Episode 7: The Future Hands Shaping the US’s Unmanned Arsenal

>> Julia Macdonald: Episode 7, The Future Hands shaping the US's Unmanned Arsenal.

>> Speaker 2: As Commander in Chief, my focus is on building the most powerful military of the future. As a first step, I'm asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art golden dome missile defense shield to protect our homeland.

 

All made in the USA.

>> Speaker 3: This plane flies with drones. It flies with many, many drones, as many as you want. And it's a technology that's new, but it doesn't fly by itself. It flies with many drones, as many as we want. And that's something that no other plane can.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Welcome to the Hand Behind Unmanned a podcast about how America fights war without human beings, told from the perspective of the human beings making those choices. I'm Jackie Schneider.

>> Julia Macdonald: And I'm Julia McDonald. In this podcast, we take you inside weapons budget lines and behind classified program doors to understand not only what unmanned technology the US military bought, but why.

 

For those of you who came for the technology, we hope you'll stay for the people. Because this really is a story about remarkable humans, historical junctures, and our beliefs about the future of war and what that means for unmanned weapons we buy.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Along the way in our unmanned journey, we'll learn valuable lessons about how technology shapes the winners and losers in war, how humans and technology interact at a time when the march of technological progress seems inevitable, how public funds get invested when it comes to warfare, and above all, the human hands at the heart of unmanned technology.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: Over the last six episodes, we've taken you on a journey to explain why the US ended up with an unmanned arsenal of expensive, exquisite, remotely controlled unmanned aerial systems. And in the last episode, we showed you what's happening outside the us. How conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle east are influencing not only the us, but China, as both countries consider how emerging technology and new unmanned weapons will shape their great power competition.

 

If you've been with us this long, you have a sense of why the US invested in the current unmanned arsenal. But we're going to spend the rest of this episode looking at how that arsenal is changing, what lessons the US is taking from current wars, and make an argument about what the US should have in its future arsenal and how it might get there or get derailed.

 

Throughout this journey over hundreds of years of American military technology, we've introduced you to the people who have shaped our beliefs, identities, and eventually our unmanned military arsenal. Many of those people and offices are now gone, some dead, some retired, offices closed, a new presidential administration in office.

 

So we're going to introduce you to a new cast of characters, perhaps the next big influencers in military ideas and give you a glimpse into the beliefs they are starting to articulate about technology, unmanned warfare and the future of the American military. We left our American story at the end of the war on terror, but US unmanned investments have evolved even in the short years after leaving Afghanistan.

 

Today, after three years of war in Ukraine and a little over three months of the second Trump administration, it feels like the US unmanned arsenal stands at one of those important critical junctures like the creation of the air force or air land battle or the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

 

And that critical juncture is going to dictate its trajectory potentially for decades. We started this episode with a few clips of President Trump discussing some of the technologies his administration is prioritizing. A golden dome of missile and space based defenses, the next fighter aircraft with a team of loyal drone wingmen, and in general, a focus on attritable one way missiles and drones.

 

Many of these programs were already under development before the Trump administration took over for their second term, and certainly the cracks within the US unmanned arsenal were already starting to show far before the transition between Biden and Trump. Ukraine highlighted weaknesses in the US Defense industrial base, shortages in air defense missiles and precision munitions, and how ill equipped the rigid US defense acquisition process was to adapt the arsenal to the rapidly changing battlefield environment.

 

In Ukraine, meanwhile, the US Was dealing with an ongoing tit for tat missile and drone volleys, the both Houthi rebels and Iran.

>> Speaker 5: Now to the Middle east and the dramatic new video from the Iran backed Houthi militia who claim it shows them shooting down a US drone in Yemen.

 

 

>> Speaker 6: Today Iran launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles towards targets in Israel. The United States military coordinated closely with the Israeli Defense Forces to help defend Israel against this attack. US Naval destroyers joined Israeli air defense units in firing interceptors to shoot down inbound missiles.

>> Julia Macdonald: These attacks highlighted both the vulnerability of US remotely controlled unmanned aerial systems and the overwhelming cost burden of shooting down cheap but prolific Iranian drones and missiles with expensive, exquisite and scarce American missile defense systems.

 

So how is the US responding to these cracks in the arsenal? Well, interestingly enough, the changes are happening from the outside in and the top down. Even before Trump's election victory, venture capital investment in defense technology began flooding into the market as conflicts in Ukraine, Israel, the Red Sea, and an increasingly dangerous relationship between the US and China all signaled an appetite for defense technology.

 

These investment incentives were flamed by a burgeoning defense innovation ecosystem created over the last few presidential administrations. This included organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit, in addition to a slew of other innovation organizations owned by the Air Force, Navy, Army, Marines and Space Force, as well as the new Office of Strategic Capital.

 

These organizations attempted to fund technological innovation by playing bureaucratic dodgeball with the American military weapons acquisition process. Dodging, ducking, dipping, diving and dodging again the cumbersome Pentagon bureaucracy. With a series of contracting acronyms like ota, CIBBER and cidr. And to some success,

>> Speaker 7: Replicator is meant to help us overcome the PRC's biggest advantage, which is mass.

 

More ships, more missiles, more people. We've set a big goal for Replicator to field attritable autonomous systems at scale of multiple thousands in multiple domains within the next 18 to 24 months.

>> Julia Macdonald: But none of these outside in and top down attempts to respond to US weapons vulnerabilities will be successful without the support of the armed services.

 

So how are they adapting to these technological and political shifts? Perhaps not surprisingly, the Air Force is moving away from the MQ9s of the past and focusing instead on new drones and missiles that enable manned fighters to and core strategic air power missions like Long range Strike. The centerpiece of this acquisition strategy is the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or cca, a program which envisions a team of drones controlled by a manned aircraft.

