Angry Planet - Can the US Win the Wars of the Future?

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

It doesn’t take high technology to kill someone. Simple chemicals propel pieces of lead out of steel tubes. Other simple chemicals are placed in larger vessels and are triggered by the weight of a vehicle or even a human body. Some are even set off by strings attached to fuses. Not one computer involved.But the weapons of warfare do evolve - some into trillion dollar monsters that gobble up whole defense budgets and can destroy life on earth with the turn of a key. And new weapons are always on the horizon.Today, we’ve brought on Patrick Tucker to talk about some recent developments and what may lie ahead. Patrick is the technology editor at Defense One and writes about weapons technology every day.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country almost with impunity, and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. You don't get freedom.

freedom is never safe-guided people. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. It doesn't take

high technology to kill someone. Simple chemicals propel pieces of lead out of steel tubes. Other simple chemicals are placed in larger vessels and are triggered by the weight of a vehicle or even a human body. Some are even set off. by strings attached to fuses. Not one computer involved. But the weapons of warfare do evolve,

some into trillion-dollar monsters that gobble up whole defense budgets and can destroy all life on Earth with the turn of a key, and new weapons are always on the horizon. Today, we've brought on Patrick Tucker to talk about some recent developments and what may lie ahead. Patrick is the technology editor at Defense One and writes about weapons technology every day. Patrick, thank you so much for joining us. Okay, thank you for having me. So start off with the most basic question in the world, which is the United States still the most technically advanced military power. Oh, yeah, totally. But having being the most technically advanced military power doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to win every confrontation or engagement that you stumble into. And that's actually part of the

problem, really, is that the United States is so confident in its ability to produce and buy exquisite platforms they're sometimes called, but basically weapon systems and you have to count fighter jets and things like that in there. It can lead to policy mistakes or steps that you wouldn't necessarily take if you weren't quite so confident in your own technological prowess. But having said that, if you talk to military leaders today, they really want to emphasize that the position of the United States is the most innovative and armed nation on the planet, despite our enormous military budget, that that is a very fragile position, because the effect of information technology, just as it has been across all economies and areas of human life,

also is democratizing strength through weapon rate. So you have China, Russia, and even smaller actors that are going to use the benefits of, of infrastructure. information technology to very rapidly close that gap between the United States and themselves. You were talking about a certain, is overconfidence the right word that maybe the United States has? Is that too strong? Possibly, this is an issue that a lot of historians debate and talk about, and they'll probably do it a lot better than me, looking at the reasons why the United States gets involved in long military conflicts. but the thing that it has always brought to those military conflicts that I can't speak to some

confidence on is vast technical superiority. And that is something that it continues to possess. And it's something that we pay a lot of money for. But it is diminishing really quickly because of the trends that I mentioned. And you're getting to a point where the way the United States buys that technological superiority is not going to be relevant to the way conflicts happen in the future. and that's what the military is grappling with right now. Oh, wow.

Could you explain what you just said? Yeah. See, the United States military is really good at giving money to a very well-established a handful of defense contractors to create machinery that performs exactly as it's supposed to that is incredibly expensive. And you can only afford one or two. and a fantastic example of that is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is, many of your folks might know of this.

It is this super technologically advanced fighter jet. It was co-engineered by all the services, and many people say that's where it started to go wrong, is that never asked the Marines to make a jet, but whatever. And it performs very well in stealth if the thing is like a flying robot. Like the actual pilot doesn't have to do very much. It flies itself in many ways. and it's supposed to be this thing in the sky

that's going to collect digital information off of drones and satellites and all these other stuff and serve as this kind of skeleton key to future combat and warfare, and it costs a lot of money. We're very good at making things that cost a tremendous amount of money or what the Pentagon refers to as exquisite platforms. And the way we will practice warfare in the future, this is something that the Pentagon is beginning to acknowledge, but we just know watching manufacturing trends, for instance, out of China and Russia,

is going to be through what are sometimes called attributable platforms and very easy to make. And you need a whole lot of them, but they don't require as much human control as weapons of the past. So is it better? It's like that question of would you whether fight like one big bear or a hundred really small ones? Future of Warfare is 100 very small bears winning every time because they're harder to track. and they're very cheap to shoot. So just in terms of scale of manufacturing, small attributable drone swarms

