A low-tech future?
It is ironic that, despite two decades of US-led fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, it took only a few months of Russia's war in Ukraine to bring to light the depleted state of US weapons supplies and vulnerabilities in US military supply networks. Recently, American military chiefs have indicated growing dissatisfaction with the defense industrial base. Admiral Mike Gilday, the United States Navy's top officer, told Defense News in January, "Not only am I trying to fill magazines with weapons, but I'm trying to put U.S. production lines at their maximum level right now and to try and maintain that set of headlights in subsequent budgets so that we can continue to produce those weapons." According to Gilday, the war in Ukraine has shown military authorities that "the spending of that high-end weaponry in conflict could be larger than we predicted."
Only 100 days after the US approved the supply of Javelin and Stinger missiles to Ukraine, Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin cautioned that it could take years to replenish their supplies to pre-invasion levels. As the war drags on, the United States will face not only production line obstacles but also difficulties acquiring access to semiconductors and raw materials such as cobalt, neon, and lithium—elements critical to the development of contemporary military hardware and increasingly controlled by China. The United States will need to find a way to maintain its current weapon arsenals while also investing in research and development of next-generation systems and munitions.
Since the Cold War's conclusion, the Pentagon has invested in technology that reduces casualties but does not reduce the cost of troops. It has invested a lot of money on expensive and scarce technologies for first-strike offensives, mainly ignoring the impact on its capacity to pay wars and protect supply lines. Thirty years into this technical effort, the United States lacks the technology and resources to continue current levels of support for Ukraine, let alone dissuade China from invading Taiwan.
These flaws demand careful consideration now that they have been exposed. The difficulties the US has had in supplying Ukraine's weaponry needs foreshadow the even bigger hurdles Washington would face in maintaining its edge in a war waged with more cutting-edge battlefield technologies. A good knowledge of the historical relationship between technical change and conflict argues that the United States should emphasize technology that decreases both the political and economic costs of war.
SEARCHING for the Advantage
War is the ultimate test of human determination. At its most basic, it is a fatal struggle for power and existence in which the weak are destroyed and the strong survive. But, while combat is ultimately a struggle of human might, it is also human nature to seek a technical advantage over an adversary in order to shift the balance of power.
The book of Samuel in the Old Testament tells the story of David defeating the Philistine giant Goliath with a slingshot and a well-aimed stone. The creation of the English longbow provided England an advantage over France during the Hundred Years' War. The United States developed stealth aircraft at the close of the twentieth century, which were utilized to great effect during the "shock and awe" phase of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Military planners have long sought new technologies to give them an advantage over their opponents on the battlefield, whether with arrows or aircraft.
Yet, Governments frequently struggle to transform technological advantages on the battlefield into strategic wins. Germany's creation of blitzkrieg in the 1930s, for example, constituted a revolution in mechanized movement warfare, but the technique was insufficient to allow Germany to maintain territory once American materiel and personnel were committed to retaking Europe. A high-tech US force with remotely piloted planes, precision weapons, and satellite intelligence could not outlive the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Technology cannot impact who eventually wins or loses by causing just momentary changes on the battlefield. Instead, it must strengthen the human drive to persist in fight by radically altering the cost of warfare. It is critical to have the correct technologies for battlefield efficacy. Yet, unless there is a focus on how these technologies effect the long-term cost, whether political or economic, the correct instruments are insufficient for strategic success. A government must have both the economic ability to finance battles and the political control to raise funds and rally its citizens in order to win. When a government charges taxes or establishes universal conscription to maintain a struggle, the economic costs of warfare produce political consequences. When new technologies, as military historians Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox argue, "change the capacity of governments to develop and project military power," they constitute a revolutionary advantage in conflict.
Military planners have always sought technology to give them an advantage over their adversaries, whether with arrows or aircraft.
This is something that technology can do in a variety of ways. First, technological advancements can increase the cost in terms of life and limb; consider artillery, firebombing, or nuclear weapons. These high-firepower technologies pave the path for strategic success by inflicting such a high human cost on an adversary that it surrenders, either because it lacks military manpower or because civilian losses undermine political resolve. Alternatively, technology can reduce the human cost of conflict by reducing losses and decreasing the likelihood of escalation, saving personnel and reinforcing political will. This was a recurring theme in US technical investment following the 1990-91 Gulf War, when new instruments like long-range precision-guided weapons helped keep US losses low over decades of prolonged conflict in the larger Middle East.
The price of arming, training, and replacing armies is affected by technology that reduces the human cost of battle. For example, the development of the longbow allowed the English monarchy to replace knights with archers, lowering warfare's economic and political costs. Archers were commoners who were paid a tenth of what aristocratic knights were, and their equipment—arrows, bows, and swords—was significantly less expensive to provide than knights' armor and horses. Monarchs could finance a far larger army with the same budget, allowing them to wage more conquest wars without imposing new taxes on the landed class, which may turn them against the crown.
Technology also alters the cost of participation, changing the balance of offense and defense. The Renaissance-era competition between sieges and fortifications is perhaps the best historical illustration. Advances in metallurgy and gunpowder improved attackers' firepower in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe. At the same time, advances in fortifications (such as the trace italienne, a polygonal castle intended to defend soldiers from cannon fire) made it more difficult for attackers to succeed. According to Giovanni Botero, an Italian political theorist of the time, the winners in this contest were those who could "not demolish but tire; not defeat but wear down the enemy." As a result, Botero observed, combat became "completely dependent on money."
In general, technology has an impact on a state's ability to fund wars and supply the battlefield. It can do it by enabling powerful war economics or by reinventing weapon design and production—ideally, both. Machine manufacture and steam engines permitted mechanized warfare and the mass production of arsenals throughout the Industrial Revolution. Railroad investments aided economic growth while simultaneously lowering the cost of assembling huge armies, allowing governments like Prussia to rely on a readily deployed reserve force rather than an expensive standing army.
