Whether one is talking about autonomous surface ships, diesel-electric submarines, or massed drones, the necessity of inexpensive massed weaponry for a future fight is becoming a more acceptable philosophy for the Pentagon. The war in Ukraine confirms what we already knew and chose to forget: A few fancy toys do not a war win (especially when fighting against countries for whom casualties are not a concern). When faced with militaries like Russia’s, China’s, or Iran’s, one had best shop at the armament equivalent of a Costco rather than Erewhon.
A recent Washington Post piece does an especially good job of working through what such a change would look like and why it’s better than the current system.
David Ignatius writes:
There’s finally a flicker of good news. Change advocates, including Hendrix and Brose, told me that the iron triangle that supports legacy systems — which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) described as the “defense-industrial-congressional complex” — might finally be giving way to common sense. Every military service, in nearly every combatant command, is experimenting with uncrewed, autonomous systems for land, air, sea and undersea combat. . . .
What’s finally driving change is the brutal lesson of the war in Ukraine. This is a drone and satellite war: Russian and Ukrainian tanks are almost defenseless against attacks from drones overhead; Russia’s huge Navy has lost control of the Black Sea because of Ukrainian naval drones; satellites can feed precise targeting information to kill anything that algorithms designate as a weapon.
But there’s a catch: The Ukraine battlefield is a blizzard of electronic warfare. So systems must be truly autonomous, able to operate without GPS or other external guidance, as I described in a recent account from Kyiv of technology developed by the software company Palantir. In makeshift weapons factories in Kyiv, and in defense labs around the United States, designers are creating systems with artificial intelligence at “the edge,” embedded in the weapons themselves, so they don’t have to depend on jammable signals from space.
Watching a Gen-Z kid vaporizing Russians while hitting his vape in a bunker just behind the front lines gets the point across pretty well: Large-scale warfare requires a lot of disposable matériel.
