A (3:10)

Hey, thanks, Marshall. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks you for having me.

B (3:14)

Yeah, I'm really prompt to talk with you. So just to set the picture at a broad level, today's episode is about the unfolding revolution in robotics and AI that has just vast implications for geopolitics warfare, and weirdly enough, but I think will be intuitive to people, the implications for our lives at home, even if we're not working in foreign and defense policy. So how about you just kick us off by describing what this unfolding revolution is?

A (3:44)

So this unfolding revolution is very similar to something that we saw perhaps a hundred years ago with the onset of the military revolution, when industrialization and mechanization hit warfare. So the major realignment that we're looking at, if you will, is that we are on the verge of a major shakeup in global military affairs. So the robotic military revolution that we're seeing and we're getting hints of is in Ukraine is just the very beginning of the first wave that, say, that leading edge of that of what is going to be at least two waves of the robotic military revolution. And, you know, I think one of the things that this book attempts to do is fill in a lot of that big picture that's been lacking. There's been. Prior to the kickoff in Ukraine, there was a lot of complacency and, you know, a lot of the. The defense industrial complex and think tank world was really focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And, you know, I can tell the story of how the book got started later, but that absence of deeper thinking and the sense that we were getting surprised by change is what really drove me to try to write this book. And so I can. I can paint that big picture for you. So what we're seeing right now in, in Ukraine is really about a dramatic leap in weapon lethality. Right. So what we have here is a situation that's somewhat analogous to what we saw at the beginning of World War I with the onset of industrialization and mechanization. And now we have the onset of robotics and AI, and they're both having a pretty similar impact on the battlefield, actually surprisingly analogous. So that the first impact is a dramatic leap in weapon lethality, that is an increase of 100 to 1000x. In this case today, it's due to universal precision. We can talk about how small drones fit into that and so forth, but that's really the big picture. Universal precision, whether it's from small anti tank missiles, guided artillery, small laser guided bombs, from fixed wing UAVs, all kinds of other things are all same, are all related in that they are ways of putting munitions on targets much more reliably and certainly and lethally than was ever possible before at scale. And what does that mean? It means that those that once again fires are totally suppressing maneuver across the battlefield. Now In World War I we had the same phenomenon with the onset of industrialization in the form of say, machine guns and heavy artillery, right? In those days, those that leap in firepower caused by industrialization allowed those fires, if you will, to completely dominate the maneuver elements of their day, which was foot, infantry, horse cavalry, they were cut to pieces by machine guns and heavy artillery. And as a result, you had a reversion to trench warfare and what we call the crisis of maneuver. Right? No one could make any movement on the battlefield and it became a static attrition warfare. Today, the same thing, it in essence is happening through universal precision. So the first wave that we're seeing of this robotic military revolution is the rise of small, inexpensive precision weapons of all kinds that are allowing them to shut down maneuver again, maneuvered these days being by traditional industrial age platforms, tanks, armored vehicles, even ships and warplanes. And once again in Ukraine, you're seeing this static trench warfare that's opening up a brutal, grinding war of attrition. So this first wave is what we're really dealing with today. And it seems like it's really had its full onset. But what we're seeing is just a toe in the water, right? This wasn't even evident in Ukraine even four years ago when Russia initially invaded. So how did we get out of this before? What is the lesson of history in the 20th century? We broke out of this dominance of fires not by wholeheartedly embracing attrition warfare as the wave of the future. But we had some very forward thinking military leaders in the west that understood that we could embrace the inherent capabilities of mechanization in those days to create entirely new platforms, right? Like tanks, airplanes that would live in that environment. They weren't horseless versions of anything that had been previously common. But they were fundamentally new inventions that really embraced and implemented the inherent advantages that were offered by the new wave of technology that was sweeping the world. And so when we embrace the inherent capabilities of robotics and AI in the military world to create entirely new maneuver platforms that we haven't seen before, that would not have been possible in a pre robotic form, then we will be entering that second wave and we'll know them when we see them, because we won't be referring to them, for instance, as unmanned. Anything else, we're going to see a Cambrian explosion of new robotic systems that we wouldn't recognize today and that will be built for dominance on this emerging precision battlefield. So that's the big picture of what we're seeing today in the military context.

B (9:16)

Yeah, a couple of things. So number one, I really want to focus on. I've read the book. I love the book. Please buy the book, listeners. But when you mentioned horseless, if you haven't read the book, that may just seem like a throwaway line, but there's real implications there because you're making reference to in the book to cars. That obviously could apply to a tank you could think of. Okay, so because it's powered by a motor, it's like a horse in that it takes you places, but there's no horse. So a horseless carriage was what people started calling the automobile at first. But the key thing is, though, and obviously in our sort of conventional story of World War I, we're like, it's crazy that they had horsemen, still the cavalry during an era of industrial warfare. But what's really interesting about the initial period of World War I, there's this great book that I also want to recommend for folks. I just read it a few months ago. It's called the Killing the autumn of 1914, Ypres, and the Afternoon that Cost Germany the War. And it's about the initial first few months of World War I on the Western Front. And the point that the book makes is that those first few months of the war do not fit into this typical stereotype of the story that we think of when it comes to World War I. So there weren't trenches, so things actually moved incredibly quickly. And for those first two months of the war, horses were actually quite useful when it came to scouting, which is what you did with a horse. But taking this back to the horseless carriage point, the purpose of a horse up until 1914 was scouting, getting places quickly useful for the first three months of the war before you will start entrenching like it's a very rapid moving part of the war. It looks much more like World War II in that sort of sense. But if you just said, okay, so a tank, a car, these are horseless, you know, vehicles, platforms, they're just not. Because you did not use a tank for that scouting role. You did not use an automobile for that scouting role. So by using the word horseless, you were just totally not understanding the, or it was setting you up to have a conceptual misunderstanding of what the actual opportunity was. So I just, I just love that context. Or for Rick, hearing what you just said there. So I'd love to hear your response to that.

