The United States military remains unprepared for the rapidly changing face of war in which autonomous weapons systems such as drones and powerful algorithms increasingly dominate, Foreign Affairs has warned in its current edition.
The article was written by Retired Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023, and by Eric Schmidt, who is chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project and former CEO and Chair of Google.
The authors point out that the U.S. military has not yet embraced artificial intelligence, despite the advanced U.S. position in the field, and the Pentagon does not have nearly enough initiatives seeking to rectify these failures — and its current attempts are moving too slowly.
Making this situation even more perilous is that the militaries of powerful rivals Russia and China are ahead in building up technology-driven forces.
Milley and Schmidt emphasize that if the U.S. wants to remain the preeminent global power, it will have to quickly shift course. If the U.S. fails to lead this revolution, evil actors equipped with new technologies will become more willing to attempt attacks on the United States, they wrote.
They said History has shown that the performance of militaries often depends on how well they adapt to and adopt technological innovations, and it has often been difficult for military planners to predict which innovations will shape future battles.
But the authors note that forecasts are easier to make today, as drones are already widespread and robots are increasingly in use, with the wars in Gaza and Ukraine currently demonstrating that artificial intelligence is already changing the way states fight.
And it is increasingly clear that if Russia's war on Ukraine expands to other parts of Europe, a first wave of land-based robots and aerial drones could enable both NATO and Moscow to oversee a wider frontline than humans alone can attack or defend.
Milley and Schmidt also stress that the use of unmanned weapons are cheap. For example, a simple first-person-view drone can cost just $500, and a team of 10 of them can immobilize a $10 million Russian tank in Ukraine. More than two-thirds of the Russian tanks that Ukraine has taken out in the past few months were by the use of such drones.
Even when defense systems overcome an attack, the cost of defending against swarms will far surpass the cost for the enemy, with such an example being Iran's April mass drone and missile strike against Israel, which cost at most $100 million. However, U.S. and Israeli interception efforts cost more than $2 billion.
In such a new world, the American military needs to make major reforms to avoid becoming obsolete, they argue. It must change the way in which it buys weapons to better adapt to a quickly changing world, and it must also change the military's organizational structures and training systems by making its complex, hierarchical chain of command more flexible and give greater autonomy to small, highly mobile units, according to the authors.
And it must make these change and continue to adapt at a rate faster than America's adversaries or risk the troubling consequences of no longer being the world's preeminent power.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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