The Kill Chain

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• During the last four years of his life, when he was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I was his staff director. That meant I led a team of defense policy experts who supported McCain and his colleagues in authorizing and overseeing the entire US defense program—every policy and activity of the Department of Defense, every weapon it developed and bought, every dollar of the roughly $700 billion that it spent each year. McCain and I had access to the Pentagon’s most highly classified secrets and programs, and we regularly met with our nation’s top defense officials and highest-ranking military officers.
• For years, McCain and I had been pleading with Pentagon leaders to be clearer and more forthcoming with Congress and the American people about how bad things really were. They did not want to encourage our competitors by sounding defeatist, which was an apt concern. But it was a concern we had to overcome because it is impossible to solve a problem that no one knows exists. As it stood, the Chinese Communist Party knew far more about the US military and its vulnerabilities than the American people and their elected representatives did.
  • Urgency
• A few months later, the RAND Corporation, a renowned nonpartisan research institute whose military analysis McCain and I consumed regularly, concluded in a major report that “U.S. forces could, under plausible assumptions, lose the next war they are called upon to fight.”
• McCain wanted the briefing that day to be a wake-up call to his colleagues—to provide many of the details behind these startling public pronouncements and to build greater support for the new technologies, ideas, reforms, and resources that McCain and I had been trying for years to champion. All ninety-nine of McCain’s Senate colleagues were invited. About a dozen showed up.
  • Urgency - also… wtf?!
• The opponent is always the red team, and the US military is always the blue team, and this is how Ochmanek described what has happened in those war games for years now: When we fight China or Russia, blue gets its ass handed to it. We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary.… Everyone assumes based on 25 years of experience that we have a dominant military establishment—that when we go to war, we always win, we win big, and there isn’t any question about this. And when you say to people, “not so fast,” they are shocked, because they have not had this experience.
• Cyberattacks would grind down the logistical movement of US forces into combat. The defenseless cargo ships and aircraft that would ferry much of that force across the Pacific would be attacked every step of the way. Satellites on which US forces depend for intelligence, communications, and global positioning would be blinded by lasers, shut down by high-energy jammers, or shot out of orbit altogether by antisatellite missiles. The command and control networks that manage the flow of critical information to US forces in combat would be broken apart and shattered by electronic attacks, cyberattacks, and missiles. Many US forces would be rendered deaf, dumb, and blind.
• It is also possible that a hit could be fatal, sending five thousand Americans and a $13 billion ship to the bottom of the ocean—all at the cost to China of around $10 million per missile.
• After a long silence I spoke up. Imagine how that meeting in the Situation Room would go, I said, if a future president, whose name could well be Donald Trump, came to realize that the only available options are surrender and lose or fight and lose. The bigger question at that point would be whether that future president would even be willing to go to war at all. After all, that has been China’s goal all along—as Sun Tzu counseled in The Art of War, to “win without fighting.”
• “I just don’t understand,” McCain murmured into his hands. “I remember when the Chief of Staff of the Army testified to Congress in 1980 that we had a ‘hollow’ force. It was shocking. It was front-page news.” McCain paused. “What is happening now is just as bad,” he continued. “It is actually much worse. And no one seems to care. They don’t even seem to want to know.” McCain looked away from me and stared at the floor, and I will never forget what he said next. “Future generations of Americans are going to look back at us,” he lamented, “and they’re going ask how we let this happen, and why we didn’t do more about it when we had the chance.”
• For the past decade, I have worked within America’s defense establishment—the iron triangle of the Department of Defense, Congress, and defense industry that McCain, modifying President Dwight Eisenhower, used to call the “military-industrial-congressional complex.” In this time, I have come to believe there is a systemic failure in our defense establishment, a world I still inhabit. It is a failure to understand what is really happening in the construction and exercise of military power, and this failure leads us to misjudge and mismanage our defense enterprise.
• All too often in defense, we think the measure of our strength is our platforms—individual vehicles and specific advanced military equipment and systems. We generate our requirements for military power in terms of platforms. We build our budgets and spend our money on the basis of platforms. We define our goals for military capability in relation to platforms. We aspire, for example, to a 355-ship Navy or a 386-squadron Air Force. We are drawn to platforms, in large part, because they are tangible. We can count them, touch them, and employ people to build them. They look good in parades. Indeed, platforms often rise to the level of defining the very identities of our military institutions and the men and women who comprise them, who see themselves as fighter jocks, ship drivers, and tankers. In short, we mistake inputs for outcomes. Leaders too often seem to lose sight of the larger objective—the reason why we would want any platform in the first place. For the goal of a military should not be to buy platforms. The goal is to buy deterrence, the prevention of war. And the only way to deter wars is to be so clearly capable of winning them that no rival power ever seeks to get its way through violence. What enables victory in war? Platforms may be useful tools, but they are not ultimately the answer. Rather, the ability to prevail in war, and thereby prevent it, comes down to one thing: the kill chain.
  • Status quo: big centralized platforms. Deterrence
• The kill chain is a process that occurs on the battlefield or wherever militaries compete. It involves three steps: The first is gaining understanding about what is happening. The second is making a decision about what to do. And the third is taking action that creates an effect to achieve an objective.
• Though the challenge of understanding, deciding, and acting in warfare is timeless, kill chain is a relatively new term that is linked to the information revolution, which began in the 1980s. Prior to the information revolution, the kill chain was largely concentrated in single military platforms. For example, the process of understanding where an enemy aircraft was, deciding what to do about it, and then acting against it all occurred within one fighter jet or air defense system. Platforms collaborated, to be sure, but for the most part, an individual platform had to be its own self-contained kill chain.
  • Timeline / platforms
• The information revolution created the prospect of what became known in the 1990s as networked warfare. New technologies transformed the collection, processing, and distribution of information, making it possible to disaggregate the kill chain. One military system might facilitate understanding, another might enable decision making, and yet another might take the intended action. Instead of concentrating all of these functions in one platform, militaries could distribute them across a “battle network” of many different military systems. Kill chain, then, more accurately described the overall process and goal, because it was an actual chain of events—information led to understanding, which led to decision making, which led to action.
  • Decentralized decision making systems
• A classic example of such a revolution is the emergence of automatic rifles, modern explosives, steamships, aircraft, and other industrial-era technologies that transformed warfare in the late nineteenth century in the run-up to World War I. Many believed in the late twentieth century that information technologies would lead to a similar military revolution—something like an internet of warfare waged with battle networks, and at the center of it all would be the kill chain. The problem is that, for many years, often while preaching the language of kill chains and military revolutions, America’s defense establishment never really changed its thinking. We remained focused on building and buying platforms rather than kill chains. Even at the peak of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States was spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to modernize our military in many of the wrong ways. We often tried to use unproven technologies to produce better versions of the same kinds of platforms that the US military had relied upon for decades. Many of these programs turned into multi-billion-dollar procurement debacles. Some produced highly capable platforms, but these platforms rarely cohere into one battle network that can share information effectively. “The main problem,” one military officer put it to me last year, “is that none of my things can talk to each other.”
  • Evolution of military technology broke; why?
• Centralized platforms are a key problem.
• This situation is especially dangerous because the information revolution did not end in the 2000s. It went into overdrive, propelled by commercial technology companies that usually have little to no connection to national security. Technologies such as ubiquitous sensors, “edge” computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced manufacturing practices, biotechnology, new space capabilities, hypersonic propulsion, and quantum information technologies will have sweeping economic and social implications, but they will also have profound military applications that go far beyond platforms and weapons, which is traditionally how military power is conceived. What will be so consequential about these technologies, taken together, is that they will transform the entire kill chain—not just how militaries act but also the character of their understanding and decision making.
  • Innovation happened in private sector that military struggles to access
• And yet, when members of our military put on their uniforms and report for duty, hardly any of this technology is available to them. Instead, they consistently have to do dangerous and important jobs with technology that might be many years behind what they use in their daily lives. This was reinforced again for me at a major Air Force conference last year, where I spoke on a panel about how new technology could help build better networks of military systems. An airman in the audience asked the panel how this would be possible when most servicemembers currently deal regularly with long network outages that leave them disconnected from email and the internet. Nearly everyone in the audience, more than one thousand people, erupted in applause.
  • Consumerism took of the enterprise lags even further behind in military
• For the past three decades, the Chinese Communist Party has gone to school on the US military and its entire way of war. It has raced to catch up. From 1990 to 2017, the Chinese military budget increased by 900 percent.5 China has devised strategies not to beat America at its own game but to play a different game—to win by denying the US military the opportunity to project power, fight in its traditional ways, and achieve its goals. China has rapidly developed arsenals of advanced weapons intended to break apart US battle networks, destroy the US military’s traditional platforms, and shatter its ability to close the kill chain. This threat has progressed much further than most Americans realize.
  • Urgency; China
• The Chinese Communist Party aims to become the dominant power in Asia and in the world, and it believes that for China to win, America must lose. We have to lose the race for advanced technology. We have to lose jobs and influence in the global economy. We have to lose partners who share our interests and values. We have to lose the ability to stand in the way of the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to make more of the world safe for its model of high-tech authoritarianism. And as the balance of power continues to shift out of America’s favor, the Chinese Communist Party will likely become more expansive in its ambitions, more assertive in its pursuit of them, and more capable of getting its way, no matter how much that harms Americans.
  • Urgency; China
• China poses far more than just a military challenge to the United States, but that broader challenge has a clear military dimension, and it is putting us in a real predicament. The problem is not that America is spending too little on defense. The problem is that America is playing a losing game. Over many decades we have built our military around small numbers of large, expensive, exquisite, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace platforms that struggle to close the kill chain as one battle network. China, meanwhile, has built large numbers of multi-million-dollar weapons to find and attack America’s small numbers of exponentially more expensive military platforms. For us to continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the same ways, on the same things, would be the height of folly. It would be exactly what our opponents want us to do.
  • Anti-platform based warfare
• No one should think that we face these problems because people in America’s defense establishment are somehow stupid, incompetent, or negligent. To the contrary, the vast majority of these people are hardworking, mission-oriented Americans who are doing their best to do right as they understand it. They are wrestling with a complex kill chain of their own. They are trying to understand what America’s enemies will do, what different threats may materialize, and how the future will unfold. They are trying to make large, complex, and costly decisions based on this imperfect information. And they are acting under extremely difficult circumstances in risk-averse bureaucracies that seem inclined to resist and stymie change at every turn.
  • Lack of confidence - in systems, not people Find quote about how no one hates war more than military personnel
• National defense has been the ultimate closed system. It is governed by a dense web of perplexing laws and policies, dominated by a handful of major companies, shrouded in secrecy, and impenetrable to aspiring new entrants. Whereas emerging technologies have recently disrupted and remade major global industries, from entertainment to commerce to transportation, national defense has remained largely unaffected. This situation is no longer sustainable. The entire model of American military power now finds itself in much the same position that Barnes & Noble or Blockbuster Video did amid the rise of Amazon, Apple, and Netflix, and this circumstance is forcing a similar choice: Change or become obsolete. Adapt or be left behind. But the consequences of failure for the United States go far beyond any adverse events in the commercial economy. What is at stake is nothing less than the security of all Americans and our closest allies.
  • Status quo: centralized power but siloed / decentralized systems
• When it feels as if the scope and speed of change are increasing, as it now does, it is all the more important to focus on the things that do not and must not change—on the essence of things. For militaries, that is the kill chain. New threats and new technologies change how militaries understand, decide, and act, but not the enduring centrality of those tasks.
  • Kill chain
• The real goal, however, is a more effective kill chain—achieving better understanding, making better decisions, and taking better actions. The question is not how new technologies can improve the US military’s ability to do the same things it has done for decades but rather how these technologies can enable us to do entirely different things—to build new kinds of military forces and operate them in new ways.
• It requires a sweeping redesign of the American military: from a military built around small numbers of large, expensive, exquisite, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace platforms to a military built around large numbers of smaller, lower-cost, expendable, and highly autonomous machines. Put simply, it should be a military defined less by the strength and quantities of its platforms than by the efficacy, speed, flexibility, adaptability, and overall dynamism of its kill chains.