are going to outperform probably your exquisite. I think now it's averaging around $89 million per F-35 joint strike fighter. And that's why the way that the United States has practiced warfare forever buying these weapons that really are the best in the world, but that are way too expensive to use against an adversary that can,

can take a lot of them out is not the method of warfare in the future. I just had this horrid vision of a swarm of drones flying into a V-22 Osprey. Just the, like how little money it would take to take down something that expensive. Yeah, yeah, that's a great example. And not even, you can look at drones, but you can also look at offensive cyber operations or electromagnetic warfare operations where you're using the spectrum against. your very expensive piece of equipment. The F-35 is pretty good against EW effects, but there's a lot of other stuff that are not. And of course, we spend a lot of money just because we were doing

counterterrorism over the last two decades against adversaries that didn't have anti-aircraft defenses. We spend a lot of money on stuff that's pretty easy to shoot down if you can shoot down stuff. And we make the best shoot-downable stuff ever. Anybody that anybody's ever made It's just irrelevant to the geopolitical challenges in competition of the future. And that's a huge part of why the Pentagon will say needs to spend all of this money on this stuff. It's mostly to deter future conflicts, this is their explanation for it. You can agree or disagree depending on a variety of factors. And there are many good arguments on both sides.

I take no stake. But their argument is that they have to spend this much money to have the newest weaponry in order to deter Russia and China or some other adversary from making what they call a miscalculation, like taking over some large chunk of territory that's not theirs and possibly causing a huge geopolitical crisis or attacking the United States directly. Ukraine. Ukraine is an example. Crimea, yeah.

Yeah. That is a, that is, we now know that the Russian government is perfectly willing to illegally annexed territory that wasn't theirs and to, uh, start the first tank war in Europe since World War II. A big deal. And they're not alone. This is the thing. Because of the international reaction to the illegal annexation of Crimea, potential series of crises happening. A few months ago, I went to with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on a trip, we went to Indo-Paycom headquarters, and I spoke with some officials, not necessarily from that combatant command, but top military officials

in the two-to-three-star range. This is something that former Indo-Pa-com commander Phil Davidson and has also said, their calculation is that China is going to invade Taiwan sometime in the next three to five years. This presents a very short time window for the United States to make a decision about how to fill the South China Sea with lots of naval assets and possibly with army assets on discontinuous formation across island chains across the first and second island chain. You've got very small time window to figure out. if you want to do that to potentially deter China from making that decision. But that is going to be the thing that we're going to be talking about in a couple of years now is whether or not China is actually going to do that.

And a lot of intelligence suggests, yes, we're looking at that time horizon for that. So yes, you're exactly right. And it's just an example of premier but on a much larger scale. And also, these are the kinds of weapons. Just to reiterate, I think, what you were saying, our weapons are too expensive and in some ways too scary to use. Whereas a swarm of drones, hey, why not? Or more importantly, like taking down a pipeline, for example. Why not? And this is also another thing that the Pentagon has been grappling with for a long time. And it's sometimes after Crimea, it's really been around for

a while, this new method of warfare. But after Crimea, it got a new name and it got a lot of new focus in the military. And the new name was hybrid warfare. And hybrid warfare is what happens when you have a nation state that is perpetrating war, but doing it while trying not to look like they're perpetrating war, which is exactly what happened in Ukraine, where you had what were called the little green men, these masked men showing up on street corners all across the peninsula, huge, bulky, obviously like GRU servicemen, just all of a sudden really needed to go on vacation in Crimea, and they're just like hanging out on street corners and stuff in the days and weeks before a massive radio silence military takeover. And all of a sudden, it turns out that everyone in Crimea,

with the exception of the Tartars, really wants to join Russia and the city hall is seized. And then that happens all across the Dunbass. And Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are like, hey, you know what? All these people spontaneously decide to do this. This is, you know, who knows why people make such decisions. But we will support the Russian-speaking population. And that is the method of warfare that has shown to be very effective when you're not going to acknowledge that you're actually at war. Because what happens when you do that is the United States, which is, you know, after World War II, that's the type of warfare we really like is where the adversary says, here I am. They denounce you, United States. I resist your will. Then we do a couple of things. First, we get all of our, whatever allies we can bring

to the table, hopefully NATO, but if not NATO, then some coalition of the willing to stamp our military exercise or our new military operation with international approval. And then we just park all of our very expensive shit right there and plow right through them. And we win very quickly. So that method of warfare because is not the kind that our adversaries in the future are going to play. They have seen that's not a winner. So hybrid warfare also involves, as you point out, kinetic, what are sometimes called cyber physical attacks. And we've seen before colonial pipeline, the Russian government began to practice this in Ukraine. And this is why Ukraine is, I think, so important because if you really want to know what the future of warfare potentially looks like,

