What's a Revolution in Military Affairs Good For?

you are listening to the war on the rocks podcast on strategy defense and foreign affairs my name is ryan evans i'm the founder of war on the rocks in this episode i brought together three friends mike horwitz ben jensen and stacy petty john to discuss whether we're undergoing a military revolution what that means and if it even matters which it might not this episode is brought to you by arkenstone defense the end-to-end platform helping defense tech startups enter and scale in the federal market overwhelmed by government contracting requirements arkenstone brings compliance security workforce payroll and contracting support together pay for what you use stay lean and keep your team focused on product development and growth learn more at war on the rocks dot com slash arc a r k enjoy the show why should we care about the even concept of a military and revolution affairs why does it even matter who cares there are large changes in how militaries fight wars these happen like all the time conceptually the you know often we think about these as changes in the character of warfare as military think about like naval warfare and shifting from pirates of the caribbean style like put your wooden ships next to each other and fire the cannon to like all steel gun battleships to carrier warfare to whatever things are going to evolve to next and being able to capture those changes in what is happening is essential for grasping shifts in power and essential for militaries when you think about why we don't have battleships today is that most naval warfare is beyond line of sight and that you don't want to get close enough to your enemy if you actually approach that area you're likely to have already been hit and destroyed because you don't have weapons that are long enough to hit first so these big changes sort of sometimes end up informing the types of weapons that are useful and why we still don't stand in lines in red coats with muskets or other things like that realize that some technologies end up being obsolete and you need to move on from them or you're going to face a loss on the battlefield mike has given you the logic stacy has actually taken that further talk about technology procurement force design i want to add to that you never necessarily will get the moment of a change right military change is slow battlefield defeat makes it seem sudden and so the more important thing is developing a process in a profession that allows you to visualize and describe change sufficiently to start to think about how you're going to fight how i'm going to build new formations what i'm going to buy and i think one of the reasons you'll find people like us who study military innovation a lot start to have skepticism the deeper in our careers we get is we realize it's never just a function of the technology it's people and bureaucracy and really achieving something you might call a revolution requires such a whole scale institutional change even cultural change and how people see visualize describe war resource it organize it that you start to appreciate that change builds up very slow and that clifford rogers old like 1993 punctuated equilibrium argument is still probably pretty valid for how we might look at this definitionally it is it is the combination of technological change organizational operational change and strategic consequences is that fair i would separate out strategic consequences because i think that essentially conflates whether something is an innovation with how effective it is if we want to understand innovation i think we need to understand like what militaries are actually doing how their practices are changing training education doctrine forces etc some innovations are more successful than others frankly on the battlefield. imagine a line for example not successful on the battlefield well it could have been i don't want to get into that oh i agree with you i could have been quite successful but well and it's how you employ your forces right the the concepts of operations you develop and how you use different capabilities together that normally has led to more significant changes i do think and this is why i have argued that what you see right now is not yet a revolution that there does have to be some significant change and improvement in the efficacy of fighting and battlefield outcomes that is of a certain magnitude to make a difference i don't know if you have to go all the way down the line of what like krepenevich says where the old ways of fighting are completely obsolete but if it is just a small incremental change that i think is still an innovation but a tiny one and certainly not a revolution the thing that strikes me and i agree with you a hundred percent as much as an advocate if i am of drones and ai particularly if it helps you kill authoritarians not do domestic surveillance or undermine elections what i would say is the missing piece is time let's look at adjunct court adjunct court is a big ass win adjunct court's a big ass win if you're french and you die suffocating in mud because of an arrow hitting your horse not a great day but for the other side we zoom in first the simple story is the the archer what it misses is that archer it's not like a crossbow where anybody could pick it up it took years to train someone to have the strength the ability to aim it and so most of these discussions i think stacy hit on it moving from just an innovation to a revolution miss that problem of time and how long it takes to make some of these changes right i feel there's like an old sim for the movies like every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings or something every time i think we talk about revolutions and like use that phrase i think it delays the change that we want to see probably why do you think that is the endless debate and discourse over how exactly to define a revolution which is right is essentially like the definition of an empty suit i mean think about the the rma debates back in the 90s and early 2000s could you recap