The Manfesto Of The Military
“Techno-Optimists” Is Deeply Flawed
William Hartung / Forbes
(March 22, 2024) — Touting the potential military benefits of weapons systems controlled and connected by artificial intelligence is all the rage in the Pentagon, industry and financial circles these days. The notion of robotic, pilotless systems and hypersonic weapons that can be produced cheaply, quickly, and in large quantities is being enthusiastically endorsed as the future of warfare in general, and the way to beat China in particular.
This infatuation with “advanced” military technology is not new, but it has taken on new resonance in the wake of last year’s announcement of the Pentagon’s “Replicator” initiative, which is supposed to enable the production, for example, of thousands of new drones that can be deployed in swarms to overwhelm any potential enemy. This enthusiasm at the highest levels of the Pentagon has been matched by a flood of venture capital funding of military tech startups, and the growing role of companies like Palantir, Shield AI, and Anduril in spearheading a potential military tech revolution.
One of the touch points of this new wave of “techno-optimism” is a book by Christin Brose, a military analyst who now serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Anduril Industries. The book , “Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High Tech Warfare,” can be spot on in some of its critiques of the current system employed by the Pentagon and the big contractors to purchase and develop major weapons platforms. But its analysis of the primary military challenges facing the United States and the best way to address them is deeply flawed.
The biggest mistake in the analysis put forward by Brose, a former aide to the late John McCain, is a misguided threat assessment. Early in the book, Brose recounts a 2017 conversation with McCain in which they both concurred with the proposition that “China . . was rapidly building up arsenals of advanced weapons with the explicit purpose of being able to fight and win a war against the United States.”
My first question on reading this was “what war?” China has no capability or intention of attacking the United States directly. So Brose is apparently referring to a war close to China’s shores, perhaps over Taiwan or the South China sea. But arms racing is not the best tool for protecting Taiwan or any other US ally in Asia. The best hope of resolving these challenges is through dialogue and diplomacy.
US military capabilities should be developed in the context of a larger strategy for preventing war with China, a strategy in which military power is only one element. The goal should be to reach a point where cooperation on pressing global issues like climate change and preventing pandemics supersedes confrontation. There’s no guarantee that China will embrace such an approach, but it offers a far better chance at mutual security than a military-first policy.
Unfortunately, the push for a technological arms race by the Pentagon and key sectors of industry will only undermine the development of a more balanced approach to China, making war more likely in the process. Meanwhile, China hawks in Congress are out of control, engaging in vigorous fear mongering and exaggerating China’s military prowess as a political tool for promoting ever-higher Pentagon budgets.
Unfortunately, Brose, even as he rightly points out the weaknesses of America’s lumbering arms-producing behemoths like Lockheed Martin and decries the Iraq war as a “mistake” and a “strategic detour,” adopts the same kind of militarized rhetoric and world view that made that disastrous conflict possible in the first place.
On key points, Brose’s assertions are either flat wrong or largely irrelevant. He notes the sharp increase in Chinese military spending over the past two decades, but fails to mention that the US still outspends it by two to three times by any measure, as I demonstrate in a recent paper for the Brown University Costs of War Project. He suggests that the Obama administration made deep cuts in Pentagon spending, when in fact budget loopholes and Congressional budgetary maneuvers produced cumulative military outlays of nearly $6 trillion in the 2010s. That’s more than the prior decade, when the U.S had as many as 200,000 troops stationed in or near the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s no question that this money could have been better spent, but the Pentagon had ample resources during the period described by Brose.
Perhaps worst of all, Brose joins generations of military leaders, government officials, and policy advocates in overstating the potential benefits of deploying a new generation of “advanced” technologies. From the “electric battlefield” in Vietnam to the much-ballyhooed efforts to employ “networked warfare” in Iraq and Afghanistan, alleged technological marvels either didn’t work as advertised or were not well-suited to the actual conflicts in which they were being employed, resulting in US defeats at the hands of opponents with far less funding and far less technical sophistication. Brose does not address the question of how or why his proposed tech-driven “revolution” will be any different.
Rather than tying our approach to security to the fever dreams of analysts and experts who stand to profit handsomely from going all-in on emerging technologies, we would be better served by listening to the growing list of skeptics who are pointing out the potential dangers of techno-wars. As Michael Klare wrote in a 2023 report for the Arms Control Association,
“[E]ven as the US military and those of other countries accelerate the exploitation of new technologies for military use, many analysts have cautioned against proceeding with such haste until more is known about the inadvertent and hazardous consequences of doing so. Analysts worry, for example, that AI-enabled systems may fail in unpredictable ways, causing unintended human slaughter or uncontrolled escalation.”
Or as a group of US and Chinese scientists said in a recent joint letter on the issue, a collaborative approach to curbing the dangers of AI is needed to prevent “catastrophic or even existential risks to humanity within our lifetimes . . . In the depths of the cold war, international scientific and governmental coordination helped avert thermonuclear catastrophe. Humanity again needs to coordinate to avert a catastrophe that could arise from unprecedented technology.”
Brose makes a point of saying we need not only new technology, but new thinking. I wholeheartedly agree. But we don’t need new thinking about how best to fight wars nearly as much as we need new thinking on how to prevent wars. Placing priority on spinning out scenarios for winning a war with China in order to “deter” such a conflict is exactly backwards. Throwing more money at a campaign to out arm, outpace, and outfight China will make war more, not less, likely.
William Hartung is a defense analyst who covers the economics of Pentagon spending. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011) and the co-editor, with Miriam Pemberton, of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008).
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