The new incident between Israel and its neighbours should remind all strategists, political leaders and elected representatives of the people, that the future of our defence and security will soon be disrupted by a new weapon. And there is too little talk about this new weapon, including in the new law of military programming, which is otherwise very welcomed: the drone.
Flown over by a drone from an Iranian base in Syria, the Israelis reacted by destroying the truck from which it took off, which led to retaliation and counter-retaliation of unprecedented dimensions. In a way, it may have been the first direct confrontation between Israel and Iran.
This incident should lead to, for us as well, the realization of the importance of drones in the battles of tomorrow. Today, we see them as toys or means of observation. Admittedly, we also know that the Americans and the French use small unmanned planes for precision strikes.
But soon, very soon, the situation will change. Not only is the drone the future of the fighter plane, but we will also see the emergence of tiny unmanned aerial vehicles (“UAVs”) the size of a football or even a tennis ball, capable of recognizing a human target from a photograph and seeking to destroy it in any location. A little later, hundreds, even thousands of such drones will be shipped in a truck, or a plane, and dropped as a squadron in the middle of a crowd, a marching army, or a political meeting.
Today, however, we are continuing essentially to prepare for yesterday’s war: massive, total, dissuasive. And we are continuing on doing everything to protect the soldier with exoskeletons, or by replacing him with robots.
Without seeing, or perhaps not enough, that the economy of war is changing like that of peace: it is becoming increasingly intelligent, tailored and miniaturized.
So far, no one knows how to stop a drone; and a fortiori thousands of them. No technology is preparing for this. And the Americans themselves, leaders in this field by a long shot, seem destitute and helpless facing such dangers. As are the Chinese, the Israelis, the Iranians and some others, who devote a lot of resources to it. France, for its part, considerably lags behind in this area. Though it is beginning to make strides, albeit barely, thanks in particular to the efforts of then-minister of defence, Jean Yves Le Drian.
Can we imagine hunters, murderers, lunatics, terrorists with such means? Can we imagine them sold over-the-counter, similarly to so many other weapons in the United States? Can we imagine the devastating effects it could produce?
I have tried in a novel² on the subject that will be released in a few weeks. Moreover, after having consulted some of the best experts in the world, I can say that it would be very wrong not to devote much more resources to research and development of these technologies. Countermeasures should be studied as well, in particular related to artificial intelligence, on which everything depends.
We should not miss this strategic and technological evolution, which incidentally will lead to tremendous civil implications; as already shown by what Rwanda is doing (where drones are used to deliver medicine in remote areas) and what global cross-border commercial retailers are doing.
This could be one of the first, if not the first, program of the future Franco-German, and more broadly European, industrial military cooperation agency, so hoped and so expected.
j@attali.com
² « Meurtres, en toute intelligence », éditions Fayard, mars 2018