 

That essentially create external, semi autonomous or fully autonomous stories of munitions that can be dynamically tasked for both air to air and air to ground missions. At its pinnacle, the idea is a swarm of smaller, hopefully cheaper systems that work in partnership with a manned mothership to launch strikes from afar.

 

The transition from Predators and Reapers to collaborative combat aircraft in conjunction with this new defense industrial base that includes both the traditional defense prime companies like Lockheed or Boeing, as well as defense technology startups like Anduril or to some extent, General Atomic, has created a new competition dynamic for the future of the unmanned arsenal.

 

And this is a competition that is defined as much by armed service requirements and traditional defense bureaucratic politics as it is by YouTube Shorts about cool new technology. Charismatic founders giving TEDx style talks about the future of the military and defense technology companies leaning into the future of war even before official defense requirements.

 

Here's Palmer Luckey, founder of new defense tech company Anduril.

>> Speaker 4: For years there's been this science fiction trope of conflict in the future being defined by large numbers of swarming drones or autonomous systems. But it's not just a sci fi trope. This is also what a lot of war planners and a lot of people looking at the future of the military believe is going to be the future.

 

Anneral Industries is a defense product company that builds defense technology and then sells it to the United States government and our allies around the world. The thing that makes us special and the thing that makes us different from a lot of other contractors is that we use our own money to fund almost all of our research and development and we build products and then we sell them after they're done.

 

So we're usually not going to the government and saying here's an idea, here's a white paper, you're going to pay for it whether it works or not. We're saying, look, we are going to use our own money on this. We're going to make sure that it works.

>> Julia Macdonald: As Ben Jensen, director of the Futures lab at the think tank csis, explains about the ensuing competition between companies like General Atomics, who created the Predator and Reaper, and new tech darlings like Anduril.

 

 

>> Benjamin Jensen: I think the MQ9 is tailor built for a very specific mission and it becomes so good at that long range persistent mission that it almost becomes a victim of its own success. And if you go back and look at it, what's interesting is that even General Atomics was trying to invest in an alternative, a jet based alternative to take over from the MQ9.

 

But then budget reality set in and that never really came to fruition and then might now with cca and so now the big CCA game will be which one is picked? Is it the new kid on the block andil ooh that Andrew. It's like cancel in Zoolander so hot right now.

 

Or is it like GA is Derek Zoolander? I don't know which one will get picked but they have very different approaches to how they're building the CCA and I'd give GA credit for that. They saw the MQ9 was really optimized for a particular set of wide area surveillance mission and point strikes and you needed something else that was faster, more survivable, different payloads and they engineered towards that and truth is they were down selected One of two companies out of.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: Five, the Air Force is prioritizing the collaborative combat aircraft program and galvanizing new defense technology companies as they compete for the premier unmanned weapons weapons program of the Air Force. But at the same time, the Air Force struggles with other unmanned modernization efforts. The Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles, a program slated to modernize the Cold War era nuclear ballistic missile inventory, is behind timelines and significantly over cost estimates.

 

Similarly, the Air Force's hypersonic missile development program was eventually canceled. Meanwhile, the Air Force's intended replacement for an aging and expensive cruise missile inventory, the Extended Range Attack Munition, is going through a bit of an identity crisis that threatens to derail the entire program. The Navy, as always, is going its own way.

 

While it partners with the Air Force in Australia on a loyal wingman drone, its main focus is on modernizing its shipborne missile inventory and experimenting with surface and subsurface vessels to account for an overworked, expensive and increasingly vulnerable inventory of manned vessels. While most of these unmanned vessel programs are still in research and development or early experimentation and prototyping, the Navy has started to put some budgetary skin in the game to these programs.

 

Over $300 million in the FY 2025 budget, with over a half a billion already expected for procurement of large and small unmanned vessels by FY2027. There is a growing sentiment from the operational Navy that unmanned systems will be a centerpiece of the Navy in the near future. Admiral Paparo, Indopacom Commander, speaks frequently of a hellscape concept, one that uses swarms of unmanned platforms across domains to create fog, friction and inflict costs on a Chinese military threatening Taiwan or other interests in the Pacific.

 

Here's Admiral Paparo from a February 2025 keynote at the Pacific Forum on Autonomous Technologies and Competition With China,

>> Leon Paparo: I see. Certainly unmanned systems as our force multiplier. You'll be aware of the term hellscape and you know, and its association with my name. We have to build these capabilities at scale network through resilient multispectral communications that can operate in contested environments.

 

And it's not about replacing warriors. It's about giving warriors the advantage they deserve and giving our nations the defense they deserve. Autonomous systems will provide persistent coverage, accept the levels of risk and multiply the combat power without multiplying our manning requirements. The technology exists, the concepts are proven.

 

But what we lack is sufficient scale and integration. And we've got to move beyond boutique programs and limited deployments, the full scale implementation across all domains.

>> Julia Macdonald: In the Pacific, the US Navy is leaning hard into these experimental concepts and unmanned technology, perhaps with a fervor reminiscence of the inner war years, putting research technology in the field, standing up unmanned vessel units, clamoring for manned unmanned teaming, and in general, desperately seeking to bring unmanned out of the acquisition valley of death that stands between idea and and introduction onto the battlefield.

 

But while the combatant Pacific Navy may be leaning into the employment of unmanned systems, that's not where the Navy makes procurement or buying decisions. Instead, it is Navy offices far afield from the Pacific Ocean, in offices in Arlington, Virginia, at the Pentagon that's tasked with manning and equipping the naval force.

