In 1903 the Wright brother’s Wright Flyer took to the skies, briefly, over Kitty Hawk North Carolina. It didn’t take long before someone decided that dropping grenades from their airplane was a good idea. A decade later an airplane demonstrated its ability to destroy a warship, and the Air Force has never let us forget it since.
There are a number of tactics that used to be popular in war but not so much today:
The Phalanx. A great way to go when you’ve got a few city-states to conquer.
Line Infantry. The preferred meat grinder of soldiers in the western world until…
Trench warfare. Indirect fire and improved tank technology really made it pointless, as the Wehrmacht demonstrated in the late 30s.
Dogfights. Top Gun movies notwithstanding, this hasn’t really been much of a thing since your grandfather was in uniform. Yet we still keep building jet fighters…
Line of battle. When your weapons platform was at the mercy of the wind, and it was easier to move a whole ship than a gun, this made perfect sense.
In the modern age, what worked in the last war rarely holds up in the next one. This is where the phrase “preparing to fight the last war” comes from, and why the senior leaders of most armed forces make it a priority to swing back to what they know once the latest war is over. Because of course their errors were one-offs, and can we just get back to a world where I have the chance to be my generation’s Patton?
Like tactics, warfighting technology also evolves. It wasn’t all that long ago that the modern quad copter was a toy. The Spider’s Web drone attacks in Russia and the Israeli drone attacks in Iran make it clear that such technology defines low-cost, high-impact, asymmetric advantage.
We’re not the only ones watching what is going on in the battlefields of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Those who cannot project conventional force worldwide like the US can are taking notes. There will be more of the same in other parts of the world, at which point any number of very expensive conventional warfighting tools are going to become superfluous.
Armor. We’re already seeing this happen in Ukraine, where main battle tanks like the US M1 have been sidelined because they’re such easy targets for drones.
Large manned aircraft. Bombing runs are expensive and high risk, whereas the things that just decimated a bomber fleet are neither.
Single-Role Platforms. If it can’t adapt to support multiple iterations of ingenuity its useful life will be shorter than the average enlistment contract.
This begs the question: In such an environment, what does the future force look like, what is it using, and how do we get there from here?
If we’re actually thinking clearly and intelligently (and not parochially) about the country’s ability to fight and win wars, we have to focus on six key factors:
Agility and Adaptability: Forces must be able to rapidly reconfigure, deploy, and respond across domains, leveraging AI and autonomous systems. This applies particularly to command and control.
Resilience: Redundant, self-healing networks and platforms that can withstand and recover from both physical and cyber-attacks.
Integration of Human and Machine: Combining human judgment with machine speed and precision for decision-making and execution.
Continuous Innovation: Retiring or retrofitting obsolete platforms and investments in new capabilities.
Cognative Dominance: Preparing forces to recognize and counter psyops, disinformation, AI-driven manipulation. Know what is true and trustworthy.
Ethical and Strategic Foresight: Anticipating the risks of autonomous and cyber weapons, including escalation and loss of control.
If you’re going to war-war (invasion, defeat enemy forces, replace government), we need to remember the adage: ‘If you’re not there, you don’t own it.’ This means we’ll need a force that can not only put boots on the ground, but take and hold that ground in the face of a technically astute enemy. In addition to rifles and grenades, it also means:
Drones. Why expose yourself to enemy fire when a flying bot can do it for you? And count the number of enemies, and provide precision location information for indirect fire or drone-borne attack?
Anti-Drone “Artillery”. Traditional AAA means small flying objects intercepting larger flying objects. I don’t know that “artillery” is the right word to describe what’s needed against hordes of drones on the future battlefield, but I’m planting this flag.
Electromagnetic Weapons. If you can’t shoot down the drone hoard, you have to make them inoperative via other means. Directed energy weapons fit the bill, though it’s not clear that the technology is ready yet for the scale we’re talking about.
Not all flavors of conflict require boots on the ground, which means we’ll need to be able to project power from a distance. Normally this would mean an Air Force or a Navy, but in the world we’re envisioning its neither: its Game Force.
Game Force has certain trappings of the old Navy or Air Force; large, flexible platforms like mobility aircraft, aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships, but they don’t carry specialized jets or bombs, but multi-function aircraft, drones, hypersonics, and weapons-after-next). Unsexy boxes that can cause disproportionate amounts of damage for pennies on the millions-of-dollars. This is a warfighting capability – networked, flexible, and autonomous - that can deliver force across multiple domains simultaneously. Ideally before the enemy knows they’re vulnerable (zero-day warfare). That howling you hear are the staff at TRADOC rending their hair and gnashing their teeth.
Which leads us to the issue of how we train such a force. We know how to train large numbers of troops who can deliver kinetic effects, but in this new age of warfighting the remote operator who has thousands of assets at her disposal is arguably the more lethal combatant (and she’s not even sitting in the same continent as the battle). As the much better futurist and heavy thinker John Robb points out, if warfare evolves along these lines, the way we train for warfare has to change as well. Does everyone in the military need basic training? I don’t think that’ll ever change. But of equal importance to infantry school, the Q Course, or Weapons School will be gaming training. It’s the closest thing available that simulates our future of warfare. Is it “real” soldiering? If we measure good soldering by effects on the battlefield, then yes, it is.
Conclusion
For America to maintain its status as a superpower it must resist the temptation to assume that what got us here will get us to where we need to go. The future of American military power will be shaped less by specialized individual platforms (much to the chagrin of the traditional military-industrial complex) and more by the ability to innovate, integrate, and adapt to a rapidly changing way of warfighting. The lessons of recent conflicts underscore the sense of urgency we need to adopt when it comes to embracing new technologies, tactics, and mindsets in order to maintain strategic advantage in an era where anything, anywhere, is a target, and yesterday’s toys are tomorrow’s precision guided munition.