The End of American Military Dominance? A Conversation With Paul Scharre

I'm Dan Kurtz-Falen and this is the Foreign Affairs interview. Building US military dominance based on the idea that there is some special technology that the US has that adversaries do not have, that area is over. That is a huge paradigm shift from how the military has thought about military advantage for the last 40 years or so. The war on Iran pitted two of the world's mightiest militaries against one weekend by years of strikes, sanctions and sabotage. And yet it was the smaller country that appears to have emerged with the advantage. In Ukraine, similarly, Russia expected an easy victory only to be repeatedly thwarted by apparently outmatched Ukrainian forces. These outcomes may seem surprising, but Paul Sharry argues that they should not be. The innovations that have in recent years transformed battlefields have also leveled the playing field between powers great and small. And as Sharry wrote in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the US military is unprepared for this new age of warfare in which drones, AI and other emerging technologies undercut the dominance it has become used to. Sharry, the executive vice president of the Center for a New American Security, served as an army ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan and then went on to craft Pentagon policy on drones and autonomous weapon systems. I spoke with him about what the wars in Iran and Ukraine should tell us about the future of warfare more generally about what China is learning from those wars and about what the United States must do to adapt. Paul, great to have you on the podcast and to have your essay called "Losing the War of the Future" in our latest issue. Thank you. Thanks for having me, podcast. I'm very excited to be in a latest issue. Yeah. You've been studying and earlier in your career crafting military policy and strategy around the role of technology, especially drones and AI. I think of you as the person who is pitching foreign affairs on these topics before it was cool. You have credibility there. There's been a lot of hype about technology in the war in Iran as you've watched that war since February 28th. What did you see as new, whether from the US, Israel or Iran, to what extent did the role of autonomous weapons or any other technology make this a new way of work? Well, I think what's significant here is, obviously we've seen drones and ballistic missiles play a huge role in the damage that Iran was able to unleash not just on the United States, to a space, but also Israel, other countries in the region. But what's significant is it's not cutting edge technology, right? It's not sophisticated, stealth, and other things. It's pretty low tech stuff that the real game changer here is, it's widely available to other countries. It can be produced in large numbers at low cost, and the defenses are hard. The defenses are expensive for the US, and they're hard to defend against, and these low cost attacks can cause really a lot of damage. So the change is about integrating technology that's existed for a long time rather than innovative breakthroughs that make new kinds of weapons possible? I think the real, you know, kind of maybe meta lesson here about the way the technology landscape is evolving is the technology is proliferating really rapidly, and it is leveling the playing field between the US and competitors. And so it's not that technology doesn't matter. Technology is playing a significant role in changing how wars are fought in the conflict between the US and Israel against Iran, or we're seeing unfolding in Ukraine, or Israel's operations in Gaza, or other conflicts that we've seen in the last couple of years, like in a Gornar Karabakh. But it is in some ways the opposite of how the US military tends by default to think about technology, which is when US military thinks about technology, well, it's about what's the next stealth? How can we use high energy lasers to shoot down things? Things that are really exquisite, hard to build, require a lot of investment. This is technology that's really piggybacking off of developments in the commercial space that are being weaponized and they're widely available and, you know, they're effective, and that's that's the challenge. People often draw the parallel between Ukraine, thwarting Russian designs and Iran, thwarting US and Israeli designs. There's obviously implications there for Taiwan and the face of Chinese pressure or Chinese cross-straight invasion. Do you see the same dynamic at play in all of those theaters? Is that the kind of fundamental fact we appreciate about warfare now? Yeah, I mean, I think there's this like tension oftentimes in looking at conflicts of each, you know, conflict is unique in lots of ways. The terrain, the participants, the maybe political dynamics, but in order to understand how warfare is evolving, you do want to look at these throughlines, right? So, I think there are a lot of ways in which, for example, Ukraine has been able to be so successful in defending against Russia's attacks that have nothing to do with technology. You don't have to do with morale and, you know, cohesion and like non-material factors when heavily in Ukraine's favor in that conflict, the Russian military being very corrupt, we're like on conscripts and other things, but the technological component that is significant, that I think is a throughline here and it's probably very relevant to a Taiwan fight, is that drones are making the battle space more transparent and therefore more lethal. So what we're seeing in Ukraine is it's really hard for either side, the Russian-Dukranium to mass forces for an attack because you're going to get seen. The drones can see you and so there's no ability to mass forces for a surprise and your forces are very vulnerable when they're massed and so that's led to a condition where one of the front lines are pretty static and drones are not the only factor there, but they are a factor contributing to make the front lines more static, it's harder to gain offensive advantage. But also we've seen that the front lines have thinned out quite a bit and so the concentration of troops of infantry troops and trenches has thinned considerably and in many cases if troops are advancing what they're going to run into first is drones that are spotting them and then being used to swoop in an attack like infantry troops when they're advancing in combination with things like fortified defensive positions in minefields for example. So it's not just drones that are playing earlier, but they are playing a significant role. Well boy there's a connection there to the conflict with Iran where US bases in the region now are awfully vulnerable to attacks from Iranian drones and ballistic missile launchers and I think we're likely to see that we've seen that in past conflicts like in Nagorno-Karabakh and I think we're likely to see a similar dynamic in for example a fight between the US and China over time one might be different drones might it be those small quadcopters those aren't going to be quite as relevant and like in air and sea battle over longer distances