Ukraine is hitting Moscow with daily drone attacks, resulting in substantial damage to an oil refinery barely 25 kilometres from the Kremlin. In Occupied Crimea, Ukrainian drone attacks have resulted in fuel shortages so severe that legal sales of fuel to anyone but the military have been shut down, and people are attempting to leave in such high numbers that the few remaining routes out are jammed with traffic.
A lot of people are happy about this. I kind of am myself. The sooner the Russian empire gets broken up and Moscow reduced to a minor principality the better.
But all power gets used, and the power to destroy cities with drones will not go away when Ukraine is victorious.
Drones are cheap, precise, powerful, uncrewed, and deniable. They also cover ranges from a few metres to a thousand kilometres or more. Soon enough they will be globe-circling.
And cities are soft targets.
There are two aspects of this: national and international, or internal and external. This essay is a somewhat muddled meditation on the likely consequences of drone-siege warfare, either state-like or irregular.
Civilizations exist at the mercy of superior destructive technologies. We know that civilizations have risen, flourished, and fallen in the past, and in at least some cases the likely reason for their fall is that they were organized the way they were to defend against destructive technologies that were supplanted by something that required a different form of organization to deflect.
The Late Bronze Age Collapse may have been one such incident: a Dark Age that was deep enough that literacy was lost in the Eastern Mediterranean, leaving us scripts that have still only been partially deciphered today. The notable thing about the Late Bronze Age is that it overlaps with the Early Iron Age, and iron opens the door to superior destructive technologies.
Similar things have happened since, albeit with a little less totality. The invention of the torsion spring by an engineer working for Philip II of Macedon changed history. While Alexander is known today primarily for the length of his march and the breadth of his conquest, in his own time he was most famous as a besieger of cities, which were--prior to the invention of the torsion spring--the ultimate hard target.
And to distinguish myself from a simple-minded technological determinist, I want to be very clear about one thing: technologies do not determine what modes of organization must exist. They determine what modes of organization can't exist, either domestically or internationally.
Technologies that make it cheap, easy, and deniable to cripple a city make it much more difficult for cities to exist, and for civilizations that are organized around cities to exist.
This is practically a tautology.
In a world of eight billion people, there will be a substantial intersection between "groups of people who want to cripple a city" and "groups of people who have the means to do so thanks to cheap and deniable drones."
The motives for crippling a city are so many and so obvious that it seems like a waste of time to even start listing them, but since there are probably already people reading this thinking, "But no one would ever want to do that!" I'll point out a few.
1) Ransom. Duh. This works for cities, corporations, nations, whatever. "Pay us in crypto or we'll keep the drones coming."
2) Strategic advantage. "Sorry, London and New York are no longer viable international financial centres due to continuous drone attacks on their infrastructure, but Singapore and Beijing are." And hey, China isn't behind the attacks! They're just trying to do what's right for the world since the old power centres aren't protected by the awesomeness of Xi thought. Of course, two can play at that game. So can three, or four, or...
3) Ideology. Hate fossil fuels? Have I got a soft target for you! As we've seen, refineries are full of stuff that burns and explodes "real good". I know... who'd've thought?
4) War. As we are seeing in Occupied Crimea and around Moscow.
Cheap. Powerful. Ranged. Deniable.
The rule of law can regulate technologies up to a point, and influence how they are deployed in society. But it's very difficult to effectively ban tech entirely, especially when it has a bunch of economically valuable uses.
So long as drones exist, the world will be full of soft targets, at least until so much infrastructure has broken down that the wheels of our technological civilization can no longer turn fast enough to keep us all afloat. That'll be fun.
There are at least two general approaches to countering this tendency.
One is to build bigger walls. Cities tried that after Alexander came knocking, and to some extent it worked, all the way up to the Age of Artillery.
The second way is to build stronger international institutions and national structures so that the problem technology is both regulated, and--more importantly--whatever it might be used for can be achieved more easily in other ways by working those institutions. Rome didn't have to depend on its walls after it had conquered so much of Italy that no enemy could get close to it. The legal and social mechanisms--particularly those raising armies--of the republic and the empire protected it more effectively than the stone of it's ancient walls.