Finally, technology can reduce resource dependencies, allowing governments to maintain control of supply chains and their ability to carry out a conflict over time. For example, late-eighteenth-century French breakthroughs in gunpowder manufacturing enabled the French to provide enough weaponry to the American colonies to outlast the resource-rich British empire.
Have we become Shortsighted because of our past?
Many of these historical lessons regarding technology and warfare were forgotten by the post-Cold War United States military, briefly dazzled by the tremendous triumph technology enabled in the 1990-91 war against Iraq. US policymakers hoped that developments in computation, stealth technology, and sensors would allow a smaller, high-tech US military to avoid huge and costly attrition wars, preserving the political will to support an all-volunteer army after Vietnam.
The method, dubbed "the new American way of war" by writer Max Boot, was predicated on what military strategists called "effects-based operations" that provided swift, overwhelming victories. According to this viewpoint, advanced technology would make wars more decisive, shorter, and less bloody. Without having to worry about the expenses of waging attrition wars, the US could devote its resources to a leaner, higher-quality army.
When Donald Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense in 2001, he prioritized reducing the size and sophistication of the US military. Nevertheless, the 9/11 attacks and following US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq tainted the reasoning behind the transformational paradigm of technical victory.
When militants manufactured low-cost IEDs, the United States launched $150,000 missiles from $30 million drones.
The US was still conducting high-tech, expensive wars, but it was doing it over a two-decade period and at a cost of more than $10 trillion. Whereas insurgents made low-cost improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars, the US launched $150,000 Hellfire missiles from $30 million remotely piloted drones, dropped $25,000 precision munitions from $75 million stealth aircraft, and spent $45 billion on an armored personnel carrier phalanx—all while connecting all of these systems with satellites at a cost of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Even as the number of US military personnel decreased, the average cost per service member for the reformed elite all-volunteer force increased by more than 60% between 2000 and 2012. War was less bloody than previously, but it wasn't inexpensive, and victory didn't come soon or decisively.
Meanwhile, Chinese developments in electromagnetic warfare, artificial intelligence, stealth, propulsion, space, and precision bombs gradually eroded Washington's initial technological superiority in the information era. Not only was China lagging behind; the United States was also struggling. Because of the Pentagon's sluggish acquisition process, bureaucratic laziness, and continual thirst for "the next big thing," each technological iteration took longer and cost more. For example, the United States Navy's Zumwalt-class destroyer program promised 32 stealth destroyers with significant breakthroughs in guns, propulsion, and networks. Instead, after spending more than $22 billion, technological cost overruns prompted the navy to reduce the program to three destroyers, all of which have had maintenance issues. Nobody intended to spend $22 billion on three destroyers. Instead, the military had ended up in a paradox: in pursuit of emerging technologies, weapons had become so expensive that no qualitative upgrade could compensate for the decrease in quantity, leaving the Pentagon with an arsenal that was neither good enough nor large enough for the campaigns it planned to fight. Similarly, the Government Accountability Office projected a $6 billion cost overrun for the F-35 fifth-generation fighter program in a damning 2021 indictment, warning that the military must reduce either the total number of aircraft planned to purchase or the number of flying hours anticipated for them.
The US also emphasized high-tech weaponry pieced together with weak and old software over technology that would reduce the cost of logistics, maintenance, and resupply. This resulted in a succession of ambitious but failed programs, such as the $20 billion Army Future Combat Systems, which failed because the military overlooked the support technology required to run next-generation weapons platforms. The lack of investment in support technologies worsened issues with manpower, training, and preparedness that had emerged over two decades of continuous conflict. Starting in 2017, a series of ship collisions and maintenance issues highlighted the navy's struggle to man and train surface fleets equipped with "overly complex" technology.
As the US pivots to Asia while resupplying Ukraine, it remains mired in costly acquisition programs for exquisite new bombers, submarines, and next-generation fighters. It has little more to show for itself than billions of dollars in PowerPoint presentations as it embarks on developing military-wide networks to connect all of these weapons.
ALTERNATIVES AT A LOWER COST
Washington must urgently prioritize technology that will reduce the economic cost of US warfare. As some observers have advocated, the first step is to admit that it is unrealistic to expect the United States to replace all of its expensive existing systems with low-cost, off-the-shelf technology. Many of these advanced systems play critical roles in combating US adversaries such as China. Instead, the US should supplement complicated, high-cost technology with less expensive autonomous sensors, communications relays, bombs, and decoys—all designed to generate friction, slow war, and increase opponents' long-term costs. Parallel investments in durable networks, flexible information technology, and munitions stockpiles will produce a resilience that also boosts U.S. deterrent credibility after the early salvos of war. The United States will also need to decrease the administrative cost of technology by restructuring bureaucracy, leveraging the savings to invest in defense industrial capacity and access to raw resources for new technology. Such initiatives will be tough at a period of rising inflation and political divisiveness, but they are important. Not only must technology reduce the human cost of war for the American people, but it must also reduce the economic toll.
None of these situations are novel. In 1553, the Republic of Siena began constructing a new fortification that was so ambitious and costly that when Florentine troops arrived a year later, Siena was only partially built and broke, with no money to form an army. Bad cost-management and technology decisions killed the city-state. Recently, US President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (a high-tech proposal to take down ballistic missiles with airborne lasers) is attributed with bankrupting the Soviets as they sought to compete with what proved to be a technically impossible undertaking.
To avoid becoming Siena (or the Soviet Union), Washington must recognize that possessing the correct technologies is vital but insufficient for winning wars. If the US is to compete with Russia in the short term and China in the long term, it must consider the economic implications of technology while pursuing a technological advantage.
