What Kind of Conflicts will the U.S. Military Face this Century and How to Fight Them
Hello, I’m Ylli Bajraktari, CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project. In this edition of SCSP’s newsletter, Senior Director for Defense Paul Lyons highlights SCSP’s new Defense Paper Series, a forum where guest contributors explore the nexus of future warfighting challenges and opportunities for emerging technology!
This paper series includes discussion papers written by SCSP advisors Lieutenant General (Ret.) Clint Hinote, Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jack Shanahan, Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mike Groen, Australian Major General (Ret.) Mick Ryan, Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, as well as external experts Dr. Keith Dear, and Dr. T.X. Hammes to accompany our Defense Panel's 2024 Working Group Meetings. The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of SCSP.
What Kind of Conflicts will the U.S. Military Face this Century and How to Fight Them
The next Administration will confront a geopolitical and technological landscape fundamentally different from the one it dealt with during the first Trump Administration. China continues its determined march toward a new, re-ordered world that undercuts U.S. leadership and accommodates China’s global rise to the top. China’s no limits partnership with Russia, coupled with tangible evidence of an expanding alliance between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, presents the broadest and most intense challenge to U.S. interests in nearly a century. The emergence of this new Axis has intensified friction points with the U.S. and its allies, and the risks of crisis and direct conflict, beyond the war of aggression against Ukraine and multi-front attacks on Israel. In addition to challenging geopolitics, the next Administration will also encounter an intense wave of technological advances, driven principally by the growing sophistication and rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI). A new general purpose technology, AI is quickly moving across broad swaths of our economy, society, and national security. The opportunities, dislocations, and the risks are unlike any that an American administration has faced in over a century. AI is also converging with changes in the character of war, evidenced in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as in the informational and cognitive domains. In the likely event that AI models also reach levels of artificial general intelligence (AGI), as it is expected over the next four years, the conflicts of 2030-2050 may look very different.
These are the tough geopolitical and technological realities that the next team drafting the National Defense Strategy (NDS) will face. These realities will present the team with real strategic dilemmas, stark resource tradeoffs, and critical decision points. Mindful of these challenges facing America’s next defense leadership, but also the significant opportunities, SCSP’s Defense Team – with tremendous help by our Senior Advisors and other national security experts – convened a series of exchanges to examine the fundamental building blocks of the next U.S. National Defense Strategy. As part of these exchanges, some of our advisors and outside experts drafted exceptionally thoughtful assessments and recommendations that informed the discussions. The high quality and clarity of thinking in these papers is leading us to publish them in this new Defense Paper Series. The current series contains clear visions, critical perspectives, and actionable recommendations focused on the future: (1) Character of war and Joint Operating Environment (JOE) awaiting our military, (2) Joint Warfighting Concepts (JWC) necessary to maintain U.S. military advantage, and (3) Command and Control (C2) arrangements for an AI-driven war. Going forward, we intend to supplement the current series with thoughtful assessments on (4) necessary Institutional Reforms of the defense enterprise to drive lethality and innovation, (5) the role of allies and partners in innovation, and (6) how must our Defense Industrial Base (DIB) transform to an innovational base to enable the future warfight.
The Future Character of War and the Joint Operating Environment
We begin our series with an exploration of the key attributes and characteristics of the future Joint Operating Environment (JOE) across two timeframes, 2025-2030 and 2035-2050. We decided to split the timeframe to account for the real risks of a war in the Indo-Pacific region in this decade and what that may look like, while also trying to articulate what warfare may look like beyond this near-term window of uncertainty. Lieutenant General (Ret.) Clint Hinote and Australian Major General (Ret.) Mick Ryan, in their paper, The Character of Future War to 2030, assess the geostrategic factors influencing current conflicts and the near term JOE. They proffer that, “to some degree, Western politicians and bureaucrats have enjoyed the luxury of strategic drift since the end of the Cold War, but they can no longer afford such an approach. They need to accept that the world is in constant confrontation.” This notion will be critical to decision and policy makers as the interchange between competition and conflict becomes more dynamic.
