Gradually, then suddenly

The peaking dronification of naval force structure

“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

―Ernest Hemingway,The Sun Also Rises

I’ve told the story here but it bears repeating.

I gave an all-hands speech at the Naval War College in 2004, basically delivering my then-maximum Pentagon’s New Map presentation.

During the speech, looking out at this large audience of naval officers, I said (to the effect):

The good news is, you may well command dozens, hundreds, even thousands of naval vessels in your career.

The bad news? The vast majority of them won’t have any sailors on them.

At the time, it got a big laugh because it did seem unbelievable — inconceivable even.

I didn’t pull that image out of nowhere, though. When working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s new Office of Force Transformation (2001-2003), I was exposed to almost everything new going on in force-structure innovation — to include seeing the earliest prototypes of many drones that are quite familiar today.

The only question was time and intervening accelerants/”deccelerants” — or things that would speed up such developments or retard them. Thus, I saw an inevitability looming ahead, one that triggered an inconceivable downstream reality.

Clearly, the first great land war in Europe in many decades has become that profound accelerant in a development now clear to all.

Check out today’s WAPO column by Max Boot:

Ukraine’s naval drone success holds a huge lesson for the U.S. Navy: Ukraine is defeating Russia in the Black Sea without a navy. The Pentagon needs to catch up, fast.

We’ve left gradually behind and are now embracing suddenly with vigor, lest we fall victim to some historical “gap” (like so many identified by us in the past WRT Sovs). Expect to hear many clarion calls about drone gaps and the need for Manhattan Project-like accelerations.

The retired USN admiral James Stavridis sums it up nicely for Boot:

“We are at an absolute pivot point in maritime warfare,” he told me in an email. “Big surface ships are highly at risk to air, surface, and sub-surface drones. The sooner great-power navies like that of the United States understand that, the more likely they are to survive in major combat in this turbulent 21st century. Like the battleship row destroyed at Pearl Harbor, carriers are at the twilight of their days. It is absolutely time to move the rheostat of procurement away from manned warships and toward more numerous and far less expensive unmanned vessels.”

The sale is complete.

I have written here (see below) about a Military Singularity that is rapidly rendering the modern battlespace too dangerous for actual troops and most (if ultimately not all) of our classic manned platforms.

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Check out this more formal piece I wrote for India’s ET Insights: Coming to a battlefield near India: The Military Singularity.

This is how I have drawn up the shift in PPT form:

The die now seems cast alright: the inconceivable becoming the obvious inevitable: the future of US military force structure will — progressively over time — dramatically de-emphasize personnel and shift overwhelmingly to force presence (having platforms appear routinely in places), force defense (drones protecting drones), logistics (drones supplying drones) and power projection (based on in-theater rapid mass production of drones).