but this is not a proper basically being like the kind of drone that if I wanted to you know buy my own drone and use it in a backyard that started using. Right right and so like a lot of the drones that you create is using for example like these do it yourself small quadcopters cobbled together with parts from 3d printers and things that are buying you know from China you know electric motors that things are building these like that's not going to be used to that's okay if you're attacking an infantry soldier I'm relatively short distances that's not what you're going to use to fly across this Taiwan's trade and like sink and Chinese infabuse ship right this is not going to do it but that same dynamic of drones making it harder to hide of making greater threats coming from the air lowering the cost of entry to air power I think that's likely to persist across a wide range of conflicts. The point about lethality does not seem to have held in the Iran case just given you know there were obviously American service members killed in a certain number of casualties among Iranian troops and also civilians including some pretty awful strikes are we in the war but on the whole it does not seem to have been an especially lethal conflict given just how many you know air strikes there were and how kinetic it was. Yeah I mean the US didn't shuffle a lot of casualties now in terms of equipment loss you know it's a significant number of you know pretty expensive aircraft lost on the ground which I think is a pretty significant development a lot of which were to ballistic missile attacks but I think it's a big sea change from you know say like the Persian Gulf War and we see how the technologies evolved since then where the US has been investing in ballistic missile defenses but other countries have been investing in ballistic missiles and the trend there has really favored the offense the US lost five KC a Stroudoutaker you know aircraft on the ground take a aircraft an E3 on the ground that was destroyed a surveillance aircraft like really expensive so you know that equation and the material side was pretty unfavorable to the United States and the cost exchange ratio between intercepting these rounds is really unfavorable to the US a Shahedron cost by some estimates 35,000 by others as less as low as $7,000 to make for the Iranians the US was shooting now at patriot missiles that cost $4 million dollars a piece. Now obviously the US needs lower cost interceptors but it's still going to be a different kind of game than the US has been playing one where building lots of cheap things is going to be an important part of being effective on about that observation does make me wonder about a point that's become almost Derriger in American discussions of the war and Iran even when it's from someone lamenting or as a strategic calamity you know it's this idea that the US military performed wonderfully despite the strategic loss given in an Air Force that didn't control the airspace and the Navy did not control the straight-of-form moves bases in the region were that vulnerable and is that point about the US military's performance really really hold up or is there are there harder lessons here in some ways? I think there are harder lessons I mean I think it's easy to pat yourself on the back here I mean the US was good at destroying things in Iran but when you try to link that to not even just political objectives but like clear operational objectives I think there were a couple areas where you can see that US military to send an operational sense came up short for what we're looking for. One was, as the conflict devolved over time into something that looks more like an attrition war between the U.S. ability to find and attric Iranian mobile missile launchers and mobile drone launchers versus Iran's ability to launch those and destroy things in U.S. bases, you know, the U.S. didn't win decisively when that. Now the numbers of Iranian missiles and drones launched over time went down, but they didn't stop. U.S. wasn't able to actually like find all these things, the really hard targets. So that's like an operational problem that the U.S. didn't come out in a way that was clearly dominant and is I think a problem the U.S. military should take away of, hey, we need to work on this. We need to find ways to better defend against these ballistic missiles and drones and we need to have better ways of having persistent intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance coverage to find and track these mobile targets and hit them very quickly. Then there's the straight-of-war-move problem, which clearly the U.S. military has not been able to solve a forceably and be able to open the straight-of-war-move and protect international shipping from Iranian attacks, which is kind of the ultimate operational problem the U.S. military has to be able to do if the U.S. can't guarantee safe passage through international waterways. That fundamentally threatens the role that the U.S. has as a guarantee of international stability. That does take me to the warning that you make in the peace. You write, "The current age will not afford the United States and advantage in the technologies that are now transforming warfare, especially drones and artificial intelligence." Why not? And how much of that is inherent in these technologies? How much of it is about specific failures by U.S. policymakers and military leaders to really integrate them in the way they need to? Yeah, I think there's a narrow tactical lesson that one could take from the more in Iran and conflict with the Ukraine and some of the others that I mentioned, which is, "Hey, we need more low-cost drones and we need ways to shoot down low-cost drones." I don't think that's actually super-contentiously people on board with that idea. What I'm suggesting is there's a bigger lesson here, which is building U.S. military dominance based on the idea that there is some special technology that the U.S. has that adversaries do not have. That area is over. That is a huge paradigm shift from how the military has sought about military advantage for the last 40 years or so, where the U.S. military made investments in the first wave of information technologies in the '60s and '70s that then bore fruit that we saw really in dramatic fashion in the Persian Gulf War in '91 in GPS, stealth, precision guided weapons, computers and networks, and that the U.S. military has continued to build on. The way that the U.S. defense enterprise broadly thinks about technology is still in this vein of, "What's the next stealth going to be? What's the special technology that we're going to invest in and we're going to have advantage over others?" Even when the U.S. military talks about AI, is this where we're going to invest in AI and we're going to give a hold of it and we're going to have the AI and we'll have better AI than China does and we'll stay ahead of others. My message is that's not going to happen. We need to accept that reality because it's not that we don't want it to happen, but the technology playing field is very level right now. The technologies of the future drones, autonomy, AI are coming out of