The US and NATO Cannot Win a Major War
How a System of Political Cronyism Led the US Military to Institutional Paralysis
By some estimates, roughly 50% of the armor and equipment destroyed along the line of contact in Ukraine has been the result of drone strikes. For what amounts to a relatively cheap and mass producible weapon, drones have provided lopsided victories over older and now provably obsolete “conventional” weapon systems. These older systems like tanks are expensive, industrially intensive to build, and a logistics nightmare to field, support, and maintain. These systems also burn through massive amounts of ammunition and fuel to generate combat power. On the other hand, drones are adaptive, inexpensive, mass producible, rapidly deployable, easy to operate, and maintenance light, all while providing excellent shot to kill ratios with the ability to penetrate in-depth with lethal precision. Drones are highly efficient weapon systems with short logistics tails that produce asymmetric advantages over conventional systems historically considered heavier weapons. The results of this adoption of autonomous weapons were easily predictable and should have been embraced two decades ago by NATO and the US. The armies that embraced and fielded drones and autonomous weapons widely and early obtained a major combat advantage over older, bigger conventional armies. Armenia learned this the hard way recently. As a result, any doubt of this superior to inferior relationship has been erased, which has left people asking if the US and NATO will be able to adapt to drone warfare. I believe this question has already been answered in the negative. To fully appreciate the scale of this disaster in technological adoption, I believe the truth is closer to simply stating the US and NATO are incapable of adapting. This inability to adapt in scale to modernize the force around autonomous systems has already left the US and NATO weak and incapable of defeating a peer competitor like China that has a two decade jump on adopting drones and autonomous technology on an industrial scale across its military. If a major war was fought today, the hard truth is the US would suffer a catastrophic defeat that goes beyond mere humiliation and would virtually annihilate the US military. The defeat would be staggering in its totality.
I can already hear the naysayers shouting that it was the US that “pioneered” the use of drones in persistent surveillance, reconnaissance, and precision strike. These cheerleaders of the military industrial complex are correct in that the CIA and then the Department of Defense (DoD) did start using drones in combat as early as the war in the Balkans. However, there never was any intention of widespread adoption. Drones could be used and integrated but were not going to be allowed to threaten established suppliers of high dollar, high profit, legacy weapons systems. The lobbyists for the entrenched weapons manufactures joined by the very static and linear thinking senior brass at the Pentagon ensured this. Instead of reprogramming funds away from useless and incredibly expensive easy targets like surface ships and manned aircraft to newer more effective autonomous drone systems, Congress and the DoD were beholden to maintaining what amounts to federal welfare programs for contractors and continues to fund obsolete systems to this day. If those legacy systems had been canceled, the recapitalized funds could have been used to rapidly scale up the adoption of autonomous weapons. This would have created a lighter yet far more lethal modern fighting force at a huge discount. Yes, it would have put old manufacturing lines out of business, but it would have created high tech modern manufacturing infrastructure desperately needed and broadly lacking in the US. This greed was only further incentivized by America’s hubris and belief in its military superiority using overly technical and absurdly expensive military assets in what amounted to glorified policing operations around the globe. This ability to effectively kill poorly armed low level insurgent adversaries with impunity only reinforced this delusion. This effect could be compared to a professional football team playing high school junior varsity teams for forty years, losing every playoff game, and still running around claiming it is the best team in the National Football League. No team that had been playing JV high school teams is ready for the Super Bowl, yet the American military, which lost to the Taliban and found itself strategically mauled in Iraq, somehow thinks it is competent enough to go head-to-head with Russia and/or China. The results of this grand self-delusion are easily predictable. The military gets annihilated.
Let me dive into one of the primary impediments a bit more. For years, I worked in the capabilities development and advanced analysis field for the military. One of my tasks was conducting what many refer to as an analysis of alternatives for funding various strategic laydowns for the Navy, Marine Corps, etc. These studies would provide various budgetary courses of action that identified the trade space between costs and capabilities with weapons systems. Time and time again, I’d strongly argue for cutting very expensive obsolete systems that were legitimate liabilities such as aircraft carriers so that the military could modernize, but every time the money interests would crush good sense. There were always “too many jobs” tied up in such and such congressman’s district to cut aircraft carriers or the latest manned fighter jet. As such, we continued to spend insane amounts of money to continue production and development of systems that had been obsolete for a half century. If this wasn’t a zero-sum game, you could get away with this. However, despite obscenely large budgets, the DoD still has fiscal constraints and cannot have “both.” To summarize this paradigm, your options are to modernize your force or fund carrier battle groups and squadrons of manned aircraft. The US Congress with full DoD consent has opted decade after decade to continue this fool’s errand and double down on the big conventional weapon systems. It’s so bad and so pervasive, we now have an entire military built around what was most profitable for the defense industry balanced only by what was believed to bring in the most jobs and money to various congressional districts tapped for pork barrel spending projects. Looking at it from this perspective, you’d be correct in assessing America’s military as a giant jobs program that exists as a bureaucratic mechanism to redistribute tax dollars to the pockets of elites and buy votes. Profit margins and jobs are what drive and shape the US military, not true warfighting capabilities designed to achieve full spectrum dominance over peer competitors.
