The Dream of the Motorcycle Warlords

Part 1: The Dream of the Motorcycle Warlords

[Roop] Hey Sarge what’s the form on this thing?

[Sarge] Twisto-bikey. A scoot-jockey. A few hours ago down in Sun-City he goes berserk. Breaks custody, kills a young primary, takes off in a pursuit special. We’ve been on him ever since. This one’s run off the air Roop. I’ve seen the style before: Terminal Psychotic.

–MAD MAX, dir. George Miller (1978)

Recently some friends and I were discussing a Twitter thread ( follow me @FromKulak) that had cropped up. The author of the thread speculated that the advent of cheap drone based bombs was fast rendering armoured vehicles obsolete. Armenia took extraordinary casualties to their tanks, vehicles, artillery, and logistics from Azerbaijani drone strikes and Drone guided artillery in the recent Nargorno Karabakh war. Even ISIS and Iraqi Militia now regularly deploy commercial drones modded out to either explode themselves or drop mortar shells on armored vehicles with incredible success (the distribution of armour on most vehicles favouring the sides and front meaning that an explosion directly above bypasses most protection).

So the Author presents a solution already being deployed by militias and irregulars from Africa to Afghanistan: Motorcycles.

Lets take a deeper look a motorcycles in warfare, why they are so prominent in insurgent movements, and why despite their usefulness (and coolness) western forces still use them only sparingly.

Versatility

A tattooed madman, I’m hell on wheels/ Born a wicked child left alone in the fields/ My father was the wind, my mother was fire/ Raised by the wolves and I grew up wild

–Mean Man, WASP (1989)

Motorcycle are fast, nimble, and outstrip even tracked vehicles in off road capability. In the woods a bike can get between the trees right under the densest canopy and travel along single track trails no wider than what a person or deer might walk, and wind between and, for the skilled enduro rider, Over! massive rocks and terrain that would rip a tank apart. Bikes preform uniquely well in mud, while the dual-sport bikers reading this are probably shuttering at memories of wrestling their bike up after a fall or stall in waste deep water, or their feet slipping about while trying to keep their bike balanced upright as they try to turn around on a trail… A fit guy can individually wrestle his bike out of spots professional teams would struggle to recover any larger vehicle from. With others to lend you a hand recovering even a heavy bike becomes fairly trivial.

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