The El Paso Fiasco

“[S]something is happening here,
But you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?" — Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

According to recent news reports, federal authorities recently shut down the airspace over El Paso for about eight hours, causing havoc and widespread delays in our nationwide air-travel system. The havoc was hardly surprising: on an average day, there are 44 to 45 thousand commercial flights nationwide. And a lot of them are “interlocking” in the sense that passengers and/or crew from one flight may be, or may have been, scheduled on another connecting flight.

What is surprising is that the Homeland Defense side of our government reportedly wanted to make the shutdown last for ten whole days. Fortunately, our civil aviation authorities, and possibly the president himself, prevailed.

This is what happens when you appoint stupid and unqualified people to high positions like Secretary of Defense and Head of the Department of Homeland Security based on their “central casting” good looks and obeisance to a not-so-smart would-be king.

But that’s the easy part of the analysis. The harder question is “what was this all about”? What was so important as to shut down an entire border city’s airspace and risk nationwide chaos, whether for eight hours or ten days?

The answer, I think, is no mean thing: the future of warfare.

Empires rise and fall on the latest weapons and defenses, often in short order. The ancient Greeks invented the catapult, but the Romans used it to breach the walls of besieged cities and expand their empire. The Brits carved their enclaves in Canton and Hong Kong, despite Imperial China’s huge population and its collective might, with the help of more accurate and easier-loading firearms. In World War II, the Nazis’ “Panzer” tanks, with their high mobility, easily bypassed the fixed French fortifications erected at great expense after World War I, and collectively called the “Maginot Line.” Our erstwhile attempt to put missile defenses in Poland and what’s now the Czech Republic may have been similar.

Of course our inept federal authorities couldn’t hide the reason for the shutdown. It was to test some new defenses against drones. Apparently the Mexican drug cartels are using them increasingly, not just to fly drugs themselves, but to surveil our defenses against penetration by drugs, hit men, drug cargoes, and undocumented immigrants.

So what better way to test our defensive (and offensive) measures against drones than in a medium-sized city right on our border, let alone one in which the North Franklin Mountains dominate the city and provide clear lines of sight to and across the border?

That much is crystal clear. But the general importance of drones may not be.

Drones are not just important; they are likely to change the very nature of conflict forever. They are small, mobile, hard to knock down, and cheap. Far more important, their “sacrifice” in combat involves no loss of or injury to human life.

Much more of Ukraine might be Russian today if not for drones. Under Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s capable leadership, Ukraine has developed a vast cottage industry for home-made drones. Ukrainian devices, including field-assembled models, use mostly commercially available components and standard military explosives. Yet they are helping keep the great Russian Bear at bay.

Russia’s nuclear arsenal and gigantic military-industrial complex—far out of proportion to its population, as befits modern history’s most battered nation—have proved no match for Ukraine’s largely hand-made drones. So effective are Ukraine’s drones that it has held Russia back all along the Donbas front for over a year, inflicting terrible casualties on Russia. Russia has responded by throwing convicts, ethnic minorities and now even foreign soldiers into the battle, to die as cannon fodder for Putin the Kleptocrat’s glory. (One wonders whether the recent resort to foreign fighters was intended to suppress a rising mood of rebellion inside Russia.)

Belatedly, our government has reportedly admitted that the El Paso Fiasco related to drone defense. The air-traffic pause was apparently called to avoid any interference in, or danger to aircraft from, test targeting of drones with lasers.

This news came as great relief to me, despite despite the Fiasco and public spectacle. Why? It suggests that our military may finally be doing something right for a change.

Drones are not just the self-evident future of warfare. They are also the future of law enforcement and surveillance. They can be powerful instruments of dominance and tyranny, or they can help keep the forces of darkness at bay.

As long as our species doesn’t self-extinguish, drones will be far more important than nuclear weapons because: (1) drones are infinitely cheaper and less dangerous, and (2) they can be used to take the bad guys out one by one, not just by whole cities. Properly developed, maintained and used, drones could help establish a global regime of individual responsibility—what I once called (referring to the Nuremberg Trials) the “salvation of our species.”

Over 64 years ago, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned us to beware the “unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power” of our “military-industrial complex.” He was evidently concerned with possibly malign influences on our democracy.

But our military-industrial complex also presents another, more subtle danger. As it gets bigger and bigger, richer and richer, and closer and closer to American industrialists, it may fail to do its most basic job. It may fail to protect us from our enemies. It may be subverted, not by foreigners, but by our own citizens’ quest for profit and “shareholder value.”

Aircraft carriers and the fighter and bombers on them are hugely profitable. So are our “big-system” drones. Here, from Google AI, are procured cost estimates of various US defense items:

Hardware	Price (USD)
USS Gerald R. Ford Aircraft Carrier	Average: 13 billion Allocated R&D cost: 4.7 billion Total: 17.7 billion
B-1 “Lancer” Bomber	317 million
F-35 fighter jet (average for A Model)	82.5 million
Predator MQ-1 Drone	4 million
Reaper MQ-9 Drone	30 million

The same source reports the price of an Iranian Shahed 136 drone as $20 thousand to $50 thousand and Ukrainian field-made offensive drones at as low as $50 to $100 thousand. These numbers suggest that our enemies and allies can produce at least forty drones for the price of a single one of ours, several hundred for the price of one of our big planes, and 170 thousand for the price of one of our big carriers. And bear in mind that a coordinated set of some fifty drones is probably enough to destroy any of the foregoing.

Unlike Iran and Ukraine, China is hardly restrained by cost. So what I fear most is what might happen to one of our great aircraft carriers going to break a Chinese blockade of Taiwan. It might be sunk forthwith by a vast swarm of coordinated or autonomous Chinese drones, without the loss of a single Chinese life. You can imagine the resulting loss of American lives, the domestic political chaos and finger-pointing, and the abject retreat from our international responsibilities that such a catastrophe would produce.

The El Paso Fiasco suggests that, at last, our military leadership is coming to grips with a huge and rapidly increasing threat that it so far has failed to take seriously. Perhaps now our self- and wealth-obsessed “tech bros” may get involved in keeping the US from becoming the latest in a long list of nations and empires that faded from history after failing to stay abreast of advances in weaponry. If so, the Fiasco might be like the tattered flag that “flew through the night” before our Founding.