The rot rooted in this greed, corruption, and cronyism is now on full display in the Ukraine. NATO’s “best” weapons are being reduced to burned out paper weights at a rate far exceeding the combined West’s ability to replace them. The western militaries designed around overly complicated and expensive legacy weapons have underperformed in actual combat conditions and are not sustainable on the modern battlefield. Perhaps the most damning fact to emerge supporting this thesis is that the West no longer has the industrial ability to mass produce the numbers of the systems in the quantities required for a fighting a serious war of attrition. The systems are too technical with too many low-density components to be reliably mass produced. For example, the manufacturing and supply chains for the F-35 are a mindboggling nightmare that stretches across all 50 states, touches Europe, and unwittingly or not, relies on components and rare earths procured from nations like China and Russia. Compounding that problem is the fact these systems are simply too expensive to make and field in sufficient quantities when factored against true loss rates. Then add on the incredibly long training periods to build a pool of technicians and operators capable of properly employing the various systems and you have a serious vulnerability that one hypersonic cruise missile could exploit. Here again, we find the military cannot replace technicians fast enough to keep pace with the casualties incurred during any kind of serious conflict with a peer level enemy.
Remember, the US and NATO force structures have been developed over decades and includes recruiting, training, equipping, facilities, doctrine, plans… everything. Worse, it extends well beyond the DoD itself and encompasses the civilian industrial base, which would also have to be not just transformed, but literally rebuilt from the ground up at this stage. You cannot just change the US military and NATO in months or a few years. An overhaul of this magnitude would take a decade or better, which is well beyond the time the US would have to adapt against a modern military threat. Even the most agile and adaptive large corporations take years to transform their operations. The giant and unwieldy bureaucratic mass associated with an organization like the US military makes it fundamentally impossible to adapt and keep pace with leaner military architectures. To put this in simple terms, the DoD can’t get out of its own way to modernize the force. By the time the DoD did transition (assuming it was able, willing, and there was the political will) to the “next thing,” the “next thing” would already be obsolete, and they’d need to immediately begin another transformative process. This inescapable problem of scale for the US military makes it fundamentally impossible for it to ever get ahead of the power curve. Only by severe reductions in force structure could this agility be gained. Folks, the US military and NATO are facing an organizational crisis. For too long they have been oriented towards fighting small policing operations with no real appreciation for the attrition of men and materials in the event of a real war. This has culminated in an oppressively bureaucratic military organization composed of cronies and middlemen supplied by a hollowed out industrial base creating the conditions where the entire system is incapable of adapting or properly modernizing. The result is the US military is unable to fight a war beyond first contact against a threat like China.
This brings me back to autonomous systems and drones. These systems have a proven ability to punch well above their weight class. Relatively inexpensive unmanned systems can perform all manner of combat operations to include surveillance, reconnaissance, targeting, strike, and even resupply. These systems can overwhelm even the most advanced legacy systems such as modern aircraft carriers, tanks, and air defense systems for pennies on the dollar while providing far higher kill ratios that approach 1:1. These systems can be produced for land, sea, subsurface, and air missions and can come in all sizes ranging from something as small as a fly to as large as a cargo jet. Swarms can be launched to wipe out entire field units, air bases, or industrial complexes in one single simultaneous strike. Unmanned aerial vehicles have already proven they can outperform and shoot down even our best pilots flying 5th generation fighter jets. Other aerial systems can silently loiter for days collecting and relaying intelligence or waiting for a target to destroy. Sea and subsurface drones have rendered conventional surface fleets into giant floating liabilities. As we have already seen in the Black Sea, even makeshift surface drones have the capability to slip past the best defenses and sink billion-dollar surface ships. Undersea drones are even more deadly and can wait silently at the bottom of the ocean for potentially years before they are activated and destroy their target.