 

And here, a continent away from Admiral Paparo's hellscape, it's still a struggle between the calls for unmanned masts from commanders at sea and the strain of budget requirements to field 600 manned ship Navy that has long been the desired but difficult to attain gold standard for naval force design.

 

This is a delicate balancing act for the Navy, not just balancing budget priorities between manned and unmanned, but also trying to shape missions for these unmanned vessels and aircraft that enable but don't throw threaten the core missions of the surface and subsurface navies. Now, that can lead to unmanned systems that are built with unclear missions or they're tasked to do too much.

 

Both unclear missions and too many missions are a recipe for programs that spiral in both cost and timelines. For example, in a 2024 Congressional Research Service study, Ronald O' Rourke detailed the Navy's vision for the large unmanned surface vessels. But it looks like a kind of do it all list of tasks and a vessel design that would allow for.

 

Adaptation as the Navy force evolves. As O' Rourke writes, the Navy wants LUSVs, that's Large Unmanned Surface vessels, to be low cost, high endurance, reconfigurable ships with ample capacity for carrying various modular payloads, anti surface warfare and strike payloads, as well as anti ship and land attack missiles.

 

Perhaps paradoxically, in the quest for these unmanned systems to fill multiple potential future roles, the programs can get caught in what I've called an identity crisis, which can lead to expensive and delayed fielding of the technology. These issues derailed the Navy's first unmanned aircraft program, the X47, which was canceled in 2016 after the Navy spent $1.4 billion in the program.

 

The army is perhaps where you would expect the greatest unmanned adoption and the biggest force adaptation to the lessons of Ukraine and Russia. And the army is certainly experimenting with unmanned aerial and ground Systems, from the 3D printed UAV, low altitude stocking and strike ordinance to the future tactical unmanned aircraft system.

 

And they've tried to empower adaptation from the bottom up to bring these new systems in. Here's Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Program at the center for a New American Security Stacey Pettijohn.

>> Stacie Pettyjohn: You've seen the US army, the Chief of Staff has started an initiative called Transformation and Contact in which he's trying to help the army incorporate off the shelf commercial drone technology by giving it to different units and letting them just sort of experiment with it in real time and see what they do, see what they can't do.

 

Instead of waiting and going through the multi year acquisition process, they're given these drones. They're able to figure out what is sort of the art of the possible, what the limitations are and the conditions under which they might be able to use them to help them to achieve different missions.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: The focus of the army is always on how unmanned systems enable the American vision of all arm ground maneuver warfare. The human, the soldier is always the centerpiece. Here's General Rainey, head of Army Futures Command, in a keynote at the AUSA Global Force Symposium in March 2025.

 

 

>> Speaker 8: War remains a human endeavor. It's a contest of will between human beings. There's no indications looking at anything going on that that is changing. It's good news for the US Military and especially the US army because our people are our number one asymmetric advantage.

>> Julia Macdonald: And for the army, the lessons from Ukraine about unmanned systems that enabled an increasingly entrenched attrition war are not a simple copy and paste for the modern American army, whose bread and butter is maneuver and deep first strike offensive campaigns.

 

Instead, the army is looking at how they can invest in unmanned systems across domains that can retake the initiative while moving the American soldier further away from those first volleys of conflict. General Rainey made the role of unmanned systems and their ability to protect the front line even more explicit, Promising onlooking soldiers at the 2023 Army War Fighting summit that we will never again trade blood for first contact.

 

In many ways, what the army is talking about today looks very similar to the airline battle deep strike vision of the 1980s army. But this time, they don't have to beg the air force for help with combat air support, manned F16s and A10s. Instead, the army can turn to today's unmanned systems, FPVs, small UASs, even ground based missiles and robot vehicles embedded within army units and controlled by army commanders to strike the enemy first and prepare the battlefield for an overwhelmingly dominant U.S. army maneuver campaign.

 

Here's General Rainey again.

>> Speaker 8: And you talk to anybody who's ever fought, and they'd much rather be in the offense and have the initiative, cuz once you stop, lot of advantage confers to the person who's moving. Human machine integration, right? Not, not replacing humans with robots, but figuring out how to combine our great people with unmanned systems.

 

And I use that term deliberately, that's, you know, uas, ugs, surface, subsurface, subterranean. We need to think about unmanned systems holistically. It's not to replace our people. That's the wrong way to think about it. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that as you inject unmanned systems, you might actually have an initial increase in the number of people, but they'll be farther away from the point of contact.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: Perhaps where the army can make the biggest change is investments in long range conventional missiles and new air defense missiles, Two missions that the air force has almost completely abandoned. And yet it is the most likely mission for the army In a Pacific ocean or Taiwan scenario in which the navy's long range strike is limited by its capacity and its own vulnerability, and the air force by weapons stores and base vulnerabilities.

 

Accordingly, the army invested in a few modernization programs for long range strike, including the ATACMS successor the precision strike missile, and the army's long range hypersonic weapons program. Both these programs are relatively expensive and exquisite. And the cost of these missiles only goes up as you make them more precise, longer range and faster further.

 

While none of these programs directly threaten core army missions or specialties, they also don't have vociferous advocates from within the Army. And that's a problem because when the army first announced its intentions to refocus on long range strike, the Air Force went on the offensive. The Mitchell Air Power Institute, a think tank devoted to strategic air power, published reports and a podcast that criticized the army programs and advocated instead for long range strike via Air Force bombers.

 

Here's former commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, Tim Ray in an interview from that 2021 Mitchell Institute podcast.

