Word of the Day: Precision Mass
The logic of hyper war.
Precision Mass
Strike weapons capable of carrying out relatively precise attacks on targets, while being procured at a cheaper individual cost than traditional guided munitions.
| Luke Widenhouse, The Clausewitz Bind: Force Posture in the Age of Precision Mass
Pretty much every time an American interceptor missile destroyed a Shahed drone, it blew a hole in the U.S. military budget measured in millions of dollars. It blew one in the Iranian budget measured in the tens of thousands. And those were the encounters logged as American successes. When the drones and missiles did get through, they could take out a $500 million American surveillance plane.
Military futurists sometimes like to talk about what they call “hyper war” — conflicts in which autonomous weapons systems might compete at speeds, and according to logic, completely illegible to human observers. The term for where we are now is “precise mass”: precision-guided missiles and munition-laden drones now cheap enough to deploy in large numbers, even for lesser militaries. “It used to be only a small number of states that could launch precision strikes,” Horowitz says. “But now every country around the world and many militant groups can do low-cost strikes at scale.” And those weapons aren’t just getting cheaper, they’re getting smarter. “I think in 10 years, you’re going to see a situation where virtually every country has an army capable of precision mass,” says Michael Boyle of Rutgers, the author of “The Drone Age.” The result, he says, will be the return of wars of attrition, no matter how mismatched the armies may seem on a spreadsheet. In Iran, we seem already to be there.
| David Wallace-Wells, [ Iran Demonstrates the Power of Drones and Cheap Weaponry
Note: Wallace-Wells uses the terms ‘precise mass’ and ‘precision mass’, interchangeably.