those for some of our younger listeners who might not be as so like back when your younger listeners didn't exist yet and their parents were listening to ska or nirvana or whatever the sure or biggie and tupac i mean i don't know there was this big debate in the american military that had been triggered by research out of the office of net assessment and other places about the way that what was then emerging technologies like the information age might shape the future of warfare this was the beginning of the of everybody understanding what precision warfare would mean the beginning of what we now think about as cyber operations etc and that that led to this incredible debate over whether the infamously the fog of war would be lifted by all of the incredible surveillance capabilities you got from satellites and other things and the combination of satellites and precision would fundamentally revolutionize warfare all those capabilities have actually come to pass and become incredibly useful in modern warfare but the question of is this revolutionary or not i think fundamentally distorted the conversation and led to all these weird things like the marine corps talking about how the boots that they were going to give their soldiers were revolutionary and thus they should be funded i think it's worth pointing out that the reason that innovation and the revolution debate to the extent that that matters at all because i agree most of it is really annoying and just sort of disturbing i think it's worth pointing out that the reason that innovation and the revolution debate to the extent that that matters at all because i agree most of it is really annoying and just sort of distracts from the bigger point is that warfare is a competitive enterprise and everyone's trying to gain an advantage. And so you're looking to adapt and leverage your strengths and take advantage of any weaknesses of your anticipated enemies. And that is leading to this need to innovate and why people care about it. He's right. It's an academic empty. I just want that for the record. Well, I think what's interesting, I don't disagree, Mike, but these do become a big part of our discourse in part because of your own pioneering work in the field. Do you know, I read this awkward. I read Mike's book before I knew Mike. I read Mike's book literally in the evenings while sleeping on a cot in Helmand. It's really good for getting some rest at night. Yeah. I'm amazing. You didn't get your ass kicked about what I was doing otherwise. But I think what's interesting about it is, yeah, we can say this is important. It's not important. But when people talk about are we undergoing a revolution in military affairs, given all this. You know, waving your arms around, that's happening. What I think is interesting is how we assume that we're talking about the same this, like people will think drones and AI. But is that really what is revolutionary? I'm not so sure. I don't think anyone disagrees with the importance of discussion. I think where you see frustration is who's having the discussion and why starts to matter. If this just becomes like a way for a tech bro to sell some basically like middle tier TRL capability as revolutionary, that's actually self-defeating for the department and the republic. If it's a way for someone to try to like seem grand and rhetoric, but really not have an argument, not helpful. But if it's the military professional and civilians in the Department of Defense and a large national security community having the second order discussion, I think you hear each of us touching on of how, OK, that's cool that you want a drone. How do I resource it? What's that formation look like? I think all of us would agree those are where those conversations matter. And then it's less about revolution and more about cost efficiency. Of implementation and back to the book you read in Hellman Diffusion. And so now I think that's where you'd see all of us. It's just shifting the word revolution to that kind of practical, hard implementation discussion and then talking about the tradeoffs that I think matters. I think it becomes so controversial in some ways because it leads to a focus on a technology and thinking that a technology is the solution and the answer. Stacey's dropping truth right now. And that's the problem. Not because it is not just the technology and it isn't one technology. It is. It is all the things we talked about in the beginning about how you organize to actually leverage the different technologies you have together, what sort of concepts you have for employing them, how it allows you to conduct missions that you couldn't previously do at a reasonable level of risk. It just becomes very hyper up and is what you see in the media and what people are trying to sell so I have an article forthcoming with Lauren con and sheer appendix that breaks down this question of the question that people are talking about a lot now which is whether drones are revolutionary and we point out that there are actually four different kinds of drone capabilities at least that people are talking about when they talk about drones you have collaborative combat aircraft you have your original like Reaper predator male hail drones you have tactical surveillance kind of capabilities and the the universe of one-way attack both shorter range and longer range we call all of those things drones and then we add a wrapper to it and ask our drones quote-unquote revolutionary I can they give nothing less helpful for trying to for a military trying to figure out what capabilities should I buy and how should I use those capabilities to you know help me best you know deter conflict win wars etc here's why this is really important though so you had secretary heggen Seth at a USA little ruckus at first but actually dropped he is a ruckus I know but they hear what happened right the protesters you're talking about yeah but you had him calling for another 50 billion dollar infusion into a lot of these technologies are talking about well we had the dog top off - if you just throw