A Ukrainian soldier launching a combat drone near Pokrovsk, Ukraine, August 2024
Serhii Nuzhnenk / Radio Free Europe / Reuters
In addition to specific investments in precise mass, the U.S. military is making organizational adjustments to help the armed forces adapt to and adopt new technologies, refining how U.S. forces are organized, trained, equipped, and deployed. Marine units are experimenting with AI-enabled sensors that help soldiers understand the surrounding environment and monitor adversaries’ vessels. The army has created task forces working across multiple domains to test emerging capabilities in air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace and see how they can be effectively employed on the battlefield. The elevation of the Defense Innovation Unit—an organization within the Defense Department tasked with accelerating the development and deployment of commercially available technology—to report directly to the secretary of defense, and the dramatic budget increase it received from Congress in 2024, prove that both the Pentagon and Capitol Hill are taking these changes in warfare seriously.
Finally, the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve funds experimentation with capabilities that the U.S. military views as the most important for addressing challenges in the Indo-Pacific and other theaters. Already, three projects that came through the reserve’s initial set of activities are moving into the U.S. military, including the acceleration by five years of improvements to the Marine Corps’ ability to perform strike operations in the Indo-Pacific. Although there is more to be done, these advances demonstrate that the United States has laid the groundwork not only to take advantage of precise mass but also whatever comes next.
THE FOG OF THE FUTURE
The signs of major change in how wars are waged are unmistakable. The small, inexpensive drones deployed en masse in Ukraine over the last two years provide only a glimpse of what such wars could look like in the future. Militaries will have to figure out ways to defeat a precise mass strategy, and that effort will lead to further change. For instance, directed-energy weapons—arms that use highly focused energy, such as lasers or particle beams, instead of a solid projectile—could lower the cost per shot of defending against swarms of drones. American and British militaries have recently tested and deployed directed-energy systems designed to defend against aerial drones, including in the Middle East. To be sure, directed energy has been imagined as the technology of the future for at least four decades. But such weapons could indeed find a place in the wars to come.
What is certain is that standing still means falling behind. China, Russia, Iran and its proxies, and a range of other actors are not holding back in pursuing precise mass and its tangible benefits on the battlefield. Policymakers in Washington should be alarmed in particular by China’s rapid advances in everything from ships to hypersonic missiles to antiship missiles, combined with its enormous investments in artificial intelligence, interest in precise mass concepts, and ability to produce systems far more rapidly than the United States can today.
The U.S. military must stride forward faster; today’s innovations and prototypes must become tomorrow’s everyday military force if the United States is to preserve global leadership. The growing evidence of the effectiveness of precise mass systems should trigger not just conversations about future changes but also real changes in investments today—outlays that will influence a wide array of decisions, from the ships the navy builds to the missiles purchased by the army to the artificial intelligence infrastructure that every military service will need to use. Since the core underlying technologies driving these advances in precise mass come from the commercial sector, strategists will need to think through the consequences of the large-scale proliferation of such capabilities. The relative accessibility of precise mass systems will shape the way every country, not just the United States and China, prepares for the future.
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Publish date : 2024-10-21 16:47:00
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