>> Speaker 14: Now, while I get the Air Force is the only service that has bombers, I also hear a lot about other. Branches pursuing long range strike options these days.

 

Could you explain that?

>> Speaker 9: Sure, Doug. What's going on is a Roles and missions thrash where many of the services are trying to prove their relevance in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq, the calculus has changed a lot as we look at operations against top tier competitors like China.

 

And with budgets set to get tighter, some of the services, particularly the army, are aggressively trying to grab mission that they think will help them become more relevant in our new national security strategy. And long range strike is at the top of that list.

>> Julia Macdonald: For Ray, the Army should instead focus its missile efforts on air defense, defending, for example, Air Force bases in the Pacific that are vulnerable to Chinese volleys of missiles, drones and bombs.

 

 

>> Speaker 9: It also sees them divert money from core responsibilities, in the Army's case, like providing for air base defense, and and missile defense.

>> Julia Macdonald: Ray may be fighting what then Army Chief of Staff General James McConville described as service identity rivalry. Where you sit sometimes depends on where you stand, he said.

 

And your view of the future fight may be different from your perspective. And that's what retired general Robert Brown, executive vice president of the association of the United States army and former commander of US Army Pacific, called a stunning slap at a sister's service. But perhaps why the comments hit so hard is that there's an element of truth to Tim Ray's critique.

 

The army has been perhaps under prioritizing unmanned. Point defense systems, while focusing on unmanned technology that defends ground troops or that enables long range strike. The Army's premier defense system continues to be the Patriot, the same air defense system developed as part of the 1980s air land battle.

 

Now the army has invested in improved radars and battle control systems. But the Ukraine war revealed how much more the US needs. More missiles, more launchers, and more battalions in general. In the last year, the army has promised to invest more in these air defense units with at least one extra battalion.

 

The army is also designing a tactical alternative to the Patriot, the ifpc. Designed to defend fixed and semi fixed sites from rockets, artillery and mortars, as well as cruise missiles and drones. It's currently under contract for 4.1 billion. That's only for 18 systems. Where the army may be investing in unmanned systems that largely enable the way the army has wanted to fight since the first Gulf War.

 

The Marines have wholeheartedly embraced unmanned systems. They have unmanned aerial vehicle squadrons which operate larger remotely controlled systems, as well as early investments in small unmanned aerial systems. But that's just the beginning. Because as part and parcel of the new force design, the Marines envision a kind of a future combat systems on steroids that leans on network sensors, big data AI and unmanned systems across domains to enable a new warfighting strategy of modern island hopping in the Pacific.

 

 

>> Speaker 15: General David H. Berger first communicated the Force Design 2030 concept.

>> Speaker 10: We have a lot of experimentation, a lot of learning to do.

>> Speaker 15: Although it is rooted in decades of experiments that date as far back as 1997, it is designed to create a single integrated force that supports joint operations focused on forward maritime campaigns, yet retains the ability to perform traditional Marine Corps roles.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: The video that we just included shows Marines in typical missions, but in between clips of Marine soldiers in combat, the Marines show the small drones, the ship worn unmanned reconnaissance, and the long range unmanned strike they're designing to complement the smaller, faster new Marine force.

>> Speaker 17: We have to change.

 

We have a lot of experimentation, a lot of learning to do. We cannot wait to move out. We have to change. We have to move out now. And we have to preserve enough to learn in the future over the coming to make sure we get it right.

>> Julia Macdonald: Not waiting for the programs to reach full maturity, the Marines are experimenting with these systems, thinking about training, logistics, and in March 2025, they stood up the Marine Corps Drone Attack team to streamline the introduction of the technology to the Marines.

 

 

>> Speaker 18: The Marine Corps Attack Drone Team mission is to rapidly scale and accelerate the implementation of armed first person view drones into the fleet. Marine Force.

>> Julia Macdonald: Finally, we turn to the newest armed service, the Space Force. The Space Force is at the beginning of defining who they are as a service.

 

And that includes what kinds of missions they will view as key to their identity and as a follow on the weapons and systems that will enable that new identity. Today, some of that debate revolves around whether to focus on offense in space, Space weapons, space bases on the moon, manned space missions, or to focus on how space enables other domains which would lead to investments in intelligence, navigation, communications for our exploration of unmanned systems.

 

What this debate ends up being about is between a service defined by manned missions to the moon and astronauts and guardian warfighters in space. Some of the ideas featured in this Space Force recruitment ad.

>> Speaker 19: The light from a star can take millions of years to reach Earth.

 

So when you look at a star, you're looking back in time. But I see the future. I see exploration and courage. I see my country finding new horizons out there, and I see giant leaps making a comeback. I see myself. The future is where I'll make history.

>> Julia Macdonald: Or a service that is primarily one about unmanned technology and the humans on Earth that keep those satellites in space enabling terrestrial warfare.

 

An identity you see in this competing Space Force recruitment ad.

>> Speaker 20: We're calling on all late night coders, early morning gamers, self proclaimed space geeks, stargazing science junkies, and especially square peg and a round hole type thinkers to shape the only force created for the 21st century.

>> Speaker 21: So consider this your invitation.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: Here's Aaron Bateman, assistant professor in the History department at George Washington University, to explain this divergent debate about the core identity of the Space Force.

>> Aaron Bateman: Fundamentally, the Space Force is an information support service. Yes, it has some offensive capability, and you know, the only ones that are really acknowledged at all are electronic warfare.

 

But if we look at personnel across the service who are engaged in operations, like not looking at acquisition, but like people who are on console doing operations. I mean, most of what they're doing is maintaining information infrastructure that the Joint Force is using. And it's really vital, it's really critical, and it's just not the kind of sexy warfighter identity that most people associate with the military.