the commercial space. They're global. They proliferate very, very rapidly. In many cases, within a matter of months, we see AI models proliferating to China and then they go open source and available to anywhere in the world. Staking your military dominance on a technology advantage that you have that others don't have is not going to work. We need to think differently about military advantage on the battlefield to maintain the leadership of the world's strongest military. I want to pick up on exactly what it will take to do that, but let me actually go back and you talked about conflicts that you've been watching closely. You mentioned the Gorno-Karabakh. I'm struck that people like you who are paying attention to military technology and doctrine talk about that war a lot and it gets very little attention and broader foreign policy discussions. What was so striking you about Gorno-Karabakh? I think what was so striking that we saw in Gorno-Karabakh in 2020 was this was a place where using sort of low-cost drones, the Turkish TB2 drone and some Lordering Minitions, like the Israeli Harap drone played a really significant role in allowing Azerbaijan to get a dominant advantage over our median forces. One way to think about this is that lower the cost of entry to air power. So allow them to fuel the air power to find and strike Armenian targets on the ground and a much lower cost than if they had to build a sort of traditional air force using crude fighter aircraft. We've seen that trend persist I think now in other conflicts as well where drones are, it's not that a cheap drone is as effective as an F-35. It's that hey, I can do things with a cheap drone at much lower cost and that's going to create a lot of opportunity for smaller countries, middle powers, even non-stake groups. So if we go back to the struggles or the failures of the US military to adequately adapt to this new era and integrate these technologies, there are a couple of pieces of it that you really focus on. The first relic when it comes to low-cost drones is just producing enough and quickly enough. You note in the piece that the current leadership of the Pentagon of the Defense Department of the World of War as they call it is quote, "willing to break the mold" and it certainly has made a lot of noise in ways both going to bad about willing to disrupt process and thorough out process. What are the opportunities for real stop change here when it comes to the failure of the United States' build and off of what it needs? So the numbers here are kind of staggering. Ukraine is reportedly producing about 4 million drones a year. The US Army is according to public information procuring about 50,000 drones a year. Now it's been a priority for Pentagon leaders in not just this administration but the last administration to scale up production of low-cost, some of them are called a "tritable system" is basically things that are cheap enough that it's okay if I lose them in various forms at sea in the air. You lose an F-35 or an aircraft carrier, it's billions of billions of dollars a year. Right. Aircraft is definitely not not affordable. So things that might be recoverable, it might be a drone that can fly and take off in land, but we might treat them more like you treat missiles and bombs as expendable assets. And we really struggle. The Defense Enterprise is really struggle to do this, to scale up production in large numbers. The last team, the Biden team had this thing called the Replicator Initiative to try to do this very quickly. So the current Pentagon leadership has set really ambitious goals. They said they want to be able to produce a million drones by 2028. I'm not sure that they're getting there. I think the goal is right because there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to do this. By we're bigger country than Ukraine, we should be able to scale production. We are not facing the problem of having to find a war on our own territory. The real problem is just a lack of desire. It's a willingness on the part of the US government to be willing to spend the money to break the China, to be able to cut through red tape. I'm very excited by the fact that this leadership team in the Pentagon is willing to do things differently. And they've made very clear that they're willing to shortcut bureaucratic processes and cut red tape to do this. But to get there, we're going to have to see consistent funding. It's going to have to be ambitious. Congress is going to be in board two here. We're going to be able to send signals to industry that the money is going to be there because when industry scales up production or scales up their supply chains, if they don't believe the money is going to be, they're not going to take that lead. If you look to that 2028 goal, what worries you most when it comes to the likelihood of failure? If we don't get there, what will have caused that? I think the biggest risk, the biggest sort of most likely failure mode would be that the administration and Congress together are not able to signal to industry, the committed long-term multi-year funding that would allow a drone producer to say, "Okay, I'm going to scale up my production. I'm going to take that cost on in capital expenditures," which has to downflow not just to the company you're buying them from, but to people in the supply chain because they're going to say, "Okay, what's the whole up is? Maybe there's an electric motor that I need and I want to source it from a U.S. company instead of China. But to get the scale that I need, I'm going to be able to tell the supplier a couple of lines on the supply chain, they've got to make investments to scale up production. That money's got to be there because there's not a natural market that someone's going to make a bet and say, "Oh, there's a commercial market for this." There's not. It's just the military. I think if we're not able to show that committed multi-year funding, then no one's going to stick their neck out on the road. What about on the AI side of this? Where do you see the U.S. military depending on getting things right, certain moving the right direction and where do you see not enough movement or the wrong kind of movement? I mean, I think the number one thing that the military is between right now is to just put AI models in the hands of people, the Gen-AI that mills deployment across the defense enterprise, putting large language models and people's desktops, the deployment of a couple of large language models into classified networks integrated into Palantir's Maybets Smart System, for example. Those steps are the key sort of zero to one transformation of just getting it in people's hands. There's a longer term challenge. It's harder of, what do I do? How do I use a large language model? Actually, everyone is trying to figure that out now and you see this in all parts of the economy where companies are trying to figure out how way adopt AI effectively. How the way act. actually use it to increase productivity instead of just spending a lot of money on AI tokens, maybe for like little value. That's really important. I think that's going to be a difficult cultural and organizational challenge