money after a technology without having these hard discussions and you have this revolutionary rhetoric in the background it justifies potentially very bad policy decisions because anytime you just throw money at SOCOM or some entity to resource something and you miss these dot mil PF conversations of how do you develop the doctrine the organization around it there's huge diminishing returns on that investment you end up with conic containers full of drones and one of the four variants he's talking about that would have been really effective two years ago that now have a half-dead battery and maybe they have an operating manual maybe they don't so I think sometimes the revolutionary rhetoric again obscures our ability to have those hard implementation and budget conversations that are extremely important right now okay but let me just let me push back a tiny bit like you like obviously I agree with that but let me just say that from from the world that like I was in in the last administration the Pentagon scrounging for a couch cushion money Pentagon style to fund like ten small one-way attack systems or something or something like that there traditionally has been when it comes to emerging capabilities like the universe of things we call drone along with artificial intelligence not enough money there has been a money problem you are absolutely correct that throwing money at the issue doesn't solve it fundamentally from a capability development question at the end of the day like money's not bad no you were right to you guys were right and you know I love you and Scott like you had to fight that hard fight to get the initial package across the line the problem was the services aren't following suit aren't being and and frankly they have their own pathologies so if you look at their budgets for some of these capabilities versus what goes to dog and these other initiatives it's I think it's creating this very bad bureaucratic imbalance that we're going to be digging out of I felt really conflicted about the dog because in some ways I think it's defense Autonomous Warfare group correct and this 50 billion I think this is a second 50. 64 over the dog in the fy27 budget proposal whether are there anybody sees that Vegas money but I liked previously I think it is important the way that General George had been pursuing this before he left in terms of transformation in contact where he wanted to get the capabilities in the hands of actual soldiers and let them do experiments so they could work on those organizational and those Concepts issues there is a point where you buy too much of a bunch of stuff that is just going to be obsolete before and probably doesn't actually work on a really contested Battlefield if you believe most of the reporting that we're getting anyway but you have to let people start to use it and I think small drones in particular are potentially the most transformative for ground forces and this is where they do need to have them and employ them in different ways but at the same time it runs the risk of being a waste in particular when you know you think of the services and this goes back to like their organizational culture and Carl builder and all of that with they like their big weapon systems and they have their certain preferences and priorities and new Technologies often challenge those and therefore are resisted so I couldn't be a bigger fan of people like General Donovan who was running dog and it's just like you're describing it's an initiative out of extremists to make something happen it's just you need to connect it back to the service and I agree with you like General George and Driscoll too to his credit really had a good vision with that in fact you're starting to see some of the payback even though they shut it down so there's this like I forget which Brigade it is there's a brigade of 101st who just had a rotation at grtc where through some of the drone dominance initiatives and through some creative use of AI agents to make up staff functions they were able to kick the crap out of Geronimo and the op4 through using some very creative tactical adaptation and using some novel uses of AI to come up with staff functions so that story is right about that the other night didn't he during the interview yeah so I think that's where you hear a lot of us talking about that infusing the technology with people at the lower level to do the type of rapid iteration and experimentation and then pick the winners and scale up is what ultimately can become a revolution you just calling it a revolution before it's happened and change things is a bit foolhardy for the 100th time for for our listeners the diu funding something is not winning winning is when the capability is so scaled and useful that it's the thing that future me says is old and busted well I think we're still dancing a bit around what this is like is it really just drones and I'm just going to put a proposition out there we're defaulting to drones and AI but it seems to me that if there is a revolution underway it is focused on the industrialization of precision capabilities and the I kind of hate this word applied in these contexts but the democratization of those capabilities whereas before they were only available to advance militaries they are now available to pretty much yeah totally done yes but Mike loves Revolution hates diffusion don't you think that's a bigger way of looking and and according to your own definition Mike something that actually tells the service is something useful because when we talk about drones and AI what we're really talking about is how are we going to use drones and AI what are we going to do to the enemy but I think a more holistic version of what a revolution is is what the enemy is likely to do to you and who those enemies are and how they're going to use some of these same things which then have to feed back into I mean I think this is the maturing Revolution military affairs that you were talking about in the 90s where the technology is diffused now it's readily available it's cheap it's largely