A (11:32)

Oh yeah, you really get it, Marshall. The, you know, that use of the term horseless and the use of the term unmanned, it really was a pet peeve of mine for years working in this space, in the, in the Pentagon and in the headquarters of the DoD laboratories, when people would say unmanned just because it has that same, that same connotation of not really understanding what's happening. So like when we think of unmanned systems like unmanned planes, unmanned tanks, unmanned ships, it really is like the horseless carriage, which was the first automobile, or the horseless tiller, which was the first tractor. You know, these things seemed amazing right at the time. They seemed futuristic, but they were really just a, you know, a mechanized version of something that was familiar. And all those things that were going to be revolutionary, tanks, aircraft, you know, modern ships, submarines, all those things were yet to be invented. Right? They were not ever going to be a horseless anything. And so the same time today, when you talk about an unmanned system, we're almost blocking our own cognition about what's happening by constraining it to understanding it. It's about unmanning or roboticizing things that we're already familiar with, which is exactly wrong. And, and why is that important? Because it's leading us to be surprised and, and, and, you know, and be confronted on the battlefield with innovations that do, are not stuck in that simplistic unmanned system mindset, but that can have really revolutionary results. So the war in Ukraine, for instance, has really started to shake up those obsolete images. So as a result, the small strike drone, like an FPV drone, has now become the new face of military robotics and AI. And that's pointing us in the right direction towards systems that don't resemble anything that could have existed in a pre robotic form. And that means they embody robotic age design principles like dissociation, things that just aren't relevant to manned platforms. But what we're seeing in Ukraine is just the leading edge of that first wave of the robotic military revolution. So like the warplane and the tank and the submarine, the systems that are going to dominate what will be the iconic systems of this new dawning military industrial age are mostly things that haven't appeared yet. But the last thing I want to say about that is that, you know, since we're talking about Ukraine, is that it's also really serves as a warning because unlike the military revolutions of the past hundred years, the US did not invent the systems that are dominating the war there. The small armed quadrotor drone was actually invented by isis and not even a state, but a small non state terrorist force. And that the revolution, at least the very first wave of this revolution on the battlefield in Ukraine was being driven by the Ukrainians, who are one of the poorest countries in Europe. And also one of the things we talk about in the book is that the first war that really was fully built around robotic warfare was the war of Azerbaijan against Armenia in 2020. Azerbaijan, a tiny country, ranked 60th in the world for military spending. So that's really cautionary. Our situation here is different from that in World War I in the sense that we are not in the driver's seat as a major industrialized leading power. We are not driving this revolution. And in that way, it's actually a lot more akin to. Well, it has aspects that are a lot more akin to, say, the PC revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, where small, inexpensive, but very potent microcomputers, PCs stunned the established mainframe computer industry and they found themselves completely realigned out of business in a few years. And if we're not very careful, we're going to find ourselves in a similar situation. And that's the other half of this big picture. It's not just about how we change to answer the immediate problem of the battlefield today. It's answering that strategic threat to our entire industry, if you will, of global military defense.

B (15:53)

Yeah, another thing I'll add on Ukraine before we move on. I think what's also interesting about The World War I metaphor is there's also a replication of that dynamic where the first few months of the war look much more like the past. And then quickly, the revolution that we're describing really changes things in the sense that the first few weeks and months of the war in Ukraine looked much more like the US invading Iraq in 2003. So you have a massive assembly of Russian military might. They are Charging for Kyiv the way we charge for Baghdad. They're going to be there quickly. Of course, the Russian soldiers have all of their dress parade uniforms.

A (16:36)

Rubbish.

B (16:37)

Ready in the back, because they're gonna take it. Because the story of post Cold War warfare is basically, at the end of the day, the strongest power, the power that spends the most money, the power that has the most power is just going to win. And then the reason why you see the Russian convoys just getting bombed to smithereens by TB2s and other Ukrainian sort of munitions and assets was they were fighting in that old style. And then, of course, we then shift more towards the entrenched version. So it's just so important to understand that the war in Ukraine, especially the first year, is what happens when you see the intersection of the old and the new at the same time. Speaking of which, I'd love to. I sent this to you ahead of time before we did this recording. But I obviously know that there's a limit to historical metaphor. But I'm frustrated by. Because I do a lot of work in the defense and venture capital community. I. I'm frustrated by the hype dynamic. So after the war in Ukraine happened, then we all hear these anecdotes. You now hear people saying, okay, so the aircraft carrier, by definition, because of this FPV thing is over, and therefore we need to have drone carriers. Lots of people who have lots of money sort of like spouting off. And my take on this in terms of situating myself is, no, this is basically just 1917 in the sense that by 1917, you have fully weaponized direct military aircraft, right? So, like, in the first year or so of the war, actually, the, you know, fighter planes, they didn't have machine guns on them, right? Like, it wasn't until 1915 that they even invented the device that let a machine gun shoot through a propeller, which is just like a fascinating concept we react to. Wait, that was actually. That's. That's actually crazy. Like, if you think about it, like, how do you shoot a machine? How do you get the timer so it perfectly goes between the blade on the biplane? So, you know, for those first few months, like, people were literally bringing rifles and pistols up into the air because they were scouting planes. 1917, they solved that. 1917, you have the tank, you have chemical warfare. But the key thing, though, is what both sides were trying to do were using these tactics and technologies to get a breakthrough on the battlefront, but they still just were not enough. It wasn't the tank that broke through in 1918 on the Western Front. It wasn't the ability to deploy mustard gas or mass artillery. It was the fact that Germany was eventually exhausted and you had just the prospect of millions of millions of American doughboys coming across the Atlantic that led to the breakthrough in the summer and fall. So it just wasn't quite there. Is that a useful way of understanding how we can point to these different technological developments, but not then imagine that a swathe of Ukrainian or Russian drones are just going to settle everything tomorrow.

