Blazing the Yi Sun-Shin Trail

Every Korean knows the name Yi Sun Shin. It is a shame that few outside Korea have heard of him.

Yi Sun Shin was an ancient Korean admiral who changed naval warfare in Asia and defended the independence of his nation from a Japanese invasion. Koreans revere him for thwarting Emperor Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea in 1592, when his small navy sank 73 Japanese ships despite overwhelming advantages in numbers, manpower, and finances. Yi’s innovative genius is such that his victory outshines (at least in a technical sense) the British defeat of the Spanish Armada. Admiral Yi saw past limitations and conventional solutions to the possibilities his limited resources still afforded him. Yi could not match Hideyoshi ship-for-ship or man-for-man, so he reinvented naval warfare with innovative battle formations and a new ship, the kobukson or turtle ship, named for its carapace of hexagonal iron plates that proofed it against canon fire and boarding parties.

Americans, with their love of innovation and technology, are inevitably drawn to the story of Yi Sun Shin. His example offers us lessons today. North Korea has built formidable defenses against conventional attack. It may be time to reassemble existing technology in a way that better suits the North Korean problem than either balloons or B-2s.

Congress shows signs of understanding this. Section 104 of the recently signed North Korean Human Rights Act appropriates $2 million for–

. . . such actions as may be necessary to increase the availability of information inside North Korea by increasing the availability of sources of information not controlled by the Government of North Korea, including sources such as radios capable of receiving broadcasts from outside of North Korea.

Congress is looking for that solution now. The Knight-Ridder newswire, quoting an anonymous congressional aide, reports that “The U.S. government is preparing to smuggle tiny radios into North Korea as part of a newly financed program to break down the country’s isolation.” But how? According to Knight-Ridder’s anonymous congressional source,

‘[That] remains to be worked out. Legislators may keep operational details of the program classified to prevent North Korea from countering them,’ said a Capitol Hill staff aide who’s active in shaping U.S. policy on North Korea, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘I don’t see radios in balloons as particularly tenable,’ the staff aide said. During most of the 1990s, the South Korean military deployed balloons to send propaganda leaflets, rice and radios into North Korea, but suspended the practice in late 1999 under then-President Kim Dae-jung’s ‘sunshine policy’ of opening contacts with Pyongyang.

Without question, balloons alone won’t do the job. The ones that don’t fall in China or into the ocean are apt to land in uninhabited mountain areas. They would not be reliable enough to give the North Korean people any hope that they would ever return.

What these planners need is an unmanned aircraft that can fly from international waters to a specific destination accurately, can go for at least 200 miles, can carry a reasonably large payload, bears no resemblance to cruise missile on a radar screen (!), and is cheap enough to produce in large numbers within the $2 million dollar budget authority of Section 104. Enough proven, off-the-shelf technology exists to lead us to the answer.

Sixty years ago, the Germans used a UAV (the V-1 “buzz bomb“) with a payload of 900 pounds and a range of 250 to attack British cities (earlier versions had twice the payload and a 150-mile range). The technological triumph of the V-1 was its pulse jet engine, a primative jet capable of speeds of 350 miles per hour despite its extreme simplicity and low construction cost. The pulse jet relies on the natural oscillation of a tuned pipe to produce its pre-combustion compression; it lackes any of the complex turbines and injectors of modern turbojets, and is so easy to build that its following among garage inventors (more here; this home-built engine could technically lift a half-ton payload) is limited only by its deafening sound and the difficulty of controlling a 200-mile-per-hour model airplane. Those familiar with the V-1’s history know it as a terror weapon whose effectiveness was limited by a poor guidance system and vulnerability to British defenses. Neither limitation would be a concern for a similar aircraft with a humanitarian payload. GPS has solved the guidance problem, and the vulnerability to defenes was never really a limitation at all if one views the real impact of the V-1 in economic terms. The historian Paul Johnson explains in his superb history of the Twentieth Century, Modern Times:

Hitler’s difficulty was that he had to choose between two possibilities. The pilotless guided aircraft (V1) appealed strongly to his highly developed sense of military economy. It was one of the most cost-effective weapons ever produced. For the price of one Lancaster bomber, crew-training, bombs and fuel, Hitler could fire well over three hundred V1s, each with a ton of high-explosive, a range of 200 miles and a better chance of reaching its target. In the period 12 June-1 September 1944, for an expenditure of £12,600,190, the V1 offensive cost the allies £47,645,190 in loss of production, extra anti-aircraft and fighter defenses, and aircraft and crew in the bombing offensive against the sites. The Air Ministry reported (4 November 1944): “The results were greatly in the enemy’s favour, the estimated ratio of our costs to his being nearly four to one. Only 185 Germans lost their lives, against 7,810 Allies (including 1,950 trained airmen). The V1s were damaging 20,000 houses a day in July 1944 and the effect on London morale was very serious.