commercial whether you're talking about satellite imagery satellite communications all of the things that used to only be available to really rich countries with sophisticated militaries now anyone can get and it looks like a revolution because suddenly from the U.S perspective we're facing threats that we never had to before and having our bases attacked by cheap drones watching cheap drones be able to destroy very expensive aircraft or potentially threatened ships and that's what seems revolutionary about it right now you know what's funny is actually all three of us in this room are the maturing Revolution and military affairs I mean I think the first time I met both of you is probably like 10 or 15 years ago how many net assessment games how many of these different games like we're talking about the same thank you for reminding everyone that I am still quite young compared to you three you do have flowing locks my friend but honestly like we've spent a lot of our professional life going to these classified games having these same conversations and so it just reinforces for me that kind of underappreciated dynamic of time and I would have thought back then that the cost and form factors would have declined faster to if you ask me what it is to enable these type of dueling battle networks to be more proliferated than they are I think they are now I'm surprised it took them this long to do that a couple thoughts here one in the counterfactual world where 9-11 doesn't happen I think we actually get it much faster the reason being that the investment portfolio that would have been necessary to to proliferate faster within the American military and then drive down costs and then generate some of those diffusion patterns I think would happen much faster so like that's thing one I think like thing two is like macro I've argued extensively in War on the Rocks great publication occasionally elsewhere and obviously less great publications that's all right we can be friends with foreign leaders that we are that we are in the era of precise mass in war that being the intersection of commercial manufacturing advances in AI and autonomy and to Stacy's very smart point a moment earlier the diffusion of precision guidance and the fact that it's a 50 year old technology at this point so it shouldn't be that surprising that everybody in the world now has access to it and the Houthis can fire up you know like essentially flying lawnmowers to threaten American ships in the Red Sea to say nothing of like Iran and the Shahids you know what what Russian Ukraine do to each other Etc and that this fundamentally I think is changing the character of Warfare and I am personally most focused on the United States because I think to like your point Ryan because I think the like lights are flashing red for like risk for American conventional military superiority for some of the historical reasons that we have all talked about but the system level impact of what we are seeing in some ways is that it gives traditionally weaker powers the ability to generate a effective strike at much lower cost which helps them then impose costs on adversaries and potentially makes coercing them harder yes I agree with all that and I think that the war in Iran the way it played out especially in the early months was proof that we had not been coming to these realizations faster at least institutionally an organization it's uh which is really a shame we're going to take a quick break from this conversation for another conversation with my old friend william tressiter william is a marine corps veteran and actually rejoined the reserves fairly recently we joked that he might be the oldest sergeant in the marine corps but he joined me because he's one of three founders of an exciting company called ark and stone defense which basically takes care of all the hard stuff so your company can keep building and accomplishing great things the government is not getting the best capabilities partially because they put so many roadblocks in place for good reason for taxpayer dollars and for security purposes and it made it really hard for the best capabilities to come in and so we're looking at how do we welcome more companies how do we broaden the industrial base how do we bring more great people in working in great companies to solve problems in the public sector because those are the most compelling kinds of problems to solve this has to do with keeping people safe prosperous the kinds of things that really matter when you look at the number of incredible companies and incredible people that are working with the pentagon despite the challenges you realize that they're hooked on the mission at its core ark and stone is the only company that's built as a platform end-to-end support for government contractors that could be something having to do with a product product might need to get fed ramped or get an ato a company might need to have foci mitigation they may need to handle cui data or they may have workers that you need to be tracking prevailing wages for a service contract that a company has or managing security clearances all of these different things are traditionally done with either hiring people into overhead or hiring a bunch of different vendors you can end up with a lot of employees and a lot of fractional vendors that are all helping you doing these different things that are just there so that you can be a government contractor it has nothing to do with delivering on the contract or anything else so it's a lot of overhead to carry that's the default path sort of a diy approach we think that it's an understandable approach i've done it in the past but there's a newer approach where you can use our platform our infrastructure right on top of that pay for what you use and then you don't have to have all those people that you're carrying right you can stay lean and focused product development go to market stay there stay as close as you possibly can to your commercial idea don't give up on the idea that you can build incredible products and then grow in the