The good news is the US does possess many different autonomous systems and has some of the most sophisticated examples in every category. The bad news for us is we can’t produce them in large quantities because the US industrial base no longer exists after offshoring and switching to a service-based economy. Further, even if autonomous systems were able to be produced in mass, the DoD cannot incorporate them on a scale necessary to prepare for a modern-day war. The DoD is stuck with an obsolete force structure because of the political pressures linked to financial motives. If these same conditions applied equally across the globe, perhaps the problem would amount to a net neutral issue. However, that is not the case. Despite also having a massive military, China’s centralized planning and control of its force structure is proving to be adapting and onboarding technology faster than the US. This growing capability gap has only been accelerated by the increasing industrial and demographic disparities between China and the US. In short, with each passing day, the US is losing any edge or advantage it possessed over the Chinese military. Today, with Russia moving firmly into the Chinese orbit, the combination of population, tech, industry, and now nearly unlimited Russian raw materials, the US and NATO are looking at an impossible military situation.
Autonomous systems and the mass use of drones will be the dominant force on any battlefield today and for the foreseeable future. Manned fighter aircraft, naval surface fleets, tanks, and even conventionally equipped infantry will only be associated with the loser in a war. China has the necessary industrial capability to produce all types of autonomous systems in mass. At best, the US can produce a few very high-tech systems, but in nothing close to the quantity required for a hot war. On the other hand, China has established its industrial base to produce numerous classes of drones in mass quantities. These systems are far from junk too. Chinese drone technology has been more advanced than US technology for years in many critical areas. For example, Chinese electronics that operate video, stabilization, and navigation systems are the industry standard. This dominance has led to nearly all of our commercial drones being mass produced in China today. China has such an advantage, even the military and CIA have had to admit they were forced to procure and use Chinese drones to support many of their operations. This only came to light after it was leaked that we were using Chinese drones and they presented a security threat because they were transmitting data back to China that could expose sensitive military and intelligence operations. Since then, measures have been taken such as creating local mesh networks to firewall the data links on the drones to prevent them transmitting information back to China, but the point remains. We still are having to rely on Chinese drones. Knowing the huge advantage these convey on the battlefield, it is safe to say this is a serious strategic vulnerability.
Military modernization is not a new subject. In fact, perhaps ironically, it has been a subject that volumes of graduate papers and years of study have been dedicated to. Nonetheless, all of this intellectual capital failed to overcome the critical deficits imposed by the political establishment. The conclusion easily reached from all of this is that the US military and NATO have become paper tigers. We have enjoyed enormous sums of money to create “poster weapons” while never actually developing the efficiencies and force structure needed to field a military designed for high intensity warfare. Beating up on low level threats only reinforced the delusions of superiority created by an incredibly sophisticated propaganda machine in the West despite failure after failure against low level insurgent threats. We certainly still have a big military, but we no longer enjoy an effective one. When it comes to the US military’s failure to mass adopt autonomous systems, the fate of the British forces involved in the Charge of the Light Brigade comes to mind. Horse cavalry against dug in artillery just is never a good match in battle (despite the fact the British did actually make it to the Russian artillery lines before being repulsed with heavy losses). The military employing a strategy of maximum use of autonomous systems today enjoys a similar battlefield advantage. Tanks and ships are easy prey, but even artillery is generally useless against modern drones. I highlight artillery, because it still is the heavy weapon system on the Ukraine front determining the fate of most soldiers and could lead to false conclusions about its battlefield utility. The fact is that even massed artillery would be short lived against a better equipped drone force.
So, where to from here? This letter is far from long enough to discuss how to “fix” the problem. The truth is the problem isn’t going to be fixed anytime soon, if ever. The odds are far higher this problem will be self-correcting long before it is “fixed.” By that I mean the US military is poised to go beyond the humiliating defeat it suffered at the hands of the Taliban and get knocked out cold by a legitimate military force that has incorporated autonomous systems in mass across the full spectrum of military operations. What is left of the shattered US military will be far easier to rebuild after being mostly wiped out than it will be to correct today. Knowing this, I’d assess the US and NATO are nearing the point where their hubris leads them into a fight far tougher than they bargained for. This will lead to a strategic defeat that reaches all the way to the heartland of America. After this conflagration, I honestly don’t see the US ascending back to a superpower status for at least a generation, if ever. The American era is coming to an end short of a massive political overhaul of a revolutionary nature in the US. My recommendation is to expect both and not be surprised by the level of violence and the scale of the collapse. These geopolitical shifts lead to serious downturns and realignment of the global system. The only way to negotiate this level of change is to incorporate maximum geographic flexibility into your contingency plans. If you haven’t yet, start shopping for good locations and visas in neutral nations. They may not be perfect, but even a poor country is a much better option than one just wrecked by a world war.
Till next time…
D.t.Y.