A (19:30)

Right. Well, Marshall, one of the things I love about your podcast is that you do definitely appreciate the relevance of history in the sense, you know, those who not learned from history are doomed to repeat it. Things don't happen exactly the same way, but the dynamics really are really similar. What you talked about in the Battle of the Frontiers and so on during the early days of World War I actually is, you're right, very similar or analogous to what we're seeing in Ukraine, because those were also some of the bloodiest battles of World War I. Right. Some of the casualties, we don't think about those battles so much anymore, but they were traumatic for Europe because the numbers of casualties that were reached either from those 1914 battles all the way up to the Battle of the Somme were just astonishing. And that when what we're seeing in Ukraine is when the Russians invaded in 2022, just like then, as you pointed out, they used those mechanized maneuver forces, which was battalion after battalion of tanks and armored vehicles, which were the dominant military platforms in and formations of this previous, say 50 years. The Ukrainians defeated that initial invasion not using machine guns this time, but using those small, highly lethal precision robotic weapons of all kinds. You mentioned the TB2s, right? Those, the laser guided bombs dropped by TB2s were key to blocking some of the convoys headed toward Kyiv. Also there were a large number of shoulder fired smart anti tank missiles, much of which were provided by NATO, but some of which were Ukrainian. And also, you know, a surprisingly effective small use in the early days of small grenade dropping hobby drones through a unit called Aero Razvitka, which was actually a unit of civilian volunteers who had decided to take some of the innovations. They saw that from ISIS in the Middle east and a few others, and see if they could develop a combat capability for small grenade dropping hobby drones. And they turned out to have a much larger effect on turning back those initial thrusts toward Kyiv than anybody would have expected. But the supply of most of those weapons was limited. Right. So what Ukraine did is they went all in on One category of weapons that they could actually get their hands on, they could make and afford in unlimited numbers. And so those small drones have done the job just like early PCs, and they've been so effective that now both sides have effectively abandoned their previous mechanized maneuver forces and made precision fires using drones the focus of their entire war effort. You know, we see the effects on land, and you also see the similar dominance of robotic precision fires on sea and in the air. Right? So ships in the Black Sea warplanes as well, have basically been banished from the battle area and threatened even at bases and harbors hundreds of kilometers away from the front lines, like the. The Ukrainian raid on the Russian strategic bomber bases during Operation Spiderweb. So when you're talking about hype, though, I think one of the things that we really struggle with in the west is that we lack this larger context, some of which you try to fill in in the first chapter of the book by looking at the dynamics of the last hundred years of robotic warfare development and some of the combat history that even military folks have forgotten and its relevance for today. Because what we're seeing and what I see inside the Pentagon is the same phenomenon that you see when you take a bunch of kids to a youth soccer game, right? Everybody runs around the field chasing after the ball and. Or same thing in youth hockey. I have some relatives who are youth hockey players, and if they're untrained, they'll just chase the puck around the ice in a big clot of folks all focused on, hey, let's get to the puck, right? And today, now, that puck is small uas or small drones. But.

B (23:31)

And what does UAS stand for?

A (23:33)

Unmanned Aerial Systems. Yeah, that's the. That's defense speak for small drones like quad rotors and so on. But, you know, just like World War I and those initial battles was not about machine guns, it was about something bigger and more transformative than that. What we're seeing in Ukraine is not about drones. They are a manifestation of it. But if we just focus on that, the way some of the military leadership is focusing on it today, saying, we got to make lots of drones, it's all about drones. Make as many drones as we can. We need drones. That's part of it. But we're just chasing the puck again, and we're setting ourselves up to be once again surprised and failing to anticipate the next thing, which is going to create the next wave of hype which is coming behind that. And if we're going to get out of this, you know, chase the puck around the ice and continue to be surprised by innovations by others. We've got to get to where we are thinking ahead and in effect skating to where the puck is going, as they say. And we need to get back into the position where we are driving the next concepts and getting ahead of this so that others are reacting to us and not us reacting to others.

B (24:42)

So something you could probably tell that I like to read about these topics as a civilian who's just trying to understand this. And I think a lot of what I'm trying to do with this show on this episode specifically is offer folks who are in policymaking positions or who have to think about this for a living a framework for understanding something. And the thing that's interesting about the takeaways from the readings on Just like the US Foreign and defense policy experience this century has been, there's been two waves of narratives around the balance between focusing on the present and focusing on the future. So during college I'm at the University of Oregon. I'm as separate from things as you could be. So I went through a Iraq War phase. I was super, super interested in counterinsurgency. Fred Kaplan's the Insurgents, about David Petraeus and transforming the US military in 06 to actually confront what was actually happening in Iraq, is one of my favorite books of all time. I really recommend it for people. But the thing is, when you read those books that were usually published between 2005, so like Tom Ricks's fiasco is behind me here all the way through 2013, 2014, what they talk about is the problem in the Pentagon was no one in the Pentagon wanted to do occupation. And that's going to sound kind of weird to people who don't focus on the military. They're sort of like, the military likes to kill people and do invasions. But no, the military likes to win wars and win battles. But structurally, especially post Vietnam, we've been tremendously disinterested in the it's called post conflict stability operations. That's not of our interest. You want to go in, you want to get out. And like that's the deal. Like people love in the military, especially in the 90s and early 2000s. Desert Storm is great because you go, you wreck Saddam's incredible for the time army. And then unlike the Iranians, it doesn't take us eight years to do it. We do it in 100 hours. That's their scenario. So then when you actually run into year three of Iraq, where there are EFPs and there are thousands and thousands of Americans getting killed in a counterinsurgency war. That's just not what they wanted to do. And Secretary Gates when he came in, and then David Petraeus when he took over in Iraq, were trying to get the Pentagon to focus on this problem. So Upgrade us from Humvees to MRAPs, because the MRAPs are mine resistant. And that's. We need to focus on. And then the people in the Pentagon, they have all these anecdotes in their books. The people in the Pentagon are saying, but the MRAPs are going to be useless in a. In a conflict with China, in great power competition. We're not going to need these things in, like, five to 10 years. So we need to focus on the future. And that, you know, Secretary Gates is like, no, focus, focus, focus. Save the people who are dying in the field today. So that was the sort of narrative at the time. Today. Now they say what you basically said, which is, as this revolution was unfolding, we weren't focused on this technological future. We were focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I love asking this question, the guests who have the context to give me a somewhat serious answer on this, which is basically, how should people in the Pentagon navigate this balancing dynamic? Because both sides. Both sides are both correct in the sense that we struggle to deal with the present challenge. And you have to remember the future. And it seems like we always just overbalance in one direction or the other. So, you know, in a. In a 2006 when we literally didn't have enough body armor for people, if I were an assistant secretary of whatever, I would just say, I don't care, George, about your future drone things. I need to get men and women who are dying their body armor. That's both correct, but also missing the big picture. So how do we balance this? I just love to hear your answer to this.

