By R.W. Johnson
America’s military machine enjoys an enviable reputation as the world’s strongest but that reputation is mainly based on the awe generated by its huge pieces of hardware – the enormous aircraft carriers, the F-35 fighters and the B-2 bomber (recently in action at Fordow), the Abrams tanks and so on. Yet the truth is that America has been falling behind. One reason is that the procurement for the Pentagon has fallen almost entirely into the hands of the so-called “primes” – the five biggest arms manufacturers: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon (now RTX) and they and their lobbyists have made it very difficult for anyone else to compete. These large companies move very slowly, do things on a cost-plus basis and have had it far too easy. And the primes spend more on buying back their own shares than on R & D.
Secondly, the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate generation has taken its distance from the defence establishment. And yet this is the generation that has built Silicon Valley. Hence the almost complete divorce between the Valley and the Pentagon. Any rumour that e.g. Google is involved in defence work of any kind will bring out the whole Google workforce on strike. In any case, defence procurement is known in the Valley as “the Valley of Death” because endless attempts to bid for Pentagon business have been defeated by the primes and their lobbyists. It has taken repeated legal action by Elon Musk and others to even force the Pentagon to allow non-primes into the bidding process for contracts.
This situation only changed in 2015 when Obama appointed Ash Carter as Secretary for Defence. Carter, smart and well-informed, set up a Defence Innovation Unit aimed at changing the situation. This was at first easily sabotaged by Pentagon bureaucrats: the DIU couldn’t even get adequate furniture for its office. When a fresh management team was put in their entire budget was immediately wiped out by staffers on the House Appropriations Committee. When these teething troubles were finally overcome the DIU folk were horrified by what they found.
At the Combined Air Operations Centre in Qatar, in charge of all USAF operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the technology for controlling air tankers and matching them to aircraft in need of fuel was exactly the same as that used in the Battle of Britain, with women moving pucks round on a huge table-map. This involved an inordinate amount of (expensive) scrambling by air tankers. Realising that this was out-dated, the Pentagon had commissioned Northrop Grumman to carry out a ten year tech overhaul: a ludicrous choice – Northrop is expert at making planes, not at devising software. This contract had already run for eight years, consumed $745 million and produced nothing. The Silicon Valley boys moved in and 132 days later had devised a new app for $1.5 million which solved the problem and saved $500,000 a day in fuel alone. No more ladies were required to push pucks around.
As a result Northrop Grumman tried to have the DIU shut down but luckily Senator John McCain, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the new Defence Secretary, James Mattis, took a wiser view. Already the DIU was pointing out the absurdity of having vastly sophisticated weapons systems being run on Microsoft Office that anyone could hack. But another problem was that Silicon Valley was used to developing new technologies in the confident expectation that customers would materialise as soon as you produced the goods. The Pentagon wasn’t like that. “In The Field of Dreams film the slogan was “Build it and they will come” but where the Pentagon’s concerned you can build it and they still won’t come” was the lament. The DIU aimed to end that situation.
But these were the days of the first Trump administration and everything was in chaos. Several dozen of the top tech executives were flown to Washington to meet Trump and his Cabinet and brief them on major new technologies. Twenty five minutes were spent on introducing people and praising Trump whereupon Trump and the Cabinet said thanks and left. Trump was wholly ignorant and simply had no idea about how to run an administration. Almost half of the top jobs at the Pentagon never got filled and it was soon clear that nothing much would get done. Meanwhile, alarm grew that China was now close to parity with the US in AI research while the Pentagon was working with only three of the top 100 US AI firms.
In fact the situation was much worse. Chinese investors were involved in 15-18% of all US tech venture deals which meant that they’d been able to look into the technology of over half the US tech companies who’d bid for anything. Of course, China spied as well, but a whole lot was just being given away. Meanwhile the Pentagon’s cloud computing infrastructure was effectively incompatible with AI so even if it wanted to adopt AI, it couldn’t. Moreover, as late as 2023 US investors were providing more venture funding for Chinese companies than they were for US companies.
A major area of interest for DIU was aerial surveillance. The US had led the way in the 1960s with the pioneering of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) which bounces radio waves off the ground, extrapolating from the time taken for the waves to bounce back the shape and position of objects on the ground. This allowed one to “see” through clouds or in the dark. This enabled a SR-71 Blackbird to “see” thirty foot objects a hundred miles away from a height of 80,000 feet while travelling at three times the speed of sound. But SAR equipment was very large, elaborate and expensive. SAR needed a huge antenna and required lots of power. So there were very few SAR satellites and in any case it was often necessary to “see” objects of less than thirty feet (9.14 metres) in length.
DIU found a new start-up, Capella Space, which was working to perfect SAR, using a bevy of small satellites with large antennae so sensitive that they could resolve details smaller than 20 inches (50 cm) long. Ultimately, Capella was the reason why President Biden could accurately and repeatedly predict that Putin was about to invade Ukraine in 2022. Putin kept insisting that he had no intention of invading and even put out video showing Russian tanks being loaded back on to trains to return to Russia. But Capella could see exactly what was really going on and ultimately put its own images on CNN. Hence Ukraine was forewarned and able to give the Russians a warm reception.
