD, received the F-47 moniker, but, not unlike how the broader idea behind the F-35 program was something more sophisticated than a single fighter, the F-47 is more than a single plane. The F-47 itself is expected to completely take over the role of the F-22, replacing the entire fleet, but it is expected, at least at this point in development, to be used with an integrated squad of YFQ-42A and YQF-44A drones to fly along with it.

And this isn’t even the most impressive development in air war technology that the public presently knows about, either. Australia has already contracted Boeing to develop the MQ-28, a drone platform designed to work alongside existing air frames in much the same way that the NGAD program is presently designing. These drones fly themselves thanks to AI; the assigned pilot will give it some guidance or orders and then leave it to carry those orders out, like playing a point and click game. This concept is referred to as a “Loyal Wingman” drone, or a Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). It is not a stretch to imagine drone swarm technology scaled up to handle supersonic (or even hypersonic-capable) UAVs coordinated by only a handful of human operators asserting air superiority over a given territory.

The push toward faster aerial dominance once had a hard limit: the physical capabilities of the man in the cockpit. As drone technology improves, and as software gets more and more sophisticated in its applications, this limitation becomes significantly less relevant. The NGAD project depicts a next-generation replacement for a top-of-the-line fighter jet, but integrates aspects of drone swarm technology into its praxis such that the B-47 becomes significantly more than what the F-22 ever was. But it remains limited in its maneuverability by what a human being is capable of withstanding. Only the laws of physics and the durability of the craft limit their movement.

With this in mind, one can consider the Talon-A platform combines the technology and range of hypersonic glide vehicles with certain capabilities of AI drone warfare, turning a missile into a deep-strike capable, potentially reusable air frame that one assigns missions to rather than simply firing at enemy targets. It’s not difficult to imagine the scale of disruption a few of these could inflict even without operating within a drone swarm, much less if they were.

One obvious limiting factor to much of this is expense. Australia’s MQ-28 is projected to run between $10-15 million per unit, once the project has fully shifted into production phase and the kinks are worked out. The MQ-28 was also designed to be at the more cost-effective end of the loyal wingman spectrum; the more sophisticated YFQ-42A in development is shooting for a price range starting at double that. As vast as the American military’s budget is, massive numbers of UAV drone swarms isn’t on the horizon, but concentrated deployments in enough numbers to overwhelm a peer seems likely.

One expects defense systems to counter drone swarms to be just as sophisticated as the drone swarms themselves. Originally, they didn’t have to be; crude wireless quadcopter drones in Ukraine were quickly deterred by simplistic electronic jamming systems or signal hackings that robbed the drone from its original operator. This resulted in the shift to shorter range but far more reliable quadcopters operated by fiber optic wire, leaving the battlefields of eastern Ukraine drowned in the glistening spiderweb of glass debris.

This more localized use of wire-guided drones is only feasible in a combat environment where the enemy has not established air supremacy, at least as they’ve been deployed in Ukraine. Additionally, due to the swarm’s need to have at least some communication with each other, directly-wired drones make poor choices for swarm vehicles.

Automated War Machines

As technology has advanced, wars have been waged with fewer and fewer men involved in the fighting. A firearm could do the work of several pikemen, and at range. A well-placed and well-stocked machine gun team could lay down fire comparable to half a platoon of bolt gunners. But with this reduction of men fielded to battle, the amount of training and expertise necessary for a given man increases. If the F-47 program yields results resembling its intention, a single air frame with its drone companions will similarly reduce the number of pilots necessary to carry out aerial operations. They’ll just have to be even more skilled.

This principle applies to infantrymen and the ground war as much as it does to the airmen. Tanks and artillery have grown in technological sophistication while, to some extent, simplifying their operation in order to account for smaller crews. The United States relied heavily on special forces operations during its two decades in Afghanistan, sending highly trained and specialized units of handfuls of men into insurgent-infested territory on a regular basis. To this end, the Army’s interest in a more sophisticated optic for their controversial new rifle platform makes a bit of sense.

While AI is not necessarily at the heart of every innovation on the battlefield, it’s showing up in more and more places as the technology improves. This should make any astute viewer pause.

The chief worry isn’t that a loyal wingman platform or a swarm will hallucinate targets or misreport readings. Error correction in these models, particularly specialized models, continues to improve by leaps and bounds. Once these platforms are deployed, it’s reasonable to assume that any margins of error along these lines will be below that of even human operators. Nor is the worry that of the science fiction terrors that AI will take over the world and kill everyone. The worry, rather, is what this increasingly removed sense of warfare is going to do to the people in charge of waging it.

One might be tempted to consider “A Taste of Armageddon,” an old Star Trek episode in which populations of people voluntarily incinerated themselves as a result of an automated war game between two civilizations. While this did not involve drone warfare, it did involve some prescient idea of artificial intelligence, at least for 1967. However, with drone warfare and AI reaching some other juncture, the future seems considerably bleaker than that.