to overcome. Like how do you put the right incentives in place for people to take risks and try things with AI? Maybe it doesn't work. You know, it's kind of a risk of those culture within the defense ecosystem. But the starting point is just putting the models in people's hands. And I think they're actually doing a great job of that. And there's more to do in terms of getting sort of like you really want a diversity of models available across all levels of unclassified networks. But I think this seems really moving out in the right direction there. Where do you see it as especially valuable? I mean, obviously, there are lots of parts of the Pentagon where it's going to help with whatever filing expense reports and doing, you know, contracts and everything else. But when it comes to real war fighting, where do you see AI is especially useful? I think there's like a couple of areas that are low hanging fruit that are really easy right now that AI can just do today. One is anything that involves coding, then involves software engineering as exceptionally good at. You really shouldn't have people writing code anymore. We should have the AI writing code. That code could be a little bit buggy, but you could have AI clean it up. AI is actually really good at that too. And so that has a lot of implications for anything that's in the development space on the defense side in terms of like design and production. Certainly in cybersecurity, you know, a lot of interest around the capabilities that we're seeing out of cutting a J.M. models, like anthropics, Mithos and models from other companies as well, being used to find and exploit or patch vulnerabilities in software. And so that like the sort of use of AI in cyber operations is probably the most mature thing right now. And part because it's a really good software development, but it's also a native digital environment. Whereas to deploy AI out into physical assets, you've got to get it onto some platform and then get it on the real world. And that's going to happen. It is just slower. There's a lot more things that get in the way. How much was AI actually used as far as you understand it in targeting or planning or anything else in Iran? There's been some hype about this, but it's a little hard to know what that actually looks like. Yeah, I mean, so I think we know that large language models were used in operations, you're smolder conducted against Venezuela and against Iran. With Iran in particular, large language models were integrated through Palantres, Mavins Smart System, which was used to do operational planning to assess targets to help Mavins Smart System more broadly, integrates information coming from a bunch of different intelligence sources. So it's all in one place that's really valuable in a dynamic battlefield environment where you've got, you know, say a couple days a week into that war. Now a lot of the targets have already been struck. The US struck 13,000 targets total over the course of the 39 day campaign. So the US is hitting a whole bunch of targets. A lot of the Iranian targets, both the radars and missile launchers and drone launchers, but also people are moving around and are being hard to find. Intel is coming in for different sources. Large language models are useful to help people parse through a lot of that data very quickly. And so, you know, if you maybe have hundreds of different pieces of information, that's slow for a human to parse all that and try to make sense of it. You could dump all of that data into a large language model. It's actually really great at then sifting and organizing it or finding connections. Provided that the thing that you want the language model to do is like a pretty straightforward task. Maybe the kind of thing that you could give, like in turn, or a pretty junior level person, and it's pretty formulaic. And you could tell them, you know, line these things up or prioritize them according to some criteria. And it might just take a human a long time to do it, you know, have an army of people to throw at it. The language model could do that very quickly. I don't think it's, you know, the case necessarily that if you had removed AI, like I think about the counterfactual, there was no AI involved. Would we have seen a fundamentally different conflict? Probably not. Maybe slower, somewhat slower temple of operations on the US side, slower ability to strike emerging targets. There were certainly instances where the US was like rerouting planes in flight to new targets that were emerging. We might have still seen that without a, maybe less of that or less effective. So I would sort of think about it as kind of like, we're at the biplane days of AI playing a role in warfare very early, but a lot of promise for where this might go down the road. I was struck by a line in your piece about periods of disruptive technological change when you say that what determines a military's wealth of success is how well it employs new technology, not necessarily being at the forefront of that technology, because as you pointed out, the AI case catch up happens pretty quickly. That does seem to kind of map onto these debates about Chinese priorities and AI development versus American priorities, the priorities of the big American labs that we switch over to the future will be focused on being at the frontier and being first AI or super intelligence or whatever. Do you think that the Chinese focus here is actually the right one when it comes to the military applications? Yeah, I think probably this right, that for the military AI adoption will matter more than AI development. And I think this is an important asymmetry between how the frontier AI labs, how anthropic and open AI and Google deep mind, are thinking about AI versus how the military ought to be thinking about it. So for the frontier labs, they see themselves and this may turn out to not be correct, but I think there's valid reasons why they believe this in a winner take all or largely winner take all dynamic to gobble up market share for AI. And the reality is that we've seen in the last 20 years or so that there are a lot of digital technologies that have natural monopolies and there's room for one or maybe just a handful of players. That's true in social media and operating systems, in handsets, in search, for example, there's like one company, Google, the Dominate search. Lots of other companies have tried to break into. There are these network effects that often happen for a lot of digital technologies. So for a lot of these companies, they're anticipating that AI will turn out to be similar and there will be like one company that everyone goes to for their AI. Well, maybe there's like two, maybe max three players in the mix. That's true today, actually, for frontier labs. It's not actually true. If you just go like six months behind, maybe then the model space explodes and you've got a whole bunch of Chinese open source models that are in the mix and it widens considerably. I think there's very much an open question what that looks like for AI models, but I would say for the military, that's just not going to be the case. In part because our competitors are going to not