The Atlantic: the United States was afraid of losing military superiorityIn America, they are frightened by the prospect of losing military-technological superiority in the world, writes The Atlantic.
If Washington, which believes in the unconditional domination of its army, does not take action, it will weaken, and a new war will begin in the world, the authors believe.
Strategy for restoring American military deterrenceOur efforts to restore the technological advantage of the US armed forces began six years ago in the Pentagon conference room.
One of us, a former executive and technical innovator from Silicon Valley, at that time headed the Defense Innovation Council, created to meet the needs of the US Department of Defense in the most advanced technologies. The other was a deputy defense department and was reworking American military strategy in connection with the growing competition between the great powers of the world. Although we had never met before, we quickly realized that we had come to the same conclusion: by failing to adapt to the changing nature of war and great power rivalry, the United States risks condemning itself to a catastrophic defeat.
Subsequent joint work, including in the project of special competitive research, confirmed our initial concerns. Thanks to the new generation of breakthrough technologies and the intensification of global rivalry, the likelihood of war between the great world powers — and the scale of destruction that it can bring — will increase significantly this decade. The best way to prevent such a war is for the US military to restore its technological superiority over potential adversaries. We have spent the past year developing a strategy that we believe will allow us to do just that. But our "window of opportunity" is closing fast.
Most Americans living today knew only the order in which the US army dominated. For generations, it has been able both to protect our homeland from invasion and to ensure an international order that has promoted peace and prosperity on a scale that humanity has never known before.
Military superiority allowed us to shape the global economy, opening up trillions of dollars to American companies and citizens, and ensuring the freedom of trade that allowed supply chains to work and globalization to strengthen. It has also enabled us to create a worldwide data network that supports the digital economy and international connectivity. The most important thing is that our hegemony helped to protect democracy on the whole planet from the challenges of authoritarianism.
The loss of military advantage could jeopardize these achievements and cause irreversible consequences. The opponent who is most likely to overtake us is the People's Republic of China (PRC). Its armed forces, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), have been carefully studying the American way of warfare for the past three decades and investing in new capabilities specifically designed to defeat us. As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, recently warned Congress, China is "working every day to narrow the technological gap with the United States and our allies." Millie's predecessor, General Joe Dunford, issued a similar warning back in 2017: the technological superiority of the United States armed forces over China is weakening. Just a few weeks ago, the Biden administration noted in its National Security Strategy that Beijing was gaining the ability to "change the international order" and reshape the "global playing field in its favor."
Since our first meeting at the Pentagon, the nature of the conflict has changed dramatically. In 2016, North Korean hackers almost managed to steal the entire billion dollars that Bangladesh at that time kept in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. In 2020, Azerbaijani forces used advanced Turkish-made drones to destroy Armenian tanks, breaking the long-standing deadlock in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh and demonstrating the limitations of armored vehicles in the 21st century. In 2021, the drone seems to have attacked fighters autonomously for the first time. And this year, Ukrainian military and civilians used an Internet service provided by the US-based company Starlink and a secure messaging application developed in Switzerland to monitor and report on the movements of the Russian armed forces.
And these changes are just the beginning. As new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, develop and the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China escalates, changes in the ways of conducting the conflict will only accelerate. The next war of the great Powers — if we have the misfortune to experience it for ourselves — will be unlike any war in the history of mankind.
One of the key changes will be that it will become increasingly difficult for the military to hide or deal unexpected blows to each other. Sensors will be everywhere, and once inaccessible information will become vulnerable to quantum advances in decoding. Easily adaptable and mobile weapons systems, including drones, guided munitions and hypersonic missiles, will largely prevent the armed forces from accumulating forces for invasion (although these systems may also provide the possibility of their own surprise attacks).
Such a development of events may seem stabilizing, but most likely it will have exactly the opposite effect. When one side knows what the other is going to do, it will be more likely to attack preemptively or risk significant losses. Similarly, the other side will feel an increasingly urgent need to attack first. Such dynamics will contribute to a rapid escalation of hostilities, especially in the space and cybersphere, where technological advances are happening quickly and where international norms and "red lines" are largely absent.