  • Anti-platform
• The United States has enjoyed a position of unrivaled military dominance for so long that most Americans cannot imagine a world without it. The result is that we are not moving with anything close to the level of urgency that is required to be successful. Many good Americans within our defense establishment understand the urgency and are doing their best to build a different kind of US military. But they are laboring in institutions whose political, economic, and bureaucratic incentives are aligned with continuing to build and buy the military America has. Changing these dynamics would be hard under normal circumstances, but it is exponentially harder now, when American leaders are consumed by a level of political gridlock, distraction, acrimony, and outright dysfunction in Washington that is rare in our modern history.
  • Key Risk: political grid lock
• I would much rather live in a world where the values that define the future of technology and warfare—the future of the kill chain—are the values of the American people.
• In 1991, as the Cold War was coming to an end, Andrew Marshall was looking to the future. For eighteen years, he had been the director of one of the most influential offices in the Department of Defense that most Americans had never heard of: the Office of Net Assessment. Its mission, in brief, was to determine how the United States measured up against its competitors, primarily the Soviet Union, and how it could improve its strategic position over time. Marshall reported directly to the secretary of defense (he had already worked for seven of them) and few beyond the secretary himself were privy to Marshall’s writings. Marshall would go on to work for seven more defense secretaries in a forty-two-year career that earned him a mythic status and led many in the Pentagon, including a few secretaries of defense, to refer to him reverentially as “Mr. Marshall.” In Washington defense circles, however, he came to be called by a different name: Yoda.
  • War games
• The Gulf War, it seemed, represented a new way of warfare. But Marshall’s report, which he sent to the secretary of defense in 1992, drew a different conclusion. He foresaw far more sweeping changes in how war would be fought. He had been influenced by then-classified writings of Soviet military planners about what they called a coming “military-technical revolution.” Those Russian officers believed that new sensors and surveillance technologies would be able to identify all of the targets on the battlefield and feed that information nearly instantly to new weapons that could strike the targets more precisely and from farther away than ever. It would be the fastest, most effective kill chain in history. The Soviets called it the “reconnaissance-strike complex,” and they believed the US military had demonstrated it in Iraq. Marshall disagreed. His report concluded that “the United States did not come close to its potential to move the most useful information rapidly to those who needed it most.” This assessment was affirmed by a major study of the Gulf War commissioned by the Pentagon and released the following year, in 1993. “Some of the aspects of the war that seemed most dramatic at the time,” it concluded, “appear less so than they did in the immediate afterglow of one of the most one-sided campaigns in military history.”2 The US battle network “had not changed appreciably from the Vietnam era.”
  • War games
• What Marshall saw coming was the emergence of what he later called a “revolution in military affairs.” These were periods when major technological developments transformed the weapons and ways of war. Marshall pointed to historical examples, such as the inventions of machine guns, steam-powered ships, and airplanes. But he also stressed that new technology on its own did not enable militaries to succeed. They also had to develop new ways to employ that technology operationally and reform old institutions for new strategic purposes.
  • Evolution of warfare
• Shortly after Marshall finished his report, some of his analysts were searching for a shorthand way to describe how a powerful adversary might harness the emerging military revolution to counter America’s traditional platform-centered approach. They settled on the term “anti-access and area denial” capabilities. Little did they know, all the way back in 1992, that these were exactly the kinds of weapons that China was beginning to build.
  • Decentralized future of warfare
• There were no more “demons” or “villains,” General Colin Powell quipped in 1991. “I am down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” The old “bipolar world” was gone, but rather than giving way to the historical norm of a “multipolar world,” with many great powers all competing for influence, we had entered a unique new era: a “unipolar world.” The United States was more than a great power. It was more than a superpower. It was, in the words of one foreign leader, the “hyperpower.”
• A slew of ambitious efforts to reimagine the US military was undertaken in books, papers, and government plans with names like “Army After Next,” “Network-Centric Warfare,” “Joint Vision 2010,” and “Lifting the Fog of War.” The 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s premiere strategy document, made it an explicit priority for the Department of Defense to “Exploit the Revolution in Military Affairs.”
• Indeed, from the start of the air campaign in Bosnia in 1995 to the end of the seventy-eight-day air war over Kosovo in 1999, the United States lost only four military personnel, all of whom were killed in training, not in combat. Winning had less to do with any decisive transformation in how the United States built battle networks and closed kill chains, and far more to do with the fact that our opponent was just not that capable. Yet, all the same, the experience reinforced America’s sense of dominance, as well as its traditional assumptions about how to fight wars.
  • Timeline
• Admiral William Owens, who retired as the nation’s second-highest-ranking military officer in 1996. Four years later, he wrote a book that blasted his former profession for “residual overconfidence” and “learning all the wrong lessons from our experience” in the Gulf War. “We used victory to validate doctrine, tactics, and weapons that had prevailed against a particularly inept foe,” Owens wrote. If we did not change, he warned, we risked “a major dissolution of American military strength—and perhaps even a total collapse of our military capability—in the next ten to fifteen years as weapons and equipment financed during the Reagan-era buildup two decades ago become obsolete.”
  • Timeline - consolidation vs Reagan era buildup?
• Marshall commissioned what was called the “Future Warfare 20XX Wargame Series,” which sought to realistically simulate what future wars could be like when “the key technological and strategic trends associated with an ongoing Revolution in Military Affairs have been fully played out.”7 The war games were set at an undefined future date, 20XX, which was presumed to be between 2025 and 2030, and they pitted the United States against an undefined rival that was innocuously called a “large peer competitor.” Everyone knew that only one country fit this description: China. Marshall turned to two defense experts to lead this series of war games over the course of the final years of the twentieth century. One was Robert Martinage, who would later go on to serve in the Pentagon under President Barack Obama. The other was Michael Vickers, who also became a senior Pentagon official for both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama. Vickers would always be better known as the former Green Beret who once jumped out of airplanes with a miniaturized nuclear weapon lashed to his ankle and who later, as a CIA agent, helped Congressman Charlie Wilson plan America’s covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Vickers was depicted in the film Charlie Wilson’s War playing chess in the park against multiple people at once. In 2001, Martinage and Vickers submitted their final report to Marshall, and it challenged many of the Pentagon’s core assumptions. The report foresaw a near future in which a competitor like China would have most of the same advanced technologies as the US military. The adversary would be able to find targets quickly and hit them with large numbers of precise weapons at very long ranges, no matter where the targets were—including in outer space. The US homeland would be struck by precision-guided missiles. US military communications and logistics networks would also come under withering attack, which would deny America the ability to fight the same way it had in Iraq and the Balkans. The only way for the US military to succeed on this future battlefield was to fully embrace the revolution in military affairs and build technologically advanced networks of forces, especially unmanned forces, that could hide more effectively and close the kill chain faster than anything the US military could do at the time. The consequence for not doing so would be an…
  • War games
• Through the conduct of thousands of counterterrorism missions, the Joint Special Operations Command developed new technologies and new ways to fight with them that have enabled US special operations forces to close the kill chain—turning information into understanding, understanding into decisions, and decisions into targeted actions—with a devastating speed and effectiveness that have ripped apart terrorist networks across the planet. It was this military innovation, as part of the broader counterinsurgency strategy that was introduced in 2007, that decimated Al-Qaeda in Iraq and prevented the United States at that time from actually being defeated in battle in that country.
  • SOCOM
• For the past two decades, US leaders have spent vast sums of money on misguided ideas about military power and the deterrence of war. Too often, we have imagined that a persistent and predictable presence of US forces in numerous places around the world—rather than periodic and surprising demonstrations of new and better ways to close the kill chain—would deter US rivals from acting aggressively. The result is that we have run our military into the ground through repeated deployments of limited strategic value, and US adversaries have factored this into their plans to counter us.
  • Deterrence
• Over the past two decades, during the peaks of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, multiple new weapons programs were started and ultimately canceled with nothing to show for them. The Center for Strategic and International Studies stopped counting the different programs at eighteen, acknowledging that the real number is far higher. All told, the Pentagon and Congress spent more than $59 billion on these programs during the 2000s and got no usable capability by the time the programs were canceled.9 This list includes the $18.1 billion that the Army spent on its Future Combat System, which was to be an array of aircraft and fighting vehicles that would redefine the future of land warfare. It includes the $3.3 billion that the Marine Corps spent on its Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, which was to replace its legacy amphibious landing craft. And it includes a whole host of other systems, from Air Force satellites to Navy ships to new helicopters for multiple military services. They were all billed as leap-ahead, next-generation technologies. They all cost billions of dollars. They all failed. They were all canceled. And they all had the same result: nothing. To this list of canceled programs that yielded nothing must be added a longer, costlier list of programs that were initiated or accelerated when the defense spending floodgates opened in 2001. Most remain many years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, and yet they continue to stagger on—two steps forward, one step back—like zombies. This list includes programs that regularly make the news, such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Ford class aircraft carrier, the KC-46 refueling tanker, and the Littoral Combat Ship. But it also includes a vast array of satellites, radios, communications equipment, software programs, intelligence systems, and much more that most Americans have never heard of but have nonetheless financed to the tune of hundreds of billions of tax dollars.
  • Massively expensive costs
• The bigger issue is that most of these allegedly information age military systems struggle to share information and communicate directly with one another to a degree that would shock most Americans. For example, the F-22 and F-35A fighter jets cannot directly share basic airborne positioning and targeting data despite the fact that they are both Air Force programs and built by the same company. They were architected with different means of processing and transmitting information that are not compatible. It is as if one speaks Greek, and the other speaks Latin. If one aircraft identifies a target, the only way it can transmit that data to the other is how it was done in the last century: by a person speaking on a radio.
  • Centralized silos
• At a time when the Department of Defense, Congress, and the defense industry all seemed to be singing from the same hymnal about the centrality of new information technologies and the importance of the US military services operating together as one “joint force,” they were nonetheless pouring billions of dollars into new military systems that achieved the opposite outcome, if they worked at all. The result has been a US military version of the Tower of Babel.
  • Centralized power but information silos
• Some military capabilities put into development in this two-decade period actually were revolutionary, but many ended up suffocated in their cradles. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other organizations did promising work on artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, but these projects rarely moved beyond the laboratory. The semiautonomous Long Range Anti-Ship Missile struggled for adequate funding year after year. For a long time, the Air Force dallied with unmanned combat air vehicles, such as the X-45, before abandoning them.10 The Navy developed the X-47, the first unmanned aerial vehicle to be launched and recovered from an aircraft carrier, which was so effective at dropping its tail hook and landing each time in the exact same place that it damaged the flight deck, and the Navy had to program it to land in different locations on its aircraft carriers. But the X-47’s success did not stop the Navy from canceling the effort a few years later. None of these development decisions created strong incentives for traditional defense companies to prioritize next-generation technologies. These and other promising technologies were not neglected or abandoned for lack of funding but rather because they threatened traditional ideas and interests, such as manned military aviation.
  • Early 2000s and 2010s
• This outcome, sadly, was less the result of a bug in the defense establishment than a feature of its business model. The military services, Congress, and defense industry mainly conceive of military power in terms of platforms. The ability of these things to share information is often an afterthought. In fact, the incentives usually cut the other way: Defense companies have profited more by building closed systems of proprietary technologies that make the military more dependent on a given company to maintain and upgrade those platforms for the decades they are in service, which is where companies make their real money. This behavior stems not from malice but a rational pursuit of self-interest in a platform-centered defense market.
• The counterrevolution was swift and severe. By 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke of a scourge that he called “Next War-itis—the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict.” In reality, Gates got it backward. The real affliction ailing the defense establishment was “Last War-itis,” the belief that the concepts and weapons that had succeeded in the past would remain successful in the future, and the willingness of that defense establishment to spend tons of money trying to optimize the past.
• “Last War-itis” only intensified under President Barack Obama. His overriding belief was that America remained militarily dominant, that our traditional assumptions about how and with what we would fight were valid, and that our greatest threat was not foreign rivals with new kill chains but the misuse of our own power. The top priority was to end the wars that Bush began, cut military spending, and focus on “nation-building at home.”