In his paper, Exploring the Future Operating Environment: 2035-50, Dr. Keith Dear, the Managing CEO and Founder of AI Strategy start-up Cassi, provides an over-the-horizon view on how the evolution of generative artificial intelligence (AI), artificial general intelligence (AGI), and artificial super intelligence (ASI) will likely transform warfare and notions of a traditional defense industrial base (DIB) in the 2035-2050 timeframe. The outlook is equally sobering and opportunistic. “Within the period 2035-50, automation, robotics and artificial intelligence will have eliminated nation’s dependence on people to create wealth, and scale armed forces to deter or fight. The iron shackle chaining destiny to demography will be broken. For national power, today so dependent on the vitality of a nation’s ability to produce ideas, turn those ideas into products and services, and scale their distribution, this constraint will cease to apply: AI systems will research, invent, create, build, better than we can. Thus nations with smart strategies and systems will be able to outperform those with numerous citizens, regardless of how innovative those citizens might be.” Winning the innovation race is even more critical than previously imagined.
Developing Winning, Future Joint Warfighting Concepts
With contours of the future operating environment in hand, we turned to the question of how must DoD prepare for this future and how it must evolve its force structure and warfighting approaches. Specifically, we explored how the combination of legacy force structure and new technologies could be harnessed to increase lethality, while lowering risk to mission and force. Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery and Dr. T.X. Hammes tackled the key issues and attributes that a future force should possess in their paper, Joint Warfighting Concept 2034-2044. They argue that the next joint warfighting concept must “focus on timely offensive operational maneuver designed to give U.S. forces the advantage of the tactical defensive.” They urge that the next JWC must accept that “any war with China will be a long war – measured in years.” And they conclude that the next JWC must also clearly articulate the “ need to defend the homeland.”
Command and Control for the New Era of Warfighting
In a future with crisis, confrontations, and conflicts, the ability to command and control, as well as to rapidly unleash deterrent and defensive capabilities will be critical. Therefore, we decided to examine how to architect global command and control (C2) for the future fight, focusing on how both command and control are changing, and how technology and human-machine teaming can deliver information dominance, decision advantage, and superior lethal effects. Lieutenant General (Ret.) Clint Hinote, Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jack Shanahan, and Major General (Ret.) Mike Groen provided differing perspectives in separate papers. Hinote, in his paper, Reimagining Command and Control with Human-Machine Teams, explores where disruptive technology could complement C2 and the need for increased decisional speed. “With access to the right inputs, the command algorithms will recognize when operations are not meeting objective criteria and make humans aware of this. The machines can suggest operational adjustments, and/or the humans can adjust the algorithms. This flexibility will be critical in fighting the battle of adaptation.”
Shanahan provides an analysis of the trade-offs across multiple approaches to leveraging AI as a C2 enabler in his paper, Reimagining Military C2 in the Age of AI – Revolution, Regression, or Evolution? He asserts that, “while faster C2 speeds are often critical, in OODA Loop terms, the goal should be for AI to improve tempo and increase agility while generating friction, disruption, and chaos within adversary C2 systems, networks, and decision-making processes – aiming for relative and temporal, if not absolute and enduring, OODA cycle advantage.” Decisional speed will be increasingly critical in designing and executing C2 architectures that employ the changing speed and character of warfare to advantage.
Applying additional emphasis on the role of leaders and the human element in teaming with AI and disruptive technologies, Groen, in his paper, Digits Collide. Commanders Decide. Command and Control in a Digitally Transformed Age, explores the opportunities and challenges with automating aspects of C2 and the need for deliberateness. Correctly, he notes that, “the value of tomorrow’s C2 is not found in the delivery of data as data itself is only the raw material for operational insights. Real value is found in the translation of digital content into the virtualized realities that humans can inherently sense,” affirming the criticality of the art of warfare and the human qualities and instincts of command that provide a decisive edge in warfare.
We hope you enjoy and learn from these papers!