More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 10 - February 14, 2022
former Pentagon official in the Obama administration named David Ochmanek.
DF-21 and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles, better known in US defense circles as “carrier killers.”
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.
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.
OODA
“The main problem,” one military officer put it to me last year, “is that none of my things can talk to each other.”
the means by which the US military generates understanding, translates that knowledge into decisions, and then takes actions in war have not been built to adapt.
From 1990 to 2017, the Chinese military budget increased by 900 percent.
a cautionary tale of how a prolonged period without real geopolitical competition bred a false sense of invincibility.
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.
New technologies are important, but not as important as new thinking. And new thinking is more likely to emerge if we remain focused on the right things.
Do not present problems without also having answers to recommend.
America’s top national defense priority, possibly for decades to come, should be to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from establishing a position of military dominance in the Asia-Pacific region, the center of the global economy, and eventually beyond it.
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-access and area denial” capabilities.
“We used victory to validate doctrine, tactics, and weapons that had prevailed against a particularly inept foe,”
so would be an unforgiving future battlefield, where the rule would be “if you can be seen, you can be killed.”8
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.
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
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.
The deeper problem is that the Pentagon and Congress got military modernization backward. Rather than thinking in terms of buying new battle networks that could close the kill chain faster than ever, they thought in terms of buying incrementally better versions of the same platforms they had relied upon for decades—tanks, manned short-range aircraft, big satellites, and bigger ships.
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.
the tyranny of current operations.
The new government in Kyiv soon evacuated its troops, and on March 21, Moscow annexed Crimea to the Russian Federation. It was the first time since World War II that an international border on the continent of Europe had been changed through the use of violence.
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
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 plan was to saturate US bases with more missiles than they could ever defend against.
China developed early-warning and long-range radars to spot approaching US aircraft from as far away as possible. It also built dense and formidable networks of integrated air and missile defense systems that would aim to shoot down US planes from greater distances and high-powered jammers that would seek to destroy their ability to communicate.
China set about building over-the-horizon radars, long-range reconnaissance satellites and aircraft, and other means of hunting America’s floating airfields as they made their long journey across the Pacific Ocean.
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.
Beijing fielded an even more capable carrier killer missile, the DF-26,
Indeed, some joked in Washington that all of the multi-billion-dollar acquisition disasters that plagued the US military were actually part of an ingenious plot to sabotage China when it tried to copy them.
Chinese leaders openly spoke of the September 11 attacks as a “moment of strategic opportunity” that China had to seize while America was distracted.
“the reemergence of great power competition.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is the mutually reinforcing development of sensors (which collect information), computers (which process and store information), and networks (which move information).
CRISPR
an even more radical frontier of the information revolution—the ability to build technologies that can collect, process, and communicate information using quantum science, which concerns the bizarre properties of matter that are smaller than atoms.
In reality, true military innovation is less about technology than about operational and organizational transformation.
This is a legitimate cause for concern, and it highlights the critical question at the center of our current debates over artificial intelligence and warfare—whether humans could ever train and test intelligent machines enough to trust them to close the kill chain without a person in the loop or directly in control.
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.
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
...more
Just because lethal autonomous weapon systems are not inherently illegal does not relieve human commanders of the responsibility to develop the same level of trust in their safety and effectiveness as any other machines—or fellow humans, for that matter—that they choose to send into combat.
the law of targeting, which has three criteria. The first is discrimination, which requires combatants to take all reasonable steps not to attack civilians or civilian objects. The second is proportionality, which requires combatants to evaluate the military gains of an operation in light of the civilian losses that could occur as a result. The third criterion requires commanders to take “precautions in attack” that spare civilians from unnecessary suffering.
the enemy always gets a vote.