Ukraine is the exact example of what it looks like. The Russian government was able to shut down electricity in parts of Ukraine on Christmas Eve in the middle of winter, take down power plants. They were able to invade a huge portion of the country without ever acknowledging that they were doing it, no matter what people said about it. They certainly used drones to fantastic sending them over to do like reconnaissance on Ukrainian tank positions. They were able using that reconnaissance to take out entire tank battalions in, in hours. Completely devastated the Ukrainian military forces through the use of drones. When you look at what the future of warfare is, that, Just look to Ukraine starting from 2014 through to today because cyberphysical effects, hybrid warfare, drone warfare, all of that is on display very vividly.

All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We will be right back after this. All right. Thank you for sticking around, Angry Planet listeners. We are back on talking about the future of war. Do you think America can pivot? We have so much invested in our big, expensive. toys, there's a lot of players that are invested in those big expensive toys.

We're trying to. The great big players say, you know what we love more than anything else is pivoting. We'll need more money to do that. Like, is the thing that they like to say. They'll say, no one's better at pivoting than us. Don't go with the other guys, though. They're terrible at pivoting. But we are the pivoters.

Like, we're really the disruptors here. Everyone is very anxious to co-op that branding. But that is something that the current Pentagon budget request really does reflect this desire to pivot. And so you see kind of friction between and within the military and also in Congress to fund things like emerging technologies through the military, emerging technologies being things like artificial intelligence, rapid manufacturing, to a certain extent quantum computing, but also space and offensive cyber operations and all of the things that are going to really be a big part of the people. but also maintain a certain number of what they call like legacy platforms and systems. The Biden administration is like the folks that they brought in are actually pretty anxious to get

rid of the old stuff. It's a lot of folks in Congress that aren't because the thing about the platforms like them, there's a little bit of the F-35 that's made in every state as well as in parts of Japan. And until very recently, parts of Turkey. So there's allies that also like our legacy systems. There's strange congressional districts that really all of this old stuff because the military industrial company, part of the reason it exists is that it makes everybody really tied in to what the United States military is buying and doing. And that's not really the way it's going to work in the future either.

So that entire paradigm of keeping people interested in your stuff, keeping their interests economically aligned with yours, the manufacturer of weapons being one tool in that, that begins to shift because it just goes to more and more little startup players that don't have a natural constituency. They're just really good, they have a really good use of AI and data to achieve specific potentially relevant like national security effects. And it goes to emerging sciences. And that the friction isn't with the current Pentagon leadership that really,

really wants to redesign the way military does a bunch of stuff. It's the political barriers that are stand in the way of the pivot, mostly. I have cyber-specific questions. Some of what I read in like government accountability reports, specifically on cyber stuff, and also these recent pipeline hacks that they believe are possibly tied back to foreign state actors. Yeah.

It paints a picture to me as a person who's a person who's a little. little bit about this stuff, that we're bad at it, and we got to get real good, real fast. Do you think the military, do you think that like the military understands that? And do you think the politicians understand that? Sort of. It's, in terms of offensive cyber operations, we're actually really good. But it's this little portion of the military that does it in the context of warfare. Like, if you want to take down large portions of Iran's electricity grid, then we are able to do that. It's just that is generally coupled with. a larger, like, heavy equipment invasion, which is not something we're doing right now.

So in terms of taking down or even attributing, like, cyber attacks and effects, we're very good at it. The difference is that we are limited by a variety of norms and laws from, like, just attacking Russia in retaliation for the colonial pipeline hack. after the 2016 election, the NSA and cyber command did initiate this new program, this kind of new mandate that they called the Fending Forward, where they make sure that adversaries know we really are inside your networks. And that they began this process, this practice of actually sending like warnings

to directly to the cyber operators on the Russian side, who they thought were going to mess with, like U.S. elections activity. They would find them directly and send them notes, which is a terrifying effect, you can imagine. But there are a lot of norms and laws that, for instance, keep U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA from doing intelligence and reconnaissance within the United States on U.S. networks, which is part of the reason why colonial happened is because the NSA can do signals intelligence collection on foreign entities, not within the United States. For that, you have to go to law enforcement like the FBI, and the FBI is investigatory, so it only responds to stuff after the