defense market without becoming a more traditional company you want to stay doing all the innovative things that are the reasons why you started the company in the first place i managed to catch a company right before they hired four different vendors four different 1099s who were going to support four different pieces of their contract readiness and security and compliance journey and as we spoke they listed the four things that they were about to do because they were being forced into this right as a contract was about to be let they only had 45 days to sort this out they were kind of just going for whatever they could and we were able to walk through all four of those dimensions say yes we can do this yes we can do this yes we can do this yes we can do this and the so what of all that is it's actually going to be cheaper for you so you only have one person to focus on as a partner and it ends up costing you less those feel incredible and the feedback from the customer is just amazing because they were had kind of accepted that this was really going to suck and now they're realizing that it's actually not you can learn more about arkenstone so we're going to go back to the show and we're going to go back to the show and i'm going to go back to the show now that i have you in person for the first time in a while i love your work on this topic i don't love the term precise mass and i'll tell you or whatever because mass typically in military affairs is about a concentration of forces that can you know in the more causawitzian sense and it's also when we're talking about precise mass where it's not always mass is it frankly whether one wishes to call it affordable mass precise mass attributable mass i wouldn't use the word mass i think the issue the reason why i think the term mass is important in this context is that the american military since the cold war has been constructed around capabilities that are almost exclusively exquisite expensive and hard to produce and so the use of the term mass while while referring to something different perhaps than clausowitz intended it's in the like plain meaning version mass like a lot with the idea being that what we the the future force we need to the extent that i suspect all of us would embrace variants of sort of a high-low mixes and like thinking about what the american future force should at least look like the like bottom line is the u.s needs more mass i actually think the mass part is important too and i prefer affordable mass that's what trill shears and i just wrote about but i think it is important because it is the quantities and then it's the producibility and mike benita's had a really good piece in war on the rocks about this as well and that is the part that people don't recognize it's not just buying lots of drones that are going to be probably absolutely obsolete in 12 months at the most. It is being able to produce lots of them very quickly and in a way that other weapons that the US military uses right now just simply can't meet those timelines at all. So you had started this part of the thread on asking us what we think is the real change right now. And I think they've both wisely pointed out, and I would add too, that one, is the real change we want to see is an acceleration of the conversion capacity of the United States economy to produce, whether affordable mass, whatever it is, we've got to produce the widgets that kill our enemies faster and cheaper than we do right now. And a really interesting question, and I've noticed in my own thinking on this, I've gone from loving to write con ops and thinking about it forward to thinking at the level of defense strategies. What does that really actually look like? When I compare what you see with Ukrainian civil society, Brave One Network, despite the corruption, distributed kind of almost Ayn Rand on steroids marketplace versus kind of still prime tilted and quasi prime tilted entities, there's a bureaucratic and market incentives that I think are limiting that next step for us to get to that scalability we want. And I don't see, and I've been involved with multiple DARPA and government projects that ask like, is there a widget I can insert that all of a sudden explodes the industrial capacity of the United States? I don't think it's a technology problem. I think it's a problem of policy, incentives, regulation. That is the first thing you need to change. The second, and we can talk about that separately, is what really is information warfare when we actually do start to combine inform and influence cyber electronic warfare and other activities that actually create whole new, they're not new lines of effort, but we can do old things in new ways. I agree with everything you said. I would add, I think it's a problem of vision in that essentially the American military of our young adulthood and however old Ryan was then, I think is a historical anomaly in that the American military is currently constructed around capabilities that we plan to field for 50 years when we buy them. And that only works if you are so far ahead of everyone else that you think through just like routine upgrades, that like that's going to be good enough. And we have a couple of examples of the B-52 where frankly it has been good enough. And like, that's great. Ukraine wants Patriot missiles more than anything. That's another example. Absolutely. But using $4 million Patriot missiles to shoot down $50,000 Shahids is not a sustainable cost exchange ratio. The point being, if you look historically at militaries over time, capability development, militaries didn't buy capabilities to last 50 years, whether we're talking about the Agincourt era militaries up through the late Cold War, it's really an artifact in some ways of the post-Cold War period. And so arguably what we're seeing now is a return to normal, which connects back to points that both Ben and Stacey have made about producibility and your point about industrial scale being essential here. Because your drone becoming more and more obsolete after a year or two matters