rely on American technology. And so we're not going to be able to sort of rely on even if there is one US company that controls a big portion of global market share. That's not going to give the US an advantage the same way that like that being true for search means that the Chinese military can't access search technology. There are Chinese competitors in the search space. And so what's going to matter much more is how do you adopt the technology, how to use it? Or maybe put this a little bit simpler. If the leading US companies are three months ahead of the leading Chinese companies in AI development, but the US military is five years behind the leading US companies in AI adoption, it doesn't matter. Like that three month lead negates to basically nothing. And then it's an adoption race between the US and China. What do I do with AI? I have a reason to say that. Well we're turning my conversation with Paul Sharra after a short break. You look at some of the history of this in the essay. You talked about being in the biplane era of this at this particular moment. When you look to, especially that period between World or One and World War II, when tanks and airplanes and everything, we're being integrated in new ways, what determined which military is we're able to figure out how to best use those technologies? Was it idiosyncratic? Was it individual leaders or something got systems? And what a lessons about history is used here? Yeah, I think it's a great historical example here. At the tail end of World War I, we'd seen tanks and airplanes introduced in fairly marginal ways. But everyone agreed in the aftermath and the interwar period that tanks and airplanes would play a big role in future wars. The question was, what do you do with them? And it wasn't obvious to people at the time. There were lots of debates about the roles of airplanes and tanks, the role of carrier aviation, for example, one of the striking examples to me is that Britain was actually out first. In terms of adopting carrier aviation, but fell behind Japan in the United States, not because their aircraft technology wasn't good, but because of internal bureaucratic and cultural squabbles within the British military about who controlled the technology and who gets to own these planes. And so those mundane things about bureaucratic politics turn out to matter a lot because it creates incentives for who's willing to adopt this technology. I think we can see that today in the way that the different services think about drones, how that the army and Navy and Air Force, for example, think about drones very differently, even within parts of the services, within the Navy, aviation versus surface versus undersea community, for example, how they think about robotic systems and uncrewed systems often is driven by bureaucratic incentives. This is taking away some power from some existing power center, tanks are taking away from the cavalry, for example, or is it giving power to some community and enabling them? And you'd like to think that it should be strategic factors that dominate, but that's not always product factors that matter a lot. - Is the Chinese military doing better than the US military when it comes to integrating AI especially, but also in kind of adapting to new technologies more broadly? - I want to say that they're ahead today. I think the risk is that maybe they're hungrier. And the Chinese leadership is willing to, particularly at the political level, at choosing paying, it willing to force change on the people's liberation. It's not necessarily the most nimble and efficient organization. It may be their sclerotic and slow on their own ways, but that there is a sense of being the underdog of wanting to catch up and we want to force hard cultural change from the Chinese Communist Party onto the Chinese military and get rid of people that are underperforming. And I worry that being on top for so long has led us sort of assumption in within the US defense enterprise and will always be the top dog. And look at how great we did in Iran and look at how great we did in Iraq and Afghanistan and all these failures are political failures and they're not failures on the part of the military and will always be ahead and will always have better technology or better ability to fight. And then may not be true. And I worry about something like a Suez crisis moment for the United States ahead where we just run into, we actually can't perform. And we've fought short in a big way. And so I think that to get there requires an acknowledgement that US technology leadership is not a birthright. US military dominance is not a birthright. And we've got to take these challenges like what we've seen a country like Iran which really shouldn't be able to do the things the US military that it did pose a lot of difficult challenges and we've got to adapt to that. - Yeah. I did think back to a piece that we ran late last year called America's drone delusion by Justin Bronck that made, I think an argument that's certainly intention with the US, these are not, obviously, sort of pieces are not, it's not point counterpoint. And with the apologies Justin for doing this without him here to defend himself. - Yeah. I am interested in how you think of his argument. The core of it was that he thinks that the kind of, you know, focus on large scale acquisition of drones or A and Aible drones does not meaningfully enhance the turns against China that that's just kind of overreending the lots of Ukraine and that, even in fact China as he argues is spending more time prioritizing, you know, crude military hardware rather than unmanned systems. I'm curious how you react to his argument and how you see that difference. - So I think there's a strong version of the drone argument that I sure some people make that I want to make clear to this was I am actually not making, which is that like all we need is cheap low cost drones. That's not what I think. I think there is a role for expensive assets. There are things that like large stealth bombers and submarines and aircraft carriers do that you can't replicate the drones. I think we need a balance across the force. And right now the US is woefully under-invested in large numbers of low cost systems and we need to rectify that. You know, I think if the goal is for example, to turn against China, what is going to get you there? I think the answer is not like a revolutionary idea is getting to the place where shooting plane believes that an invasion will fail. And how do you get there? You have to demonstrate the ability to find and sink enough Chinese amphibious ships early enough in an invasion. And if you do that early and you can demonstrate to the Chinese that they're not going to be able to make an invasion succeed, then I think that accomplishes deterrence. I think drones play a role in that. They're not the only thing the players are role in that. And I ship cruise missiles and long range bombers and submarines and mines all play a role in that. But they've just probably a role for drones there. And I think if you want to create this sort of, you know, health capers, the service that I've used over the Taiwan Straits, where