The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has one shtick and it’s touting the future of warfare. And while considering the influence of tech on the battlefield is important, the two key military events of the last few years have a common lesson.
1. Afghanistan
2. Ukraine
The lesson is that a determined insurgency can overcome less motivated forces despite wide discrepancies in technology and numbers.
Putin’s regime has been obsessed with touting high-tech future weapons. Some of those have been deployed in Ukraine with few results. The U.S. meanwhile gave the Afghan government the technological edge with little to show for it.
Technology counts. The Ukrainians were apparently able to effectively make use of Javelins and similar weapons (though considering the propaganda coming out of the region, it’s hard to know what’s true). But both wars have been fought in fairly familiar ways. A general from WW2 or the 70s would be able to take a look at both Ukraine and Afghanistan and have a fairly good idea of what happened and what’s going on.
With that in mind here’s Gen. Mark Milley with more of the same old military retrofuturism.
Weapons technology will also change dramatically in future decades, Milley said, and the shift will be as radical as the change from musket to the rifle, the rifle to the machine gun or from sailing to steam ships. And the technological edge is no longer automatically in America’s favor.
“You’ll be fighting with robotic tanks and ships and airplanes,” Milley said. “We’ve witnessed a revolution in lethality and precision munitions. What was once the exclusive province of the United States military is now available to most nation states with the money will to acquire them.”
Artificial intelligence is “resulting in that profound change, the most profound change ever in human history,” Milley said. “Whatever overmatch we the United States enjoyed militarily for the last 70 years is closing quickly. And the United States will be, in fact, we already are challenged in every domain of warfare in space and cyber, maritime air and, of course, land.”
This is the same sort of thing that Milley has been saying forever, but he doesn’t seem to have thought the metaphors through.
What would the shift from muskets to rifles or sails to steam really be like in the modern context? And what does that have to do with obsessing over AI, a concept that I suspect Milley doesn’t grasp, let alone robot tanks, which we could build and deploy no, if there were some actual use for them in anything except a major land war in which we wanted to reduce casualties while spending a lot of money for worse battlefield performance.
The future of war may yet arrive, but for now it looks a whole lot like somewhat better tools and a few remote options.
raja says
If he has learned nothing he is unfit for the job he has pledged to carryout. If he is all for virtue-signaling he should be a tele-evangelist or some con artist.
mortimer says
Gen. Milley should also have discussed the importance of a having a strong American president, rather than a senile weakling like Beijing Biden. The US leadership should be so tough and so determined that no one will dare wave a red flag in front of them.
Most of the country’s wars have started as a result of weak Democrat presidents. No one started a war against American interests during the presidencies of Teddy Roosevelt, Ike Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump.
A weak US president always emboldens dictators. Hitler though wrongly that he had nothing to worry about from polio-patient Franklin Roosevelt. Khrushchev wrongly thought Democrat Kennedy was weak and so sent missiles to Cuba. He would not have tried it with Nixon.
A weak, cocksure, arrogant, senile American president has to be the most desirable thing a foreign dictator could wish for.
wpm says
Gen .Milley serves at the pleasures of the current President ,he must follow the present President weak stupid policies look at how Biden pulled out of Afghanistan .If Milley opens his mouth against any “official” government policy he will be replaces.
James Lincoln says
wpm,
True enough, but Gen. Milley should have resigned over Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal “plan” – BEFORE it was carried out.
Infidel says
Quite a number of our military top brass need to be investigated, and put out to pasture once this government is done. Starting w/ Milley
wpm says
I am sure meal time Milley will land on his feet when he retires from the military and get a great lobbying job in DC working for some democrat party causes.
Jake says
We need a man in charge who knows how to win. Miley isn’t it. Fire him and get another general who knows how to win.