Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems (THAAD, Patriot batteries) designed to counter tens or hundreds of aircraft and missiles is insufficient against asymmetric attacks of thousands of drones. And that 2) undefended high value fixed civilian infrastructure – oil tankers, data centers, desalination plants, oil refineries, energy nodes, factories, et al -are all at risk. 

When the targets are no longer just military assets but anything valuable on the surface, the long term math no longer favors the defender. To solve this problem the U.S. is spending $10s of billions of dollars on low-cost Counter-UAS systems – detection systems, inexpensive missiles, kamikaze drones, microwave and laser weapons.

But what we’re not spending $10s of billions on is learning how to cheaply and quickly put our high-value, hard-to-replace, and time-critical assets (munitions, fuel distribution, Command and Control continuity nodes, spares), etc., out of harm’s way – sheltered, underground (or in space). 

The lessons from Gaza reinforce that underground systems can also preserve forces and enable maneuver. The lessons from Ukraine are that survivability while under constant drone observation/attack requires using underground facilities to provide overhead cover (while masking RF, infrared and other signatures). And the lessons from Iran’s attacks on infrastructure in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries is that anything on the surface is going to be a target.

We need to rethink the nature of force protection as well as military and civilian infrastructure protection.

Air Defense Systems
For decades the U.S. has built air defense systems designed for shooting down aircraft and missiles.The Navy’s Aegis destroyers provide defense for carrier strike groups using surface-to-air missiles against hostile aircraft and missiles. The Army’s Patriot anti-aircraft batteries provide area protection against aircraft and missiles. The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) provides missile defense from North Korea for Guam and a limited missile defense for the U.S.  MDA is leading the development of Golden Dome, a missile defense system to protect the entire U.S. against ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles from China and Russia. All of these systems were designed to use expensive missiles to shoot down equally expensive aircraft and missiles. None of these systems were designed to shoot down hundreds/thousands of very low-cost drones.

Protecting Ground Forces
The problem of protecting troops with foxholes against artillery is hundreds of years old. In WWI, trenches connected foxholes into systems. Bunkers were hardened against direct hits. Each step was a response to increased lethality from above. Today, drones are the new artillery; a persistent, cheap and precise overhead threat but with the ability to maneuver laterally, enter openings, and loiter. And mass drone attacks put every high value military and civilian target on the surface at risk. Fielding more hardened shelters for soldiers like the Army’s Modular Protective System Overhead Cover shelters is a first step for FPV kamikaze drones defense, but drones can get inside buildings through any sufficiently sized openings. 

Drone Protection
Ukraine has installed ~500 miles of anti-drone net tunnels with a goal of 2,500 miles by the end of 2026. These are metal poles and fishing nets stretched over roads but they represent the same instinct: the surface is a kill zone, so cover it. Russia has done the same.

The logical response is to go underground (or out to space) but the technology to do it quickly, cheaply, and at scale is genuinely new. The gap in current thinking is between “put up nets” (cheap, fast, limited) and “build a Cold War concrete bunker” (expensive, slow, permanent). What’s missing is the middle layer – rapidly bored shallow tunnels that provide genuine overhead cover for movement corridors, equipment parking, and personnel protection. 

What tunnels solve that nets and shelters don’t
A net stops an FPV drone’s propellers. A shelter stops shrapnel. But a tunnel 15-30 feet underground is invisible to ISR, immune most to top-attack munitions, can’t be entered by a drone through a door or window, and survives anything short of a bunker-buster. Gaza proved that even with total air superiority and ground control, Israel has destroyed only about 40 percent of Gaza’s tunnels after two and a half years of war.

That’s an asymmetric defender’s advantage the U.S. military should be thinking about for its own use, not just as a threat to overcome.

What’s changed to make this feasible is that we may not need boring tunnels per se, but instead modular, pre-fabricated tunnel segments that can be installed with cut-and-cover methods at expeditionary bases. Or autonomous boring machines sized for military logistics (smaller versions of the Boring Company TBMs) corridors rather than highway traffic.

The problem is a lack of urgency and imagination
The problem is real, the incumbents (Army Corps of Engineers) are slow, and the existing commercial tunneling industry isn’t thinking about expeditionary military applications.

The doctrinal gap is between “dig a foxhole with an entrenching tool” (individual soldier, hours) or deploy a few Army’s Modular Protective System Overhead Cover shelters or “build a Cold War hardened aircraft shelter” (major construction project, years, billions). There’s no doctrine for rapidly boring hardened underground movement corridors, dispersed equipment shelters, or protected command post positions using modern tunneling technology.

Army doctrine treats excavation as something done with organic engineer equipment — backhoes, bulldozers, troops with shovels — to create individual fighting positions and cut-and-cover bunkers. The Air Force doctrine barely addresses physical hardening at all, having spent 30 years assuming air superiority would substitute for it.

Nobody in the doctrinal community is asking: what if the Army could cut and cover 100 meters of precast tunnel segments in a day or if we could bore a 12-foot diameter tunnel 30 feet underground at a rate of a hundred of meters per week and use it as a protected logistics corridor, command post, or aircraft revetment?

Summary
Oceans on both sides and friendly nations on our borders have lulled America into a false sense of security. After all, the U.S. has not fought a foreign force on American soil since 1812.

Protection and survivability is no longer a problem for a single service nor is it a problem of a single solution or an incremental solution. Something fundamentally disruptive has changed in the nature of asymmetric warfare and there’s no going back. While we’re actively chasing immediate solutions (Golden Dome, JTAF-401, et al), we need to rethink the nature of force protection, and military and civilian infrastructure protection. Protection and survivability solutions are not as sexy as buying aircraft or weapons systems but they may be the key to winning a war.

The U.S. needs a coherent protection and survivability strategy across the DoW and all sectors of our economy. This conversation needs to be not only about how we do it, but how we organize to do it, how we budget and pay for it and how we rapidly deploy it.

Lessons Learned

• There is no coherent protection and survivability strategy that addresses drones across the DoW and the whole of nation
  • Just point solutions
• For troops near the front, tunnels could reduce visual, thermal, and RF signature while providing fragment protection with a network of small, concealed, overhead- covered positions, short connectors, buried command posts, protected aid stations, and revetted vehicle hides.  
• We need to underground assets that cannot be quickly replaced 
  • Command posts, comms nodes, ammunition, fuel distribution points, repair facilities, key power systems, maintenance spares, and high-value aircraft or drones.  
  • Think protected taxiways, blast walls, covered trenches, buried cabling, alternate exits, redundant portals, and rapid runway repair. Sortie generation under attack depends on a whole system, not one bunker.  
• We need to work with commercial companies to harden/defend their sites
  • Provide active defenses and incentives for under-grounding critical facilities
• The Army and Air Force need to rethink their doctrines and techniques for Protection and Survivability
  • Army Techniques Publications (ATP) 3-37.34 – Survivability Operations treat excavation as something done with backhoes, bulldozers, troops with shovels to create individual fighting positions and cut-and-cover bunkers. Update it.
  • The Air Force needs to do the same with AFDP 3-10, AFDP 3-0.1 (Force Protection and AFTTP 3-32.34v3, AFH 10-222, Volume 14 and UFC 3-340-02
• We need to think of force and infrastructure protection not piecemeal but holistically
• • Part of any weapons systems requirement and budget should now include protection and survivability 
  • Protection and survivability should be deployed concurrently with weapons systems
• We need a Whole of Nation approach to protection and survivability for both the force and critical infrastructure

Filed under: National Security, Technology Innovation and Modern War |