if you planned to keep it for a decade or for 50 years. If you have a model where you're only keeping it for 12 months and you're paying as if you're only going to keep it for 12 months because you're going to buy and scale another generation and your industrial facilities are set up to produce that, then like that's just a different business model for how you're producing military force. I totally agree that it was an anomaly, right? And we've been in a weird period, but I wonder how durable any of the changes are. And this is one of the reasons that I don't really think we're seeing the revolution is that in some ways the technology is so easy to mimic and to proliferate because it's commercial. It is not military anymore. And that means that it is really hard to actually gain a significant advantage. So if we're talking about drones and AI and autonomy, unless there are the really exquisite systems, maybe it's something like the CCAs that are fully autonomous. Yeah. I mean, the CCAs that are fully autonomous and integrate stealth or something on the side in future iterations of it, I don't know if it. We might just be in this rapid cycle of constantly needing to change. The current marketplace of producing violence doesn't favor our exquisite paradigm. And so if it is diffuse, if it is cheap, and your theory of victory is to constantly produce the next offset, the next version of long range penetrating precision strike, that actually means you're out of position in the marketplace. And it doesn't matter how much money you begin to throw Project Meridian at the next leap technology goal, you're already out of position in the marketplace and it can be copied or adapted to. And so that produces real strategic risk, which is why it's important to have these conversations and think about, well, where do you produce those incentives to make more modular equipment? You can update it or you just. A life cycle that's shorter. I think you can still gain strategic advantage in this kind of era of warfare, though. And so I think that the. If what you're seeing is the more rapid diffusion of capabilities that help countries, at least at this point, maybe resist coercion more effectively, et cetera, think back to something all three of us have, I'm sure, taught in classes at one point or another, which is the German victory over France in World War II. And I like everybody at some point it points out the fact that the french and the british have like about as many tanks and about as many planes and right arguably superior technologies in like some cases it's not like the secret sauce of the like nazi blitzkrieg machine is not the fact that they have tanks it's the operational concepts to go back in some ways the beginning of the conversation that makes the difference which suggests in some ways that in this emerging era that we are seeing that the if it's harder to gain sustainable first mover advantages through technology because of diffusion that puts an even greater emphasis than probably on people organizations and operational concepts and then also when you send the bulk of elite french forces into belgium while the nazis come across through the hinge in the south of france and that that's i i think sometimes i think we've talked too much about that case because so as ernie may point out a very strange i agree with you on the operational concept point and i think it is really important i think the other thing we're seeing is because we are considering these technologies mainly for offensive operations despite like the counter drone drones and what you're seeing in terms of trying to improve air defenses with cheaper technologies i think it primarily is offensive and you're seeing the rise of defensive systems to impassive defensive systems hardening i mean as people adapt and make changes and don't just assume that they're base or don't just assume that they're base or they're factory or you know their oil refinery is perfectly fine out in the open that is going to reduce the efficacy of some of these new capabilities that right now are wreaking such havoc in the middle east i worry that um all of this in addition to that marketplace imbalance is taking us back to what's going to be a really new nasty air of proxy warfare it's like going to be a new version of stability and stability paradox i mean watching china even help these produce ballistic missiles cheaper north korea sharing like crappy ballistic missiles with russia who makes them better that marketplace dynamic makes it easier for states to support surrogates and proxies in a way that makes it very difficult for a global power like the united states to stay globally committed so here's an example from like a little even like more obscure which is i have a brilliant phd student in natalia henry who's written a paper about a drone use by rebels in burma that shows the way the drone is used in burma it shows the way the drone is used in burma it shows the way that it transformed their effectiveness drone use transformed their effectiveness against the burmese military military into your proxy war kind of point until china shuts the border and they lose access to a bunch of the like drone parts that they needed essentially which then sort of undermines them and so the it is both true that that commercial manufacturing means that more actors can produce these useful military capabilities than ever before in a way that hearkens for me back to the early 20th century but it also means that you have some of these proxy more of these proxy dynamics to what extent is auto war command which a successor to dog is i guess conceptually also sounds like something from a transformers movie a solution to any of this or is this just a sort of an organizational choice that won't matter that much at the end of the day i'm curious what you all think since i no longer live in washington dc into the air and the air is very different in philadelphia where the primary topic of conversation is like how the eagles are phillies or like whatever you're right philadelphia is a smellier