School of War - Ep 110: Thomas Mahnken on Net Assessment

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Thomas Mahnken, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, joins the show to talk about net assessment and the future of war. ▪️  Times     ��•      01:39 Introduction      •      02:02 An interesting journey     •      03:33 The Office of Net Assessment      •      09:49 A tool, not a solution      •      13:19 Both quantity and quality matter      •      15:05 Soviet thinking      •      19:20 Leveraging insight      •      23:11 Potential outcomes     •      28:35 “The Houthis have friends.”       •      33:19 Danger and opportunity      •      37:20 The terms of success change     •      43:14 Solving the problem of the moment Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

A recurring theme here on School of War is something called net assessment in the legacy of Andrew Marshall. We're going to return to this theme with our guest today and talk about how this way of thinking about strategy and about defense policy can be applied to the present with all of its emerging domains, its complexity, and its uncertainty. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live. In infamous, the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We'll fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to be joined today. by Thomas Mencken. He is the president-in-chief executive officer for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He's senior research professor at the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins Sice. He is the author of numerous articles in books concerning subjects that listeners will know are central to the enterprise of this podcast to include examining the critical question of what the heck is going to happen next when precision-guided munitions start flying

in the Western Pacific. If anything, it's, I think it's a problem that Tom, we haven't had you on the show yet. So thank you so much for making the time and joining. My pleasure, Aaron. It's great to be with you. So let me, let's start with you in your background because I think that's naturally,

I see us going from your background to the sort of net assessment world more broadly and then to these present day questions that are on all of our minds as a sequence for the episode. Tell us about yourself. How did you get into this line of work, if you will?

How did you start to devote serious thought to these matters? Yeah, thanks for asking. asking, you know, it was an interesting journey. I was born and raised in Southern California, a son of a World War II Marine veteran, and had a lot of different interests growing up. But I remember, you know, really from my childhood being interested in history, being interested in military affairs. And then a real turning point for me was in college. When I took a course, International Relations 381, Introduction to Strategy. And I read Klausovitz. I read Sunza. I read the very first edition

of Makers of Modern Strategy. And just it sparked something. It sparked something inside me and I wanted to know more. And that led me to study strategic studies in college, to move on to graduate school to get my master's in strategic studies. And then, you know, ultimately it, it led me while I was, while I was a PhD candidate to the Office of Net Assessment. And it's, yeah, it's really, yeah, it's really influenced my my whole career. Tell us a bit about that dimension of the story that you just ended with, the Office of Net Assessment. We've talked about it a bit on the show in the past. We had Andrew Krippenavich on just a couple of months ago. But just let's start at the start.

What is the office of net assessment? And what would it mean to, what is net assessment? Why would one need an office devoted to it? So I think the notion of net assessment is as old as war and as old as strategy itself. I mean, the notion that you need to, and to quote, Sunza's art of war, you know, know, know the enemy and know yourself. That's just, you know, good, good strategy, right? Good assessment is the predicate for good strategy.

So from that perspective, the need to do net assessment, I think, is timeless. I'd say for the United States in particular, the Cold War, the competition with the Soviet Union, and particularly the nuclear dimension of the Cold War, really brought to the fore the need for the U.S. government and then the U.S. Defense Department institutionally to think about net assessment, right, where you have a competitor, the Soviet Union that is capable, that is long-term competitor, that's armed with nuclear weapons that has the ability to destroy the United States. The United States has the ability to destroy them. Well, knowing the enemy and knowing yourself becomes all the more important, right? And so going from the, you know, the concept of

net assessment being sort of a, you know, a timeless one to its embodiment in, in the defense department. I mean, that that happened during the Cold War for the reasons that I just mentioned. And then really, it's hard to separate that, really impossible to separate that from the, the first director of the Office of Net Assessment, Andy Marshall. And I think Marshall was a particularly significant figure because he came to the Pentagon. He came to Washington, really after already having a pretty substantial and substantive career at the Rand Corporation, where he formulated some pretty important concepts in strategic studies, and then really had a whole second career inside government as director of net assessment. So again, as I think about the net assessment

story, there's the concept, there's the, if you will, the underlying need for a secretary of defense to think long term and think in terms of net assessment. And then there's the actual instantiation of the office where I do think, you know, the man, Andrew Marshall, played a key role. If we keep saying this phrase net assessment, what's the gross? Like what are we net of? Yeah, I guess the best way to think about it and look, we're stuck with the terminology that we have, you know, and I think, you know, I remember talking to Marshall about it. I think, you know, he had various times that if he had it over to do over again, he probably

would have called it strategic assessment. But I think the notion of net assessment, you know, is to look both to measure side by side competitors, to look at their, to measure up their strengths and weaknesses, but then also to think about them head to head, how the two sides interact with each other in peace and in war. And I think a couple of particularly pertinent elements of the net assessment approach are first, freeing ourselves of this simplifying assumption that states or militaries are just these billiard balls that collide with one another. In fact, it's the recognition that states, militaries, governments, national security establishments are collections of bureaucratic actors.