fact. So there's a bunch of bureaucratic things in place that kind of keep us from responding as quickly as many would like to stuff like this. Having said that, you want those bureaucratic things in place, because otherwise you're creating a potential entity with really vast power that doesn't isn't accountable to Congress the way singular entities are today. And that's not something you necessarily want. At the very least, you can talk to Senator Ron Wyden, who is very vigilant about this and will say, hey, listen, there's a lot of reasons not to give the NSA and Cyber Command more power, particularly in terms of operating domestically terrified. And like any agency, like any entity that's human run, they are potentially fallible. And if you look at the last four years, you saw an

administration slowly push out officials that were considered experts and did have bipartisan support and were considered very rational known entities that were aware of the laws and tried to do a good job and they were just slowly pushed out to make way for sycophants that potentially and I don't feel like I'm being overly political in saying that I think that if you look at the ODNI ombudsman report on their last director this came from the actual ombudsman at ODNI, they'll say, yes, they actually put a political Apprachnik in place here to run this agency and they manipulated intelligence. So this is part of the reason why we suck at exactly what you said. We have a large diverging and barriers put up between entities and there is cross-agency

collaboration, but there are some limits on that. So we're a little bit fun. Having said that, I just had a conversation with Rob Joyce, who's the head of the cybersecurity director at the And his job before that, he was the head of tailored access operations, which basically means he was the guy that figured out how to send that Russian soldier in St. Petersburg the note saying, we know what you're doing. That is tailored access operations. So he was the nations like top hacker. And he'll tell you the number one problem that we face just in terms of cybersecurity

is that we just have too many old computers that haven't been patched or aren't up to date with the latest vulnerabilities. and that requires a law to like make sure that they are up to date on stuff like gaps and vulnerabilities that we already know exist. This is a big thing about cyber war that I think a lot of people don't understand, that the vast majority of the big hacks that you hear about or that you read about, colonial pipeline absolutely among them, they actually occur when hackers use a vulnerability that people already knew about.

It's already actually been released by the government. It's in, let's call the cyber vulnerability's database. It's something that you can patch, that you can fix. If you have a CIO that is really good, that's 90% of this stuff. Only very rarely do you see even nation states using zero days, which are very exquisite cyber tools that an entire nation state had to figure out on their own and have never been seen before. So there's no known patch or defense against them.

So really, the reason why you suck at this is because there's a lot of reasons, But there's a lot of entities out there in the United States that are hooked up to the internet. And there's a lot of just vulnerability out there. All of the big, important aspects of government, they are relatively protected from this sort of thing. And if they're hit, then everyone knows right away. They have very good endpoint security and very good resilience. Completely impenetrable. But also when they're penetrated, there's rapid reaction.

There's a whole lot of things. The city of Baltimore? No, not so much. I don't know if you remember a couple years ago, but the entire city of Baltimore was completely shut down by a ransomware attack. I lived there for years, and I like sometimes have to do, I have a house there that I rented tenants,

and I had to pay water bills. I couldn't pay water bills because of a ransomware attack that the city of Baltimore couldn't fix. Look at hospitals, look at schools, the exact same problem. When it comes time to spend a dime, updated IT equipment is not the first thing on their list. They have to buy new machines to,

to save people's lives. They have to pay teachers. They have to do all this stuff. So that's another big part of why we suck at this. It's the same, I'm going off here, but it's the same economic disparity that affects the way we all live. But it's also a matter of like proportional response from what you were just saying, too. If we were going after Iran, because we were actually going to war with Iran, we would fuck them up. But I, I don't think that we, I don't think that we, I think that would be a harder fight than you think, but that's a separate podcast. Yeah, I mean, I guess in a way what's fascinating about cyber stuff is everyone can be good at it. You can be anywhere in the world and you don't need vast resources to do it, unlike building a nuclear bomb or something.

