Is the US military obsolete?
"America risks a catastrophic defeat if doesn't radically change the way it thinks about war."
The issue is "disruptive innovation".
“The traditional model of U.S. military power is being disrupted, the way Blockbuster’s business model was amid the rise of Amazon and Netflix,” Brose writes. “A military made up of small numbers of large, expensive, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace systems will not survive on future battlefields, where swarms of intelligent machines will deliver violence at a greater volume and higher velocity than ever before.”
The logic here is the same as the one that decided the Battle of Agincourt, where the humble and effective English longbow made short work of the expensive and vulnerable French cavalry. Today’s version of that cavalry consists of aircraft carriers priced at $13 billion apiece and fighter jets that go for $90 million (and cost $30,000 an hour to fly).
These systems are all beset by the usual technological hurdles, cost overruns and bureaucratic pitfalls. Still, they’d be worth their enormous price if they conferred a long-term, decisive edge over our adversaries, as U.S. technological superiority over the Soviets did during the Cold War.
In classic disruptive innovation, a cheap, inferior product improves over time and completely overwhelms the more costly and sophisticated product that dominates the mainstream market. Companies that make the dominant product generally don't know what is going to hit them, and even when they do (e.g., Kodak's prescient understanding of the eventuality of a digital camera), their response typically fails. That might be happening to the USA today in terms of military technology.
On the one hand, we are burning through billions of dollars by deploying state-of-the-art resources against technologically primitive enemies in the Middle East and Africa. Why? Because, for example, an Air Force obsessed with acquiring fifth-generation stealth fighters still can’t bring itself to purchase a squadron of cheap turboprop planes to patrol, say, the skies of northern Iraq.
On the other hand, we are burning through trillions in order to build a relatively small number of ultra-sophisticated platforms that are increasingly vulnerable to detection and destruction by near-peer adversaries like China and Russia. “Put simply,” Brose writes, “U.S. rivals are fielding large quantities of multimillion-dollar weapons to destroy the United States’ multibillion-dollar military systems.”
The problem is democracy. Voters love politicians who give them money for dubious projects.
The answer is what Brose’s old boss, the late John McCain, called the military-industrial-congressional complex.
“Military pilots and ship drivers are no more eager to lose their jobs to intelligent machines than factory workers are,” Brose writes. “Defense companies that make billions selling traditional systems are as welcoming of disruptions to their business model as the taxi cab industry has been of Uber and Lyft. And as all this resistance inevitably translates into disgruntled constituents, members of Congress will have enormous incentives to stymie change.”
One critic of indulgent military procurement is (was?) President Donald Trump.
Over time, however, Trump's actual policies seem to reflect the interests of the status quo, despite his continuing inflammatory rhetoric.
The French ambassador to the USA recently retired and asserted that Trump's election is not a fluke, it reflects long-term trends that few have understood in their significance. The old ways of thinking have failed and American elites are clueless about the new, radically changed reality, and so rational alternative policies have not been created, leaving a vacuum in which Trump's crude worldview prevails.
Let’s look at the dogma of the previous period. For instance, free trade. It’s over. Trump is doing it in his own way. Brutal, a bit primitive, but in a sense he’s right. What he’s doing with China should have been done, maybe in a different way, but should have been done before. Trump has felt Americans’ fatigue, but [Barack] Obama also did. The role of the United States as a policeman of the world, it’s over. Obama started, Trump really pursued it. You saw it in Ukraine. You are seeing it every day in Syria. People here faint when you discuss NATO, but when he said, “Why should we defend Montenegro?,” it’s a genuine question. I know that people at Brookings or the Atlantic Council will faint again, but really yes, why, why should you?
These are the questions which are being put on the table in a brutal and a bit primitive way by Trump, but they are real questions. Where the shift is going to push us, I really don’t know.
You know on the eighth of November, 2016, at 6 p.m., we were calling the people on the [Hillary] Clinton side, the Trump side. We were calling pollsters, and everybody was telling us, “She’s elected.” And we said, of course, “This guy can’t be elected.” It was so shocking to have Trump elected that basically [Democrats’] conclusion was either the Russians are responsible or she was a very bad candidate.
The case of Trump for me, it’s not so much Donald Trump, it’s not so much a person, but it’s a political phenomenon.
My career had started with the election of [Ronald] Reagan, and my career is finishing with Trump. From Reagan to Trump you have, more or less, the neoliberal era—taxes were bad, borders were bad, and you have to trust the market. It’s also the period of the triumphant West … that the West was in a sense doomed to win. That sooner or later all the world will march triumphantly, to the triumph of the market. And suddenly the election of Trump and the populist wave everywhere in the Western world is for me, and I may be wrong, but for me means that this period is over.
There are two long-term trends here, one in economics, and the other in foreign policy. Economically, the old model of deregulated trade and economics fell apart in 2008. This has been widely discussed, but the other trend has not gotten much notice. The Cold War came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and American global leadership and institutions like NATO are relics. But the military-industrial-voter complex just keeps chugging along.
The idea of disruptive innovation is illuminating in relation to military policy. After all, at the cost of some airline tickets and some box knives, terrorists in the 9-11 attacks were able to plunge the world into an economic crisis and traumatize Americans -- and also manipulate the US foreign policy establishment into a disastrous over-reaction. (The latter is the typical aim of terrorism. One example would be the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria by Serbian terrorists in 1914, which was meant to plunge Europe into war and break up the Austrian empire -- which it succeeded in doing. Another example would be the Dublin uprising of 1916, which the Irish population opposed initially, but which rallied the Irish against the English after the harsh British response; that was the objective all along.)
Again, what makes the specter of disruptive innovation so disturbing is that incumbents generally do not respond to new threats which they cannot perceive or contemplate, and even when they do it is generally a failure. Corporations simply go broke and get replaced by other corporations. In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, a top expert on terrorism noted that the military has no real role to play in the fight against terrorism, it is really a job for police and intelligence services -- which sounds a lot like disruptive innovation as applied to counter-terrorism. But again, this cheaper, low-key response is inconceivable to foreign policy elites, and importantly, perhaps to the public as well.
In terms of disruptive innovation in military affairs, one solution might be to have the CIA take up the task of adopting and using cheaper disruptive technology, because Congress has funding control over the military and will always opt for the popular and expensive pork-barrel projects that make no sense. The CIA has a secret budget, in contrast.
In terms of foreign policy, someone would need to articulate a more refined and rational version of Trump's isolationism. But as the French ambassador noted, there is a continuity between Obama's foreign policy and Trump's, and Obama was articulate about his policy of disengagement, but no one really remembers Obama's speeches.
Trump's attack on free trade, by that measure, would also require a more refined equivalent, and perhaps that already exists on the leftwing of the Democratic Party.