  • Obama’s comment of derision in response to Romneys comments about Russia
• In 2011, in a bid to cut federal spending, the president and Congress enacted a plan that ultimately mandated $1 trillion in cuts to the defense budget over ten years. This set off a mad scramble in Washington and the broader defense establishment to get a piece of the shrinking pie. The result was a zero-sum fight between the needs of the future and the demands of the present (the latter of which were really the priorities and programs of the past).
• The stories that Ukrainian commanders recounted to me at the time were chilling. The Little Green Men could jam Ukrainian drones, causing them to fall out of the sky. They could also jam the fuses on Ukrainian warheads so they never exploded when they hit their targets, but instead landed on the ground with an inert thud. The Ukrainians talked about how the Little Green Men could detect any signal they emitted and use it to target them. Minutes after talking on the radio, their positions were wiped out by barrages of rocket artillery. Their armored vehicles were identified by unmanned spotter drones and immediately hit with special munitions that came down right on top of them, where the armor was weakest, killing everyone inside. The Ukrainians tried to dig themselves into bunkers and trenches, but the Little Green Men hit them with thermobaric warheads that sucked all of the oxygen out of those closed spaces, turning it into fuel that ignited everything and everyone inside. Entire columns of Ukrainian troops were annihilated by cluster munitions.
• What emerged in Ukraine in 2014 was more than just Little Green Men; it was a battle network of sensors and shooters that closed the kill chain with remarkable speed and lethality. It was a Russian reconnaissance-strike complex. And it caught Washington off guard again the following year when it emerged in Syria, where US forces had been fighting for one year.
• In 2016, two analysts from the RAND Corporation, David Shlapak and Michael Johnson, predicted that Russian forces could reach the outskirts of all three Baltic capitals in sixty hours and that US and NATO forces would struggle to respond effectively.1 A troubling realization began to emerge in parts of the Department of Defense and Congress: The United States could lose a war to this new Russian military. Indeed, Russian victory could be a fait accompli.
  • Urgency
• The larger significance of these events was that they awoke US leaders to the similar but far greater military challenge that had emerged in China. Russia was just the wake-up call.
• Rather than backing down, Putin doubled down. Russian planners had been studying the US military for a long time. They knew that US forces would fight a future war on Russia’s periphery in much the same way they had fought past wars in Kosovo and Iraq. So, as the Obama administration was going out of its way to “reset” US relations with Russia, Putin was pouring money into the construction of an arsenal of technologically sophisticated weapons: long-range missiles and rockets, highly capable special operations forces, advanced air defenses, electronic warfare, cyber weapons, lasers to blind satellites, missiles to shoot them down, and tactical nuclear weapons. All of this military modernization had one explicit purpose: to render the United States incapable of projecting military power into Europe and defending its NATO allies, especially the many parts of Europe that Putin still believed should be part of a greater Russia.
• In February 2013, Russia’s chief of the general staff and highest-ranking military officer General Valery Gerasimov outlined the stakes in an article that became required reading in the Pentagon after the Little Green Men appeared in Ukraine and Syria the next year. “The very ‘rules of war’ have changed,” Gerasimov wrote. “The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.”2 Put another way, the reconnaissance-strike complex now included the ability to surveil the political and social fault lines in countries and strike directly at the heart of them through “military means of a concealed character.” This included misinformation campaigns, political subversion, assassination, cyberattacks, and “active measures” using social media to tear at the fabric of diverse and democratic societies. The battlefield would now be everywhere.
  • Opportunities: surface area of war
• By 1978, its new leader, Deng Xiaoping, wanted to take China in a different direction, toward economic openness at home and integration into the global economy. Here, too, a bipartisan consensus about China arose in Washington. It rested, as Asia experts Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner have written, on “the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking.”3 Washington was more confident than ever in its ability to achieve this lofty goal as it emerged triumphant from the Cold War and the Gulf War in 1991, but those events led to different conclusions in Beijing.
  • The biggest mistakes in geopolitics came from assuming they could mold massive nations, like Russia or China, to their will.
• Under what it called its 995 Plan (named for the Belgrade embassy attack in May 1999), China accelerated work to build a different kind of military. It continued to spend money on traditional military systems, such as ships and tanks, but its priority was to develop what it called “Assassin’s Mace” weapons. The name refers to special weapons that were used in Chinese history to defeat more powerful adversaries. It would be like David and Goliath: the goal was not to beat the giant at its own game but to render it unable to fight by confronting its vulnerabilities.
  • China’s military build up began in 1993
• China also developed weapons to attack US aircraft carriers and their associated “strike group.” The DF-21, the world’s first ever anti-ship ballistic missile, was designed to do just that—fly out more than one thousand miles, slam into a carrier, and cripple its ability to fight, if not sink it altogether. These capabilities eventually earned the DF-21 a different name: the carrier killer.
  • Anti-platform
• An additional set of Assassin’s Mace weapons focused on doing to the US military what it had done to Iraq in 1991: destroying the underlying systems that sustained the ability to wage war. In America’s case, this was its communications and intelligence satellites, especially its Global Positioning System (GPS), which enabled US weapons to find their targets. It was the information networks that moved targeting data from sensors to shooters. And it was the logistics enterprise that allowed US forces to flow into theaters of operations and sustained forces in combat with food, fuel, and supplies. China built advanced aircraft, electronic attack and cyber capabilities, and more precise weapons, including antisatellite missiles, to counter the US military’s ability to collect intelligence, communicate information, and command and control its forces in combat. This was all part of a broader warfighting doctrine that Chinese military officials ultimately called “systems destruction warfare.” The simple idea was that the US giant could not move or fight if it were deaf, dumb, and blind.
  • Anti-platform
• By plundering intellectual property and trade secrets from US military and defense contractors, China saved years of painstaking work and a small fortune in military research and development, much like a runner hitchhiking through the middle miles of a marathon.
• By 2012, General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of US Cyber Command, estimated that the United States was losing a quarter of $1 trillion every year to cyber-enabled industrial espionage, much of it by China. He called it “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
• Ultimately, the strategic challenge that China poses dwarfs that of Russia. Despite all of its hostile rhetoric and saber rattling, Russia possesses orders of magnitude less conventional economic and military power than China, and that disparity grows wider every day. The larger significance of the Little Green Men’s invasion of Ukraine was as a wake-up call for Washington about China, a far more formidable strategic challenge. But for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, it is unlikely that Washington would have shifted its attention to China as considerably as it did in 2014 and the years that followed.
  • Connect to “Russia has very little economy outside military spending, and that makes it dangerous.”
• The evidence has been there all along. As early as 1993, China declared that its military’s goal would be “fighting local wars under high technology conditions.” Chinese leaders openly spoke of the September 11 attacks as a “moment of strategic opportunity” that China had to seize while America was distracted. In 2007, China took the extraordinary, and quite public, step of blasting an aging weather satellite out of low-earth orbit with one of its new antisatellite missiles. And as Rush Doshi has argued, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2009, President Hu Jintao further shifted China’s strategy away from Deng Xiaoping’s entreaty to “hide capabilities and bide time” toward a more overtly assertive role in the world.
  • Timeline of urgency with china
• the broader chaos of a deteriorating Middle East, which consumed the foreign policy of George W. Bush and, to a lesser degree, Barack Obama—both of whom had come into office stating their intent to focus on China. But to a larger extent, America’s leaders disregarded the mounting strategic challenge that China posed because of the durability of the bipartisan consensus that the United States could shape China in its own image, primarily through increased trade and investment on favorable terms for China. This consensus extended beyond Washington and strongly influenced its actions: powerful domestic businesses and banks often pushed for security interests to take a back seat to economic ones in regard to China. Talk and action that deviated from this consensus was frequently scorned as warmongering that would antagonize Beijing.
  • Biggest mistake in assuming the US could shape China
• We have been blinded by the myths we have told ourselves—that, with the end of the Cold War, the world had transcended great-power competition and conflict, that, in the words of The 9/11 Commission Report, transnational threats such as terrorism, not great-power rivalry, were “the defining quality of world politics.”7 We told ourselves that China and Russia wanted to be like America, and that greater exposure to US technology, business, and culture would make them into the partners we wanted. It is not that we were wrong to try to achieve these aspirations. It is that we clung far longer than we should have to beliefs increasingly at odds with the realities emerging all around us.
• It was not until the ambushes of 2014, first by Russia and then by China, that things really began to change. Washington leaders were abruptly seized by what many of them began to refer to as “the reemergence of great power competition.” And they started to think about how to respond. One of the main architects of that response was Robert Work, then the deputy secretary of defense and an acolyte of Andrew Marshall who had once written reports and run wargames for him. For many years, Work had grown increasingly concerned that China and Russia had been acquiring the kinds of military countermeasures that Marshall…
  • Understand Andrew Marshall and Robert work
• Although Work did not put it this way, he was trying to rehabilitate the revolution in military affairs that had fallen into disrepute in the two decades after Marshall had first articulated it. The technologies had changed radically, but the goal had not: to build high-tech, information-centered battle networks that enabled US troops to find enemy targets and take action against them faster than ever before—or as Marshall said two decades prior, “to move the most…
• Although some traditional defense companies were developing some of these technologies, such as advanced missiles and directed energy weapons, many of the most consequential technologies were being developed by commercial enterprises that were not interested in providing them to the US military. How the…
  • Consumerization of the enterprise
• Find again the quote from whoever first talked about “consumerization of IT”
• How America got ambushed by the future is not just a story of Washington learning the wrong lessons about its dominance and failing to take seriously emerging great powers with chips on their shoulders and serious military technology ambitions. It is also a story of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex,” the tight relationship that emerged at the dawn of the Cold War between private defense companies and the Department of Defense, as well as Congress. More broadly, it is a story of the close collaboration between the US government in Washington and the world of high technology that grew up in California in the 1950s, with Silicon Valley as its capital, and how that partnership eroded over the years, leaving the military and technology communities struggling to…
  • Consumerization of the enterprise
• On April 30, 1946, as chief of staff of the Army, Eisenhower wrote a memo to the War Department describing the “general policies” of military acquisition that had won the…
• It is difficult to overstate the all-encompassing sense of urgency that Washington felt in the early years of the Cold War. The nation had survived the most cataclysmic war in human history only to find itself locked in a long-term strategic competition with a great power that possessed a hostile ideology and a growing nuclear arsenal. There was no “residual overconfidence” in America. If anything, the country was deeply concerned about falling behind in the development of military technology, a fear that became all the more real when the Soviet Union beat the United States into space with the launch of Sputnik in 1957. There was a pervasive belief that America could fail, and that failure could result in another apocalyptic war.
  • The sine waves of fear + existential threat = urgency vs hubris + unearned confidence = falling behind
• Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times. Hard times make strong men.
• The way Eisenhower saw it, Washington’s primary role was to get the big things right. That started with picking the right people—not necessarily good people or nice people, but exceptional people, the kinds of people who might today be called “founders.” Eisenhower believed in empowering these founders by giving them broad authority to solve clearly defined problems, providing them all of the resources and support they needed to be successful, and then holding them strictly accountable for delivering results. In short, it was a strategy of concentration—of priorities, money, effort, and, most importantly, people.
  • Opposite of the cutoff to startups and McNamara Doctrine
• One person Eisenhower bet on was Air Force general Bernard Schriever, a German immigrant who had only recently gotten his first star when the president assigned him the mission of developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver a nuclear weapon to the other side of the planet in a matter of minutes.3 This was not even close to being feasible in 1954 when Schriever got to work, but with Eisenhower’s complete support and flush with funding, the general set up shop in an old church in California. He awarded gigantic contracts with fat margins to companies and technologists and integrated them into one military-industrial team. He scraped a space launch center out of a boggy stretch of Florida wetland called Cape Canaveral. He repeatedly blew up rocket engines and missile prototypes on the launchpad. But along the way, Eisenhower defended Schriever, got him more money when he needed it, and protected him from bureaucrats and staunch rivals, such as fellow Air Force general Curtis LeMay, who tried to kill the project at every turn, believing that missiles should never displace manned bombers (an early round of the fight over unmanned systems that continues to this day).