But anyway, now I'm getting this picture of us in my head of this big, strong, preppy kind of guy. And with a very square jaw. and everybody else are like these bantam weight boxers who are just kicking the living shit out of us. And we can't decide whether we should, we're worried that if we hit them hard enough, we'll actually kill them or something. And we just, we don't know how to respond. Yeah. The thing is that like our adversaries figured out this strategy precisely because we were this like huge thing. And we're not actually getting our, are we getting our ass kicked or are we not?

it depends on whether or not you think that we should be performing the same role that we have throughout much of the latter 21st century. Are we main entity that's in charge of enforcing global norms around, for instance, not invading countries that aren't yours? Is that our primary, if we don't do that or if we fail to do that, are we getting our ass kick? That's a very big question. And if we do feel like it's our role, is there a way to do a little bit better? This is a huge ongoing discussion about America's role in the world.

And we all have personal feelings about it. I have personal feelings about the role of America in defending the will of people that aspire to the democratic system of government. I think that America has a very valuable and essential role to play in that. But even I don't know exactly what role that should take. So are we getting our asses kick? That's a very good question. In order to justify enormous and growing military budgets, we need to believe that we certainly could. That's very important. Has any adversary attacked the United States directly? Really only nutcases.

If you look at the war on terror, that shows an entity that a non-state enemy that bit up way more than it can chew and spent the next 20 years running from cave to cave. No large nation state has attempted something like that. The closest would be, I think you can go back to 2017 or so in the sands of Syria when there were a handful of Russian mercenaries. It really was only about 12, but they were paying a whole bunch of other proxy forces, and they attacked a U.S. outpost. And the U.S. responded with such calamitous force that we know that it completely changed the willingness. Though that mercenary team does not like exist anymore, and the Russians stopped doing that. Are we getting our asses ticked? A huge part of the discussion right now about Afghanistan is what role the U.S. actually play.

there. But this is a good point because we're withdrawing from Afghanistan, right? This is a whole thing. The Taliban for the last like year and a half haven't really attacked U.S. troops. They have attacked the government troops. There's a lot of violence there and the violence is growing. But even though the Taliban don't live by their own peace cords, the things that they say they're going to do, they figured out that if they don't attack U.S. troops directly, they have much better run of the field. Absolutely. Ukraine, here's another example. So we spent a big, there was a 2015, 16 through 17, a lot of fighting back and forth in Congress about whether or not to give Ukraine a bunch of javelin anti-tank missiles. We wound up giving it to them. Donald Trump took credit even though it was voted into law through veto-proof majority as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, whatever.

Is that what's really deterring Russia from, or Russian-backed forces as well, from accelerating their war? Or is it a whole bunch of dudes, special operations forces dudes that we parked in the east of the country to train Ukrainian special forces dudes to go west? And if you talk to some folks, like Mike Carpenter, who was the former Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and Eurasian Affairs, he'll say that the presence of those guys is a much bigger deterrent. to Russian expansion than those javelins, which are still sitting in boxes. I don't think it's fair to say that we're getting our asses kicked, but I do think it's fair to say that we don't know exactly what we're doing in all of the places that we are. That's a long, ongoing conversation.

And in that chaos, there are adversaries that are strategizing how to take advantage of a big discussion we're having internally about where we should be and what we should be. That's a very philosophical answer to your question, but basically, I don't think we're getting our asses kicked. I just think that we're pretty confused right now about where we are and what we're doing in the world. I feel like we're having an existential crisis about what it means to win. Yeah, yeah. And I think that totally plays a near whole point about Iran and what a war with Iran would look like.

The first 24 hours of a war with Iran, we totally kick their ass. Are we going to govern Iran? We're not going to do that well. We don't know how to win because we don't know exactly why we're getting involved in this stuff. I didn't mean to cut you off, but yeah. It's just something I keep thinking about. As we're recording this on Friday, the 25th, there's just Mill Twitter is all a flutter with the anti-woke stuff and Marx General's testimony. And every, like, I keep hearing this new kind of politicalization of the military that I don't remember there being in the past.

And most of it is centered around people on the right being upset that we don't win. We don't win wars. And I just, I think that we have to stand back and have redefine what winning means. Yeah. I think that's fair. And I think that's, there are some folks that have spent a lot of time thinking about how to really think about this stuff. Because we do win wars. We don't win peace anymore.

We're not, we lost our ability to do that. And part of the reason is that takes a lot of investment. And in order to justify that expenditure of public money, you have to have, you have to bring all of America along. post-World War II, they were working in civil offices in Japan, where you wanted to get a license renewed for something like that. There'd be an American GI there that would speak a little bit of Japanese, and if you had intelligence about something going on in your neighborhood, then he was there to listen to that and take it, and he was also there to help you with your problems, and they were all over the place. And unless you want to do what Army guys call consolidate gains, which means after you're done drumming and F-35ing the crap out of some place, have a lot of just regular boots on the ground guys there to change political life in that place for the better, to create kind of the circumstances in which a middle class can live.