 

And so I think herein lies the tension. And I think that what you see is a group of people within the service and outside of it who are saying, okay, look, we just have to embrace this reality. We're not going to be kicking doors in Afghanistan or Iraq or some place in the future where the US is engaged in an insurgency.

 

And if there's a war going on, in the Taiwan Strait, space based capabilities that the Space Force operates are going to be critical. But Space Force personnel by and large are far removed from that theater. They're maintaining that information infrastructure. And so you have a group of people saying, look, let's just embrace it and let's develop career paths that foster the technical expertise to do this mission.

 

That's going to be quite different than what the Marines or army or Air Force are traditionally focused on. And then you have another group of people that really reject that are like, no, we are war fighters and we need to be focused on, you know, space war fighting, whatever that actually means.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: Clearly, the armed services are in the midst of a deep period of adaptation and evolution, which involves reconciling the lessons about unmanned technologies coming out of today's battlefields with the service's age old identities and beliefs about how the American military should fight its future wars. But if we've learned anything in the last seven episodes, it's that beliefs about the future of war do not exist in a vacuum.

 

Instead, there are people, catalysts, and organizations that can build new beliefs that shape the American military. In our story of the past few decades, two core beliefs, one about technology and military revolutions, and the other about a casualty averse public, often challenge service identities. So how powerful will these beliefs be as we move forward?

 

Let's start with military revolutions. Many look to Ukraine and declare a drone revolution. But is what we're seeing on the battlefield in Ukraine truly revolutionary? Let's start first with Michael Kofman, an expert on drone warfare in Ukraine.

>> Michael Kofman: I often debate with myself between the traditionalist and the futurist outlook.

 

Futurists show up at the early cusp of any technology that's emerged and say, this has revolutionized everything. Traditionalists then show up and say, well, this is revolutionized nothing and we're just going to duct tape it to the way we fight. And it's more of an evolution. And so I'm myself constantly debating which direction I see this taking.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: Ultimately, for Michael, who is perhaps one of the keenest observers of the Ukraine war, there have been revolutionary advances in how unmanned technologies are used to fight. Fight wars, but these technologies are unable to create the revolutionary strategic advantages that create victory.

>> Michael Kofman: I don't think it's revolutionized the character of war.

 

A bold claim, but I definitely see some pretty significant impacts from both sides of these technological trends, but also the way change how both sides fight.

>> Julia Macdonald: Okay, so let's say this is an evolution, not a revolution. If that's true, is this just the latest evolution of a precision guided missile revolution that advented in the wars of the 1970s?

 

Or alternatively, an extension of the information revolution that began in the 90s? What we heard from the office in that assessment and strategists like Elliot Cohen, Thomas Mencken and Andrew Kripinovich in the early 90s was that the information age was creating a revolutionary advantage for weapons of precision and range, changing the advantage in war from campaigns of attrition to those of maneuver and first strike advantage.

 

Is this still the case? Do unmanned technologies enable campaigns of maneuver where long range strikes from qualitatively superior platforms can create strategic victory? Or do today's unmanned systems enable different and defining characteristics of war? To answer this question, we turn first to military innovation. Scholar Thomas Menken.

>> Thomas Menken: I think what we see in Ukraine, what we see in the Middle east and elsewhere, is that the means to strike with precision has really diffused.

 

And so it's not one side that has this capability and the other side that doesn't. It's really varieties of two different sides that have the ability to strike with precision. So I do think that whether, well, the current revolution has entered a new phase, it's entered the mature phase where it's all about marginal advantage.

 

And we see in Ukraine war, each side trying to struggle for marginal advantage, whether it's in inventory size, whether it's in depth, whether it's in targeting strategy. But more and more it looks like, well, I guess one of the last revolutions that spread, the railroad rifle telegraph revolution of the 19th century.

 

And when it eventually spread, well, World War I resulted. I mean, World War I didn't strictly result from the spread of the revolution, but attritional trench warfare resulted when both sides had machine guns, both sides had rapid firing artillery, and neither side really had the ability to maneuver in the face of those threats.

 

That's where we are today. And so the historian in me says we're not just in the mature phase of the existing revolution, but we're likely to see some new approach emerge.

>> Julia Macdonald: And that new approach, according to Mencken, will be about how autonomous technologies decrease personnel burden and increase situational awareness.

 

 

>> Thomas Menken: Those systems Will play. Already playing will play increasingly important roles for a number of reasons. One, manpower is limited, personnel are limited. We need to expand that. Second, the ability of those systems to perform multiple functions on their own sense, make sense and then act. Essentially, when we're talking about autonomous systems, that's really what you're talking about.

 

Something that's able to sense the environment, that's able to make a decision or come to some sort of a decision and then act on that decision. And then it's unnecessary to put human lives at risk for a whole bunch of missions where you used to have to do that.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: So fundamentally Mencken's hypothesis is that the next evolution of these autonomous technologies, perhaps as artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent on the battlefield, will finally be about substituting technologies for the human on the battlefield, decreasing labor costs or mitigating risk by creating distance from that first volley of violence.

 

And this leads to an important part of this evolution versus revolution debate, the role of technology itself. Would autonomous technology create revolutionary advantages if the technology were further along? Did the US's previous attempts at military revolutions and autonomous technologies, like the Army's future combat system of the early 90s, fail solely because the technology wasn't ready?

 

Will Generative AI and ChatGPT create a new historical moment for military technology? To answer this question, I turn to retired General Jack Shanahan, whose last job in the Air Force was running what was then called the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.

>> Jack Shanahan: We're looking now at temporal advantages, no long term enduring advantages.