A (28:24)

Oh, yeah. The problem you're pointing to is the one that really frustrated me during the whole global war on terror period. Right. Because I was at that time working as an international management consultant in my civilian job. And then as a reservist, I'd put on my uniform and come to work in the Pentagon or at the headquarters of the Air Force Research Lab where I was writing the Air Force Science and Technology strategy. And I would be struck by the dissonance of what I saw in the way that the, say, civilian CEOs were looking at technological threats and those that the military wasn't. We were so focused on, you know, the puck at the time was trying to deal with the counterinsurgency problems in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, you know, when we were working for, say, you know, 80 hours a week plus, not with the sense of urgency, trying to help some tech CEO address the potential threat that he saw that was confronting his industry, say, do a new technological innovation that was upsetting their industry segment or whatever, there was a huge sense of urgency, like from Andy Grove, the former CEO. Intel famously said, in tech, only the paranoid survive. And they were embodying that. And we would, you know, plan M and A or mergers and acquisition things or new product launches and so forth for them to help to try to get ahead of those changes. I could see a much bigger tsunami of change coming at the defense establishment when I put my uniform on. But there was none of that sense of urgency. We were all focused in the puck at that time, which was trying to get out of the quagmire in Iraq or in Afghanistan and deal with those counterinsurgency things. But we do have a long history of planning for the wrong war. The same dynamic you were mentioning there, Marshall, led us into a lot of trouble in Vietnam, because we went into Vietnam just from the Air Force's perspective, let's say equipped for the war that everybody knew was the war we had to prepare for, which is the war against the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. So we went and fought a jungle war in Vietnam with an air force that was built full of interceptors and nuclear bombers to fight a war of nuclear annihilation with the Soviets. That never happened. And we had nothing, really, that was set aside for that contingency of, you know, what if that's not the war we're actually going to fight? What if we're going to have to fight a different war?

B (30:45)

So, quick follow up on that, because I think it's fascinating. I spent a little too much time on social media, but I saw a great Facebook reel about this exact dynamic because I want to make your reference to the interceptor very clear, though. So, like, obviously an intercept.

A (30:58)

Not.

B (30:59)

Not obviously, but like an interceptor, it's high altitude. It's going after TU95 Russian bears, which are the way they would deliver nuclear bombs if there was ever a massive strike against the United States. So you had. Because once again, because it's the 50s and you have missile technology and even the U2s are getting shot down. The purpose is they're super high in the air, so they could survive as long as possible. But that is the opposite of what you need when you're fighting to your Point a jungle war. So they ran into this situation where it wasn't the Interceptors. So you're not super excited about the sort of century series. So the F1 hundreds, the F101s, the F04s, F06, they're like 1950s vintage because you needed to just get on the ground. And they actually found that it was their piston driven, sort of very vintage, not the sexy things that are actually the most useful when it came to ground combat. So that's what eventually led to the creation of the A10. It was like, how do we create close air support, friendly, modern aircraft? So like, that's just like. I think that's such like an evocative example, but I really wanted to give deepest understanding of.

A (32:05)

And you, for a civilian, you really know your military history. That's. I'm impressed. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. The other aircraft like the A37 Dragonfly and the OV10 Bronco and things like that all turned out to be really important. Even though after the Vietnam War ended, all those things got, you know, basically sent to the junkyard. We're not doing that anymore. We're never going to have to fight a war like this. But turns out.

B (32:27)

Sorry, I hate to hate to interrupt because I love hearing you talk about it, but I just want to sort of highlight what you say because I worry that the whole, you know, you're a civilian and you know a lot about this topic, I just want to really dive in on it because it's less about me showing off my free time reading and more just that my reading of history is that if we look at the geopolitical, military strategic disasters of the past 30 years, so I'm 33, so my lifetime, it was just that civilians did not understand these topics in almost every single category. So the thing that I really want to shout out for people is that this. So I don't know if you're, you know, I'm a. This is sort of a joke. Like, are you a Civil War dad or are you a World War II dad in terms of like the sort of hobby you pick up. And I very much am a World War II dad, though I'm getting more intrigued by the Civil War. But the point is, is that like, I actually think it's the job of civilians who are interested in these topics and even work in D.C. to do this, because you're never going to get. Because most of these people aren't going to like enlist or become officers or go work at the Pentagon. But once again, because of the civilian nature of our military, civilian control. We in terms of non military men, end up making those final decisions. So I just think, I just want to highlight how, like I want other people to sort of do the work that I'm doing as a model.

A (33:45)

