Not long after Elon Musk was tapped by Donald Trump to help lead a “department of government efficiency,” he set his sights on a prime target: what the Pentagon spends its money on. In posts on his platform X in December, Mr. Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, declared that “America needs a large quantity of long-range drones (air, surface water and submarine) and hypersonic missiles.” He warned, “Anything manned will die very fast in a drone war.”
In some ways, Mr. Musk’s call is not new. Experts have been warning for years that we have entered a new age of autonomous warfare, and the Pentagon needs to keep up. The Trump administration is unusually open to remaking the U.S. war machine: Weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Trump began preparing to stack his Pentagon with executives from start-ups and tech investors like Stephen Feinberg, his nominee for deputy secretary of defense.
But for the Trump administration to bring meaningful reform, it will need to do more than buy drones and change the type of weapons the Pentagon buys. It will also need to change how our weapons are built, and the speed at which they are acquired and introduced into U.S. forces.
The biggest challenge for any peacetime military is preparing for the next war. What weapons, capabilities and strategies will it need to fight and win a conflict that may be a few years to a decade or more away? This is a gamble of immense consequence.
Like any organization, militaries prefer certainty, but since they cannot eliminate uncertainty, they seek to manage it. The Pentagon’s traditional approach is to incrementally improve existing weapons, bring the latest technology to battle-tested platforms and build a better version of the same U.S. military. This, however, is a winning strategy only if old ways of fighting can still win.
Today, America faces a different challenge. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, material sciences and microelectronics are upending the status quo of weaponry and tactics. China is racing to secure a military advantage in this new era, acquiring new weapons five times faster than the United States and building lethal A.I. and autonomous systems on which this country imposes limits. Simply adding new technology to the same kind of platforms — such as manned aircraft or larger warships — could leave the U.S. military outmatched by China’s.