 

I'm not going to say those days are behind us, but I think we're going to be hard pressed to get a long term competitive advantage because all of these stuff is available very commercially, very open source. You'll have a much more advanced, much more intelligent system writ large.

 

But it's not going to happen just in whole, it will happen in little bits and pieces. What I would say is what I can attest to that from Maven and Jake. Maven started with putting AI into the ground processing stations called the distributed Common ground systems of the army and Air Force.

 

And then in Jake, we were taking similar technologies in computer vision and beginning to insert them into the platforms in the sensors themselves. So we'll see that incremental improvements over time. How do you get better edge processing? Well, you need AI to do AI at the edge. How do you do better communications?

 

Well, you probably need AI to do better spectrum management and so on. And so all of this will continue to build over time. But what I don't ever expect to see at least I don't think so, is some massively dramatic improvement that suddenly offers a war winning capability in the space of months, as opposed to a decade.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: So what advancement could win wars? Let's come back to one of the fundamental debates about warfare and technology. What matters more, quantity or quality? Precision or mass? Are these two characteristics direct trade offs with one another? Or did the precision guided munition revolution or the information age revolution or the drone revolution make precision so cheap that you no longer have to trade off precision for mass?

 

That's certainly what Mike Horowitz, professor at University of Pennsylvania and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, is arguing.

>> Michael Horowitz: I think we've entered the era of precise mass in warfare, and traditionally it was mass that set the odds for who wins and loses wars. You know, smaller armies can defeat bigger armies, but generally, you know, bigger is better, whether it's more speaker, more bow and arrow, more guns, more tanks, more planes.

 

But with the advent of precision strike, which really took off in the context of the second offset and then was publicly revealed in the first Gulf War in 1990, 1991, it really transformed how the United States thought about using force. And there are also advantages to precision weapons and reducing collateral damage.

 

But the intersection of that and military effectiveness meant that you have a strong incentive then to pursue precision. That precision gets increasingly expensive to the point where the average precision guided cruise missiles in the U.S. arsenal cost one to $3 million each. And the platforms associated with launching them, whether you're talking about F35s or whether you're talking about submarines, or whether you're talking about other naval surface craft, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, cost orders of magnitude more than that.

 

So the US has been organized essentially since the end of the Cold War on the notion of a small, qualitatively superior, precise arsenal and even more important concept. Operation for fighting. Now things have changed, or I would say things should change in the context of the United States in that in a world where precision strike technology like precision guidance is now is 50 years old, essentially this is not like a new secret thing that the US has access to that other countries have access to.

 

And in a world where the Houthis and Iran and Russia and Ukraine have access to really low cost precision strike, that's proven to work on the battlefield.

>> Julia Macdonald: And Mike Horowitz isn't the only one that thinks we no longer have to trade off precision and Mass. Here's General Rainey, head of Army Futures Command from that March 2025 keynote.

 

 

>> Speaker 8: It looks like technology is creating an opportunity to be precise and mass effects. At the same time.

>> Julia Macdonald: But can we really get precision and mass and still afford to fight a war against China or North Korea or Houthi rebels and Iran? Here's where I think the belief in technology and military revolutions and the belief in technology and the substitution of technology for human lives can sometimes be at odds with each other, especially with how they create incentives to increase the economic cost of warfare in order to prioritize the political cost of warfare.

 

The last two decades weren't just about precision versus mass. It was about how autonomous technologies can move the human from the very real human cost of warfare. And that meant building unmanned systems that privilege not just precision, but control, loiter range and survivability. And all of that is expensive.

 

So even if we decrease the price of guidance or precision if we want humans in the loop and options for both manned and unmanned on the same platform, and survivability and speed, if we need optionally unmanned platforms, complicated guidance and control, prepared to do a myriad of different missions or munitions that are survivable with great guidance and maneuverability, then even cheaper precision doesn't get us affordable math.

 

Here's Stacey Pettyjohn again on how the cost of these systems can sometimes unintentionally spiral out of control.

>> Stacie Pettyjohn: Missiles are another area where the United States has moved towards wanting more very high end systems. And they need systems with a lot of range. The US likes to or has been driven to fighting from standoff ranges where the platform that is launching the missile stays outside of the area where there are the most enemy forces that could potentially attack it.

 

And the need for standoff ranges inevitably drives up cost in missiles. So things like Tomahawk, which aren't even that long range, Jassm, another land attack cruise missile that's air launched, they're just expensive and you have even some of the missiles that are including pretty exquisite sensors so that they can track moving targets like ships.

 

And some of them have incorporated elements to reduce the signature of the missile. So it's not really stealthy, but it's pseudo stealthy. It's harder to detect on radar, and it's more likely to be able to penetrate integrated air and missile defenses and to actually reach its target. These are all really highly desirable attributes, but they end up especially when they're stacked on top of each other, resulting in something that has a really high price tag.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: And it's not just missiles that have a problem with this gold plating. It's also those little first person view drones that are dominating the front lines of the Ukraine war and being shot down, destroyed and replaced at the rate of thousands upon thousands at a time. The US has struggled to buy pretty much any technology in mass and at low cost.

 

Remember for example, the experience of Mike Brown and the Defense Innovation Unit that we introduced you to in episode five when the army's attempt to buy a commercial off the shelf short range reconnaissance program led to spiraling costs and ultimately a failed program. Often what we want unmanned to do requires satisfying contradictory needs.

 

For example, we want it to be low cost, but we also want it to be survivable. Or we want range, but we also want control. There is no unmanned silver bullet. Instead, perhaps what we need is an arsenal of many manned and unmanned things. A kind of high, low mix of manned platforms or exquisite unmanned munitions, but paired with or complemented by cheap unmanned things, getting this high loam mix right might be the secret sauce.

