AI and Warfare
Our Military Is Built for the Wrong Century
Ukraine and Iran have shown us that war as we’ve known it is over.
The future of high-tech warfare has arrived. Just look to the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran to see how much drones and robots have remade the modern battlefield. Is the U.S. positioned to win wars in this new era? What are the ethical constraints of waging autonomous warfare? My guest this week is Christian Brose, the president and chief strategy officer of Anduril, a defense technology company building a slate of autonomous weapons and defense systems for the American military.
You are the president and chief strategy officer of Anduril, which is a defense technology company that’s trying to be the hub — or a hub, at least — for autonomous warfare. But you’re also someone with a deeper background in national security and American government. You worked as a policy adviser to Condoleezza Rice, to John McCain, and you’re the author of a book about the high-tech military future.
I’d say, the assumptions that we have been operating under for the past 30, 40 years, I think that’s what’s driven the kind of military that we have.
We have assumed that if America is ever going to have to fight a war, we are going to enter the battlefield with technological superiority against any rival; that we have military primacy in the world and dominance over any potential competitor; and that if our military is called to fight, the war’s not going to last very long. We’re not going to shoot a lot of weapons. We’re not going to lose a lot of ships and planes and other types of big military platforms.
So we have built and sized and shaped our military around exactly the kinds of systems that you would expect to flow from that assumption: Very expensive, very exquisite, very hard-to-produce military systems and weapons.
I don’t think that we have the kind of military dominance that many of us in the 1990s and early 2000s just took for granted. We have peer competitors and rivals in the world who are adapting to and really disrupting the American way of war.
I think that we are going to find a much more contested battlefield, where we’re going to lose a lot of planes, ships, satellites and other things. We’re going to shoot a lot of weapons, and we’re going to have to replace that as an act of production over a long period of time. I think that is not a future that we’re really ready for.
All of this points in the direction of autonomous systems, lower-cost systems — things that are much more like consumer technology or commercial capabilities than they are legacy military capabilities.
Brose: Present and recent past. I think this has been apparent going all the way back to, frankly, the Middle East in the past six or seven years. I think all of the technology that everybody is talking about, in terms of one-way attack drones and other things, were evident on the battlefields in Iraq and Yemen and Syria, going back to 2017, 2018, 2019. Then, obviously, the war in Ukraine puts this all in high relief.
It’s a way of saying that we tend to have this belief in the United States that the future of war is something that’s going to happen to us in 10 years, and we have a long time to get ready for it. I think it’s been unfolding for years and is very much right now a present problem.