anything that's at sea gets sunk, drones actually have a lot that they can bring to bear in that environment. We've seen across a number of different conflicts that drone can create this transparency and lethality in a way that's cost-effective. That like you're not going to do with F-22 and F-35s. There's no way. Where are they based from? All right, they're not going to be able to be operating in that way. And so that's a potential solution or piece of the solution to this operational problem the US military is facing. - And I suppose the Ukrainian success in using under sea drones or maybe surface drones as well to sink Russia's black sea fleet, despite not having like a Ukrainian Navy that could compete with Russia is a lesson and how to do that, is that relevant here? - Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, so if the argument is like, look, quadcopters are not going to do it. Yeah, absolutely. As we talked about earlier, they thought they were kind of drone. The better analogy here you're right, I think is what Ukraine was able to do, for example, in crippling Russia's black sea fleet, using relatively low cost, I mean, a few hundred thousand dollars for like a drone bow that was able to damage and in some cases sinks, it's really expensive Russian warships. And you've got to balance that against a lot of these Russian warships, you know, not well maintained, not well crude, don't have adequate defenses, fair enough, but I think you could see the potential of these technologies and that's a place where there's clearly a lot of opportunity. What would you think about this as technology sort of creating a design space that you can create these low cost aerial drones or sea drones or under sea drones, never creating new operational opportunities to build things that are pretty cheap, that are laden with explosives or sensors that can find and destroy things that are much more valuable. And so, you know, not all the drones that you would want in the Taiwan state are necessarily aircraft. Some of them might be surface, some of them might be subsurface, some of them might look more like missiles or mines, but I think there is an opportunity there with uncrewed systems to create a pretty deadly environment for the Chinese military. - How do you assess the state of American deterrence in the Taiwan state? How close are we to being able to commend Xi Jinping or instill that doubt in Xi Jinping's mind? I mean, what I'm still hearing, I think it's probably others are from US military leaders is that now it exists now today, that US deterrence is still effective. The question is, what does that look like over the coming years, over the next two to five years, as the Chinese military continues to modernize? And how do we make sort of investments and most importantly, make them on a quick timetable so that we can sustain that deterrence and ideally even strengthen it, right? So that rather than getting to a world where in the next couple of years Xi Jinping thinks, well, maybe this would work, maybe the time is right. In fact, it's confidence in the ability of the people's liberation army to execute a successful invasion goes down over time. But part of it, there's like a capability dimension to this being able to demonstrate what the US military could do, but the time dimension is critical because if the US military doesn't get until 2040, that might be too late to need. - How is the war in Iran affected that deterrence? Is it obviously the effect on stockpiles can have huge portions of American patriot missiles and other interceptors are gone? And then some of the harder lessons that you were talking about earlier, are sure the Chinese are studying? Does that undermine deterrence? Does that make the Chinese more confident in some ways? - I mean, I think that the conflict with Iran has made the US military look quite weak. And I think that in fact, it's undermined a lot of the deterrent effect that had come out of the US raid to grab Maduro and Venezuela, which was remarkable as an operational success. I mean, remarkable in every possible respect. And I think many a lot of countries sit back and go, like that's crazy that the US military could do that can walk into a country, grab its leader and spare them away in the dead of the night in like 90 minutes. I mean, that's just unbelievable. And then for the US to be floundering about, still really in the Middle East against Iran to see US bases under attack, the US really unable to, I mean, sure there's bomb to target, but unable to certainly coerce the Iranian leadership to compel them to some kind of even a negotiated settlement over the strait of war movies. And we're still in this debate where on a daily basis, the truth is on, it's off, I'm striking, I'll be not. We have a deal. I think all that makes the US military look very weak. Never mind the discrete material problem of we've depleted a lot of our missile interceptors here. By one estimate, 50% of the Patriot inventory, 50 to 80% of the third missile interceptor inventory, these are investments that are not only expensive, but it's a case like a long time to replenish that arsenal. And this is like the global arsenal that would be used in other conflicts as well. We've already known that in a conflict with China, we don't have enough munitions, both offensive and then defensive like missile defense munitions for a sustained conflict there. And we've already reduced that stockpile even further. So I think that all of that definitely undermines US deterrence against China. - We've talked about Ukraine a lot as a kind of model and source of innovation. As you look at the war in Ukraine, how do you see the battlefield dynamic there evolving? And I think there's an impression now that things have turned in Ukraine's favor and purpose of its ability to strike targets so deep inside of Russia, what is your read of that back and forth as each side has looked for new innovations and in-tron technology or where's the integrating trends? - Yeah, I mean, I think like in a marginal sense, the momentum or perceived momentum, perhaps it shifted in Ukraine's favor over the last several months. But I think that some of the dynamics you see in the last couple of years are unlikely to change of one in an operational sense, the war being relatively static. I don't think we're gonna be in a place, even if Ukraine starts maybe making small gains on the ground, we're not gonna see massive breakthroughs and all of the sort of things. and a transformation of the static kind of trench lines into some kind of very fast moving, blitzkrieg style maneuver warfare. The goal of those reasons why it's been static were like they'd be the case. And at a political level, certainly, Ukraine's ability to reach deep inside Russia and blow up things is better for Ukraine and then demonstrate for cost for Russia. Putin's been willing to absorb a lot of costs. I don't think it's gonna fundamentally change Putin's calculus. I think on both sides, both sides have settled in for several years now for a long war of attrition, both operationally and about a field and politically both sides are willing to endure a massive amount of costs. And so