The dynamic Ukraine battlespace has provided a needed jolt to a system that has long been too slow to change
For several decades, military reformers such as retired Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix have pleaded with the Pentagon to stop buying wildly expensive but vulnerable aircraft carriers and fighter jets
and instead focus on getting vast numbers of cheap drones.
But nobody seemed to listen.
“Buy Fords, Not Ferraris” was the title of Hendrix’s iconoclastic 2009 polemic for inexpensive survivable systems.
Aircraft carriers, he wrote, “have become too expensive to operate, and too vulnerable to be risked in anything other than an unhostile environment.”
Similar arguments applied to exquisite systems beloved by all the services.
Hendrix became so eager for change that he argued the Navy needed a skunk works to reinvent itself for the 21st century.
He proposed using Lake Michigan, away from prying Chinese eyes, to create an “Area 52” experimentation site for autonomous naval systems.
He imagined it as a Navy version of the Air Force and CIA’s famous Area 51 test site in Nevada.
But an addiction is hard to quit
— especially one that benefits so many congressional districts around the country.
So the military sailed on, spending ever more money on vulnerable platforms that would probably survive only for minutes in a war with China.
Christian Brose, another Pentagon reformer who now works for start-up Anduril Industries, put it bluntly in a recent article for the Hoover Institution:
“The US defense enterprise … is systematically broken.”
But for reformers, 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.
A new consensus is emerging that we must make major changes,” Brose wrote in September. He quoted Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who argued:
“If we don’t change
— if we fail to adapt
— we risk losing … a high-end fight.”
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.
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-- By David Ignatius
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/04/united-states-drones-pentagon-military-weapons-evolution/
Chuck Darwin
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