Yeah, that's really important. I mean, we need Churchills and others like that who really understand the dynamics of conflict if we're going to win in the future. Right. It's not just a military problem. And one of the things I really emphasize in Beast in the Machine is that this, you know, and the reason why the whole book is written for a broad audience and not just for an inside the beltway or military audience is that this realignment that's coming is not just like the world wars. It's not just going to be something that affects military folks and professionals. It's going to affect everybody. Right. It's going to be potentially traumatic for all of us. It's going to affect the way that we live, the kinds of threats we think about every day when we wake up, the types, the ways in which our societies are going to have to change and adapt, just like the societies did. Say with the onset of industrialization or the onset of gunpowder, those things completely revolutionized not just the battlefield, but the entire shape of the global map and the way we live our lives. Right. There's one section in the book where we talk about what the invention of gunpowder on the western European battlefield did. It was originally just thought to be the nice a surprise to spring on your enemy during your next siege in your medieval siege warfare phase. But it turned out that the knock on effects of that were to make castles indefensible, which basically made small states and principalities indefensible, which caused the entire map of Europe to basically be remodeled from a patchwork of small kingdoms and principalities into large modern states. It also caused the collapse of the feudal system which had ruled Europe for hundreds of years. So, you know, more and more wars were no longer fought as contests between nobles. They were fought because of mass movements and revolutions among the common people. Because now an individual with a firearm could easily kill a knight. Riding a fortune on military hardware basically made those tanks of the battlefield of their day obsolete. But it led to, you know, the enlightenment, you know, modern politics. And so much that changed after that. It was not just a minor topic for military experts. And to go back to what you were getting at before, which is about the realities of modern war, you know, that's something I really emphasize as well in the book there's an entire chapter called no push button wars, right? And the implications of robotic warfare on strategy and the balance of power. So one of the traps that we do get stuck in is this inside the beltway phenomenon of technological determinism. And it happens over and over again, despite all the lessons of the real world. And you know, the future robotic warfare is not going to be like Ender's game or a robot soccer tournament or anything like that. We can get focused on concepts like the kill chain and closing kill chains and destroying targets. But as we keep learning again and again and again, wars are not the same thing as battles. You can win a battle, you can kill, destroy all the targets and win a battle, but you still lose the war. And we've had that experience in Vietnam, we've had it in Afghanistan, we had it in Iraq. In all of those, even without robotic weapons, we had total technological dominance over our adversaries. According to our own theories of war winning strategy, we should have easily won those conflicts. But clearly our adversaries, who we outclassed by, you know, by orders of magnitude, in some ways, they were the ones that end up winning and keeping the battlefield and imposing the system that they had wanted politically. And we were then ones who ended up walking away from those conflicts in defeat. Not because we lost the battles, because we lost the war, because we weren't fighting wars the way they really are fought, especially now in the 21st century where they're getting even more complex with hybrid warfare, gray zone conflict, economic and other dimensions of war that weren't ever as explicit in the past. So if we don't learn from those lessons and we say, hey, the future of robotic warfare is just going to be closing kill chains, putting warheads on foreheads, as they say sometimes, we're going to set ourselves up for another failure. Those that are going to win are those that can apply these transformational changes that we're seeing to the real messy, complex, volatile, ambiguous, and really politically driven conflicts that we are seeing and we're going to see throughout the 21st century. And that's going to require a big shift in thinking.

B (38:33)

And I just got to add this to what you said, because I'm not trying to force you to get political. So answer this question ever you want to. But I've, as a once again civilian who's like really interested in the inside baseball of what actually happened during these wars, one of the I entirely understand why a lot of Americans of all ages have a real war on terror hangover. And as every aspect of our societies become increasingly politicized. One of those politicized narratives was these generals, these officers who led American forces during the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. They lost these wars, we lose these wars. And once again, this is why civilians have to care about these topics. Is no like to your point, we won the battles. We took Fallujah, we took Mosul, we kicked the Taliban out of Afghanistan and Kabul by December. The issue is not the actual, this isn't like, let's say the first few years of the army of the Potomac during the civil war where we're just literally losing these big battles. No, we are winning the battles. The issue, if you have beef of our performance during the forever war, it's with the political class who are civilians in the sense that the, you know, this is Clausewitz, like war is politics by the, by their means. The political objective that we established was not compatible with our model of just like winning battles. So the political definition of did we win the war in Iraq was is there the defined. The answer the Bush administration came to by 05 was is there a politically stable and western friendly Iraq that we are confident leaving with stability in hand and our Middle Eastern interests protected? There is a gap between being able to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq on the ground in actual battles and that actual outcome because that outcome is determined by our Sunnis and Shias going to work together in the Iraqi Parliament. Are elections going to be stable? Is there rule of law? That's a totally different question. So I just wanted to highlight that because it's just like, because if we listen to the sort of why can't we win wars today and then blame it on the generals and the Pentagon and the military. What's so difficult to understand if you don't think about these issues in a day to day capacity is what was. I don't want to say we were lucky, you know, in the case of World War I and World War II, but those two defining those wars that really like, you know, set the American imagination when it comes to war. There was perfect sync between winning battles and achieving the political objective. So this trade off we're describing just didn't exist. But and by the way, maybe this is going to change given what we're talking about today, maybe these will be in sync again. But just for the past 20 years, just totally unrelated to the actual political objectives that the governing civilian led military really identified.

A (41:35)

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And you know, I think that I can bring it back to the, the context of this Realignment due to the bottom up nature of this revolution, which I think dovetails really nicely with what you're talking about there. You know, there's not going to be any reversion to some kind of a push button war. If we had fought, if we had somehow developed AI and robotics during the age of Napoleon, it would have been much, much easier to simply robotize what we had then. Right? You had a wonderful battle which determined the outcome of the war. Both armies just came together in a gentlemanly way, put their troops on the battlefield. They were all clearly identified. One side wore red, the other side wore blue or whatever. They moved like game pieces on a board, much like AI likes to play, you know, chess or go. And everything was pretty explicit. And all the individual soldiers had to do was march and aim and shoot in robotic ranks, much like, you know, a robot could easily do today. But that's not what modern war is like. Right? And so when we were talking about robotizing and AI enabling warfare, we're not talking about that style of warfare, we're talking about the messy and ambiguous complex warfare that we've been fighting and that honestly, you know, the Ukrainians are fighting in Russia. It's not simply a standup fight on the battlefield. These are long urban slugfests with a lot of civilians there. There's military, excuse me, military aspects, economic aspects. A lot of the victories are actually more political and meant to change the political dynamic, like by embarrassing the enemy and showing their dysfunction rather than by achieving necessarily a, a basic decisive event on the battlefield, all those things. Winning the political struggle is as much of a, of a, at front of mind for the combatants there as actually destroying enemy targets. But you know, the, the bottom up aspect of this is going to actually make all of those ambiguous, confusing aspects of modern war much more dramatic because they are actually, it's actually easier to empower those things than it is to try to revert war back to a stand up, as we say, trinitarian model of warfare, where you have the military show up, conduct the war, tell you, you know, the leadership, whether they won or lost, and basically everybody goes on with their lives. So I think a great warning that I think has been underheated is the warning that's posed by the example of the Houthis. So the Houthis themselves, it's not about them themselves, but the fact that a not even a second rate military nation, but a third rate militia force that doesn't even control the entirety of its own country could, with the use of small precision Nuclear or small precision robotic weapons that have been provided them, in their case by Iran, were able to force the United States and 20 other nations into what the US Navy called the most intense naval battles Since World War II in the red Sea. The fact that a previously inconsequential power could be so potent to force the US Navy into those kinds of struggles that actually occupied us for months and months and in some ways still are, should be a real warning as to what happens. Just like in the PC revolution, when users that never would have previously had access to capabilities that could really threaten a global superpower like we have, like we are now have those accessible and numbers. And once again, just like the Ukrainians, just like the, just like isis, just like the Azerbaijanis, they didn't need a world leading superpower economy like we have or a trillion dollar military budget in order to get those capabilities, but they were good enough to hold our systems at risk. It's not just the Houthis that are getting those right. How easy would it be for a hundred other groups like the Houthis to similarly arm up? That's the future world that I think we may be looking at. That is the consequence. Just like the onset of that gunpowder was into that World War II or excuse me, into that medieval stable environment. Introducing this bottom up revolution, a really potent, inexpensive but powerful robotic weapons to an entire cast of new players across the globe, is really going to make things much more complicated, threatening and dangerous for leading powers like the United States. And that's that in some ways keeps me up at night, so to speak. More than worrying about whether Russia or China today has the advantage in robotic weapons. It's that larger picture of what's going to happen in the decades to come that we may not be even appreciating as a major threat, but could be the thing that ultimately changes the course of history.