  • The intercontinental ballistic missile is a case study of what happens when risk is rewarded, incentives are aligned, and bureaucracy is held at bay
• Eventually, Schriever and his team did the impossible: they developed the Thor, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles that could deliver nuclear weapons to precise locations on the other side of the planet in minutes. They laid the technological foundation from which America first went to space and then the moon. And they did it all, from start to finish, in just five years.
  • Timeline / speed of delivery
• This was how America acted when it was serious. The paramount concern was picking winners: the priorities that were more important than anything else, the people who could succeed where others could not, and the industrialists who could quickly build amazing technology that worked. Other concerns, such as fairness and efficiency, were of secondary importance. Did this approach occasionally result in waste, fraud, and abuse? Yes. But that was deemed the price of moving fast, getting things done, and staying ahead of the Soviet Union.
  • Contrast this with the view today that the military doesn’t want to “pick winners.”
• This is how Silicon Valley originated: as a start-up incubated by the Department of Defense. Margaret O’Mara, a historian and former staffer for Vice President Al Gore, has observed, “Defense contracts during and after World War II turned Silicon Valley from a somnolent landscape of fruit orchards into a hub of electronics production and innovations ranging from mainframes to microprocessors to the internet.”4 Those technologies formed the core of unprecedented new weapons. The guidance systems and onboard computers that steered US missiles into precise targets during the Gulf War in 1991 were largely thanks to Silicon Valley. Its deep military roots contributed to a culture that not only was willing to work on weapons but also embraced this work. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of engineers was motivated by the steady stream of challenging problems the Cold War produced, such as winning the space race. They believed their work could make them wealthier and America safer.
• A sprawling bureaucracy materialized in the 1960s to administer and discipline the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower’s more personalized approach to military acquisition and innovation, which was based on picking winners and holding them accountable, became bureaucratized amid the broader adoption of the industrial age management practices that had come into vogue in leading companies.
  • Eisenhower’s “picking winners” vs McNamara’s “cutting costs.”
• The result was that the process of developing military technology became harder, slower, and less creative. This outcome only intensified in the early 1970s, when many engineers in Silicon Valley began growing uncomfortable working for the US government as the Vietnam War grew more divisive. By the late 1970s, innovators in the Department of Defense found themselves compelled to work around the acquisition system, rather than through it, to get good technology fast. Indeed, many of the weapons that debuted in the Gulf War, such as stealth aircraft and precision-guided munitions, were developed this way: William Perry, the Pentagon’s leading technologist until 1981 and later secretary of defense, gave these programs such a high level of classification that most of the bureaucracy did not even know they existed.
  • The “founder-led innovation era” only survived because of founders like Kelly at Skunk Works or Schriever, and champions like Eisenhower or Bill Perry
• General Schriever, who wrote to Packard on February 11, 1986. His verdict was devastating. Eisenhower had gotten it right, Schriever wrote, but “during the last several decades we have lost the way.” The “timely fielding of qualitatively superior weapons is not being achieved,” Schriever said, because now it took more than twice as long and “enormously” more money to develop them. Military procurement had become “politicized by a blizzard of legislation” and stifled by a “maze of top-down micro-management.” The resulting system had become “a tapestry of confusion, delay and self-serving motivation,” Schriever wrote, in which there are “more rules, requirements, documents, people, reviewers, and checkers than ever before involved non-productively in the decision-making process.” In short, this was a system that would have made Schriever’s achievements impossible.
  • A former founder (Schriever) decrying the current system
• Also compare to comments at end of Skunk Works book: “1 million pages of papers per day.”
• Washington further distorted the incentive structure of the military-industrial complex in ways that drove apart the worlds of national defense and advanced technology. When the Soviet threat disappeared, any sense of urgency in military acquisition went with it. The United States was the “hyperpower.” The pressure to stay ahead of a strategic rival that had propelled military technological innovation during the Cold War vanished, along with much of the money that had sustained Silicon Valley’s work.
• In 1993, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry convened what became known as “The Last Supper.” He called together the CEOs of major defense companies, which at the time was a lot of people. He told them each to look to their left and to their right, because in a few years’ time, as defense spending came down, most of them would be gone. Perry urged the CEOs to consolidate, and that is exactly what they did. When the Cold War ended, there were 107 major defense firms. By the end of the 1990s, there were five.
• The Pentagon, for its part, parceled development funding out in large numbers of small-dollar contracts that rarely scaled into big programs. Political leaders seemed more focused on the number of contracts they could spread around and the number of small businesses they could say they were funding. Washington seemed more interested in talking points than technology.
• More and more of America’s defense spending shifted from developing new things to operating and maintaining old things. Ambitious young engineers who wanted to design new military aircraft and other systems faced the very real prospect that they might only get one or two chances of doing so in their entire careers. This created a powerful incentive for them to take their talents elsewhere, and many of them did.
  • Brain drain in defense
• None of this was a welcome development for technology companies that wanted to help solve military problems. The opportunities they found to work in the defense world increasingly amounted to little science projects and technology demos that often failed to transition into large military programs but disappeared instead into what became known as the “valley of death.” These companies found it increasingly difficult to sustain themselves, attract private investment, and grow into larger companies. Not surprisingly, more and more of them were driven out, dropped out, or stayed out altogether. From 2001 to 2016, of new companies that sought…
  • Valley of death
• The US military remained dominant either way. It was lapping the competition. Indeed, in the absence of existential threats, the far greater problem appeared to be vice in the military-industrial complex: waste, fraud, abuse, excessive…
  • Lack of urgency. Good times make weak men
• As a result, congressional and Pentagon leaders began to optimize the defense acquisition system for another set of virtues—not speed to develop and field the best military technology, but rather transparency, fairness, social justice, ease of administration, and the endless pursuit of efficiency in planning and accounting for every dollar spent by the military or paid to industry. Picking winners came to seem archaic, even unfair. Congress passed law after law to create new processes, offices, paperwork requirements, and official homework checkers to ensure that some bad thing that happened once would never happen again. And the Pentagon added to these troubles by further tying itself into knots of red tape. All of this…
  • The death of both picking winners and risk-taking
• Acquisition bureaucrats, who would never operate weapons in combat, nonetheless painstakingly sought to define the exact requirements for those weapons, and the decision of who would get to build them came to rest more on which contractor could deliver “technologically acceptable” systems at the lowest price to the taxpayer rather than on technological innovation that delivered the best value to the warfighter. The Department of Defense and Congress sought to fix these existing technologies into so-called programs of record to make it easier to plan for future costs and predictably fund them each year. The…
  • Built to spec replaces the idea of building to the mission
• In time, defense companies began to reflect the problems that plagued their biggest customer and its increasingly dysfunctional procurement system. As Washington focused more on the efficient production of incrementally better versions of existing weapons, as it prioritized cost accounting and ease of administration over rapid technological innovation, as it created ever more boxes to check and hoops to jump through in the unending pursuit of a fair and virtuous acquisition process, companies adapted. They chased contracts that paid them to develop only the capabilities that met the Pentagon’s requirements, which frequently changed in the midst of building them, and paid them fees regardless of how long the work took or how well it was done. Defense companies spent less money on research and…
  • When you reward adherence to bureaucracy you naturally get a more bureaucratic organization that is less interested in “building to the mission” and more focused on “building to spec.”
• Many companies resented making these changes, which they felt forced into. But change they did, and they often used their influence in Washington’s byzantine acquisition system to their own advantage: They underbid on contracts to develop technology and then overran on the actual costs and time to produce it. They promised things they could not deliver. And they used their political clout in the Pentagon and Congress to make it harder for new companies and new technologies to displace their programs of…
  • What gets measured gets managed (find the quote)
• The reason was simple: year after year, Washington introduced new laws, policies, and regulations that made it harder and costlier for numerous companies to remain viable in the defense industry. For corporate leaders with fiduciary responsibilities to maximize profits for their shareholders, overcoming those costs through scale and…
  • Cutting off pipeline to startups, reducing competition, and forcing consolidation beyond what was healthy
• It is estimated that seventeen thousand companies dropped out of the defense business…
• As fewer companies were willing and able to do business with the military, and as the defense industry became more consolidated and less competitive, the Department of Defense turned to the same few companies for more of its needs. A narrowing group of voices was bound to create blind spots, and that was a main reason why Washington got the information revolution wrong. The defense establishment primarily thought (and still thinks) in terms of things—of building and buying platforms. The information revolution and the revolution in military affairs, as Marshall and others saw it, were less about things, and more about the connections between them. The revolution was about networks.
• The irony is that, thanks to all of those young engineers who fled the defense world or who had found it too unappealing to enter in the first place, the information revolution that the US military so desperately wanted exploded into existence in the outer world, on the other side of the country. As the US government’s policies and actions pushed new technology developers away from Washington and the defense market, the opportunities of the commercial technology economy pulled them toward Silicon Valley in droves. Starting with the internet boom in the 1990s and continuing with the new technology world that grew up after the millennium, commercial markets for the software, services, and consumer electronics that Silicon Valley was building quickly dwarfed the buying power of the Pentagon, as vast as it was. New start-ups were getting rich and growing into massive companies not because of a multi-million-dollar government market with hundreds of thousands of customers but because of a multi-billion-dollar commercial market with hundreds of millions of customers. By comparison, the profits to be made working with the Pentagon were a rounding error and not worth the excessive cost and hassle required to navigate its convoluted procurement system. Investors looking to deploy hundreds of billions of dollars simply did the math—the real returns would be made in Silicon Valley with commercial technology, not in Washington with defense technology—and so that river of money flowed to the former at the expense of latter.
  • Consumerization of the enterprise
• In 2018, I was visited in the Senate by some executives from a computing company called Nvidia, a member of the shrinking list of tech firms supportive of working in national defense.
• Nvidia’s core technology is called a graphics processing unit, which its founders created not with militaries in mind but video games. The gaming world had an insatiable appetite for ever greater computing power to run the increasingly high-resolution, high-speed, and large-scale games that developers wanted to develop and players wanted to play. Nvidia’s miniaturized graphics processing units were the answer, and they enabled the explosion of modern gaming in recent years that brought to gamers’ screens rich, virtual worlds filled with thousands of hyper-realistic artificial agents, all running at lifelike speeds with little to no latency. What Nvidia soon realized was that the same computing engines that enable humans to navigate artificial worlds could also enable intelligent machines to navigate the real world. The company’s graphics processing units were soon helping to lead a new revolution in artificial intelligence and machine learning with wide-ranging applications. It was by stacking Nvidia’s most powerful computing cores together that Oak Ridge had built its supercomputer. What interested me more, however, was Nvidia’s role in powering self-driving vehicles. Nvidia is not the only company building mini supercomputers for autonomous vehicles, but it is certainly a leader in the field. It integrates powerful computer and graphics processing units and accelerators for artificial intelligence into a “chip” the size of a textbook that is embedded right onboard the vehicle. When equipped with well-trained machine learning algorithms, Nvidia’s computers enable vehicles to make sense of the myriad events that happen every second on congested roads and perform complex, time-sensitive actions, such as maneuvering through city streets. The fact that all of this information is being processed and interpreted right where the vehicle collects it and needs it has led the kind of technologies that Nvidia and others develop to be called “edge” computing. A better description might be machine brains. Unlike some leading American technology companies, Nvidia is open to doing business with the Department of Defense. I asked how many of its graphics processing units were operating on fielded US military systems. I was not surprised by the answer: none. As the answer suggests, most US military systems are many years behind the state-of-the-art technology that commercial companies such as Nvidia are developing. The most capable computer onboard a US military system is the core processor in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has earned it the nickname “the flying supercomputer.” The processor can perform 400 billion operations per second.1 By comparison, the Nvidia DRIVE AGX Pegasus can conduct 320 trillion operations per second right onboard a commercial car or truck.2 That is eight hundred times more processing power.
• This has led to some striking contrasts. Many American homes are now fitted with a network of low-cost sensors made by companies such as Nest and Ring that give one person with a mobile device real-time situational awareness of their most important places, whereas the average US military base is still defended by large numbers of people either standing watch or staring at rows of video surveillance monitors, stacked up like Hollywood Squares. Similarly, many Americans drive vehicles equipped with sensors that tell them everything that is going on around the vehicle at all times, whereas most American military vehicles do not have the same capabilities.