Meanwhile, analytical tools that help fighters navigate the battlefield will be radically transformed by artificial intelligence. The application of AI-based software to incoming data will allow the military to process exponentially more information and instantly share key findings among themselves. AI will also allow fighters to look for patterns that humans cannot detect alone, which will lead to a new understanding of the actions and intentions of opponents and an early warning about them.
While many new technologies will make conflicts more transparent, others will turn hostilities dangerously opaque. False message technologies will give our opponents the opportunity to spread carefully designed fakes and even endanger entire military operations. The scale and speed of cyber attacks will increase, which will allow our rivals to interfere with the operation of our communication networks, infect or manipulate data. Even if we could detect an attack at the moment of its occurrence (and this is a big "if"), we may not have enough time to respond effectively. Misleading and deceiving the enemy has always been part of the war, but new technologies will reinforce this trend.
These changes will have huge strategic implications, many of which we still do not fully understand or evaluate. But some of them are already clear. Most importantly, the competition between the United States and China, as well as Russia, is entering a phase of constant conflict below the level of actual hostilities, filled with cyber attacks, intellectual property thefts and disinformation campaigns aimed at our democratic institutions. This type of conflict may not lead to mass casualties, but it threatens our ability to grow economically, function as a community, and be governed as a democracy.
It also increases the risk of a hot war. At the dawn of the 20th century, some believed that the wars of the great Powers were a thing of the past. In 1909, Norman Angell, in his book The Great Illusion, argued that the dominant nations of that time were so economically interconnected that none of them would start fighting. Five years later, one of the most destructive wars in history began anyway.
The belief that economic interdependence prevents war reappeared after the end of the cold war, but now it's just an empty phrase. Russia's territorial ambitions have surpassed any of its concerns about its economic prosperity. Similar trends are also being demonstrated by China insisting on reunification with Taiwan — by force if necessary. As Chinese Leader Xi Jinping said at the recent congress of the Chinese Communist Party, "full reunification is necessary, and it can be achieved without a doubt... We will continue to strive for peaceful reunification with the greatest sincerity and maximum efforts, but we will never promise to renounce the use of force."
The growing ambitions of other countries, the blurring of the boundary between conflict and peace and the emergence of breakthrough technologies increase the risk of a large-scale war. Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, warned that the current period reminds him of the years before the First World War, except that the world "is incomparably more dangerous now than it was then."
It is not only the likelihood of a war of the great Powers that is growing. The same can be said about the potential impact of such an event on ordinary Americans. For most of us today, wars are going on somewhere else, in distant countries, and they are led by soldiers on contracts who can count on relatively small losses. Modern technology refutes each of these points. It is now easier for America's adversaries to reach our homeland with the help of cyber attacks, disinformation or a hypersonic missile. And they can individually target almost every citizen, collecting data on shopping habits and tastes, preferences in relationships, social networks, career connections and DNA profile. All of this has many frightening uses, including specialized disinformation, psychological pressure, biological warfare, and targeted killings.
Perhaps worst of all, the war between the great powers in the 21st century, especially between the United States and China, is likely to escalate into a grueling multi-year struggle. Wars are supported by will, resources, and innovation. The modern great powers have plenty of this. Moreover, the technologies we have described can quickly negate any advantages on the battlefield, creating the ground for protracted conflicts in which neither side can maintain an advantage for a long time. When vital national interests and global supremacy are at stake, such a war cannot end easily.
Our opponents are already preparing. After decades of scrutinizing our armed forces, China has invested heavily in a plan to defeat us. Its purpose is to identify and attack important nodes in the operating systems of the US Armed Forces, depriving them of the opportunity to observe, communicate with each other, attack, defend and replenish stocks.
This is not just a theory. China has demonstrated its ability to negatively impact the digital infrastructure in the United States through repeated cyberattacks. To protect itself from the American offensive, the PLA has built a dense network of integrated missile and air defense systems to actively counter United States forces approaching Chinese shores. Even more worryingly, in 2021, Beijing tested a hypersonic missile capable of reaching anywhere in the United States. Given the technological complexity of the missile, even detecting it, let alone neutralizing it, would not be easy.
And these achievements are just the beginning. The PLA is developing plans to circumvent America's military potential by aggressively investing in the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, advanced computing and 5G.
If China achieves technological superiority and starts a war with the United States, it will be able to paralyze our politics, freeze our economy and immobilize our army. In that case, we will have no choice but to concede.