Unless you're willing to do that, then you don't know the after effects of your military operation, your military adventure. And Afghanistan is waiting at with this. So there's folks in the Pentagon who will tell you to this day, very, high up folks. We'll tell you to this day, Afghanistan is still in a poll. Violence is going down. The thing that the Taliban with the Taliban is that they don't have enough political support to run the country. They do have enough weapons and willpower to turn the country into a bloody goddamn mess and make the government there, make it ungovernable. They can't govern it,

but they can make it ungovernable. If you put 2,500 Americans there, then it's going to start to look more and more like Germany after World War II, the violence will go down. All you need is 2,500 is what they'll tell you. All you need is 2,500. And they probably won't even get shot at. They'll just be the stabilizing force. And we're absolutely fine keeping troops in Germany, even to this day after World War II so many years ago. It'll be like that. But that logic failed to impress Joe Biden, who has spent a lot of time justifying U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Spent a lot of time justifying U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Yeah, I think that we're in an existential crisis about how we lead or if we should be.

So this is the worst discussion ever about future weapons. I'm having a good time. Oh, no, I think it's actually a more important discussion. We can try to talk on future weapons. No, I think actually you've really hit on some of the most important things can possibly talk about. But if we are going to talk about future weapons for a second, could you just tell me what Jedi is?

I know you've written about it, and I just love it because, of course, it's Jedi. Right. Which we think Star Wars. And what kind of system is it? What's it about and is it the future? Yeah, there are a special operations team of space wizards that we are looking to train to take out. No, it stands for a joint enterprise infrastructure cloud. So the U.S. military, unlike Amazon, Netflix, big Fortune 500 companies, has relied for a long time.

on a kind of bespoke cloud capability. And so the, believe it or not, the military's IT sucks. It's relatively secure, but it's a whole bunch of like clouds that don't serve its need. They don't have big centralized cloud. So the Jedi program was this effort. And I can now speak about it in the past tense because I think they're going to scrap it because of political things. But it was this effort, very timely, very desperately needed to make an enterprise cloud for the Pentagon. And by enterprise, we mean something that's going to cover the entire freaking Pentagon.

And there were, there's basically three companies on the planet that can make it. Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Google, this is because of a, not to true my own horn, but in part because of a story that I wrote, Google had to drop out from that because it was, when it was revealed, they were working with the Pentagon on the Project Maven thing, which was applying artificial intelligence to faster target, like faster target intelligence that would go to an analyst, and the analyst would then use it, but it wasn't like autonomous targeting.

But it was like terrifying and terminatory enough to freak out a lot of people at Google. And it turned out that was a pathfinder for Google to better compete for this massive, very lucrative, $10 billion cloud contract. And as soon as we revealed that this was probably a pathfinder effort, they were really doing an audition for this $10 billion cloud. Then Google said, I guess maybe we won't compete for that. I don't know. I guess we're not going to.

This left Amazon and Microsoft. So what had happened was all of these little cloud providers that were used to this really stable business from the Pentagon, I won't name them because one of them in particular is incredibly litigious. But these little cloud providers got really mad. And they're like, hey, you're writing the requirements for this contract so that only like one company can really compete in its Amazon. That's not fair to us. And they're like, yeah, but we just need like an actual cloud that works and you make like garbage.

Like we need something that is on par with what Netflix has with how like you turn off Netflix and you can turn it back on and it immediately catches you up. It's because they have this quality called failover. And they make failovers you buy a fuck ton of servers, just like all the servers. And that is not something that these little tiny cloud guys have. That is what Amazon has, is just a lot of servers. And that is what the Pentagon wants is just all the servers in one place to keep all their data in one place. And that is what Jeddah was supposed to do. But they awarded it in the end to Microsoft.