I think absent some outside dynamic that's gonna change things in a major way, I think we're likely to see the war continue to grind on for some time. - Let's look a little bit farther into the future. I noted that you wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs two and a half years ago now called the perilous coming age of AI warfare. And you at that time said that the window to regulate autonomous weapons was closing fast and that quote without limits, humanity risked barely toward a future of dangerous machine-driven warfare. Even then I think Ukraine had at least claimed to have fielded a fully autonomous weapon that could make, you know, really its own decisions about who to kill on the battlefield without a human in the loop. How much has that developed in the two and a half years since then? And how do you see both the US and global debates about putting the right kinds of constraints on autonomy when it comes to those lethal decisions? - Yeah, and one level I think we've seen over the last couple years increases in the use of drones and the numbers of drones by other countries and other conflicts and sort of incremental growth in autonomy. I think it was predictable to those who were looking at this and I think it was kind of a long-term trend. I've been a little bit surprised by the way the war isn't fully new to Ukrainian two dimensions. One, the scale of drone production is much, much higher than I would have imagined a few years ago. Getting to the place where Ukrainian is producing four million drones a year now, that's a lot more than I would have imagined Ukraine was capable of doing. On the autonomy side, it is kind of the developed slower than I would have expected. Now we have seen what Ukrainian's refer to as sort of last mile autonomy where basically the human is piloting a first person drone and then I lock on to a target, could be a human, could be a vehicle and then the drone is able to carry that out for the last mile sort of metaphorically anywhere for maybe like 500 meters to a kilometer, maybe more in the face of jamming. I would have expected that we see more autonomy given how much jamming there was on the front lines. I don't have a great reason actually why that hasn't occurred. I think the simplistic answer is maybe it's just not needed. The both sides are able to get to the point where they can still find targets and it's really just at the really terminal phase getting really up close that the jamming is significant enough to not do that. The other reason of course is, there is concern about factor side, the front lines are static but are sometimes a little bit porous partly because they are so thinned out. And so both sides want to avoid situations, certainly Ukraine at least I should say, what's the avoid situations where they end up targeting their own forces? And that's much harder for an AI. Like to get to the point where an AI could say, oh that's a Ukrainian versus a Russian soldier, that's harder, it's a lot harder to do than simply saying like that's a human. So we're not quite there. On the one hand, the political discussion is about AI more broadly in society or just heating up what's AI going to do for our jobs and how do we deal with that. I do think regulating military aspects of AI is probably getting more challenging. The idea that you're gonna bring US and Russia and China to the table to some verifiable treaty, to ban autonomous weapons. It didn't seem realistic five years ago. It seems even less realistic these days. And so I think that getting to a place with this political momentum actually achieves some kind of regulation over military AI. This meaningful seems hard. I saw recently, the Secretary General was speaking out against autonomous weapons, but you know, that doesn't mean that's gonna lead to like actually changing what militaries do. - Where is US military policy on this question now and where in your mind if you were, you know, kind of put in charge for crafting this, what would you be doing? So on autonomous weapons specifically, there's been a policy in place since 2012. It was updated a few years ago. The Pentagon has said that they are in the process of launching a new review of that policy. That really is an internal review process that doesn't say the US military can't build autonomous weapons. Basically says if the US military were to build weapons that are different than we've done in the past, they look different than say mines or some of the automated features on like air and missile defense systems that we already have. It had for decades. Then they'd have to go through a more extensive review process to make sure not just that they're lawful but that they work properly. Like we're gonna send these exotions to the real world that they're not gonna kill civilians or target our own forces for example. Personally, I think those are sensible practical steps. Disclosure, I was involved in writing the original policy back in 2012, so I do have some attachment to it. I don't know where we'll end up on this. Needless to say, in the wake of the sort of big messy public break up between the Pentagon and Anthropic earlier this year, there's been a lot more public scrutiny over how the military is using a lot more congressional scrutiny about what the rules are gonna be and who sets those guardrails. You know, if the Pentagon were to sort of scrap the policy entirely and say our policy is, you know, unleash the killer robots, they might get a little bit of flak for that. I'm not sure how much this team would care. It doesn't mean they wouldn't do it. So I think you know, in terms of outcomes, it could be anywhere from they had maybe renew the current policy with some slight updates. It doesn't restrict development of autonomous weapons, doesn't say you can't do it. Just kind of says if we're gonna do it, here's some ways to be thoughtful about it. Or they could say we're gonna, you know, for us to lead on this policy and it's anything goes. I think there's a lot of possible issues here. - How scary does that get to you if it's anything goes? - I mean, I'm not like, I worry more about in the broader sense what happens if we see all, I've sort of raced to the bottom in terms of human control of a warfare between not just the US but also competitors. You know, I think the US military is inclined to act pretty responsibly and they give you the future of the policy way. People are likely to be pretty thoughtful. You know, military doesn't want weapons that they can't control. In some ways, one of the motivations at the time behind this policy was in the absence of any policy, what we were finding was people were just uncertain about what to do. They were like, can I build this? Am I allowed to build this? Having a process in place gives people a place to get a yes, which is advantageous if you want to think about how do you make it possible for the US military to actually move forward with the technology? So I'm actually not sure that like no policy is a good move, not just from a like safety standpoint but also from the standpoint of enabling the US to see the technology. You might get a place where people are kind of paralyzed because