Our Military Is Built for the Wrong Century

Ukraine and Iran have shown us that war as we’ve known it is over.

Hosted by Ross Douthat

Produced by Victoria Chamberlin

Mr. Douthat is a columnist and the host of the “Interesting Times” podcast.

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.

Our Military Is Built for the Wrong Century

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Ross Douthat: Chris Brose, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Chris Brose: Thank you. Great to be here.

Douthat: So it seems to me like the future of high-tech warfare has arrived, that we are living through a revolution in war fighting unlike any — at least in my own lifetime — in which drones and robots and autonomous weapons are remaking battlefields. And your professional work puts you at the center of this shift.

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.

So I want to start by asking you to describe where we are now, generally, to someone, let’s say, who fell asleep at the end of the Iraq war and just woke up.

Brose: In order to talk about the future, we probably also have to talk about the past and present. So if you look at, 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.

When you look at the future, I would argue that the assumptions that are now very evident to us in the present are almost the opposite of what we’ve built our military around. 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.

Douthat: And this isn’t just the future you’re describing. This is the present of one major ongoing war right now, the Russia-Ukraine war.

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.

Douthat: So let’s just use Ukraine as a template or a case study, because it’s the biggest conflict and it’s the one I think that Americans have followed the most closely.

Douthat: The Ukraine war starts out with Russia trying to do basically a sprint to the capital, Kyiv. Basically their equivalent, maybe, of the U.S. sprint to Baghdad.

Brose: Yeah. “Shock and awe.”

Douthat: Right. And that doesn’t work. And very quickly, the war becomes a grinding stalemate.

But how quickly do drones and autonomous weapons change the nature of that conflict? How would you describe the role that they play, for Ukraine itself especially?

Brose: I think that it is not something that happens immediately. In the early days, Russia gets bogged down, largely for reasons having to do with the character of their regime. There was an assumption that this was going to be a cakewalk, so they didn’t plan for having to operate for weeks and months and years.

It was only, I think, once the battlefield lines hardened and you began to see both sides struggling to advance and gain ground. It basically becomes a hider/finder problem, and it became very difficult to hide on that battlefield. So things like tube artillery became increasingly risky bets to make. That’s where I think you started to see attack drones really taking the lion’s share of the burden in terms of the killing that they were doing and being critical to military operations, which they are today.

Douthat: For someone who hasn’t watched a video of an attack drone in action, which you can in fact watch on the internet, what does a one-way attack drone do? Describe a typical mission for one on the Ukrainian-Russian front.

Brose: There’s going to be different kinds, for sure. These are small hand-carry drones that you can fly either autonomously or human-piloted. They have quite capable sensors on them, in terms of being able to fly over an area and identify people or military systems that you want to strike.

And most of those systems have been weaponized — they’re carrying small amounts of explosives, so you can then literally just fly them into the target. You see these horrible videos on YouTube of Russian or Ukrainian soldiers running away from these drones that are chasing them down, horror movie style.

And then I think you see the larger, more complex operations that both sides have also innovated in conducting, where they have larger drones that look more like missiles, and other drones that fly out in advance of them and do a kind of targeting, spotting of targets, feeding that information back. These larger drones are operating more like precision-strike weapons.

So the ability to have these systems that are out there on their own looking for targets, identifying systems or personnel and then are able to fly out and strike those targets with precision, and do it all at a price that’s affordable — I mean, that is how Ukraine has stayed in the fight for over four years. They would not have been able to do this otherwise.

Douthat: Is there a near future where infantry itself starts to be obsolete and you literally just have drones and robots maneuvering against each other? Or is that still further out into the hypothetical?

Brose: I think that’s further out, if it’s ever something that becomes feasible, simply because, so long as human beings continue to live on and inhabit the Earth — which I’m pretty sure we’re going to do for the indefinite future — I think it becomes very difficult for these types of robotic systems to entirely go in, take and then hold ground. We’ve seen plenty in the war in Ukraine that militaries can be, at various different times in the battle, adept at taking ground. It’s the holding of it that becomes very difficult.

The question then becomes: Can those gains be solidified? Can those gains be held entirely through nonhuman means? That’s not a bet that I would make at the moment.

Douthat: Let’s talk about Iran, because this is a war that the United States is directly involved in.

Douthat: We’re not just funding and observing as we are in Ukraine. How much of the specifics of the Iranian stalemate are connected to technological change?