  • Consumerization of the enterprise
• While some parts of the Department of Defense have recently adopted cloud computing, it was only in October 2019 that the department finally awarded a contract to set up an enterprise cloud, which quickly became embroiled in official procurement protests stemming from President Donald Trump’s public attacks on one of the competitors, Amazon, and its founder Jeff Bezos.
  • Jedi
• What has made the next chapter of the information revolution possible is a fundamentally new approach to developing software that Silicon Valley pioneered long ago. It is a never-ending process of building, testing, and releasing the computer code that makes information technology work. This is why the apps and operating systems in our mobile devices are being updated around the clock. That simply does not happen with US military systems, where hardware has always been king and software largely an afterthought. For most military systems, the schedule for hardware updates determines the schedule for software updates. After all, most of the companies building these systems are hardware companies, not software companies. This has created multiyear software development cycles that are doomed to failure. Think of how well your mobile device would work if its software and apps were updated only every several years. That’s how it is for military systems. I cannot tell you the number of defense programs I came across during my time in the Senate—on which the US government had spent billions of dollars over many years—that were failing for the simple reason that their builders were not proficient in how to develop suitable, scalable, adaptable, and constantly improving software. And the result, time and time again, is that members of the US military are handed equipment whose functionality is inferior to what they use in their everyday lives.
  • Consumerization of the enterprise. Connect to Tesla quote. Software-first iteration .
• There is simply nothing like this happening in the Department of Defense. Most Americans reap the benefits of machine learning every day. They use it to buy their next book, pick their next song, select the fastest route to drive home, and curate the information they consume online. They would be shocked to know how little machine learning technology, which they increasingly take for granted, has permeated the daily work of US military servicemembers, who in their jobs regularly have to perform laborious tasks manually that they turned over to machines and algorithms many years ago in their private lives. Most of the Department of Defense is ill equipped to take advantage of machine learning in part because of how it deals with its own data. Long ago, the commercial world realized that data is the oil that fuels the digital world and the prerequisite for an intelligence revolution. Machine learning algorithms are not possible without large quantities of data, and for more than a decade technology companies have been working hard to amass stockpiles of it. Too much of the Department of Defense, on the other hand, still treats data like engine exhaust, a by-product of more important activities, which it regularly discards in large quantities. The bigger problem is that as Pentagon leaders have come to appreciate the importance of data, they have not turned to machine learning to help them make sense of it quickly and at scale, but rather have added more people to try to deal with it manually.
  • Consumerization of the enterprise
• Low-cost space launch has spawned a whole new industry in microsatellites. Rather than being large, few in number, expensive, and designed to last for decades, satellites can now be plentiful, cheaper, and designed more like mobile phones: mass-produced devices that get used for a few years and then replaced. This has enabled satellites to get much better much faster, because new technology is deployed every few years rather than every few decades. That, in turn, has created another entirely new industry: small, low-cost rockets that can launch a few microsatellites at a time. In short, in just one decade commercial technology companies in California and elsewhere overturned many core assumptions about access to space, and they are now expanding the frontiers of the information revolution beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
  • Key opportunities: space
• A development with extraordinary military significance is additive manufacturing, which enables complex parts and even finished products to be printed in three dimensions using different kinds of materials, from low-cost plastics to carbon fiber to molten metals. This technology is already being used to print critical parts for airplanes, rockets, vehicles, and other machines. In time, people will be able to manufacture more of the things they need, right where they need them, at the push of a button, without much of the added cost, time, and human effort now required to build, assemble, ship, and warehouse manufactured goods. Indeed, it is no longer far-fetched to think that additive manufacturing will enable entire satellites to be printed in outer space, thereby eliminating the need (as well as the enormous cost, time, and risk) of launching them into orbit.
  • Manufacturing as a product
• Indeed, since 2003, sequencing the human genome has become two hundred thousand times cheaper, and writing a genomic sequence has become more than a thousand times cheaper.5 This has enabled, and been made possible, by the development of CRISPR and other low-cost genetic engineering technologies, which make it possible to create new genetic material and even new forms of life from scratch. An immediate application that will be of enormous interest to militaries has to do with expanding the frontiers of human performance enhancement—assessing more precisely which people are best at what kinds of cognitive and physical tasks, and then enhancing those natural abilities through individually customized medications or biotechnologies. Another emerging frontier in the biotechnology revolution is “brain-computer interface” technology, which is exactly what it sounds like: the ability to connect the human brain to machines and control them. Elon Musk, who has founded a brain-computer interface start-up called Neuralink, has set the goal of “a full brain-machine interface where we can achieve a sort of symbiosis with [artificial intelligence].”6 One near-term goal that Musk has defined is enabling people to type forty words per minute entirely by thinking. Brain-computer interface can be achieved invasively, using surgical implants, but it is increasingly being done non-invasively. For example, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has demonstrated that robotic prosthetics fastened to the human body can pick up neural signals that enable amputees to control them like real appendages. The same technology that makes this possible, a combination of advanced sensors and machine learning, has also enabled humans to control other kinds of machines, such as drones—and not just one but groups of them. If the technology could be perfected, human beings could direct and oversee the operations of drones and other robotic military systems purely with their thoughts.
  • Biological warfare isn’t just disease. Human augmentation is also a big part of it.
• Partly this was because many Silicon Valley companies were uninterested in providing their technologies to the Department of Defense, at first for economic reasons: working for the Pentagon took too long, was too frustrating, and resulted in too little revenue. But in time, economic differences hardened into ideological ones. Young founders and engineers who came of age after the Cold War had no memory of working with the US military. They had the same desire to change the world as their predecessors in Silicon Valley, and they were seized with their own version of the boundless optimism that swept America in the heady years of its “unipolar moment.” Technology seemed to be breaking down walls and bringing people together. Many in Silicon Valley began to see themselves as global citizens who had faith that people were naturally good and longed to live in peace, and that technology could make it all possible. This worldview seemed irreconcilable with that of the US military, which saw itself as the last line of defense against the immutable human capacity for evil, rapacity, and aggression. It was as if the Department of Defense was living on Mars, and Silicon Valley was living on Venus.
• But it is worse than that: When the Washington defense world eventually did become aware of these revolutions in commercial technology, it did not immediately embrace them. In many cases, it resisted them. The cases of two California-based start-ups, SpaceX and Palantir, have been illustrative in this regard, because their experiences have been nearly identical. As Silicon Valley was mostly turning away from national defense, these two companies were the exception. The reusable rockets that SpaceX developed slashed the cost of space launch for everyone, including the US government, which had relied for many years on one defense company to launch its important and expensive national security satellites—a company whose record of successful launches was perfect, but whose price for this service was steep. Similarly, Palantir developed software that could analyze vast quantities of data and lift out important patterns and insights, which could help the US government thwart terrorist attacks by mapping their networks. The Department of Defense, in particular the US Army, had been struggling for years and spending billions of dollars to develop a comparable capability. Both SpaceX and Palantir had cutting-edge technologies that the US military did not have, and unlike many of their Silicon Valley peers, they wanted to sell them to the Department of Defense. Both could be arrogant, pushy, and condescending at times, to be sure, but neither the Army (in Palantir’s case) nor the Air Force (in SpaceX’s) was eager to alter the status quo—even if it cost more (as in the Air Force’s case) or did not work at all (as in the Army’s case). Instead of giving up, both companies commenced multiyear fights to convince their prospective government customers to buy their technology, which was really only possible because each company had a billionaire founder who was willing and able to sustain that struggle. Even this did not ultimately work, however, and both Palantir and SpaceX had to sue their own customers to get a fair hearing. Both won and have become multi-billion-dollar companies.
  • Suing their own customers
• three decades of data suggest that if you want to start a successful and profitable new business, defense is not the place to do it (unless you are already a billionaire).
  • Palmer has said this a lot; compare to Richard Branson quote
• The classified intelligence disclosures of Edward Snowden in 2013 hardened a belief in Silicon Valley that the US government was untrustworthy, bad for their increasingly global brands, and even opposed to their values. This contributed to a series of actions that only made matters worse: Apple’s refusal to decrypt the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone in 2015 and provide the data to the FBI, Facebook’s failure to control Russia’s hijacking of its platform to meddle in the 2016 election, and Google’s withdrawal in 2018 from Project Maven, the Pentagon program that seeks to use machine learning to process intelligence, and even the cloud computing contract. Many in Washington saw these and other actions as proof that Silicon Valley had become morally unserious and willing to elevate corporate profits above national defense, especially because many of these companies seemed more willing to work with the Chinese government than their own government. The relationship hit rock bottom.
  • Timeline of defense vs Silicon Valley
• Unfortunately, this drama unfolded at the very moment when the Department of Defense had finally begun to have its great awakening regarding advanced technology. Starting in late 2014 with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and accelerating under his successor, Ash Carter, Pentagon leaders began arguing that the US military’s technological advantage was eroding, and that retaining it would depend on new technologies such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and advanced manufacturing.
  • Timeline of Silicon Valley vs DOD. Find other quotes about when people were predicting the deterioration of defense capabilities
• The scale of this divide has become staggering. The top five artificial intelligence companies in the United States—Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple—spent a total of $70.5 billion on research and development in 2018. That is money they are investing in the future. In contrast, the top five defense companies—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—spent a total of $6.2 billion. Indeed, Apple regularly sits on around $245 billion of “cash on hand,” enough money to buy all five of those top US defense companies outright. The Department of Defense thus finds itself in a terrible dilemma when it comes to the core technologies that it now admits are the most…
  • R&D spend
• And this is perhaps the greatest irony of all: with all respect to Eisenhower, the biggest problem with the military-industrial complex is not that it became a threat to American liberty and self-government at home, as Eisenhower warned in his famous Farewell Address of 1961. The bigger problem is that over time the military-industrial complex has failed at the one job it had: to get the absolute best technology the nation…
  • Read eisenhower’s address about the military industrial complex. But there’s something to said about what COULD have happened was similar American innovation. What DID happen was more a result of McNamara’s cost cutting and Bill Perry (name?)’s Last Supper consolidation. That led to “Managed Monopolies.”
• Eisenhower had directed the military-industrial complex to incredible effect, whatever misgivings he ultimately developed about it. But somewhere along the way, Washington turned against Eisenhower’s risk-tolerant approach that had enabled innovators such as Schriever and others to do the impossible, and then spent decades replacing it with cumbersome, stultifying central planning processes that could not deliver great technology fast or at all. Washington sacrificed speed and…
  • McNamara’s fault
• Militaries are unlike civilian institutions in many ways, but a primary difference is that they lack routine sources of real-world feedback on their performance. Sports teams play games that they either win or lose. Businesses have the market: if customers are not buying what they are selling, that is a good indication they need to change. None of this exists for militaries. They try to compensate with analysis, exercises, war games, and other forms of self-assessment. They experiment with new technology and new ways to use it, which is absolutely essential. But there is only so much an institution can learn about itself short of relevant, real-world performance. Indeed, the main thing that militaries exist to do—fight wars—rarely happens, and the better they are at deterring war, the less likely they are to have to fight one. That is a good thing, of course, but it makes it harder for militaries to know whether they are truly ready for the future.
  • War games
• The wrong kind of change can cost lives. At its most extreme, however, this rigidity leads to what Norman Dixon famously called “the psychology of military incompetence,” which includes “clinging to outworn tradition,” a “failure to use or tendency to misuse available technology,” a “tendency to reject or ignore information which is unpalatable or which conflicts with preconceptions,” and a “tendency to underestimate the enemy and overestimate the capabilities of one’s own side.”
  • SALY principle. Lack of urgency comes before the drivers of urgency.
