Hearing About The Next War

My week in complexity, Part 1: The century-old problem of new tech in battle.

I’ve spent the past several days engaging with new views of complexity at The Montgomery Summit, an annual conference for investors and entrepreneurs. There was much food for thought, including some very sobering conjectures about the next big war, and how we again face a fateful dynamic: What happens when organized killing encounters entirely new technologies.

From the Andruil website.

Full disclosure: March Capital, which hosts the conference, is a client of mine. However, I’ve attended this conference, and been a big fan, for years before I worked with them. They are investors who like scientific innovation, social problems, and human ingenuity. There is always much to learn. The conference also holds a reception at the Getty Museum, a damn fine place, and brings in an exceptional roster of outside speakers. This year’s list included John Allen, the former head of the U.S. Marine Corps, and David Petraeus, former four-star Army General, and former head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Those two speakers underlined one of the striking aspects of this year’s event, the growing presence in the tech world of the fast-changing technologies of the battlefield. In addition to the many companies doing enterprise and consumer technology, this year’s conference included startups working in autonomous surveillance and targeting, unmanned systems, and battle planning on a smartphone app. There were many companies in defense-adjacent or overlapping businesses, like cybersecurity, space platforms, and quantum computing.

This increase in the business of battle reflects real-world changes over the past couple of years, in particular the war in Ukraine, where the use of cheap drones for sensing and attack has upended the Russian war machine - and by extension, the warfare assumptions of the world’s great powers.

Gen. Petraeus said that Ukraine has disabled approximately one-third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, using a combination of commercial spotting drones from the air and home crafted sea-based attack drones. They have manufactured over one million drones, he said, and every night Ukraine was attacking Russia with 200-300 of them, assisted by U.S. intelligence. (Until recently, anyway; the U.S. government recently seems to have stopped intelligence sharing with Ukraine.) You can see the general’s whole talk here.

In another session, Gen. Kelly said that 70% of the casualties in the Ukraine war are from drones. “We have not adapted to that,” he said of the U.S. military. The terms now in use among war planners for this kind of conflict include “hyperwar,” and “accelerated defense,” in which intelligence collection, the process of command and control organization, targeting and attack are all purposely sped up with sensors, robots, and computers, in order to rapidly outpace and over-match enemies.

From the Onebrief website.

A founder of one of the drone-making companies said that China has produced 1.5 million drones as a result of what it is seeing in Ukraine. Petraeus also spoke of China’s development of AI-based comprehensive war-fighting systems, including some in which lethal decision-making is part of the program.

The discussions underlined an anxiety I’ve had lately: For better or worse, the world seems determined to head back into History. By that I mean the centuries-long history of politics and violence that more closely resembles a mob movie, where egos and lethal violence determine much of life. For several decades we’ve generally hewed to the alliance systems and rules cooked up after World War II in an effort to escape all that.

For reasons that may very soon baffle us, though, people now seem willing to discard these systems and rules, and re-enter traditional history. Cue the parallels to the summer of 1914. And we would be going at it with a dramatically different set of weapons, and no clear understanding of how each side will use them.

Here, history holds a very sobering lesson. Most of the great battlefield cataclysms in the past two centuries happened when an army encountered new technologies while following battle plans based on previous experience.

France was decimated in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War because she didn’t understand how fast the Prussians could move troops with trains. In World War I, no one was ready for the new technologies of tanks, barbed wire, and gas. In World War II, Germany spent heavily on fast-moving vehicles for its blitzkreig, and spent disproportionately on the new fighting aircraft, astonishing its opponents. This in turn forced the U.S. into unprecedented development of warfare technology, including radar and nuclear bombs. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, the U.S. struggled to find a good strategy against the explosion of cheap automatic weapons and explosives.

I asked Gen. Allen how well any military understands the battlefield ramifications of the current new technologies, and how well one side understands the other’s drone and AI capabilities. “That’s the critical question,” he said. “We are starting to teach it in the war colleges, but we don’t really know.” The most experienced hands, he said, were junior officers on the battlefield in Ukraine (possibly on both sides.) As a former Marine, he was particularly aware of the vulnerability of ships, and the continuous presence of drones (as he put it, “death from above”) throughout almost all Marine deployments.

Following the Franco-Prussian war, in 1871 Helmuth von Moltke famously wrote, “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.”¹ He was, of course, writing in the aftermath of one of the first great conflicts in which an entirely new industrial technology (in this case, rail) affected the battlefield. We may soon enter another one, this time marked with drones, robots, AI, anti-drone lasers, and whatever other technologies are in rapid development.

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I was thinking about the advent of these swarms of cheaper digital systems on the battlefield that evening at the Getty. In the Impressionist building there is a painting by Édouard Manet called “The Rue Mosnier Dressed With Flags,” which depicts France’s first Fête de la Paix, or “Celebration of Peace,” to mark the bourgeois republic’s recovery from its decimation in the Franco-Prussian War, and the bloody turmoil of the Commune² soon after.

“The Rue Mosnier Dressed with Flags,” Édouard Manet, 1878, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Creative Commons.

At first glance, it’s a big celebration - one of those big Baron Hausmann boulevards, filled with flags, and a little bit of rubble as Paris continues to build build build. In the foreground, though, Manet has placed the top end of a ladder, that traps your eye on a man (a veteran?) in poor clothes, hobbling on his crutches toward the celebration. Once you notice that, the boulevard becomes an enormous vacancy, with some indistinguishable celebrants obscured by distance.

The top of the painting is filled with the three colors of the flag, washed-out and fragmentary, while the red of the foremost banner gushes like blood from a wound. Peace had come, and the celebrants reveled in their order and prosperity, but within all that, for those who looked closely, there was a terrible cost to this peace. History continues.

1. Memorably paraphrased by heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson as, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

2. Following the war the defenders of Paris took over the city for two months, instituting rules against child labor and the death penalty, aid to the poor, and other advanced social reforms. They also killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of things before they were beaten back by the army. The Commune didn’t last long enough to display what it might have been, but nonetheless has inspired a number of artists and pop stars, along with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Pol Pot.