More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 23 - April 27, 2023
We aspire, for example, to a 355-ship Navy or a 386-squadron Air Force.
For the goal of a military should not be to buy platforms. The goal is to buy deterrence, the prevention of war.
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.
understanding, deciding, and acting, they refer to it as “closing the kill chain.”
It requires the US military to focus less on fighting offensively and more on fighting defensively.
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.
In retrospect, the response to the September 11 attacks marked a strategic detour deeper into the Middle East that consumed much of the attention and imagination of the US military for nearly two decades, and largely still does.
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.
The military became more enslaved than ever to the tyranny of current operations.
When the Cold War ended, there were 107 major defense firms. By the end of the 1990s, there were five.5
In just the past five years, Lockheed Martin bought Sikorsky, Northrop Grumman bought Orbital ATK, General Dynamics bought CSRA, SAIC bought Engility, L3 merged with Harris, and United Technologies bought Rockwell Collins only to merge with Raytheon two years later.
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.
“deep learning.” This technology layers multiple algorithms together, at times more than a hundred, into one “neural network,” where one layer in the network can pass its insights onto the next layer for further refinement. The first layer of a deep neural network might determine, for example, whether there are people in a picture, and the deeper layers could then analyze specific features to identify which individual people they are.
“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].”
superposition: that one subatomic particle can exist in two different physical spaces at the exact same time. Similarly, a pair of subatomic particles possess a quality called entanglement, which means they behave like mirror images of one another.
It is encoded either with ones or zeros. In quantum computers, because of superposition, quantum particles can also be encoded as both ones and zeros at the same time.
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
...more
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.
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 has to offer into the hands of the US military so that America can stay ahead of its strategic competitors.
Barry Posen has called “military mavericks,”3 visionary leaders who are determined to use their unique expertise and legitimacy to change their own institutions.
At the apex of its power, the Soviet Union’s GDP was only about 40 percent that of the United States.
The Soviet Union was powerful, but it was never America’s peer.
“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).
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.
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.”
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.
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
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.
the joke about directed energy weapons is that they have been only five years away—for the past twenty-five years.
Indeed, since 2014, the Chinese state has deployed around $65 billion to build a domestic supply of semiconductors.
The country is producing five times as many engineers as we do and
Two years later, China landed the first spacecraft on the far side of the moon, and it has announced plans to build a lunar base near the south pole of the moon, which is estimated to contain considerable deposits of ice, the oil of outer space.
What machines are capable of doing (automation) and what humans permit machines to do (autonomy) are very different things.
The problem has not been a lack of drones, but a lack of people. The technology did not exist to build military machines that did not depend on immense quantities of human labor to function—until now.
This starts with just making sense of events in the world—the first phase of the kill chain.
The next battle network, built around intelligent machines, will invert the ratio of humans to machines for the first time ever.
Those machines, even intelligent machines, are ultimately just trucks that carry the means to sense, shoot, and share information.
Jan Bloch was not a soldier. He was a banker who was born into poverty in Warsaw in 1836
Logistics has been the greatest limiting factor in the history of warfare. Hence the old saying: “Amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.”
“We must choose. We must prioritize.” And though money was vital, we could not “‘buy our way out’ of our current predicament.” We had to think differently, and time was running out.
And that should be our goal: preventing China from achieving a position of military dominance in Asia,
In recent decades, US leaders have given our military too many missions and have prioritized US military “presence” in too many places across the world that deliver too little benefit to our national defense.
Put simply, conserving US strategic resources—not just our military power but also our money, our leaders’ time, and our allies’ goodwill, among other things—must become a goal of US defense strategy.
This is why, for example, Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran was a mistake—not because the deal was “good,” but rather because it would have enabled America to spend less of its limited military power focused on what is ultimately a secondary priority.
It is less about the good things that military power could make possible than the bad things that we need it to prevent.
US thinking about warfare must shift from an offensive to a defensive mind-set.
We have sought to project massive amounts of combat power far away from home, penetrate deep into enemy territory, use advanced technologies to evade and dominate opponents, take over and occupy their physical space, and stay there for as long as Washington has wanted.
if the United States continues to plan to mobilize for war the way it has for decades, where most of the force has to flow from US bases to forward positions over weeks and months before it is ready to fight.
that is exactly how China plans to win a future war in Asia and how Russia plans to prevail in Europe: strike rapidly, consolidate their gains before US forces can respond effectively, harden their victory into a fait accompli, and force the United States to escalate the conflict to attack and dislodge their forces.
the future force should consist of smaller numbers of people operating much larger numbers of highly intelligent unmanned machines.