On top of that came Project Maven. Satellites and planes were providing enormous numbers of photographs of key areas, far beyond the abilities of reconnaissance specialists to examine the photos. So this was a key early area for Project Maven: use AI to make all the photos machine-readable and then AI could scan them all in minutes. Another interesting start-up, Albedo, produced satellites with much higher camera resolution. Where Google Earth uses pictures where one pixel resolves to one square metre of earth, Albedo resolves to where one pixel represents ten square centimetres. Effectively, Albedo could spot a basket ball from a distance of 300 miles.
The Ukraine war signalled a major technological shift. Both sides used cyber attacks and Ukrainian citizens used smartphone apps to alert their military to enemy positions. It was a hybrid war with legacy technology like artillery and tanks overlaid by digital warfare but often supplemented by hardware bought commercially. Both sides relied heavily on drones, especially Chinese DJI drones bought on Amazon – it was a shock to discover that DJI dominated the field and that US drone-manufacturers had all gone bust. Happily, a new start-up, Skydio, began to fill that gap.
Meanwhile Ukraine depended entirely on a commercial service for its communications and internet – Elon Musk’s Starlink. This was disconcerting to the many US military who saw Ukraine as a possible forerunner of a conflict over Taiwan. China would undoubtedly start any conflict by taking down Taiwan’s communications which might again lead to complete reliance on Starlink. But Musk has very substantial interests and factories in China and good relations with Beijing: would he be willing to sacrifice those to help Taiwan ?
The drone war was really a software programmer war, with each side continually altering the software to counter the changes made by software programmers on the other side, aided by legions of hackers and jammers. Meanwhile in Israel Hamas had used quad-copter drones to destroy the generators powering security around Gaza, an act which allowed the Hamas attackers through to wreak havoc on 7 October 2023. Simultaneously US servicemen in Iraq and Syria were facing attacks from Hezbollah drones. In Ukraine even the most lethal modern weapon, the US HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) was having its fire directed by drones bought on Amazon.
Back in California DIU had come across a Brit, Richard Jenkins, who had set up Saildrone – producing autonomous sailboats which could remain at sea for months. These sailboats towed acoustic arrays which enabled them to locate and track ships and submarines – essentially doing the job of a $2 billion destroyer. Indeed, Jenkins had convinced not a few that the era of large manned ships was over. The Chinese had tested a hypersonic missile flying at Mach 10 (against which there is no defence) which could kill even the largest carrier in minutes. Similarly, Russia has developed super-cavitating nuclear torpedoes. Just one torpedo could take out an entire carrier group.
The Ukrainians, though lacking a navy, used their own sea drones to wreak terrible damage on the Russian navy, sinking a number of ships, most notably the cruiser, Moskva, the flagship of its Black Sea fleet. The Russians, who had been intending to blockade Odesa, were forced to withdraw their ships out of range of the Ukrainian drones. This complete relegation of the Russian navy dramatised the question of whether there could be any role for manned ships in a future war.
Already there are scenarios of conflicts fought by robot planes, robot ships, robot tanks and robot artillery. The US is already building thousands of supersonic drones which will operate alongside and in conjunction with the USAF’s manned fighters and bombers. The world of Skynet and Terminators is almost here. The natural human resistance to such technical advances are doubtless less important than financial necessity. For example, the cost of Northrop Grumman’s programme to develop and build 100 B-21 bombers – successors to today’s B-1 and B-2 – will exceed $200 billion. This should be compared with the ALTIUS loitering munition drone produced by the Anduril start-up – costing around $250,000. Similarly, the cost of a single US carrier would buy 18,000 of the most advanced Saildrones. Our resistance to robot warfare should be compared with the fact that the Royal Navy once rejected steamships, preferring sail, while cavalry units all resisted the introduction of tanks.
The revolution in military technology is far from over. Even the Pentagon’s belated recognition of the talents of Silicon Valley has far to run. Biden’s Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, initially identified fourteen crucial areas which the Pentagon needed to solve with new technology. Both the primes and the start-ups accepted the challenge but only one project went to a start-up. By late 2022 the primes were ahead in only one of the fourteen projects and start-ups were ahead in eleven.
The primes are indeed, a problem. On the one hand they have created some of the marvels of the modern age. But they are also dinosaurs, slow-moving and hugely expensive. And they constitute an immensely powerful pressure group pushing against technological change. Take aircraft carriers. These behemoths are hugely expensive, as are the planes that land on them. They have provided employment and profit for the primes for nearly a century but it is becoming increasingly clear that the carrier’s finest hour was at Midway in 1942.
What the situation cries out for is firm and far-sighted executive leadership. Instead America has Trump, a petulant child in the White House. Faced with the close collaboration of China and Russia America needs its Allies more than ever but Trump has alienated even many NATO countries, threatening, bullying and always trying to extract more than he gives. He is using the presidency mainly to enrich himself and his family.
Far from making America great again, Trump will make it weaker and more isolated than ever before. He has alienated India, the country America absolutely needed as a counterweight to China, by slapping on huge tariffs simply because President Modi declined to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. He behaved with similar pique towards Brazil, the world’s tenth biggest economy, simply because the courts there have jailed Bolsonaro, Trump’s friend, for attempting a coup. Both these decisions are those of a spoilt child and are completely inimical to America’s national interest. America’s technical genius has won wars and put men on the Moon but in electing Trump the US has chosen to negate its own most powerful advantages.
FEATURED IMAGE: The American Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in the Pacific Ocean, October 2018. In the ongoing revolution in military technology, these expensive behemoths are rapidly becoming obsolete. (US Navy/Flickr)