Brose: I would argue that Iran is still in the fight in large part because of the sort of technological systems that we’re talking about. If you believe public reporting, we’ve done an enormous amount of military damage. The claims of sinking their navy and destroying their air force and destroying their air defense systems, of going after their military-industrial capacity — a lot of that’s happened.

At the same time, the war is continuing because they’re still capable of building, fielding and using one-way attack drones. These kinds of robotic drone boats that are quite effective in threatening the Strait of Hormuz and keeping that area of the world closed — these systems are largely the reason I think that they’re still able to project power and still able to hazard the United States, our allies and partners in the region.

This could all change in a week because of the nature of how quickly these things change.

Douthat: I know you’re not inside government, but do you think that the Pentagon was prepared for the kind of responses that Iran has offered to us? Do you think that this has gone as the military expected, and maybe it’s just the political side that didn’t anticipate it? What’s your take?

Brose: I have a hard time imagining that if the premise of this was “we’re going to very quickly decapitate the leadership, strike, and they’re going to sue for peace” — it might happen, but I think the whole nature of a military is to plan for the worst-case scenario. So I have to imagine that that kind of planning was done.

The reality is we are still in the fight. We are still striking targets. We are still conducting the military operations that the military’s been focused on. But when you look very closely at the statements of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about munitions inventory, he’ll say:

Archival clip of Dan Caine: Well, sir, we have sufficient munitions for what we’re tasked to do right now, that’s what I hear from the COCOMs, but what I will say is that we always want more. So I appreciate the effort of this committee and the Congress, we’re always gonna want more munitions.

The premise or assumption being that if somehow that changes, or if the military objectives change, or if the conflict lengthens, that might be a different situation.

I think that there are certain things that Iran has been doing that were pretty easy to forecast. Closing the Strait of Hormuz was something that the U.S. military has been worried about for a very long time. The ability to project power through one-way attack drones, etc. — this is something that they’ve been doing, again, for a very long time.

I think you can take issue with how we’ve responded to that, which suggests maybe we weren’t as ready as we needed to be, and that maybe there are things that we needed to be doing — learning the lessons of Ukraine ourselves and changing the way that we build our military to be ready for these kinds of disruptions. But it is clearly not creating the political outcome or the military outcome that at least, again, through public statements from the leadership of our country, was the intent going into this.

Douthat: Let’s talk about American military readiness, in general. There’s a lot of talk about how the U.S. is burning through its stockpile of missiles and munitions.

Douthat: War with Iran is not a major great power war.

Douthat: It’s not war with Russia. It’s not war with the People’s Republic of China. Looking at what’s played out in the Persian Gulf over the last month, and looking at trends generally, is the U.S. prepared for a major war?

Brose: If you look at it narrowly in the question of munition stockpiles, which is a pretty important indicator of military preparedness, I would say no. And this has been known to us for a very long time. I think the deeper question is: Why is that, and how do we fix it?

In the opening days and weeks of Operation Epic Fury in Iran, what I’ve read publicly is that we fired something like eight years’ worth of Tomahawk missile production. That’s an exquisite weapon. It does remarkable things. The problem is that it takes a very long time to build, and once you shoot it, it takes time to replace. And we don’t have an infinite supply of them.

So if you look at why we are not ready for this, it goes back to the comment I made at the beginning, which is the assumptions that we’ve made about warfare. Our assumptions are that we would not have to fight protracted conflicts. We have assumed that we would get into a war, we would enter the battlefield with dominance — with all of this exquisite military capability — and the war would be over very quickly. The fact that we don’t have deep inventories of munitions, for example, is not something that we’d have to worry about.

And again, this has been known for a long time, so ——

Douthat: I guess my sense had been, and you can tell me why this is wrong, that the goal of the U.S. military was supposed to be to fight at least one protracted war. And there would be controversy back and forth about whether we are capable of fighting more than one. Like, are we capable of fighting Russia and China simultaneously?

Brose: The goal was one major regional or theater war. There was nothing said about the duration of that war.

Brose: So when you look at national defense strategies going all the way back decades or so — for instance, how big do we have to build the military? What’s the shape of the military we have to build? — it was all built around this idea that we had to be able to fight two major regional conflicts at once, and then that got downgraded to one. But the assumption was that those conflicts were going to be over very quickly.

Back to your question on munitions, over the past ten years, as a country, we’ve actually tripled the amount of spending that we’re putting into Patriot missiles and Tomahawk and these kinds of weapons that now have household names. The challenge is that even as that spending has gone up 200 percent, 300 percent, production has not moved in a commensurate fashion. It’s gone 14 percent, 23........

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