perfidy

Gizmag, which to me has always sounded like an industry publication for the adult film industry or - worse - a union rag for the International Benevolent Order of Jizmoppers, has an in-depth article on the Snark VTOL UCAV. For those of you not up on your acronyms, that's a vertical takeoff and landin unmanned combat air vehicle.

The Snark is wicked cool.

Constructed mainly of Carbon Fibre and Kevlar, the Snark is light and fast (280 km/h), quiet (special rotor blades make it extremely quiet ), virtually invisible to radar or infrared detetection (it recycles its exhaust gases and emits little heat) and can carry a payload of 680kg, offering the ability to pack both massive firepower (enough to sink a ship) and surveillance equipment (such as high res infrared cameras with a magnification of 7500). But wait, there’s more, and this is the clincher. The Snark is the first UAV that runs on diesel fuel, which means it can be easily integrated into any military force – current UAVs require their own special fuel supply to be transported with them whereas the entire US Army plans to run on a single one fuel - diesel. Last and probably most importantly, the Snark can stay airborne for 24 hours at a time, offering an unprecedented loiter time for a machine of this capability.

As cool as its capabilities are, the really important thing to be understood about the advent of the Snark is the fact that it's being built by a company out of New Zealand, TGR Helicorp. Technology is not just advancing, but it is becoming cheaper and easier to make those advances. Computer technology, and the computer aided design software that runs on it, and the computer controlled machines that turn those designs into real objects are all becoming cheap. Before too long, any nation that wants to, and has a populace capable of understanding and operating the tools can become in short order a substantial power.

We are leaving the industrial age of warfare. For the last century or more, the limits of technology have encouraged the mass production of weapons, vehicles and the soldiers who use them. Any nation that lacked not just the industrial base, but the population would be doomed to being a second rate power at best. But before the industrial age, small nations were often great powers thanks to clever and efficient and disciplined use of military technology; but more importantly, the training of soldiers. Prussia was outnumbered and outgunned, but her well trained army often was able to fight off significantly large foes.

Training and technology will form the basis of the new balance of power. The United States is making a huge effort to stay at the forefront of this change - but our size is not really what's driving the expansion of our military power. It's highly trained troops and lethally clever hardware. Other nations could, and eventually will develop the technology that we are playing with now. Imagine a high tech city state like Singapore in fifteen years, fielding armies of armed drones controlled by a small but elite force of soldiers. Singapore, despite its small size could end up a significant regional power by virtue of its wealth, technology base and a certain amount of political will. Other small nations could leverage the potentials of the new weapons that are being developed to gain military power all out of proportion to their size - in much the same way that the Dutch used ship technology (and the power of stock markets and banking institutions that they had just invented) became a world power in the 1600s.