Absent imperial organization making war between neighbouring cities or sub-states too costly to contemplate, walls remained the primary technology for urban defence for many centuries, but when they broke, institutional reform is what saved us. The Age of Artillery brought us the Peace of Westphalia, which at least planted the seeds of the modern idea of the nation-state as a unified territory with an exclusive government that was strictly hands-off for other nations. The alternative to that was--and had been for decades--constant war.
But new institutions arrive slowly. The UN is just the second fumbling attempt at building a genuinely international order out of the nominal anarchy that is the normal landscape of international relations. It doesn't work all that well, and it already had the model of the League of Nations to work off of, and it was given a strong impetus by the advent of nuclear weapons: "jaw jaw" is not only better than "war war", it's much much better than "mushroom cloud mushroom cloud".
Domestically, firearms provide another example of how technological developments don't determine what kind of society can exist, but do determine what kind of society can't. While it's too much to say "God made man, Colt made men equal", if John Bull and Wat Tyler had had a few hundred Enfield 303s in 1381, the Peasant's Revolt would probably have turned out differently. Once even primitive firearms became commonplace, kings began to fall, and nation-states begrudgingly formed and re-formed out of feudal holdings and duchies and petty kingdoms to accommodate the needs of the people in a manner unprecedented in history.
The state exists for one and only one purpose: to extract surplus value from the larger population so it can be used by the elites. Anyone who says otherwise is high on ideology.
Firearms created a situation where oppressive states in the feudal mode could not exist. That didn't determine what shape future states would take, but liberal democracies were one approach that became popular, in part because the first industrial revolution meant that educated, engaged workers in a free-labour economy--one where workers could move from job to job, rather than signing indentures for a specific term--proved ableto create more surplus value for the state to extract for use by the elites.
The degree to which that was successful varied. In some capitalist societies like Finland, Denmark, France, and Germany the elites were forced by mass protests, general strikes, civil unrest, and similar, to eventually create more-or-less functional social democracies.
That is the bargain of capitalist social democracy: let the state extract surplus value from your labour, and the state will send some of that value back to you in the form of infrastructure and social services that will make your lives far better than they would be otherwise.
Other places tried various forms of socialism or authoritarianism, attempting to justify elite totalitarian overreach by claiming it was "for the good of the people" rather than for the good of elites who were dedicated to using the recently discovered corporate system of organisation to extract as much surplus value from the populace as possible while still maintaining a hard clamp on people's ability to spontaneously organise.
Socialist societies--which can not exist without authoritarian control of the whole populace, and which are necessarily subject to problems of managerial incentives and managerial corruption that no one knows how to solve--proved sub-optimal in creating surplus value for the state to extract, and bad at using it intelligently in their conflict with the capitalist West. Other authoritarian forms proved even worse. Both remained popular among ideology addled pseudo-intellectuals with the self-awareness of a turnip.
But empirically, this answered the centuries-old question of "How do you best organize a state when ordinary people have way more power to oppose state violence cartels than at any time in history?" where the standard of "best" is: a state that's long-lived, stable, peaceful, and produces enormous amounts of surplus value for the state to extract?
The right answer turned out to be: "Give people enough stuff--including free time and a modicum of free speech, as well as infrastructure like roads and social servcies--that they don't mind the state continuing to extract surplus value from them for the purpose of elite aggrandizement."
The wrong answer was: "Use the corporate form of organization in a single state monopoly on the means of production, backed by a truly massive violence cartel, to treat people like serfs working the lands of a vast national estate."
The anomaly in all this is the US, which unlike the other capitalist states led people on with the promise of riches in the future for relative peonage today--partly enforce by a health care system that made many jobs virtual indentures--and where a history of race-based feudalism made the privileged majority white populace willing to forego the benefits of capitalist social democracy for the sake of ensuring that non-whites didn't get them either.
This created enormous wealth because single-minded pursuit of money was the only way for individuals to ensure any level of personal safety and comfort, and that resulted in enormous surplus value for the state to extract. But it also created a class of non-state corporations that were themselves interested in extracting surplus value in the best Marxist manner.