• Moffett made full use of analysis and war games to build his case for the revolutionary potential of aircraft carriers, but he went far beyond that. He devoted large portions of his force to experimenting at sea, enabling sailors to develop new operational concepts and tactics for how to fight with aircraft carriers. Moffett further experimented with different kinds of aircraft to perform more combat roles, and he invested heavily in those new technologies. Perhaps most importantly, Moffett fought his own leadership and peers within the Navy to promote aviators into jobs that had never been open to them, thereby seeding the bureaucracy with insurgents who would use their newfound power to drive internal change to the benefit of the kind of warfare he envisioned would become central to any victory—naval aviation. Moffett ran the bureau for twelve years, providing continuity and sustained leadership through a heady period of change, but he could not have succeeded alone. He cultivated strong champions for his cause among powerful civilian leaders, such as President Herbert Hoover and Congressman Carl Vinson, the long-serving chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee. Indeed, when the chief of naval operations tried to block Moffett’s reappointment to a third term, Hoover himself overruled him. Moffett died eight years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Navy entered that war having already done much of the hard work of adopting a revolutionary new technology, even as World War II would usher in further sweeping changes that ultimately saw the aircraft carrier replace the battleship as the centerpiece of the fleet.
  • War games. Also there’s gotta be somewhere for a section on feedback loops. Connect to quote about how much time they spend training for something they very rarely do. Or the idea of building lots of low cost things will teach you more than building a select few exquisite things
• Why did these and other instances of military innovation in peacetime succeed? A few main reasons stand out. For starters, real change requires the definition of clear threats. Militaries need to know with as much specificity as possible what operational problems they must solve through the development of new capabilities and new ways of fighting. It is not enough for militaries to know that they must close the kill chain. They must also know against which specific threats, in which specific geographic locations, and at which specific scales and speeds they must act. These questions are often best framed by leaders at the top, but the best answers often come from the bottom up, when the lower ranks are empowered and given clear guidance to devise new ideas and try new things.
  • Trust them to know the problem, not the solution. Also similar to Anduril desire to hire veterans because they have lived experience “from the ground up.”
• General Schriever succeeded, in large part, because he knew clearly which problem he needed to solve: deliver a nuclear weapon to the other side of the planet in a matter of minutes. That is also why Assault Breaker succeeded but a program such as the Army’s Future Combat System did not: It became a theory of everything for everyone and eventually collapsed under the weight of the many divergent requirements it was directed to meet.
  • Know the problem, not the solution. The problem with “build to spec”
• Civilians require the partnership of what Barry Posen has called “military mavericks,”3 visionary leaders who are determined to use their unique expertise and legitimacy to change their own institutions. These mavericks rarely get very far on their own, however. They require committed civilian champions, especially in Congress, who provide money and moral support, remove obstacles from their way, and defend them from their opponents in the bureaucracy—which could include, as it did at least in Moffett’s case, preventing their own institutions from firing them. It is only when civilian leaders and military mavericks are aligned in favor of disrupting the status quo that real innovation becomes possible in the absence of war. That kind of alignment is why it worked with Moffett, Vinson, and Hoover—or, for that matter, for Eisenhower and Schriever—and it is something that has been unfortunately rare in the United States in recent decades.
  • Founder-led mentality. Kissell (name?) being the godfather of the skunk works
• Much of the problem with the revolution in military affairs during the 1990s and 2000s is that it devolved into technology fetishism, as if the mere acquisition of new capabilities would by itself transform the US military. This is arguably an even bigger risk today, when emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence are often treated as magic condiments to be spread atop existing military systems. In reality, true military innovation is less about technology than about operational and organizational transformation.
  • Driven more by egos than practicality
• This has been one of the biggest failings of the US defense establishment over the past few decades: we stopped doing meaningful experimentation, the kind that Moffett or Schriever would recognize. What we did too often instead was allow large bureaucratic committees to try to define in the abstract the exact requirements that new military capabilities should possess, rather than working out those requirements more iteratively by enabling military operators to experiment with new technologies. Not surprisingly, this is how we ended up with many of the procurement disasters that continue to plague our military to this day.
  • Built to spec. Lack of risk-taking / experimentation
• Put simply, militaries and their civilian leaders must believe there is something worse than change. They must believe that change is the lesser evil, and that a failure to change will realistically produce catastrophic, near-term consequences, such as the loss of a major war. Ultimately, this is the deeper reason why America has been so badly ambushed by the future. For far too long, we have not truly believed there is something worse than change. We simply could not imagine it. We became increasingly spoiled by our own dominance and unmoored from reality, a malady that afflicted Washington and Silicon Valley alike. Americans failed to appreciate, in a real and visceral way, that the world we inhabited after the Cold War, the world of our hyperpower and unipolarity, was actually one of the most anomalous periods in world history, and sooner or later it would end. Believing we faced no meaningful threats, we felt little need to innovate or deviate from our path and little consequence for failing to do so.
  • What a wasted opportunity. Similar to the hubris of believing we could shape Russia and China to be what we wanted them to be.
• “There are common causes for military disasters,” Admiral William Owens wrote in 2000, shortly after retiring as America’s second-highest-ranking military officer, “and at the heart of them lie dangerous smugness, institutional constraints on innovation, and the tendency to avoid questioning conventional wisdom.” The result, Owens went on to say, is that “the side that is the most smug, the most convinced that its interpretation of the past is the best guide for the future, often turns out to be the loser in the next war.”4 These words of caution are even more salient today than twenty years ago, because the main question confronting America’s defense establishment, its political leadership, and the American people is whether things are different now—whether we actually believe there is something worse than change.
  • Hubris.
• The challenge that Russia poses, however, pales in comparison to that of China. Russia will not get stronger over time. It will get weaker, which could actually make Putin more of a short-term danger. But whereas Putin has rather clear intentions but a limited ability to generate power, the Chinese Communist Party has rather unclear intentions but an ability to generate more comprehensive national power than any competitor the United States has ever faced.
  • Russia vs China threat level
• The challenge that China represents is amplified by the ways in which it is no ordinary nation-state. It embodies thousands of years of experience as the Middle Kingdom, a time when China viewed itself as the superior center of the world, surrounded by inferior states that it managed in a hierarchical tributary system. Indeed, the only exception to this nearly five thousand years of unbroken historical experience is what the Chinese call their “century of humiliation,” the period from 1839 to 1949 when China was beset by civil war and dominated by foreign imperialist powers (the United States notably not among them). This century-long exception to a multi-millennial rule just so happened to be the one blip in world history when the United States became the predominant global power. It can be difficult, especially for Americans, to comprehend the sheer enormity of the shift in the global balance of power that is occurring with China’s rise—or rather, its return. The only world that Americans know, the world of our own dominance, is one that few Chinese would recognize or accept as the natural order of things.
  • Threat of China. Hubris.
• China’s ambitions to become the world’s technology superpower have been spelled out in a recent series of sweeping national strategies and industrial policies. Made in China 2025, issued in 2015, seeks to establish China as a world leader by 2025 in ten high-technology industries, including robotics, aerospace manufacturing, biotechnology, and advanced communications and information technologies, such as 5G networks. The National Innovation-Driven Development Strategy seeks to make China the world’s “innovation leader” in science and technology by 2030, ranging from microelectronics and nuclear power to quantum technologies and space exploration, among other industries. In July 2017, China issued its New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, the goals of which Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and chairman of Alphabet, described this way: “By 2020, they will have caught up. By 2025, they will be better than us. And by 2030, they will dominate the industries of AI.”
  • Urgency
• What makes the Chinese Communist Party’s technological ambitions even more threatening to the United States is a major way that Beijing enacts them—through a systematic global campaign to capture the world’s best technology by whatever means necessary, which includes a massive foreign intelligence operation to steal trade secrets and intellectual property through cyber espionage and human spying. It also includes pressuring foreign corporations that seek to open operations in China—either as manufacturers or to sell to Chinese consumers—to hand over their intellectual property to the Chinese state as the price of doing business there. It includes the coercion of Chinese students at foreign universities, including at US universities, to spy on their peers, steal their research, and transfer it to the Chinese government. And it includes the deployment of significant sums of capital to invest in high-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, establish ownership positions, and send their intellectual property back to China.
  • Intellectual property threats
• The military implications are also significant. All of the intellectual property that the Chinese Communist Party acquires or steals abroad, all of the breakthroughs that its domestic technology companies make, all of the joint ventures that US companies and research institutes conduct in China—all of it has a good chance of directly benefiting the People’s Liberation Army under China’s doctrine of “military-civil fusion.” That is the law. And the goal, as Xi has stated, is to “complete national defense and military modernization by 2035 and fully build the people’s army into a world-class military by the middle of the century.” That military must focus on “preparing for war and combat,” as Xi told senior military officers in 2018 while wearing fatigues and combat boots.13 So, when US technology companies refuse to work with the Department of Defense but then do business in China, the practical effect is denying technology to their own military while providing it, knowingly or otherwise, to China’s military.
  • Intellectual property
• China’s military budget has increased by 400 percent since 2006,14 and though Beijing does not reveal the exact amount of its annual military spending, that number will surely continue to grow along with China’s GDP.
  • Urgency
• The centerpiece of the Chinese Communist Party’s military buildup is the Chinese Navy. With an estimated 400 ships and submarines, the Chinese Navy is already larger than the US Navy, which currently consists of 288 combatants. Between 2015 and 2017, Chinese shipyards launched twice as many tons worth of naval vessels as their US counterparts.
• War is a perpetual contest between offense and defense. The development of precision-guided weapons, beginning with the Assault Breaker initiative, gave the United States a decisive offensive advantage after the Cold War, because America’s military alone possessed these capabilities. But as precision strike weapons have proliferated, especially in China, which Andrew Marshall and others foresaw as early as 1992, the advantage has shifted from the offense to the defense. It is extremely difficult to move a small number of large platforms halfway across the world and dominate a great power in its own backyard. The problem for the United States is that we have been building our military to project power and fight offensively for decades, while China has invested considerably in precision kill chains to counter the ability of the United States to project military power.
  • Urgency
• Since 2014, representatives of more than eighty governments have been meeting to consider an international ban on the development and use of lethal autonomous weapons, which the Department of Defense defines as machines “that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator.”1 These kinds of systems could be sent on military missions, identify targets using their own narrow artificial intelligence, and strike those targets, all without direct human control. They are weapons, in other words, that could close the kill chain without a human “in the loop.” Opponents of these weapons, who are pushing to ban them, use a different name: killer robots. In April 2018, the Chinese government expressed support for an international agreement “to ban the use of fully autonomous lethal weapons systems.” The devil, however, was in the details. China explicitly did not call for a ban on developing these advanced weapons, and its official statement of policy defined lethal autonomous weapons incredibly narrowly—so narrowly, in fact, as not to capture the many ways in which the People’s Liberation Army appears to be prioritizing the development of the very kinds of systems it says it never wants to use. On the same day that China called for banning the use of autonomous weapons, its air force announced a project to develop fully autonomous swarms of intelligent combat drones.2 This is in keeping with years of China’s military development efforts and writings that envision a future of “intelligentized” warfare, most recently its “Defense White Paper of 2019.” Chinese military planners have described their desire to create a “multi-dimensional, multi-domain unmanned combat weapons system of systems on the battlefield.”3 That translates to robotic combat systems everywhere—in the air and in outer space, on land, and at sea, including a potential “underwater Great Wall” of autonomous submarines. Although some details of China’s military uses of advanced technology are known, such as experiments involving swarms of more than one hundred autonomous fixed-wing aircraft, it is unclear how far the Chinese military has progressed in its pursuit of intelligentized warfare. But if there was any doubt about the Chinese Communist Party’s likely ambitions, China’s Military Museum features a depiction of an aircraft carrier being overwhelmed by a “swarm assault” of unmanned combat aircraft.
  • Automation / Urgency
• First came the DR-8, a supersonic drone believed to play a critical role in providing targeting data for China’s “carrier killer” anti-ship ballistic missiles. Next came the Gonji-11, or Sharp Sword, a stealthy, unmanned combat air vehicle with an internal bay for weapons storage that also happens to be the spitting image of the US Navy’s X-47B, which was prematurely retired in 2015. That was followed by DF-17 hypersonic missiles and a pair of unmanned submarines that could be part of that underwater Great Wall.
  • Urgency
• The rush by many militaries to develop increasingly autonomous weapons has sparked concerns of a “global arms race for killer robots.”6 And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There has been talk for years about a growing “cyber arms race.”7 More recently, concerns have mounted over an “AI arms race,”8 a “hypersonic arms race,”9 a “5G arms…
  • Automation - killer robots
• And not only does the Chinese Communist Party see advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence as a big opportunity to realize its ambitions, it also sees the United States as the single biggest obstacle to those ambitions—not simply because of what America does but also because of what it represents as the world’s most powerful embodiment of Western liberalism.