B (46:44)

So for this last section I want to just bring up some more historical analogies that kind of serve as warnings. So for the first one, and this is from my Iraq War focus, I'm really haunted by the 1990s story that relates to the revolution in military affairs. So RMA was a concept that came out of the late Cold War. It was re propagated and Rand and the various think tanks, parts of the infrastructure and their point was technological development. So the rise of pilotless systems, laser guided bombs, all these different technologies were creating a revolution that would serve to increased speed, mobility, precision, lethality. The different concepts you've talked about and the danger here is that was Both true, right? The example everyone sort of gives is like, even during. It's actually crazy. Even during Vietnam. This is also in Fred Kaplan's I'll be sure to publish a list of books I reference in this episode. Fred Kaplan's excellent book Daydream Believers, which is about how grand ideas wrecked American power in the 2000s. He talks about how there was this, like there was this bridge in Vietnam and despite all of our aircraft, Cold war technology, the McNavera Ford Wiz Kid driven Defense Department, we just could not knock out this bridge. We finally knock off the bridge, it's back up in a few weeks. And we were just four years trying to knock out a single bridge. Desert Storm, we send in F117s and precision guided strikes, and we actually just totally wrecked the Iraqi command and control infrastructure at a technological level that no one could have anticipated 30 years earlier. And people were like, there it is. The revolution in military affairs. Now, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was very much a part of this crowd. So when he comes in, and this is also a popular misunderstanding of him, Donald Rumsfeld was very hostile to the military establishment. So when he came in before September 11, there was actually, there was a, there was a bit of reporting saying that he was going to be one of the first casualties of the Bush cabinet because the Pentagon brass and industry hated him. Because he came in saying, you've got this crazy post Cold War military that's bloated and you have your programs and we're going to cancel these programs. He canceled this, like useless Cold War vintage, like mobile artillery platform that we just did not need. And that's what he. And he was like, instead, let's not do that. Let's focus on the rma. Faster, lighter, cheaper, smaller. Okay. I'm sure a lot of people are nodding along. That makes a lot of sense. That rhymes with what we're discussing here. Well, then we invade Iraq and that lighter, cheaper, faster, RMA military is not up to the political task, which they have no ability to determine in terms of what they're actually doing, of actually occupying a country. So I would love to hear what your takeaway is because I just, I just hear too many people, because it's fashionable saying now we lean into this when we just 20 years ago. We don't get to choose our choices. We don't get to decide what the world looks like. So what is your lesson from the RMA story in terms of how we should think about this revolution 20 years later?

A (49:58)

Great, I've got a hot Take on this, and that is one of the assumptions that factored into the whole RMA and still in a lot of cases dominates the discussion in the Pentagon is exactly what was implicit in the story, as you told it accurately, which is the entire debate was how do we want to fight in the future? Right. Do we want to fight with precision weapons and ISR intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems? Do we want to fight, you know, more of a traditional way that we had before? That was the debate how do we want to fight? The bottom up nature of what we're seeing in this robotic first wave is really the question that's out there is not how do we want to fight is how do others want to fight us? What are they going to impose upon us now that they have the capacity to do things to us that they never had before? Right. Who is going to be in the driver's seat for this next, next change? And if we are like the, you know, like the, the knights and nobles of the medieval period, you may find ourselves surprised that it's what we want is irrelevant. Like, you know, similar, like, like the French and others who decided what they wanted to fight in the beginning of the, in the end of World War I, the beginning of World War II, with the Maginot line and so forth. What turned out it wasn't up to them, it was somebody else's idea and their attack that completely upset the way that they saw the world. And so, you know, we, I think, are in this position where as long as we're thinking about what do we want to do, how would we prefer to fight and not what is the threat that is coming at us by the decisions that are being made elsewhere. We are going to be this position of we are a Digital Equipment Corporation, we are IBM in the 1970s. You know, we're looking at small drones still and say, oh, small drones, yeah, it's like PCs, Apple computer, small company, not a threat to us. You know, we are at risk of this kind of complacency where we may find ourselves not only threatened, but potentially, if you will, put out of business within a surprisingly short period of time by being confronted with a revolution that is not of our own making. So we've got to have a little bit of humility, I think, more than we had in the revolution in military affairs, to say, you know, we don't have the luxury of doing this on our own pace and in our own way. We have got to look, we are to realize that we are in the crosshairs in the center of the bullseye of a lot of different players that would love to knock us off the top of the geopolitical hill. And now weapons are being placed in their hands that offer them the opportunity to do that, especially while they have this window of advantage where we have not really seized on or recaptured the advantage that, say, the second wave of the robotic revolution might offer us if we can get there first. But we have a window of vulnerability now that puts us at great risk. And, you know, one of the, you know, the book talks about the, the kinds of attacks that we might see in the future that we're now becoming ever more exposed to. But that RMA type thinking, we've got to get beyond that. And the idea that it's up to us how this all unfolds. The world of the future, if we're not watching out, may not be of our own making.