And then the internet happened, which created the situation we have today, where ordinary people are effectively unable to operate on a day-to-day basis without access to infrastructure that is largely controlled by those self-same non-state corporations, which have in the US and to a great extent in Canada taken over the organs of the state in pursuit of their own interests, leaving much of the populace in a condition that is starting to border on digital serfdom.
They are acting like the states of old, extracting surplus value from the populace and giving nothing much back, while slowly strangling to death the governments that produced the legal and social conditions for them to exist in the first place. As those governments weaken, the stable, predictable, legal and social conditions required for corporate existence are being eroded, and a new class of oligarchs is being created, indistinguishable from those who rose up in Russia after the fall of the Soviet empire.
In modern politics the "left" has become the party of corporate stability, and the "right" the party of oligarchic chaos. Neither have any interest in the needs of ordinary people because they don't need our consent to govern. They just need a few--it doesn't really matter how few of us to vote for anyone every few years.
The new oligarchs would happily set themselves up to be the lords of digital estates, taxing everyone who carries out any online activity, in a world where "online activity" is a necessary part of daily life. Our corporate overlords are not much better.
But now we have drones.
The material means of destruction do not determine what can exist, but what can't.
In the 20th century Blitzkrieg--fast attack by massed armour--became the dominant mode of war due to technological advancement. Others were tried, like aerial bombardment, but they didn't work so well.
The Main Battle Tank (MBT) was so dominant on the battlefield that the US developed the "Davy Crocket", which was basically a luggable nuclear mortar, to counter the possibility that Soviet armour would pour through the Fulda Gap in central Germany to invade Western Europe.
Back in the '80s a reviewer at a major arms show commented that everything on display fell into two categories: the MBT, and things that didn't do a very good job at countering the MBT. There was an entire sub-genre of military science fiction based on the assumption that the MBT and its increasingly large, intelligent, or mobile variants would continue to dominate battlefields on Earth and among the stars into the indefinite future.
What couldn't exist in such a world was a state that either lacked international sponsorship from one side of the Cold War or the other, or its own capacity to field a plausible force of armour, or terrain where armour wasn't much good, like jungles or mountains.
What can't exist in a world with drones is a state that tries to control its populace by traditional means, or a state that relies on traditional defense--particularly armour--when its enemies have the capacity to use drone siege against it.
What also can't exist in such a world is a state with cities.
I'm sure the doctrine of drone siege is developing its own categories and language even as I write this. There are different kinds of drone siege: urban, infrastructure, and probably political, although that hasn't happened yet.
Ukrainian attacks on Occupied Crimea and parts of Russia are infrastructure drone siege. If they were choose to start hitting specifically municipal infrastructure in Moscow--water and sewage treatment facilities, say--that would be urban drone siege.
And political drone siege is one where you drone away at a nation's political centres, its Parliaments or presidential mansions, the hotel d'ville, whatever: anything symbolic of the state... which--remember--only exists to extract surplus value from the populace for use by the elites.
Foreign nations--while there are still foreign nations--can do this, and irate citizens can too.
Citizens who are annoyed, for example, that while they are paying social democratic taxes, they are getting libertarian services.
Citizens who are annoyed that while their vote is required to put anyone in office, everyone in office is answerable to the same corporate or oligarchic overlords who are hell-bent on building some kind of neo-feudalism to replace capitalism.
No state anywhere ever simply works for the good of the people. That's a lie put about by people who want to control the state for their own ends, and think that telling people, "We're doing all these things for your benefit" is a good way to get there.
States extract surplus value from the populace for use by the elites either by violently suppressing and controlling the populace--the socialist, fascist, authoritarian route--or by throwing the populace enough fish of one kind or another that people are willing to put up with the arrogant idiots who inevitably end up running things, which is the capitalist, liberal, social democratic route.
Modern capitalist states are increasingly unwilling to throw people fish because they think they have people under control thanks to digital serfdom and they are under the financial and ideological influence of our corporate and oligarchic overlords. People are trackable, their bank accounts are accessible, the long arm of the state can reach almost anywhere in their lives.
That control is not complete, which is why practically every Western state is rushing madly to control internet access via bogus "age verification" laws.
But now we have drones.