War looms as a credible threat and deterrent because of its cost in manpower. If nations cannot resolve their differences by negotiation or subterfuge, the use of force, and the martial defense against it, presents itself as the last viable option. This is the praxis that governed war prior to the end of the World War Two. A country waged war in order to obtain what it wanted after diplomacy failed, or otherwise, it went to war to defend threatened interests, be those interests domestic or foreign, and waged war until some diplomatic compromise prevailed.

The Great War started on such terms and ended, rather than in a suit of peace, with the total dismantlement of the Habsburg Empire, the elimination of Prussia, and the unprecedented neutering of Germany. The idea of total war was not a technological one, nor was the idea of unconditional surrender; these were ideas brought about by political and personal hubris of the leaders of the day, and this hubris was not based on technological supremacy. As it happens, however, those with technological supremacy write the rules.

The Great War brought with it machine guns, chemical warfare, and saturation artillery bombardment. The Second World War brought with it aerial saturation bombing, air superiority, and then, nuclear weaponry. Worse, the Second World War’s indiscriminate targeting of logistical and civilian installations by every major player indicated a total reorientation of war’s purpose. European powers tended to wage war such that civilian casualties, although often inevitable, were rarely if ever directly targeted by foreign armies, at least as a matter of military doctrine; the actions of both Axis and Allied powers during World War Two went against such doctrine. While America has, for the most part, returned to a doctrine that at least theoretically limits civilian casualties, this has only been possible thanks to the increased emphasis on precision weaponry. Still, it seeks to automate even more.

Conclusion

There is an admirable military and political interest in preventing senseless loss of life on the battlefield. Where open conflict can be curtailed by use of economic pressures or, increasingly, informational warfare, be it propaganda or directly cyber, it is generally in the interest of the entire world to do so. However, man being what he is, this is not always the case, nor is it realistic to presume so. The use of force will always be a necessary aspect of international politics. And, naturally, better technology entails more sophisticated automation.

The further away from the fire and blood that war’s operators get, however, the greater miseries they’re inclined to dispense of their targets. From saturation shelling to saturation bombing to nuclear deployment, and now, hypersonic weapons platforms, loyal wingmen drones, and unmanned aerial swarms, war turns from a depersonalized conflict between soldiers into an alienated and irrational struggle between systems, less sensible even than the weather.

This is all to say that war as an inner experience, as described by Junger, is only possible with direct access to the horrible violence of armed conflict. And this conflict must be reciprocal, an open fight between armies, and not the dispensation of violence against targets who have no way of resisting, defending, or increasingly, even detecting that violence beforehand. Junger’s ‘war as an inner experience,’ something that one could argue existed in all past conflicts up until the modern age, seems to be largely absent in the wars that the current set of peers are developing weapons for.

And yet it is exactly such an idea that maintains war as a credible threat. Men have to be fighting on the front lines in order for that immediate violence to become an inescapable experience. If men aren’t doing the fighting, aren’t themselves at risk of leaving their own bodies on the battleground, then one might very well argue that despite a conflict taking place, war seems totally absent. If it’s a conflict between peers, the conflict has turned instead to a simulation; if it’s a conflict in which drones are merely hunting for human targets, then it’s a slaughter.

Modern therapy lingo might refer to Junger’s idea as a trauma response, but it is clear that, at the very least, internalizing a certain stoicism is indeed the attempt of a traumatized mind to maintain some grip on sanity in otherwise incomprehensible circumstances. It goes a little beyond this, however, as it requires contextualizing these experiences as trials of death between men. Junger understood that, even during an artillery bombardment, there were men waiting in the other trench that were there for the same reasons he was. When the barrage ended, should he still live, they would come over the top and, like iron sharpening iron, this conflict would continue.

This idea has no analogue in the aerial urban bombardments of Europe and Japan, nor does it seem to apply to the target of a precision-guided missile fired from a supersonic aircraft. Perhaps it still applies on the battlefield between infantry peers, as witnessed in the Ukraine conflict, but only between the infantry; a drone operator certainly does not carry the same sense of imminent danger the moment he drops a grenade on an emplacement or flies a quadcopter into a motorcade. Even a well-hidden marksman or sniper has a closer affinity to warfare than the drone operator.

Absent this imminent threat and direct exposure to violence, war loses all personality, and as such, its threat. A nation’s leaders should take warfare gravely serious due to the danger it entails for its own people, even in cases where that war is an almost guaranteed victory. If its people are insulated from that violence, the violence over ripens into indulgence. Like a video game, drone warfare descends into the realm of fake products destroying other fake products, but with accompanying weaponry that will inevitably cause collateral damage at a scale impossible to anticipate.

Worse, it places the means of carrying out the violence associated with warfare into fewer and fewer hands. In an age as technical and mechanical as ours, where men are already viewed as bodies separated from machines only by degrees, one ought be wary of automating something as close to man’s being as warfare. Expect atrocities at scales hitherto undreamed of.

1Ernst Junger, The Storm of Steel, trans. Basil Creighton, (Chatto & Windus, 1927; reprint Mystery Grove, 2020), 27.

2Junger, War as an Inner Experience, trans. Kasey James Elliot, (Anarch Books, 2021),67.

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