B (53:16)

Quick thing before I get to my last two questions. I love that answer because. And to once again place everything, context. So if you think about 2002, during the lead up to the Iraq War, there's this famous thing where General Eric Shinchenki testified before Congress that it would actually take far more soldiers, Marines, sailors, airmen, et cetera, to actually invade Iraq than the RMA inflected DoD under Rumsfeld actually wanted. And this was like a political controversy that sort of led to Shinchi Jackie's career going down the toilet, though he did get to be Secretary of Veterans affairs. So he had a, you know, he had a future there still. Regardless, I'm under the Obama administration. But the point being, to your framework, that was a choice, like it was entirely up to us. Do we send 150 or do we send 400,000? And I just love your point in that. That's just not. Talk about metaphors that just do not apply there. That's like not the deal here. So that's super, super helpful and I thank you for that. So for the last two. So number one, going back to the World War II, World War I dynamic, critical question, especially in post Civil War, or basically post Crimean War, 18, 50s warfare, has been which sort of side is favored? Offense versus defense. And when you get offense versus defense incorrect, it's disastrous. So critically, leading into World War I, people thought offense was favored, which is what led to the horrible deaths in the first year of the war. Because the focus wasn't building trenches. It wasn't like, how do we get machine guns there? It was like, hey, like, how do we. It's even funny. The, you know, Maxim guns Started being deployed during the, during the Spanish American War. And there's this great book by Chivers called the Gun and it talks about how they were used. They put the Maxim guns and they would move them forward. They basically treated it like it was artillery, thinking the machine gun was an offensive weapon when actually it was a defensive weapon. So the French, then there was literally this cult of the offensive French. Alan will win the battles the way we won Bittery's battles in the 19th century. And that led to millions of deaths because they're charging and moving and moving when actually you want to be on the defensive. They then though get this wrong and overcorrect during World War II because they're like, okay, defense won. U.S. defense will win it again. We're going to build the Maginot line and we're going to just focus on being strong and we're going to withstand the Germans until England arrives and then body, then we go on the offensive. Yeah, that doesn't matter. Blitzkrieg happens. Mover warfare happens. The Germans have Stuka dive bombers and they're integrating them with their Panzers. And this is totally different form of warfare. So today, and maybe this is the bottom up dynamic you're referring to. Does this favor offense defense or is that an irrelevant concept given the revolutionary change you're describing?

A (56:03)

Marshall, I wish that all the debates inside the Pentagon were as insightful as that one because you know, once again, just saying how many drones can we make? How quickly is not anywhere near as insightful as getting after the big dynamics which you were alluding to and which I really try to give everyone a background in, in Beast in the Machine. So, you know, talking about the, the onset of the machine gun and so forth, that is an example I raised specifically. But to your point about the dynamics of offense versus defense, yes. The rise of the robotic revolution in military affairs is really changing that dynamic on the battlefield in many ways. Specifically, with regard to the balance of offense versus defense, there is a argument to be made and you can point to evidence that being able to apply universal precision due to small robotic precision weapons as we're seeing, favors the offense because it allows one side to strike first with tremendous effect. Right. You could have a, a Pearl harbor type effect that would say a hundred times more efficient and effective. Every one of those bombs at Pearl harbor had sunk a battleship. If every one of those airfield bombs had destroyed a, a line of fighter planes, you know, it would have been game over for the US Very quickly. But you can also point to the battlefield in Ukraine and say, hey, the Ukrainians have been using these small precision weapons, FPV drones and whatnot, extremely effectively to blunt and destroy Russian armored offensives. And they have done that as well. And so when we peel back the onion a little bit, what we actually see is that it's not offense or defense, specifically, that precision robotic weapons favor. It's the side that has the initiative, the side that can find, fix, and attack the enemy's forces first. And when you see the. The triumphs of, well, the, you know, the great defensive battles like Avdiivka and the Eastern Front in Ukraine, what you see is a really, really strong robotically powered defense that's, you know, inflicting, say, in that case, 40,000 casualties on the Russians in order to take one small suburb. But they haven't been having a passive defense or even like, you know, like barbed wire and machine gun nests did in World War I. It's an active defense, like what Chinese military doctrine calls offense in defense. It's basically they attacked the attacking forces before the attacking forces could reach and attack them. They saw their attack developing, targeted them, struck them with, in effect, offensive attacks before they could get close enough to engage, and let the survivors basically flee back to their own side. So it's not, you know, that tight coupling of offense, defense, attack, counter attack is going to be determined by initiative. And the speed and lethality of robotic weapons is going to help ever more so in the future, determine which side has the initiative and which side can seize the initiative from the other at any given moment. So I love that thinking, and that's exactly the kind of question that more people should be asking.

