They were simply new versions of old things

Monday, March 21st, 2022

Many of the high-tech weapons systems that Rumsfeld and others billed as “transformational” were not actually transformational, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain) — at least not in the way that Andrew Marshall and like-minded thinkers intended, when they proposed a “revolution in military affairs” years earlier:

These systems did not represent better, faster ways to close the kill chain. They were simply new versions of old things.

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The bigger issue is that most of these allegedly information age military systems struggle to share information and communicate directly with one another to a degree that would shock most Americans. For example, the F-22 and F-35A fighter jets cannot directly share basic airborne positioning and targeting data despite the fact that they are both Air Force programs and built by the same company.

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If one aircraft identifies a target, the only way it can transmit that data to the other is how it was done in the last century: by a person speaking on a radio.

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The ability of these things to share information is often an afterthought. In fact, the incentives usually cut the other way: Defense companies have profited more by building closed systems of proprietary technologies that make the military more dependent on a given company to maintain and upgrade those platforms for the decades they are in service, which is where companies make their real money. This behavior stems not from malice but a rational pursuit of self-interest in a platform-centered defense market.

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The connections between our military systems tend to be highly rigid, excessively manual, rather brittle, and thus slow. We have largely focused on connecting specific military systems together to generate understanding, facilitate decisions, and take actions against specific kinds of targets. But those kill chains do not easily adapt to threats that are different from those they were specifically built to address. They may be highly effective against preplanned objectives that do not change much, such as striking stationary targets in the opening days of a conflict. But our kill chains struggle to confront dynamic threats, such as moving targets, or multiple dilemmas at once.

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