 

Paul Scharre, executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security, agrees.

>> Paul Scharre: Some of those munitions are going to be expensive because it might be worth it to have really capable sensors on those munitions to go in and hit difficult targets. We're going to need expensive platforms.

 

It's almost always better to be investing in the archer rather than the arrow, all right? So what I mean, like if you can invest in say a bomber that is more capable and stealthier to getting closer, that allows you to use cheaper munitions, you get to reuse the bomber versus if you've got something that's standoff and then you have to have more expensive munitions that are expendable.

 

But there's a role for low cost systems as well. And in particular because we're in a situation where a lot of the platforms that we have are not going to be produced in very large quantities. That's just the reality. Then having low cost, unmanned or uncrewed systems as adjuncts to that, like some of these low cost aircraft that might be a loyal wingman to an F35 or to a bomber.

 

That's going to help make those crude platforms much more effective, actually. And so I think that that has made a more balanced force, and we don't have one today. We are massively overinvested in large platforms.

>> Julia Macdonald: We've already demonstrated that US desire to create both overwhelming military advantage and remove the human from the battlefield can lead to pressures to increase the cost of technology.

 

So what can the US do to try and decrease the economic cost of unmanned warfare? Well, first and foremost, the US Department of Defense needs to trim its processes to enable new ideas about technology to reach the battlefield at a quicker pace. Here's Mike Brown on how the DoD might be able to bring down costs from the inside out.

 

 

>> Michael Brown: So in that race to be ahead in technology, we have to be conscious of the fact that the winner of a great power competition is not just who invents something, but how quickly that is deployed. We have to look at what are the underlying causes of why does it take so long to bring new capability to war fighters?

 

The shocking fact that I learned was it takes on average 17 years to bring new capability to war fighters. The best case is 7 years and the worst case 27 years. Understandably, you're talking about more complex technologies here. That would be the case for a new generation fighter, a fifth generation fighter going to sixth generation fighter.

 

It should be a lot faster if you're talking about these smaller autonomous systems. And it would be, but they're still going through the same acquisition and budgeting process you'd use for large defense platforms. That's the part that needs to change. So as we think about adoption, we do need a parallel system to specify what we need to acquire it and budget for it.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: And to build that parallel system, we'll need some of those charismatic long term idea entrepreneurs, defense influencers that can weather multiple administrations and congressional budget cycles to make those dramatic changes to defense acquisition. Here's Andrew With some of the historical lessons about what you need to make those big changes.

 

 

>> Andrew Krepinevich: You need a leader with extended tenure. Anybody who's trying to make a big change in an organization, typically there's a lot of resistance to doing things in new ways.

>> Julia Macdonald: You need civilian leaders within the Department of Defense that know enough about service pathologies and how things work inside the Pentagon to be able to build defense narratives about technology and the future of war that co op defeat or sometimes manipulate service corps constituencies.

 

Michael Horowitz former Dasdy on the challenge that faces this current administration to defeat that bureaucracy.

>> Michael Horowitz: You have lots of people with technology backgrounds, and if you look at the confirmation hearings of someone like Feinberger is going to be the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He talked all about the way that he wants to focus on accelerating more low cost autonomy, AI enabled systems, et cetera.

 

Those are all good signs. The thing that we don't know is how successful they will be at navigating the military services and the defense bureaucracy to produce that actual change. One of the challenges that we ran into with the Replicator initiative was that, to reallocate 0.05% of the U.S. defense budget, I mean, the U.S. defense budget is enormous.

 

But to reallocate 0.05 percent of the defense budget, to be able to field those all domain attritable autonomous systems by August 2025 required over 40 different briefings with congressional appropriators and Armed Service Committee members, because it was just moving at the rate of technological change and moving at the speed of relevance, not the speed of the DoD budget process, which is glacially slow on purpose.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: And you'll need a defense industrial base and a manufacturing capacity either in the United States or allied countries that is prepared to adapt, lean in and quickly respond to changes on the battlefield that will require government infusion of cold hard cash, but likely partnered with private sector investment.

 

I asked Mike Brown, who transitioned from leading the Defense Innovation Unit to leading a venture capital company, Shield Capital, that specializes in defense technology, about what the private sector will need in order to meet these demands.

>> Michael Brown: What the private sector is waiting for is more signal, demand signal, we would call it from the Defense Department to say this is going to be important.

 

We're actually gonna start buying in quantity. Replicator is one of the first signs of that. I will say the army has been ahead on ground autonomy and has gotten going with the remote combat vehicle as an example. So there are starting to be some programs here. We need more of those that will stimulate not only more companies that are interested in providing Autonomous systems, but also more investment.

 

Are we moving fast enough? Far enough, fast enough, that's the question is the speed at which this is happening. So I do think there's going to be a lot of pressure to move faster. I think this administration, the Trump administration, second Trump administration is going to be applying that pressure, certainly from what we're hearing.

 

And I think that will be good. The challenge will be is the Congress willing to either increase the amount of money that is going for defense? That's what Senator Wicker has called for. Let's go back to spending 5% of GDP on defense. Your listeners might know that we haven't spent 5% of GDP on defense since the Reagan buildup in the 1980s when he was really trying to spend the Soviets into seeing that they couldn't compete with the US So that means it's been a very long time.

 

So we either need to be spending more money so that there is the discretion in the budget to go buy some of these new technologies or Congress has to say, yeah, maybe we don't need quite as many aircraft carriers. We don't need that extra F35. Now the good news is these are low cost technologies.

