The war in Ukraine has had one positive effect. It is waking up our defense establishment to the fact that we are still fighting the last (lost) wars. Success today demands recognizing that technology creates new problems that require human spirit more than artificial intelligence.
The challenge to U.S. defense today is to resist the drag of the status quo.
AI is still at an early stage but its fundamental problem is that it is inherently backward-looking. At a recent Pentagon-arranged AI discussion, the participants demanded its rapid adoption by the military. But a reporter noticed that some others urged caution deploying systems researchers are “still working to fully understand.” Others “warned against the temptation to push emerging AI applications into the world before they were ready, merely out of concern of China catching up.”
Serious thought must start with simple, inquisitive human intelligence. At the Army’s National Training Center, Commanding Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor recently reported to The Washington Post that a new device — confirmed in its lethality by both Ukraine and Russia in their current war — “is going to get our soldiers killed.” It took a bit of time to realize he was talking about iPhones, which are easily discoverable even by primitive devices to expose where troops are hiding. Referring to doughboys becoming targets when smoking cigarettes in foxholes in World War I, Taylor said Ukraine shows us that “the new cigarette in the foxhole” is the cellphone. And U.S. troops are more dependent on such devices than they were on cigarettes in the past and harder to restrain from using them. (READ MORE from Donald Devine: Promoting Everyday Freedom Requires Rewriting the Rule Books)
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George explained to the planning symposium, “We are learning from the battlefield — especially in Ukraine.” Even “aerial reconnaissance has fundamentally changed.” Until recently battlefield drones were large, expensive, and usage was decided by top officers, and not sent to troops until tested and evaluated. Ukraine successfully utilizes small, cheap drones with decisions made on the battlefield by ordinary soldiers. The U.S. could find this difficult as shown recently in Jordan where three U.S. soldiers were killed by an undetected cheap drone and with no effective countermeasures. The problem is that headquarters are reluctant to give up control or to ask for cheaper, less thrilling weapons.
It likewise took simple human observation to recognize that Ukraine’s battlefield is now all trench lines — more like WWI than recent warfare, enforced by massed artillery which the U.S. basically eliminated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trenches make U.S. standard maneuver difficult and command posts basically “unsurvivable.”
Even more fundamentally for the U.S. is its dependence on satellites. The problem is their radio waves and the like all rely on electromagnetic force and thermal energy that can be easily detected. After this warning, the reporter was taken to the training area and noticed that a command post was covered in camouflage to dampen electronic and thermal emissions. But the “bright white Starlink satellite internet terminal” was merely partially covered, with a soldier explaining that “the netting interfered with its operation,” although risking “standing out to drones or surveillance aircraft.”
China has also provided new insights. FBI Director Christopher Wray recently warned about Chinese malware hacking U.S. infrastructure, that it took “five or more years” before it was discovered, and that it still remains a problem. China’s intellectual challenge is for the Navy, especially for its most expensive and beloved weapon, the aircraft carrier. I was told in the ’90s by a then top defense expert that the carrier was outdated, and that the U.S. needed a major switch to smaller, unmanned, and more maneuverable ships. But the carrier had won WWII, and its fighter pilots still look great on TV. Its appeal is unmistakable.
The Navy did institute a new class of aircraft carriers beginning with the Gerald Ford in 2017 to meet criticism. But the cost of the ship was even higher at $13.3 billion, and was 1,092 feet long, 256 feet wide, and stood 250 feet high with a crew of 4,539. Looking back, “The USS Midway, commissioned one month after V-J Day, weighed 45,000 tons, took only 17 months to build, and cost $90 million — or $1.5 billion in current dollars. The USS Gerald R. Ford weighs 100,000 tons, took 12 years to build, and cost more than eight times as much (accounting for inflation).” President Biden just asked Congress to begin funding $2.7 billion to build three more Ford’s.
The problem is that even with a large defensive element built into Ford carriers, supporters concede that any movement closer than 660 miles towards China would be difficult. Even if defense experts wanted change, the program would be extremely difficult to reverse even just to build smaller replacements. There are 13,100 workers in 48 states and 364 congressional districts in the Ford Class supply chain and 25,000 more who work at the Newport News shipyard who could lose their jobs if the chain ended, which would not be popular with their congressional representatives.
Currently every major Navy shipbuilding project is “plagued by huge delays.” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti was particularly concerned with delays in implementing the new Amphibious Ready Group and its flagship Boxer formed to rapidly deploy power to world hotspots. The Boxer reportedly left San Diego “to join the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit on April 1, months behind schedule. The rapid-response ship was reportedly slated to deploy in late 2023 but did not become seaworthy until August, after multiple engineering mishaps,” including “obstacles in training Marine soldiers,” into which lapses Franchetti demanded a “deep dive” investigation.
The Air Force did look forward to replace its fabled F16 aircraft with a new permanent F35 manned fighter beginning in 2016. But proponents for F35 longevity were challenged at a 2020 Air Warfare Symposium attended by the Chief of Staff and top officials. Elon Musk challenged that audience of manned F35s for-the-future fans by predicting, “Locally autonomous drone warfare is where the future will be,” not manned aircraft. He added “I can’t believe I’m saying this, because this is dangerous, but it’s simply what will occur.”
The audience seemed dismissive. But a month later at another gathering, Air Combat Commander Gen. Mike Holmes responded to a question about the F35 future when a decision had to be made to replace the final F16s. His response was: “Will I still want to replace them all with F35s or will I start cutting in something else, like Elon talked about, or like [Air Force acquisition chief] Will Roper and I are discussing?” Adding Musk’s argument into the decision framework was not what the audience of manned-aircraft proponents wanted to hear.
Holmes was even more skeptical of AI proponents who were “playing games where they know 100 percent of the information.” But “when you’re playing a game where you have uncertainty and you don’t know everything, then there’s still a role for people to play, whether that’s in the cockpit of a fighter or whether it’s in the command-and-control center.” The latter vehicle would, of course, be unmanned. There have been tests in the last few years using both manned and unmanned in a limited manner; but the culture of the Air Force (and Congress) is for human operated airplanes; and no one is expecting radical change very soon. (READ MORE: Apples and Oranges: Atheists, Agnostics, and Nothings)
The past can be a great burden resisting change, magnified now by backward-looking but popular AI. Henry Kissinger gave his final warning in a book Age of AI and Our Human Future (with Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher) to demonstrate that, at best, AI or technology can only tell us something about the past. The challenge to U.S. defense today is to resist the drag of the status quo, to break from yesterday’s thinking and technology to meet today’s new military realities. And this requires hard human thinking — and great political courage.
Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles. Devine is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.