city but the uh yeah there is no no problems in dc wow air is great here it seems to me like this is a uh in some ways hegseth spin on ongoing initiatives to create an institution that is for the warfighter that in a way that the trump administration hopes will sell and institutionalize this i could imagine this working as an organizational form i could imagine it not working as an organizational form i think that will have less to do with whether it is a combatant command per se and more to do with whether the like money, people, connectivity to the services, to field capabilities is there. I'm of two minds on this. And I think it's the same dilemma that the Ukrainians have faced when they created a drone service. And it's in some ways you're seeing that these new technologies and drones are best used when they're paired with traditional capabilities and novel ways. That would push me to wanting them integrated with the services. And that's a man-trained equip mission. Yeah. And then siloing them by themselves sort of suggests that they're off doing their own thing and is likely to make that sort of joint employment and joint conceptual development more difficult. But at the same time, the services have these deeply held institutional preferences that are not necessarily the most welcoming towards uncrewed technologies. And that is, you know, inhibited adoption. So I don't know where I come down on that. I think that's a really good way of putting it in that in one way, there's a reason why Feinberg and Hegseth have consolidated so much control on unmanned systems from the services. But there's also that negative aspect to it, too, is if you don't let the services own it, then it might not actually. You can't actually generate the transformation you want at the end of the day if it doesn't go through the services. Right. A combatant command with SOCOM-like acquisition authorities to speed acquisition could, in theory, help if there is then a transition plan to the services. So I would be curious on a couple fronts. One, I do think it's too soon to say. Two, I think we have to see how it survives a new Congress in terms of some of the funding dynamics. And especially if there's lots of CRs, what counts as a new start? What doesn't? I know, ultimate DC speak for you, cheese whiz. So what is going to be interesting to watch, I didn't think, and correct me if I'm wrong here, we all study national security. I didn't think you could make a new combatant command without rewriting the UCP. So was there actually a UCP rewrite, because we've talked about for the last two administrations. What do you think is going to be the next step to redoing UCP? I think we're in LOL no rules right now. So great question. Last line of questioning, something a little bit maybe out of left field. I was talking with a friend the other day about how, you know, if you accept that what we're seeing is going to be the increased roboticization of war with more machines at the front lines and fewer humans, doesn't that logic ultimately result in routine targeting of communities in interstate wars? Because if you need to hurt people, like doesn't incentivize countervalue targeting to take to take a word from nuclear deterrence theory rather than counterforce because the people are in their cities and communities and bases and far from the front line. Don't play Vip and Narang's music. This is something we were talking about, and I think it's an interesting question. I don't know if it incentivizes going after civilians more. It might be looking for the remote bases that people who still have to be there to maintain and take care of these robots would be housed. But I think, you know, Eric Lynn Greenberg, Jackie Schneider and Julie McDonald, too, like have written about how this reduces the risk of using different capabilities. And it makes you more risk acceptant in terms of going on the offensive. But you also have the sort of break there that means that it's somewhat less escalatory. So you can think about the India-Pakistan war recently that happened. It looked like it was going pretty hot, fairly fast, and then they sort of ran out of drones and stopped. And I imagine we're going to see more things like that. Hopefully, it does not encourage countervalue targeting. I mean, in many ways, the drones aren't the ideal weapon for that. Russia's using them because that's what they have and have a lot of. You can do a lot more damage with a ballistic missile if you wanted to hit a city. So when we look at our firepower strike tracker, when we actually analyze statistically what gets through, what's intercepted, drones are not the problem. The Shahids actually, even with the jet-powered Shahid, the intercept rate hasn't statistically significantly moved. It's still pretty common. The big problem is ballistic missiles. And I fear beyond drones or AI that we're kind of reverting to the historical mean, which is sadly, people are the first tragic victim of wars between states. And so I think we are reentering an era where it's going to be the norms against civilian targeting have just completely gone out the window, sadly. And you're going to see more of these punishment campaigns, which is what you're seeing Russia turn to with a battlefield stalemate. And I could easily come up with four different Taiwan scenarios that would go similar of just a series of selective escalating, kind of the old graduated pressure concept, ballistic missile strikes, and just waiting till I get you to politically compel, politically concede that you are not willing to tolerate this degree of punishment. Now, we know normally these campaigns, we can say historical cases, those punishment campaigns don't work. I wonder if that's true, though, in an era of computational propaganda and how you can even deliver those messages beyond just the physical instruction. I agree that punishment seems more likely, but I don't think it's tied to drones. I think that it's a norm that has been broken and that now is shifting, and I fear that it's going to migrate. So you've seen Iran