• Emerging technologies will certainly have broad non-military impacts, but they will transform the character of military power as well, and whichever actor is first able to develop and harness the military applications of these technologies could gain decisive strategic advantages over others. Americans must see this challenge clearly. After all, do we think there is any doubt in the minds of the rulers of the Chinese Communist Party—or Vladimir Putin, for that matter—that they are engaged in a new arms race with us?
  • Importance of being first
• One area where this is already evident is hypersonic weapons, which are missiles or air vehicles that have entirely different flight characteristics from those of traditional munitions. Until now, weapons could fly in one of two ways. They could fly fast but relatively predictably, or they could fly relatively slowly but unpredictably. Ballistic missiles are fast but predictable: They largely travel along parabolic trajectories that are determined by gravity. No matter how fast they fly, their path of flight and point of impact can be predicted once they are launched. That is how militaries can shoot them down. Conversely, cruise missiles have traditionally flown slowly (for missiles, that is) but unpredictably: they can maneuver like airplanes, which makes it harder to know where they are headed, but because they fly slower, militaries can shoot them down, as well. Hypersonic weapons are different because they can travel both fast and unpredictably. It is not clear where they are headed once launched, and they can fly so fast that there is very little time or ability to react. How fast? Upward of five times the speed of sound—that is more than 3,800 miles per hour, or roughly one mile in less than one second—and possibly faster. At these speeds, weapons could travel between China and Guam, the location of the largest US military base in the Pacific, in about thirty minutes. Indeed, US officials have stated that the United States currently has no capability to defend against, or even track, these weapons in flight.
  • Hypersonic
• But because Washington did not sufficiently prioritize hypersonic weapons, US officials now openly concede that China has gotten ahead. Beijing has poured billions of dollars into the specialized wind tunnels and other costly infrastructure that are prerequisites for developing hypersonic weapons, and it has reportedly conducted multiple test flights each year for several years in a row. The United States is racing to catch up, but it will take a lot of time and money to develop and field hypersonic weapons. Just test firing a single missile can cost more than $100 million. This will limit the number of hypersonic arms that Washington, Beijing, and others will ultimately acquire. Indeed, the enormous impact of these weapons will be limited by the fact that militaries will likely be reluctant to expend their limited arsenals of them on anything but the most important strategic targets.
  • Takes decades to create a problem that then takes decades to solve.
• Exquisite platforms with such a high cost they’re difficult to justify fielding
• The race to develop new high-speed weapons—not just hypersonic weapons, but also supersonic cruise missiles, electromagnetic railguns, hypervelocity projectiles, and new long-range cannons to fire them—is driving a related race to develop counters to these weapons. This competition will also have the hallmarks of a traditional arms race, and much of the focus is on directed energy weapons, such as lasers and high-powered microwaves. This technology has been an aspiration for a long time, and the US government has spent billions of dollars over several decades trying to develop it,…
  • Future warfare assets Always measures and counter-measures
• The advantage of these weapons is their ability to shoot more often, much faster, at lower cost, and without the burden of resupplying ammunition. A traditional missile, for example, could cost upward of $1 million per weapon or more, and the even more expensive platforms that carry them eventually run out of weapons to shoot. Directed energy weapons, on the other hand, could cost as little as a few…
  • The Spacex falcon of missile cost paradigm disruption
• Reinforces the importance of energy in all our technological revolutions, from AI to weapons
• At present, these weapons are like early firearms, somewhat clumsy and of limited use now, and the race to build effective counters to these systems, such as mirrors and heat shields, has already begun. But for the first time ever, directed energy weapons are actually operationally viable, and…
• Take the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, for example—the so-called flying supercomputer. It contains more than eight million lines of computer code that run its advanced digital systems. So, is the F-35 a piece of hardware that contains a lot of software? Or is it a digital warfare system wrapped in an aircraft? That this is even debatable shows the pervasiveness of the information revolution. It also points to the inherent cyber vulnerabilities of modern military systems and the attraction to cyber arms to exploit them. A major threat to the F-35 is not just enemy missiles but also the possibility that it could be cyberattacked before it ever gets off the ground.
  • Cyber warfare is not just systems hacking; it’s asset hacking.
• What will make this contest a different kind of race, however, are the new enabling technologies that will revolutionize the entire kill chain, many of which are being pioneered in America by commercial technology companies. What these technologies will have in common is their ability to reduce the significant cognitive load on military commanders as they seek to understand events, make decisions, and take actions during high-stakes operations, where the sheer volumes of information and levels of complexity involved could quickly exceed human capacities to process them. The biggest impact of these enabling technologies could therefore be on how militaries command and control their forces on the battlefield—the ability of human beings to make more, better, and faster decisions that affect larger areas of physical and digital space.
  • Automation is all about expanding human capacity rather than replacing it
• In September 2019, news leaked that researchers at Google had demonstrated the first instance of “quantum supremacy,” the moment when a quantum computer can perform operations that are beyond the practical limitations of classic computers.16 The researchers claimed that their quantum computer could perform a certain operation in two hundred seconds that it would take a classic supercomputer ten thousand years to complete. It is unclear just how much of a breakthrough was actually achieved, and quantum researchers at IBM quickly took issue with Google’s findings.17 But those disputes, although important, should not distract from the larger point: the moment of quantum supremacy is drawing near. The bigger question is whether Google would allow its quantum computer to solve problems for the US military.
  • Quantum computing - Palmer sort of dismisses it?
• For all of their revolutionary potential, quantum information technologies that can be used to solve real-world problems are still a long way off. That means the race is now between those seeking to build quantum computers that can crack traditional encryption and those seeking to build new forms of quantum-resistant cryptography. It also means that when quantum systems do arrive, there likely will not be very many of them. A quantum computer is so complex, exquisite, and expensive that the United States and China may each have only a few of them. Such a system could be relevant…
  • Quantum vs cryptography
• This sounds creepy, but human performance assessment and enhancement are already common in the US military. Elite special operations units, for example, regularly use these kinds of technologies to assess candidates and identify the ones who are predisposed to bearing the cognitive and physiological loads of close-quarters combat, where individuals must understand, decide, and act precisely and repeatedly in split seconds. Similarly, enhancing human performance has become routine in the US military. Pilots, for example, regularly take modafinil and dextroamphetamines, central nervous system stimulants, to remain sharp and better able to understand, decide, and act during long flight operations. Developments in biotechnology will mostly be extensions of current practices, albeit significant extensions. They will enable militaries to determine with far greater precision which individuals have won the genetic lottery when it comes to succeeding at particular military tasks, especially the command and control of large numbers of military forces under highly dynamic conditions. Of specific interest will be identifying those elite few who are more cognitively and physiologically capable of understanding, deciding, and acting effectively as the volume and velocity of warfare increase.…
  • Like Ender’s Game
• Brain-computer interface technologies, for example, could enable humans to supplement their own cognitive abilities with computers that perform more menial military tasks, such as processing overwhelming amounts of sensory information and generating better understanding of highly dynamic events. Similar technologies might serve as highly capable digital assistants, enabling human commanders to recall necessary information rapidly and right when they need it, receive updates on important events that are beyond their present focus, and make better decisions based on the recommendations of intelligent machines that have a fuller, more accurate picture of events than they do. This kind of biotechnology allows…
  • New section in key opportunities potentially in addition to future warfare landscapes, to future weapons surface areas, like energy directed weapons, quantum, or BCIs
• In the competition over biotechnology, it is hard to believe that the United States would cross certain ethical lines, but it is less clear whether the same can be said of the Chinese Communist Party. It has already turned the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region into what the United Nations has called “something resembling a massive internment camp” for the minority population there.18 It has allowed researchers to produce the world’s first genetically edited human babies.19 It condones genetic experimentation on animals, including non-human primates, that is far more restricted in the United States. It is not a significant moral leap to imagine China genetically engineering superhumans who are optimized for certain military tasks or developing precision biological warfare agents that, like designer drugs in reverse, infect specific groups of people or individual members of a rival military. Indeed, biotechnology could be one area, more than others, where values differences between America and China have the greatest military ramifications.
  • Importance of being first. You can’t control what values dictate the use of a particular technology if you’re not the first one to develop it.
• A competition akin to a new space race is under way between the United States and China, evident in the rush to blanket the earth with thousands of small satellites that provide everything from high-speed communications to high-resolution intelligence. New space-based capabilities will be central to how militaries command and control their forces. Even more than today, future kill chains will flow through space, enabling militaries to distribute the process of understanding, deciding, and acting across large networks of systems rather than depending on single platforms to close the kill chain on their own. The result will be a dramatic expansion of “time-sensitive targeting”: the ability to find moving targets, track them, and strike them before they have moved away. This type of targeting is rare today, largely because of a scarcity of satellites. The proliferation of satellites, however, is only the beginning of the new space race. Spacecraft have always been limited by the impracticality of refueling them. They have only as much fuel as they could carry into space, and when it is gone, they cannot actively propel themselves any farther. This has restricted spacecraft to orbiting Earth, but emerging space technologies are changing that. Indeed, the new space race will also be a competition to build the infrastructure off of Earth that enables and secures a spacefaring future.
  • Why space exploration? Not JUST because it’s the “next thing” (quote from west wing). But because it’s about building the enabling infrastructure
• Once again, energy limitation rears its ugly head
• This could include vast space-based solar power arrays to capture more of the sun’s energy than is possible on Earth, where our atmosphere absorbs or deflects it. Power-beaming technologies will transfer that energy around space. Space-based mining technologies could extract ice from the moon and asteroids, utilizing the underlying oxygen to fuel rockets and support human life in space. The means of production to support space operations will increasingly shift off Earth and into orbital bases and perhaps onto the moon, where spacecraft and…
• Of all the new enabling technologies, perhaps the most consequential from a military standpoint is artificial intelligence and machine learning. The most immediate impact of these technologies will be their ability to improve human understanding in warfare. They can enable human commanders to make better decisions based on available information. The US military is drowning in data. It uses powerful and exquisite sensors, all machines, to suck up oceans of information about the world, but then it leaves the job of making sense of it to humans. There simply are not enough people in the US military to interpret all of this data, nor will there ever be. As a result, most of the information that the US military collects either goes unused or is thrown away—a complete waste that results in people making less-informed decisions, often about matters of life and death.
  • Lattice
• Humans will eventually be able to delegate much of the cognitive burden of closing the kill chain to well-trained intelligent machines, thereby enabling people to focus on making better and faster decisions in warfare. In time, human decision making could be improved by machines that can predict and make informed recommendations about the most effective courses of military action. This is not the case with US war plans today, which are largely linear, static, and inflexible. As soon as those plans fail to survive contact with reality, commanders are left to improvise their next moves with limited ability to make sense of dynamic environments on relevant timelines and recompose their forces in new ways to take different actions other than the ones they were preplanned to take.
  • Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face
• It is not hard to imagine that militaries will train artificial intelligence programs using hundreds of years’ worth of simulated experience, much as AlphaStar learned to play StarCraft II, to determine the optimal ways to conduct military campaigns. Every possible event that could occur during an actual war would be an event the machine has confronted many times over in simulations. The machine could make informed recommendations to human commanders of decisions and actions they should take in any given contingency, as well as calculate the probability of their success. Human commanders would certainly be free to dismiss this computer-generated advice, but having it could give them access to better information and more considered options than they have now.
  • War Games
• In this way, intelligent machines may be more important than 5G communications in the narrow sense of how states build military systems and use them to fight differently. Though 5G networks will be critical for broader economic and geopolitical purposes, communications networks are really just pipes for information. Wider pipes allow more information to flow through them faster, and 5G pipes will be the widest yet. But faster information flows might not necessarily change the way militaries operate. Intelligent machines will. They will interpret most of the information they collect independently, using artificial intelligence to identify critical pieces of intelligence within oceans of other data. Sending those small bits of pertinent information to humans or other machines will not require 5G communications networks. In fact, intelligent machines will likely transmit less information across the network than current military systems do—it will only be the important bits, rather than all of it. This will make it feasible for humans to remain in contact with intelligent machines, including during military operations.