they don't know what to do. They're like, well, I mean, I allowed to build this thing or not. I worry more about, you know, a sort of broader dynamic of surrendering human judgment to machines. I think in my mind, the risk is more insidious and gradual. We end up in a place 20, 30 years from now, we're kind of the back and we're like, wow, this is scary. A world where humans are no longer in control of warfare. - The US a few years ago said that it would keep a human on loop for decisions regarding the use of nuclear weapons. I made that kind of public commitment. I don't think Russia or China or North Korea how do you worry about this undermining deterrence causing even kind of mistaken use of nuclear weapons to go to one of the most alarming of those scenarios? - Yeah, I mean, I was an encourage to see that. I think that's the kind of a low bar to clear. - Yeah. - Right? - Yeah. - Hey, you know, while we're building the color, let's make sure humans are trench nukes. I'd seem like a pretty reasonable argument to make. We haven't seen anything official out of the Chinese military. There had been a statement that had come out of a summit between President Biden and Xi Jinping during the Biden administration where China had sort of also agreed to maintain human control over nuclear weapons. Well, fuzzy, what if anything that means, but I felt like maybe half-stop in a positive direction. We've not seen anything like that from Russia. I mean, a perfect one. I'd love to see something like a P5 statement about the importance of human control over nuclear weapons. Again, that seems like a low bar to clear. And one level, you know, I'm not looking at this and say, like, this is, who would even suggest otherwise? On the other hand, the examples like the pro-Nitor system that the Soviets had reportedly built and allegedly deployed in some fashion and that according to some stories and reports by Russian generals, maybe Russia could continue to have in some fashion and automated sort of like nuclear retaliatory system that would allow Russia to strike back if there was a first strike against where humans would still have to authorize this. And there would still be technically a human in the loop but it would automate a whole bunch of the processes. And I do think this is a place where like machines break. I mean, yeah, like anybody who interacts with a computer knows they break all the time, they're doing weird things or Bluetooth is connecting to the wrong thing. I mean, like if we're struggling to get basic technology in a place where it's foolproof for these really high stakes applications, there's a lot of value in having humans still, not just one place, but like multiple steps of that process. I think that there's a lot of value that human judgment brings. - You mentioned the blow up between and dropping into Pentagon. I mean, the role of private companies and their work forces on some of those that another fascinating dimension of this. Do you imagine continuing friction between AI labs and the Pentagon as we try to hash out a responsible policy or has the government kind of asserted its power? And that's what's likely to happen. that? No, no, I think this is going to be a continued source of tension. I think it's unfortunate because in many ways it's a revival of the tension that we saw almost a decade ago when Google decided to discontinue their work on Project Maven and we saw in response to that like kind of a big existential panic from a lot of people in the national security space that they could get cut out of this transformative technology that was coming out of the commercial space. And that is what's fundamentally different about AI. In some ways it's the opposite of stealth technology that was invented in defense labs and doesn't really have a commercial application. This is coming out of commercial labs and for these companies like the government is important in so far as the government has vast regulatory powers in its disposal to make their lives difficult, to put in place export controls or you know, gum up the release of their models. We see the US government do this most recently with open AI and in traffic in terms of some of the cyber capabilities of their models. But the government is not a big customer the same way it is for defense companies. In fact, the government is pretty marginal player in this space. We think about total dollar amounts. And so you know, in a lot of the AI engineers, they're not coming from the national security space. They may not be supportive of military applications. They may not want to work on that. In the wake of the Maven dispute with Google several years ago, what we saw is the military leadership and defense leadership went on a listening tour among universities and tech companies talking to people in the AI space understanding their concerns. The outgrowth of that was the duty AI ethics principles stating how the military would use AI in a responsible way. It wasn't putting them place limits on what the military was going to do, but it was communicating both externally and internally to the defense enterprise. So how are we going to approach the technology in a way that's thoughtful and responsible? And they want to kind of this bridge building, you know, kind of tour in a way that's the opposite of the current approach, which has been kind of go nuclear on this on both sides. I mean, that's certainly a bit of a Pentagon leadership. I think also with some extent of people in the tech space. But you know, we've seen letters from such a synthetic letters from employees open letters at Google and open AI calling on not working with the military. That's a real problem. And I think we've got to find ways to bridge this divide between Washington and Silicon Valley. I mean, the government could forcibly compel US companies to give up models using defense production act or some other kinds of authorities. That's not going to be effective in integrating the technology in a way that's effective. To do that, to actually use AI effectively, you've got to have a tight relationship with AI engineers who can sit side by side and people in military to talk about, here's what it can do. Here's what it can't do. Like imagine if we were trying to build like advanced fighter jets and the engineers and the military were never able to talk to each other. Just wouldn't fly very effectively. And so I think we've got to find ways to repair that relationship. Well, Paul, I'm glad we could end on a note that was not an accidental nuclear attack caused by a who was needing AI. But thank you for doing this. There's a lot we will. I hope pick up in the coming months and years in our pages from you and others. But thanks for the great piece. It's called "Losing the World of Future" and "Thanks again for joining me today." Thank you. Thanks for having me on the discussion and thanks for your support. This article is very exciting to take this out there. Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Alisper and Connish Gervour. Our audio engineer is Christopher Cook. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Arena Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in. [Music]