now that they have the capability, will reach out the Houthis. Russia has been sort of teasing at the edges of parts of Europe, sending drones in if suddenly they start launching more drone strikes once in a while because they can claim they're deniable, even though it might be a thin veil deniability there that it's going to be an ugly world for people. I mean, if war is the continuation of politics by other means and countries are generally going to try to do what's most effective, then I think there's a theoretical logical logic in some ways to why you might see populations targeted a bit more. I suspect the end of the Russia Ukraine war, however it ends, actually may play a role in this and whatever stories we tell and future us teach our students in some ways about that war or go back into the Pentagon and talk about, because if the lesson of the Russia Ukraine war ends up being that Russia took these shots at Ukrainian society for four six whatever however long like the war lasts and ukraine and ukraine like stood tall and resisted russian aggression that will that will communicate one thing in terms of lessons learned about going after civilian populations whether whereas if russia's attempts to devastate ukraine's energy infrastructure are successful and imposing costs on the civilian population ultimately gets putin what he wants that will teach the world another lesson in some ways about this i don't think it's just the lessons though i think there's an emotional component like the ukrainians wanted to strike back and you hear this if you talk to the taiwanese and the type of capabilities they want they want to be able to hit mainland china and hold that at risk because they don't want to be the only ones absorbing those attacks and they're i mean the sad fact is there are a lot of potential targets that are dual use that are civilian like energy infrastructure and oil and you see ukraine being much more vulnerable than russia and you see ukraine being much more vulnerable than russia and you see ukraine being much more vulnerable than russia and you see ukraine being much more vulnerable than russia and you see ukraine being much more vulnerable than russia and you see ukraine being much more vulnerable than russia and you see ukraine being much more vulnerable than russia and you see ukraine being much more vulnerable than russia and you see ukraine being much more vulnerable than more discriminating in what it is targeting in Russia and having better strategic effect as a result of that, but it is actually kind of working for that. Yeah. Well, that's the interesting thing is that when punishment campaigns historically don't achieve the political aims of the war, but that doesn't stop countries from doing them anyway, right? I mean, strategic bombing in Europe in World War II, the Tokyo fire bombings, we've seen Russia do this basically everywhere it's gone to war. It doesn't collapse the will of their adversaries to resist. It doesn't get them out of the fight, but it's something that human beings do anyway. I don't know if we have good enough granular studies, though, of how it alters intra-war bargaining dynamics, and that would be the really interesting kind of litmus test of quote unquote success, because there's so many confounding variables in what success is, isolating it to just one really difficult. But I think if you start to look at this punishment campaign, it highlights in your question about what technologies, what trends are changing warfare before our eyes. It really is an old technology like ballistic missiles, but it's lowering the cost of producing ballistic missiles, lowering the cost of rocket engines that now gives you cheaper long-range precision strike. That does actually, from just a rational perspective, favor a return to the punishment campaign and targeting critical infrastructure. I think it's really interesting that we've had almost this whole conversation without talking about AI almost at all. Excuse me. It's SI. Sorry. Mike, you're an enemy of the White House. The White House now. That is interesting in this context because the other side of what we are talking about from a capability generation and use of force perspective is the operational planning and implementation of plans and use of force, and what we saw in Epic Fury with the use of Maven's smart system to increase the firing rate, essentially the number of targets you could effectively identify and then launch weapons at. It was pretty extraordinary, frankly, and it's only going to go in one direction and with the availability of open source models is going to diffuse to everybody. We should not believe that we are the only country that's going to be able to do that for long at all. That will turn the dial to 11 in some ways even further on whatever you think these trends are going to be. I agree with Mike. I think AI is really important. It's really where you might start to see things tip into this bigger change that really changes warfare because people can act more quickly, though you can imagine integrating AI into battle management systems for air defense as well, and so there's a countervailing side to that. But it's edge autonomy, collaborative autonomy, and then those battle management functions where you could see a tipping point. While I will continue to write a lot about AI, and I'm fascinated by it, I'm going to be the skeptic on this one. A lot of these "revolutionary change" moments are ultimately unevenly distributed just like gum powder, and they have varying effects, and unfortunately, when I watch us use AI, it looks like Wiley E. Coyote and Acme rockets. It doesn't end well, meaning that we often prematurely culminate. We fail to anticipate. I could go down the list of elements of operational design and talk about the ways the promise of the technology, when put into the existing organizations, doesn't quite work out the way we want. And I actually see more opportunities to push forward. I think that's a good point. I think it's a good point. It's a good point. I think it's a good point.