 

So for growing one of those large platforms buys you thousands, or in the case of an aircraft carrier, millions of aerial drones. So you don't have to give up too much there, but you have to give up something if you're not willing to spend more. So that's the concern I have is Congress has to participate in this one way or another.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: What is clear is that building the right unmanned arsenal for the future is not as easy as quality versus quantity, mass versus precision, or even on creating just low cost systems. Fundamentally, we as Americans struggle to think about equipping ourselves for the types of wars that we really don't want to fight.

 

Types of wars that look more like Vietnam or World War II than the Gulf War or even the long but far less casualty prone wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the 2000s. Wars that aren't won in the first few salvas, but instead require a long term strategy to sustain conflict.

 

Here's Michael Kaufman.

>> Michael Kofman: Again, the challenge we have is that most of our thinking is around the initial phase of a war which is a high intensity maneuver battle. And we've thought that through to some extent. If the war lasts beyond three months, then actually we might very much end up in a similar cycle of warfare that's characterized by high levels of attrition because it's positional nature or its destruction oriented.

 

And that's very typical for a prolonged conventional war. And a lot of folks don't want to think about the fact that wars between major powers are pretty rarely resolved in the initial combat phase. Because win, lose or draw, it's very hard to knock your opponent out of the fight.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: And this leads us to where we want to end this podcast with China, which would certainly not be a war won or lost in three months against Stacey Petty.

>> Stacie Pettyjohn: John, in terms of what the US needs because American forces had spent so long fighting terrorists in really pretty permissive environments where we would actually fly in really close, we'd have aircraft hovering above the skies, whether they were uncrewed or crewed, and then they would drop these very precise short range weapons on a target and try to minimize the damage.

 

Those are not the attributes that we would need for a war with China. We need missiles with longer range which will be more expensive. We also sometimes would need area effects weapons that aren't very discriminate, that can cause either more damage or a wider area of damage to take out or suppress.

 

Things like airfields that are big, you actually want a really big boom there and to spread out the effects instead of to make it as minimal as possible. We also did not buy anti ship weapons. The US Military across the board basically got out of the anti ship mission because the US Navy was so dominant in the 1990s and 2000s that they stopped buying heavyweight torpedoes, they stopped buying anti ship cruise missiles.

 

The Air Force just completely walked away from the mission which they had adopted at the end of the Cold War. And now we find that sinking ships and that there could be a navy that's not going to sort of sail out and meet the US Navy for a big force on force battleship fight, but more of an amphibious invasion like we're worried about with China and Taiwan and that sinking ships is one of the key operations that would need to be conducted.

 

The other types of missile that we are short on are air defense missiles. The US has invested a lot in long range area air defenses, like the Standard Missile 3, or Standard Missile 6, and the THAAD and Patriot systems, but there are never enough of them. They're the most high demand force element, sort of, I think.

 

In the Joint Force, certainly in the Army. And the army has neglected the cruise missile defense mission and short range air defenses, which we've seen are really important when you're facing a threat from drones. So if we were to end up in a war with China, we would need a lot more cruise missile defenses, which might just be aim9xs, which are relatively old missiles and a launcher, but the Army's just started buying those.

 

We'd also need cheaper munitions to shoot down cheap drones, because right now the cost exchange ratio of doing so with really expensive air defense interceptors is very much not in the US's favor. So finding whether we can improve the munitions, the bullet shot by cannons so that they are capable of taking this out, or developing shorter range rockets or really cheap missiles, or using things that are not kinetic, like lasers or high powered microwaves, are really sort of needed to write that cost exchange ratio.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: It's not clear that the vision of future warfare that comes from beliefs in military revolutions or casualty aversion aligns with the challenges that Stacey outlines. What is clear is that future conflict is not just about range or maneuver, even precision. It's about how these technologies enable a state to fight a conflict all the way up until the point of strategic victory.

 

And that is about how a country sustains costs, whether it be economic or political. And so, in the end, after taking this journey through the halls of the Pentagon, doctrinal revisions, professional military education syllabi, congressional hearings, think tank panels, and ultimately budget lines within the National Defense Authorization, we have become convinced that the rise of unmanned technology should be about how we think about costs.

 

But calculating both economic and political costs of winning a war is not an objective process of balancing Excel sheets. Instead, we make these calculations with assumptions we build from beliefs and identities about technology and the future of war. And this is perhaps the resounding lesson of this series that is ostensibly about technology.

 

We told you at the beginning that if you came to this podcast for technology, that we hope you stay for the people. But let me go one step forward and say I hope what you learned as you stayed for the people is that in order to understand technology, you have to first understand the ideas that made those technologies a reality.

 

And absent strong ideas and influencers that can help shepherd those ideas through the budget process, the American military can become lost in uncertainty, fielding arsenals that fit parochial service interests, but don't fit together to arm a coherent joint theory of war. Our aspiration in this podcast and in the book was to solve a puzzle about why the US Military has invested in the kinds of unmanned systems that now make up its inventory.

 

In the place of this puzzle, we hope that listening to this podcast or in reading the book, there's a newfound power that comes with the self awareness to optimize investments in unmanned systems not free of ideas, beliefs or identities, but recognizing, correcting and embracing these hugely influential forces to hone the American unmanned inventory.

 

The rise of unmanned systems is not inevitable. Instead, it is a reflection of human choices, organizational biases, and political shocks. The very human Hand Behind Unmanned I'm Julia.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I'm Jackie. This is the Hand Behind Unmanned podcast. If you liked it, buy the book. It's by Oxford University Press and available on Amazon.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: Thanks for listening.