B (59:17)

Almost like I read your book, which is exciting. So the last question would be, I'd love to hear what you think. Given this dynamic, the modern equivalent of the battleship in the 1920s, 1930s would be. So the context here is Billy Mitchell, famous American Army Air Corps aviator, he famously uses. He has this theory that actually naval ships are vulnerable to aircraft. So he famously proves they use a decommissioned German vessel in 1921. And he hits the target, he sinks the target. And famously, the military establishment was not happy with this conclusion because it's an era where it's all about the big ships. It's the dreadnought, it's the battleship. It's all of the sort of ships that were sunk at Pearl Harbor. And the implications of a single aircraft being able to sink a ship is tremendous. And the implication of that ability would be, hey, actually the battleship. And the idea that you're gonna have Russia, Russia, Japanese war, Battle of Tsushima. You have the big climatic battle, you have the Battle of Jutland where the two navies duke it out and then eventually there's a winner and that settles the war. That's over. Or the battleship is the central platform is over. Once a plane can do that and then that should lead you to conclude. Okay, aircraft carriers, that's what we do. And you know, famously like the Germans, the German Kriegsmarine, they had thoughts about aircraft carriers, but they put their attention into battleships. And the Japanese, they had aircraft carriers, but they had the battleship. They built this, they built the super battleships, the super battleships. They were waiting for the climactic battle of Tsishima, which they won against the Russians where they would finally knock down, drag out fighter against the U.S. navy. And it never happened. It didn't matter. Obviously the Battle of Midway, Coral Sea, those are big battles. But they weren't like the, you know, cataclysmic. This is the big battle because the battleship just didn't matter. So I don't like the one press long question, but this is like my obsession. The one thing I don't like is the obvious people. This is a common comparison people make. People take the say like, okay, that's the aircraft carrier because the aircraft carrier will be hit by missiles that are like long range. They could go a thousand miles. It's going to be hit by drones, it's vulnerable, it's expensive. And I think what that misses is the civilian side of the military, which is the aircraft carriers don't just exist in order to launch a strike force of F35s against the Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Aircraft carriers exist because we want to do power projection. So an aircraft carrier is still going to be useful in a way that a battleship that's designed for a cataclysmic battle isn't. Because we could still send an aircraft carrier to a region of the globe where there is like controversy. So you can still send an aircraft carrier to, let's say like we sent like we could have sent aircraft carriers to Rwanda during the genocide of the 1990s, where we're not afraid that the, you know, you know, the Hutus of the Tutsis are going to send like, you know, Chinese missiles at us. But we just want to say, hey, calm down, stop. We have this power. So maybe you were going to say the aircraft carrier is the battleship. But like, I just wanted to say that, like, I don't quite like when people give that answer.

A (62:40)

Yeah, no, that's great. That's this kind of strategic thinking I try to come at from my business strategist background. Right. The correct strategy for employing every new technology is not going to be the same for every, say, company because the company that you're in, the market segment and the strengths that you come with are going to be different for every company. So in the case of robotic weapons, some that do not have global power projection needs may be able to employ weapons like Ukraine has in a way that emphasizes small, shorter range weapons because they don't need to be able to conduct a war in Taiwan or somewhere. But when you're talking about the United States with our global power projection capabilities and the, and our preference to fight wars expeditionary instead of on our own territory, our own borders, we have to be able to have what we call strategic mobility. Right. Which sometimes means, yes, you still need to have some big efficient platforms to be able to get your forces into the theater to where the fight is. And those can be like aircraft carriers or intercontinental bombers, and those may be the platforms from which you deploy the small precision weapons and other systems. And when you talk about the battlefield, the battleship example, I love that example too because it's once again, it's really analogous to some of the things we're seeing today. You know, the battleship did go away as a result of the onset of, of early, let's say, examples of precision where a, you know, a $20,000 aircraft could sink a $40 million battleship once you had a precise enough weapon like the radar guide or radio guided ones in World War II, that could actually hit the ship on the first try. And they are seeing something very analogous to that with the small drones being able to take out multimillion dollar tanks on the battlefield in Ukraine. But when something becomes, quote, unquote obsolete, it doesn't necessarily disappear from the battlefield or from the thinking of strategists until there is something else available that can do the same job that that thing had been doing better than it could until then, you're just stuck using that and trying to, for instance, put more and more anti aircraft guns on top of the battleship to try to help it survive. But until you got something else, that's what you're going to have to be stuck using. And so a lot of what we talk about in the, in the, say the, the second wave of the robotic revolution we get into in the book is what are the systems going to look like that replace, say the tank, the guided missile destroyer and things like that. And there's a Lot of, I believe an entire Cambrian explosion, if you will, of new systems that are going to come out. And some of those principles, such as dissociation are outlined in the book that will guide what they will look like. There's no longer a need to have all aspects of a military platform combined all together onto the same vehicle or same hull. That allows them all to be targeted and destroyed conveniently at the same time. We have dissociated systems, like, let's say swarms, that can embody the same or even greater capability than a single integrated platform may have in the industrial mechanized age, but have tremendously greater survivability as well as flexibility and tactical utility and so forth that can revolutionize how we conduct actual maneuver warfare the way that we want to. We just got to say, hey, we're going to steal a march on our enemies, get to that second wave before they do. Just like we did with embracing, you know, carrier aviation and whatnot before our adversaries did in earlier age. Get there first and find out that we've taken that top of the mountain again before they do. But you know, Marshall, one of the things I also wanted to, to close with was that we're talking about this disruption of the international space. One of the things that I think everybody's got to stay in important mind of is we have been unique in that our development of robotic weapons for a hundred years, ever since Nikola Tesla came out with the first one, was in order to provide this sort of sanitized and scientific approach to warfare which should be more ethical and allow the more, say, civilized countries to defeat or deter the more aggressive ones. But this great equalization that's happening due to the bottom up nature of this revolution today means that all these weapons are getting put into the hands of many others that don't have that approach to warfare. Right. There are a lot of others from ISIS to Russia today who see just bludgeoning the civilian population into crying out for surrender as the path to victory. It's part of their way of warfare. And if we're not careful, these weapons are going to end up in the hands of a lot of those who don't care about the ethics that we obsess about. I think I, you know, the military that I've served in for 30 years is all about those, those ethics. And I really believe that that's essential to avoid destroying ourselves as a species. But if we allow others to seize control of this revolution the way that the PC makers seized control of the computer revolution, they're not going to have our values. And we could find ourselves in a very bad place. Subject and vulnerable to a whole wave of attacks and revolutions and realignments that are forced upon us by those who really don't share our concerns and have little pity for our, you know, the fate that we can force upon us.

B (68:15)

That is an excellent place to end. George. This has been great. The book is Beast in the How Robotics and AI Will Transform Warfare and the Future of Human Conflict. Thank you for joining me on the realignment.

A (68:26)

Thank you, Marshall. I had a great time. Thanks for having me on.