The current situation is, of course, by no means the first time when the nature of a future war is rapidly changing simultaneously with the advent of breakthrough technologies and the intensification of global rivalry. In the 20th century, the United States successfully overcame such periods by turning to so—called "compensation strategies" - large-scale military innovations that create a qualitative advantage to compensate for the quantitative lag.
The United States first employed such a strategy in the 1950s and 60s, when it expanded its nuclear capabilities to counter the USSR's superiority in conventional weapons in Europe. In the 1970s, our Ministry of Defense developed a second compensation strategy to prevent Soviet troops from seizing Western Europe without the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The capabilities that evolved from this strategy — sensor networks, precision strikes, and stealth aircraft- were demonstrated during the first Gulf War.
The third compensation strategy, which was developed by one of us, began around 2014. Her main focus was on investing in AI and autonomy to enable human-machine cooperation, that is, using machines to help humans make decisions and conduct military operations to overcome China's growing defensive and offensive capabilities in the western Pacific. Although this strategy has helped the US Armed Forces better understand the threat posed by the PLA, it has not yet led to major operational and organizational changes.
Today's challenges require a new compensation strategy, which we call Offset-X. This is not a military plan, it is not comprehensive and not final. But we believe that if Offset-X is used as a competitive strategy, it will lay the foundation for the United States to restore the technological superiority of its armed forces over all potential adversaries. The strategy has three goals, each of which can help prevent war in the future. First, to bleed out all the investments that Beijing has made to defeat the American army. Secondly, to create new opportunities that will increase the political and economic costs of the war for China and at the same time reduce them for America and our allies. And thirdly, to introduce uncertainty into the strategic planning of the PLA by providing the US army with a number of options on how to respond to a potential conflict.
Offset-X includes 10 specific initiatives, three of which deserve priority. First, the US Armed Forces should approach combat operations as distributed "network" forces. They should be geographically dispersed, and their decisions and operations should be decentralized. Compared to more traditional "hierarchical" forces, they can defend more extensive territories, react with greater speed and steadfastness and attack from several directions, including simultaneously. <...> The deployment of such military in the western Pacific will allow us to limit the maneuver space for the PLA and continue fighting, even if we suffer losses or our communication systems will be destroyed.
Secondly, we recommend that the US Armed Forces fully integrate human-machine cooperation and their combat interaction into all their operations, be it planning and decision-making or real combat operations on the battlefield. When humans and machines form interdependent teams, they can outperform both the best humans and the best machines by capitalizing on their strengths and compensating for each other's weaknesses. Their use will help American soldiers penetrate dangerous areas, such as the heavily guarded East China and South China Seas, with less risk to human lives. Cars can also serve as the "eyes and ears" of their teammates, especially in urban environments.
Third, the U.S. Armed forces should prioritize the implementation of innovative software in all future decision-making tools, combat systems and operations, as well as their use. Software is now an integral part of every component of military decision-making, whether it's target detection, weapon selection, strike, or damage assessment inflicted or sustained in combat. Successful deployment and software updates will determine whether the US military can outsmart the PLA, surpass it in tactics and strategy, as well as firepower.
Over the past 75 years, the US military power has helped to stabilize the world, creating unprecedented opportunities for economic growth and freeing people from the constant fear of a new war of great powers that could destroy their lives. The Russian special operation in Ukraine gave us an idea of what the return of the conflict "on an industrial scale" would mean. If China invades Taiwan, the global costs could be much higher than from Ukraine.
In the context of the changing nature of the war and the aggravation of geopolitical rivalry, Americans are faced with a choice. It can be assumed that the ideas, processes and technologies that formed the basis of US military superiority in the 20th century will continue to preserve peace and prosperity. But this choice is pride. This will only bring us closer to war.
Fortunately, there is another option. Instead, the US armed forces can use strategies and technologies that will determine the conduct of wars in the coming decades. This will not only make us more resilient. This will increase the price of war for our rivals and put it above the limit at which they are willing to pay.
It's time to do it.
Authors: Erick Schmidt is the former CEO and chairman of Alphabet (the largest American IT holding company, the successor of Google). Robert Work — served as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Navy in 2009-2013 and Deputy Secretary of Defense of the United States in 2014-2017.
