BLUF: Digging Deep
During World War II, Boeing disguised its 26-acre B-17 bomber plant in Seattle with a “wonderland” – a make-believe village sprawling across the roof, adorned with cottages, trees, and green burlap lawn – to trick enemy aerial reconnaissance.
Tactics like these couldn’t fool satellites today. High-resolution coverage across visible, infrared, and radar spectra makes giant propellers much easier to detect. But militaries are still trying to deceive with inflatable or lightweight decoys, painted full-sized aircraft silhouettes, multispectral camo nets, and even satellites decoys. The sophistication of modern imaging means governments face a new reality: if something’s above ground, its image is probably being captured.
A debate we’ve been having recently at Steer is about the rise of “subterranean warfare” as a response to increasingly capable imaging. On one hand, should we be dedicating resources toward something so conceptual, while American installations are being breached by simple FPV drones in the Middle East?
On the other hand, the U.S. military is often criticized for preparing for the last war. With more than 15,000 active satellites in orbit – many with reconnaissance capabilities – concealing large assets such as troop concentrations, airbases, and missile launchers is exponentially harder and demands new approaches. The “subterranean realm” offers a smart paradigm to test against forcing our troops and exquisite systems to be sitting ducks on a tarmac.
The messaging on subterranean warfare makes some of us picture futuristic mole-robots digging through the earth’s crust. But the reality is that subterranean warfare is nothing new: the Ukrainian Armed Forces operated in mines and sewers to hold Bakhmut during the winter of 2022; Hamas leveraged a tunnel system, known as a subsurface “second Gaza,” to evade the IDF; and Iran famously buried key nuclear facilities under more than 80 meters of rock at Fordow.
In the hierarchy of U.S. defense priorities at this moment, strong, scaled counter-UAS technology and one-way attack drones seem to be the most urgent. And the Pentagon has taken steps over the past year to accelerate U.S. production to meet the need. But exploring concepts right now that seem pulled right out of the movies, may just produce the edge we’ll need in conflicts decades from now.
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