But Hitler did not invest early or extensively enough in this telling weapon. . . . The actual rockets used in the V2 campaign, the A4, of which only 3,000 were fired, cost £12,000 each (against £125 [$4250 in today’s dollars] for the V1), carried a payload of 12,000 lb and were hopelessly inaccurate. . . .

Since the last V-1 impacted, engineers have invented GPS guidance, carbon fiber and other composite materials, computer-controlled fuel injection systems, and nickel-cadmium batteries. All of these inventions would mean that a modern version of the V-1 would have greater efficiency and accuracy, and (without the need for heavy compressed air tanks, regulators, and steel spars) much less weight. The simplicity of the original pulse-jet engine could keep the cost extremely low. If one unit could be built for under $1000, a realistic estimate, then the cost of fielding an antiaircraft defense against large numbers of such aircraft would be prohibitive. Raising this cost should be a deliberate goal of any air-drop program.

Of course, this is only to suggest one of many possible designs. Modern commercial UAV systems use piston engines as small as 25 cubic centimeters. Leafblowers with engines of similar size cost less than $70 in home improvement stores. But how far could such a UAV go? In suburban Maryland, a garage inventor and some friends recently put a GPS chip into an ordinary model airplane and flew it from Newfoundland to Ireland. Somewhere in New Zealand, another inventor is building a cruise missile in his garage. The Air Force has a prototype UAV that will fly dangerous bombing missions in the following decades. UAVs are at the cutting edge of aviation development because the presence of a human being aboard an aircraft imposes so many limitations of safety, weight, and performance. This is just one more application where omitting the human cargo could mean a new era in the non-permissive delivery of humanitarian cargo.

Indeed, the U.S. military has already been thinking about using UAVs to supply inaccessible areas.

The Snow Goose, pictured above, was specifically designed to carry leaflets and supplies into hostile areas. The Snow Goose can be launched by air or from the ground, carries a payload of 600 pounds, has a range of nearly 200 miles, and uses a precise GPS guidance system. The air drop option is particularly appealing, since the use of manned cargo aircraft to carry UAVs within range of North Korea greatly expands the amount of cargo that could be carried. Unfortunately, the unit cost of a Snow Goose is $250,000, presenting us with an excellent example of what happens to simple technology in the hands of the military procurement system. What prevents off-the-shelf technology from doing the same thing for a fraction of the cost?

Geography presents an additional problem; what neighboring country would host such a venture?

The answer, for new Korea-watchers, is “none of the above.” This does not mean the problem is insurmountable. North Korea has two long coastlines, and it’s a big ocean. Anyone who has flown over it has been amazed at the number of large and small boats on those waters. No doubt, this is why U.S. military planners realize they could never stop North Korea from exporting nuclear materials, either. Ideally, then, the right UAV platform should be able to take off from the short distance of a boat’s deck or a catapult.

Could UAVs carry enough supplies to matter? The answer depends on how ambitious the air lift becomes, what the aircraft can do, and how many of them are available. Unfortunately, it would probably be impossible to feed every hungry North Korean without the establishment of safe air corridors and the use of manned cargo aircraft. The Berlin Airlift initially carried 80 tons of supplies into the city per day (about 80 V-1s), eventually increasing this payload to 3,000 tons. Most of this tonnage was coal. The Berlin Airlift had to supply every necessity of live for millions of people every day. The American food drops over Afghanistan may be a better example. They were heavily criticized by international NGOs, but much of the criticism was more political than technical; it was repackaged opposition to the war itself. Abby Spring, a World Food Program representative, concluded that the drops helped ease hunger by supplementing the diet of people who stayed near their homes. The Iraq Kurish airdrops of 1991 faced a different situation; there, airdrops supplied a massive population of dislocated refugees, and still depended on the help of relief workers on the ground. Interestingly, the Afghan airdrops carried thousands of wind-up radios to the Afghan people.

Of course, the U.S. military bought a more expensive item than it had to.

A North Korean airlift would have to have limited goals, like those of the Afghan airdrops, but initially on a smaller scale. It would serve a population accustomed to surviving on very little, and it would have to concentrate on providing only that marginal amount of information and assistance to keep their hope for survival above the critical point.

What should we carry to the North Koreans? The possibilities are nearly limitless–leaflets, radios, picture books of modern South Korea, small food packets, blankets, winter clothing, medicine, or even a newspaper published by a government in exile. Eventually, the United States could even dream of delivering cell phone service to the North Koreans and drop thousands of phones to them (family reunions at the touch of a button!). Some of these ideas may prove impractical, but the essential idea of a guerrilla air bridge–a Yi Sun Shin Trail–requires nothing more than the imaginative reassembly of proven and practical concepts.

North Korea would likely try to find and destroy every single item thus dropped. That would cost plenty, and it would likely have a significant effect on North Korean military training, readiness, maintenance, finances, infrastructure, and morale. Of course, the North Korean military would not find everything. Some of the materials we dropped on North Korea would still achieve their direct goal of spreading discontent and hope for a better future.

Either way, however, the U.S. advances the goal of changing North Korea for the better. One way or another.