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Over the past decade, in US war games against China, the United States has a nearly perfect record: we have lost almost every single time.
our kill chains struggle to confront dynamic threats, such as moving targets, or multiple dilemmas at once.
The reason to build weapons is not because we want to but because we believe we have to, because we do not want to live disarmed and defenseless in a world full of predators.
Technology will never completely lift the fog of war, but the men and women in the US military deal with way more fog than necessary.
The new battle network should look less like our current military and more like the emerging Internet of Things, a network of intelligent machines that can collect, process, interpret, share, and act on information within the parameters of human-defined objectives.
The purpose of a Military Internet of Things is not to replace people in the performance of these essential roles. To the contrary, it is to free up people in our military to focus more of their time on performing these core functions better.
The critical source of future military advantage will be the ability to impose so many complex dilemmas on our opponents at once that we shatter their kill chains, disrupt their ability to command and control their own forces, and leave them incapable of understanding what is happening, making sound decisions, and taking relevant actions.
This must be the ultimate objective—to focus machines on what they can do so that humans can focus on what they must do.
To deny China military dominance, Americans must recognize that this is not just another defense priority among others—it must be the defense priority to which all others are subordinated.
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.
US thinking about warfare must shift from an offensive to a defensive mind-set.
Every dollar that a competitor has to spend on more sensors and more weapons to target larger masses of US military systems is another dollar that is unavailable for them to spend on new offensive capabilities.
the future force should consist of smaller numbers of people operating much larger numbers of highly intelligent unmanned machines.
If US defense leaders believe that key emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and autonomous systems are essential for America’s future military competitiveness, they have to buy those technologies at scale.
there is no better way to identify the winners that deserve the biggest bets than through regular competitions in which they and their future-oriented solutions can compete on their merits.
Our failure to adapt will not stop others from doing so.