  • Networks can be important but they will never be reliable enough for autonomous systems to rely on. Autonomy requires computation that can operate even if it’s cut off from a centralized network.
• Indeed, since 2014, the Chinese state has deployed around $65 billion to build a domestic supply of semiconductors.
  • Taiwan risk
• Nine of the world’s top twenty internet companies are Chinese. The country is producing five times as many engineers as we do and is beginning to equal the United States in the skill of its researchers. More than half of the most-cited research papers on artificial intelligence in the world in 2018 were produced in China. And in recent years, Chinese teams have been winning major international competitions in facial and voice recognition. China’s technological progress extends well beyond advances in artificial intelligence. Its companies represent 80 percent of the commercial drone market.
• In some areas, China may even surpass the United States. Realistically, the best-case scenario is not victory in this race but parity. That may not sit well with many Americans, who are used to dominating our military competitors, but the idea is nothing to scoff at. It is how war is prevented. The main purpose of building highly capable military forces and demonstrating their abilities to our rivals is to convince opponents that they have nothing to gain and everything to lose by using their own military forces against us.
  • Deterrence
• We seem overly concerned with means rather than ends, actors rather than actions, “killer robots” rather than effective kill chains. Ironically, even our ethical debates about military technology seem overly focused on platforms. Many defense and technology experts, such as Paul Scharre, Heather Roff, and Joe Chapa, have written extensively on the serious ethical and technical challenges involved in the military use of intelligent machines—challenges that the deepening strategic competition between the United States and China is only exacerbating.1 Artificial intelligence, at present, can be brittle, opaque, unreliable, unpredictable, and prone to error. It struggles to contextualize information. But as the technology becomes more capable, which is happening quickly, the possibility of relying on increasingly intelligent machines to perform military tasks will grow, as will the pressure to do so amid an intensifying race to develop faster, more effective kill chains.
• I speak with a lot of policy makers, military officers, and researchers who privately suggest that the United States will, and should, develop highly intelligent machines for military purposes, including lethal autonomous weapons. But those same people rarely take such clear positions in public. I do not think this secrecy ultimately helps to develop good, practical answers to these ethical questions that Americans can support.
  • If we’re too politically afraid to discuss it then we can’t be first
• The US military often refers to the relationship between human beings and intelligent machines as “human-machine teaming.” I dislike this term because teaming suggests a relationship of equals. The better way to think about this relationship is with the military concept of command and control, which refers to the hierarchical relationships between people in military organizations. Superior officers command human subordinates to control the execution of military tasks. As machines become more capable of performing tasks that people now perform, our concepts of command and control can and should evolve. Humans must remain in charge and issue orders, but increasingly intelligent machines will be able to carry out more of those orders to enable human understanding, decisions, and action. Our challenge, then, will be adapting to an era of human command and machine control.
  • Automation
• When I worked for McCain, some of our most important allies were human rights groups that brought to light the atrocities that were occurring in Syria and other conflicts around the world. They helped to tell the stories of the victims and document the many evils that humans commit against their fellow humans in war. It always puzzled me, then, to see many of these same groups advocate so strongly to “ban killer robots.” They would argue that machines should not be allowed to use violence because they are too cold, too unfeeling, too lacking in empathy, mercy, and other ethical qualities that humans possess. But the same groups would then publish case after tragic case in which humans themselves disregarded their own ethical qualities and committed unspeakable atrocities out of vengeance, fear, greed, and other passions that machines also lack. It is tempting to want to have it both ways, but alas we cannot.
  • Killer robots
• It is important here to make another key distinction: What machines are capable of doing (automation) and what humans permit machines to do (autonomy) are very different things. There is no such thing as an “autonomous” machine, technically speaking, because autonomy describes a relationship, not a thing. It is the relationship between a superior actor that delegates tasks to subordinate actors under certain parameters. This kind of relationship is pervasive in militaries. Indeed, it is the foundation of effective and ethical military conduct in war and peace. Human commanders routinely grant human subordinates the autonomy to perform military tasks, including the use of violence, but they grant autonomy within certain parameters, only if they believe their subordinates are capable of making good decisions on their own within the constraints of the orders given. This comes down to three factors: training, testing, and trust. Human commanders rigorously train their subordinates to perform the tasks they plan to delegate to them. They test those subordinates, over and over again, to determine whether their subordinates can reliably, predictably, and effectively perform the tasks they are given. And it is through that repeated experience of training and testing that human commanders determine whether they can trust their subordinates with autonomy to act on their orders. In fact, commanders would be held accountable for failing to properly train and test their subordinates. Accountability is a core component of trust. When military officers at war receive new troops under their command, the reason they should be able to trust those human subordinates to do their jobs effectively and ethically is because the commanders know that another human being has trained those troops and is accountable for deciding they were safe and ready to send to war. The same process of trust and accountability also applies to machines. When servicemembers are issued weapons, they are able to trust the safety and effectiveness of those weapons because other humans have tested them extensively to determine that they will perform as intended under the many conditions in which they might be used. If machines—or human beings, for that matter—perform in unsafe or ineffective ways in combat, the accountability for that failure lies with the trainer and tester, not the user.
  • Automation AND accountability
• This process of building trust and establishing accountability is especially important in a military context, where the consequence of giving jobs to untrained, untested, and untrustworthy subordinates can endanger human lives. That is why commanders never give their subordinates complete autonomy, even after they gain trust in them. Instead, they issue clear orders and rules that constrain their subordinates’ freedom to act. The same paradigm would apply to intelligent machines that have demonstrated their ability to perform specific tasks through training and testing.
  • Automation
• For the many military tasks that do not fall into this category, however, the prospect of human commanders delegating more to intelligent machines opens a huge ethical opportunity: the opportunity to better differentiate between jobs that machines can do and jobs that humans should do. Human decision making has an inherent ethical value that derives from the human capacity to make highly complex decisions about right and wrong in different contexts. Machines cannot do this now and may never be able to do it well. The ethical value of human decision making is wasted when people do jobs that require them to use little of their ethical faculties. These are the kinds of technical tasks that too many members of the US military still have to do each day—tasks that involve driving machines from one place to another, transmitting information from one system to another, steering sensors to look and listen at things in the world, or sifting through oceans of data to identify and classify the relevant pieces of information.
  • Automation
• For people to build greater trust in intelligent machines and delegate to them military tasks that humans are now performing, the machines should not have to be perfect—they should just be more effective than the people performing the tasks now. And in the US military today, those people are often scared and emotional twenty-somethings who work under incredibly stressful and unpleasant conditions. They are often distracted, tired, and confused. They have access to only a fraction of the information at their disposal because there simply are not enough people to make sense of it all. They are regularly making decisions based on limited and highly uncertain understandings of what is actually happening. These men and women are far from perfect. They make mistakes all the time. They are, in other words, human. Current intelligent machines could perform many of these tasks more effectively than the people who are doing these jobs now. Machine learning cannot do everything well, but much of what it has been well trained and tested to do, such as rapidly identifying useful information in vast sets of data, it has repeatedly shown that it can do more accurately, more consistently, and far more quickly than humans. These machines do not get tired or miss things because they need to sleep or go to the bathroom. They can identify the information humans have directed them to find, thereby improving people’s ability to understand events, make decisions, and act. Indeed, a principal function of machine learning is to help better inform and educate human beings, not to replace them in every instance.
  • Automation
• We tend to think mostly about the risks of trusting intelligent machines too much. But not trusting them enough could also lead to some eminently unethical outcomes.
  • Any ethical person who understands data should WANT to get rid of humans driving cars
• The US Navy, for example, has used the Phalanx gun and Aegis missile defense systems to defend its ships for decades. Though far less capable than the intelligent machines of today and tomorrow, these systems can be switched into a fully automatic mode that enables them to close the kill chain against incoming missiles without human involvement. The decision to trust those machines to do so was born of necessity: it was unlikely humans could respond fast enough to counter incoming missiles. That inability was deemed a greater danger than the option of turning the kill chain over to a machine that could shoot down missiles in time-sensitive situations more effectively than humans could.
• To the contrary, a machine’s ability to operate autonomously is confined by boundaries that humans have established. Its ability to identify targets is limited and based on algorithms that humans have written, trained, tested, and come to trust as effective. The machine’s ability to use violence against targets is further constrained by parameters that humans have defined, such as how much and how often the machine can fire. And the only way the machine is ever sent into combat in the first place is because humans have made the decision to release it from their control—a decision for which they are ethically and legally accountable.
• The humans who would train and test an intelligent machine would be accountable for determining its capabilities and limitations. The more intelligent the machine and the more complex the task, the more training and testing would be…
  • Automation
• But also… possible risk? Liability for the performance of their machines?
• There is nothing inherently unethical or illegal about lethal autonomous weapons that requires them to be banned outright. Indeed, the legality of weapons is a question that military ethicists have labored to answer for decades, and the conclusion forms a relatively clear basis in US and international law for determining what makes a weapon unlawful. First, the weapon cannot be indiscriminate by nature. This does not refer to how human combatants might use or misuse the weapon. It means only that the weapon itself cannot be specifically designed to cause indiscriminate harm. Second, a lawful weapon cannot “cause unnecessary suffering or superfluous injury.” This rule is intended to exclude, for example, bombs filled with glass shards that an X-ray machine could not detect in the human body. Finally, a lawful weapon cannot cause harmful effects that are incapable of being controlled. The oft-cited example here is biological weapons, which spread harm beyond human control once released.4 These are the rules by which humans have judged weapons to be illegal for decades. The key determinants are the effects of the weapon, not the level of intelligence of the actor deploying it. It is possible that intelligent machines could be built in such a way as to violate one or more of these criteria. But as legal scholars Kenneth Anderson, Daniel Reisner, and Matthew Waxman have argued, “None of these rules renders a weapon system illegal per se solely on account of it being autonomous.”5 Indeed, an autonomous weapon is not inherently indiscriminate, predisposed to…
  • “Killer robots”
• A complicating factor is that the decision-making process of current intelligent machines can be highly opaque. The classic case is of the theoretical house-cleaning robot that concludes the best way to keep the house clean is to lock the family in the basement—the wrong decision, but not necessarily illogical from the machine’s perspective. Similarly, artificial intelligence programs that have mastered games such as chess and Go eventually achieve a superior level of gameplay where the reasoning behind their moves and strategies is seemingly inexplicable to their human creators. For this reason, researchers are already working to develop more explainable artificial intelligence, machines that could reveal the reasoning behind their decisions and actions. Being able to follow the reasoning process of intelligent machines will not only help improve human trust in them but also make those machines more effective.
  • Explainable AI is a huge part of building trust
• This same framework of command and control would apply whether the subordinates in question are humans or machines. In both circumstances, human commanders are ethically and legally accountable for the use of violence, and it is incumbent upon them to understand the capabilities and limitations of their subordinates and to constrain their actions accordingly before giving them autonomy to use violence. If those subordinates happen to be intelligent machines instead of human beings, this does not mean there is no legal or ethical accountability for the use of violence. To the contrary, accountability for determining that someone or something is capable of performing specific tasks in war would still rest with human trainers and testers, while accountability for initiating an act of violence would still rest with the human commanders who knowingly ordered a person or machine to take that action. In both cases, humans remain accountable.
  • Automation and accountability
• Even with all of the laws and rules in place to govern the use of violence, militaries will continue to forbid, always and everywhere, certain actions as beyond the pale in the conduct of war. These are war crimes. Many of these actions, such as the intentional slaughter of civilians, will clearly remain war crimes, no matter what kind of weapons are used to commit them. But it is also possible that the concept of war crimes should be expanded in an era of intelligent machines. States may decide, for example, that it is an ethical imperative for human commanders to be able to communicate with their intelligent machines at all times because that ensures a human being is always in position to make the final decision about closing a kill chain and using violence in combat. For this reason, states might determine that destroying a military’s ability to communicate with its own machines would constitute a war crime. Adapting long-standing legal and ethical concepts in this way would take work, but it would not be impossible.
  • Networking AND automation