I talked to people in the Pentagon and they were like, hey, Microsoft should actually pull this off. They actually have a whole lot of servers. Amazon was furious about it. And they were like, this happened because of political interference. Did it? Donald Trump totally screwed up that process by being really, out front about how he hated Amazon and how the Pentagon definitely shouldn't give the contract

to Amazon because of personal reasons. We don't have an enterprise cloud computing solution now, even though there are multiple companies that could provide one because Donald Trump's personal hatred for Jeff Bezos. Yeah, the Amazon Washington Post, as we all know. Yes. Okay. And you know what? It's so, it is very frustrating because having an enterprise cloud environment, this is actually

a good point on future weapons. Having a halfway decent cloud environment is absolutely essential to everything that the Pentagon wants to do in the next 10 years, which is to interconnect everything that it has in the battlefield, all its drones, all its jets, old sailors, old shipment, all of its soldiers, every tank, every robot in one enormous environment so that you can do this like hyper-fast network warfare. In order to do that, you need an enterprise-level cloud at least. And we, China and Russia are working on a very similar effort. except they don't have to worry about political kuhanness because they're autocracies.

Well, so we've got an easy solution. We just have to become an autocracy, which some people would say we were heading there anyway. So, hey, maybe this will all be solved. But yeah, this is, so really, if you want to get into the future, it's in their closing minutes, because I got over too, but you want to know what the future weaponry looks like for the United States. Yes, please. And what the future, like, looks like for really any war against.

what they call a peer adversary, which is a high-tech adversary la Russia or China. It's this thing called joint all-domain command and control. And that is where absolutely everything on the battlefield is interconnect. And a huge AI engine is accepting sensor data, satellite imagery off of all of these things. And what happens is when you're making your initial assault, you've got F-35s, you've got drones, you've got ships, you've got cruise, you've got cruise. missiles, you've got potentially like a small, long-range fires army team, like a team with a great big that can shoot at long ranges. You have everything that you use to go to war. They're all interconnected. And so the way it would work is the big AI engine sees all of the

enemy things to take out, the enemy radar systems, the enemy barracks, enemy communications outpost, enemy airfield. It prioritizes them. It immediately establishes which of your force elements should attack those things. And if something happens where that force element, let's say that F-35 gets knocked out of the sky, the big AI immediately determines what is the second best option for taking out that target. And so that it's basically the same way people used to practice war, but at a fraction of the time. And I've watched the Army demonstrate some of this stuff in in Yuma last year, and they're actually getting pretty good at it. Their guns don't hit the target every time, and they'll be first to admit it.

But yes, they did collapse the time it took to identify, isolate, and engage a target, and then switch which element was going to engage that target from minutes down to seconds. And that is the future of warfare. It don't get hung up on what object, what F-35, if it's the drone swarm or if it's this or that, just have enough stuff out there so that your big AI can immediately, task whatever is out there with the like taking out the target faster than your enemy can recognize what you're doing and respond. That's it. It's the future warfare.

Protas carriers as far as the eye can see. Yeah. For the nerds in the audience. Thank you for that. You're very welcome. Was that a Battlestar Galactica? No, there was a Starcraft reference is what that was. A video game. Yeah, as opposed to Dratus, which Battlestar Galactica.

Anyway. I was going to say, like, the main criticism of this actually is like this Battlestar Galactica thing, where, you know, by interconnecting all of the stuff, they gave rise to terrifying artificial intelligence, actually, but it's better at them. So no one has any, that is a interesting in science fictional scenario. There is no reason to put, like, stock in it. But it does give rise to a problem. And that is that the time, like, human decision makers having less time to do human decision. making. That is also a feature of the future. And they'll have AI assistance that won't be malevolent and won't possess will to destroy the world, but they also won't be geniuses.

That's the thing. They also won't be exactly the, as operate up to the hype that they're being sold at. And that's a thing to, that's more a thing to worry about. Don't worry about AI being evil. Worry about it being fast and stupid. That's about the best summation of the modern, the actual modern problems of AI, I think I've heard. It's really good. Thank you. I'm actually writing a book called Best Stupid and Cruel, The Future of Articel. That's perfect. Yeah. All right. Well, so come back when you have it done. I will. Yeah. Yeah, we'd love that. Okay. I hope this is helpful. Hey, Patrick, thank you so much for coming on the show. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields,

and Kevin O'Dell. If you like the show, please, we have a substack for $9 a month. You get two bonus episodes. The one that's going to drop tomorrow is going to be about UFOs. We're talking about that UFO report. So if you want to listen to that, go to angryplanet.substack.com and sign up. As always, if you like the show, please drop us a line on iTunes. It helps other people find the show. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until that.