You know, so this simplifying assumption that so many people take in international relations of states as these unified actors, that assessment really gets away from that and says, no, you have to think about, you know, organizational politics, bureaucratic politics. you're interacting with competitors who are themselves, very, very complex actors. And then secondly, the notion that, again, going away from billiard balls, you're interacting with an adversary or competitor who has its own very different history, its own very different culture and experiences. So I think one of the major contributions of the Office of Net Assessment during the Cold War was

understanding the Soviets and the Soviet military as a set of complex actors and with bureaucratic interests, organizational politics, organizational culture, all of which led the Soviets to suboptimize their behavior. And then also a particular appreciation of the role of Soviet history, Russian history, and the history of those organizations in shaping their behavior. And then you can flip it around also, on our side as well. So this approach obviously attracted critics. I'm going to try to voice probably a dumbed down version of an objection.

I'm curious to hear how you respond to it. What you just said sounds very interesting. It also sounds borderline impossible to actually do well, you know, in terms of assessing the full range of things you would need to assess in such a way that you could actually be confident that you got it close to right.

And in rejecting, you know, it's all well and good to sort of reject being counting and, you know, the estimation of the balance of power, which I guess is really what we're talking about here, by counting bombs and trucks and planes, and then sort of simplifying for analytic purposes, how they're going to be used. I mean, that has the virtue that at least you're probably going to get it more or less right. Like that is to say, your counting may well be more or less right. When you try to start assessing, okay, well, you know, the man with the defense portfolio, we think he has liberal inclinations. And that's probably going to iterate in a certain way when the fighting starts. So, oh, and by, you know, you started to sort of leaven in all this stuff that you think you're going to need to know to actually see how things are going to go. Really, it just is going to become a playground for the net assessor's own assumptions, of which they're going to have to make many. They're going to have to make lots. What is net assessments defense? I take it that you'll tell me there are other

probably lines of critique or maybe I've misphrased that one, but what is the defense to that line of criticism? Well, I think first we've got to start with the acknowledgement that the net assessment enterprise is really meant to serve leaders and to inform leaders. And again, the instantiation of the Office of Net Assessment was to serve the Secretary of Defense and the very senior leadership of the Defense Department. And look, there are plenty of analytical enterprises that are devoted to bean counting and all sorts of quantitative assessment methods. I would say, you know, the, you'd say at least at times in our past, the bureaucracy is just overflowed with, with those types of approaches. And so I think net assessment is about giving senior leaders

different types of insights and different types of advice, advice that focuses on, again, the longer term, not just, not just the short term, that focuses not just on challenges, but also opportunities. And then also, you know, as I should have said at the app up front is that really is diagnostic and really the net assessment approach is meant to be diagnostic as opposed to prescriptive. Again, there's plenty of parts of the defense department or defense departments or defense ministries or government agencies that are prescriptive. They will tell you what they think you should do. My experience with senior leaders is that they'll take that in as an input, but really what they're interested in even more is how to think about the problem.

And that really is the focus of, you know, the focus of net assessment. Doesn't aim at perfection, doesn't aim at, yeah, the perfect solution aims at insight and or insights, this. that senior leaders will find helpful in executing their jobs. And at least for the Defense Department, defense departments more broadly, there are a host of things that senior defense leaders focus on and need to focus on that are by their nature long term, whether it's acquisition of new capabilities, development of infrastructure, basing, posture, recruitment and retention, personnel development, we may wish otherwise, but those are tasks that

are by their nature long term. And so if you're looking for, you know, a view of the future and a view of the long term, again, that's sort of what net assessment is about. Yeah. And does it go too far to say that maybe what struck me that sort of the brilliance of the approach is, is in, it's essentially, it's assertion, right, that a static bean counting exercise, like a static effort to just say today, you know, we've got, I don't know, we've got this much throw rate and I've got that much throw weight and we've got this many this and they've got that many that. Like that's actually dangerously misleading. Like it like the the pure quantity, the quantitative method on you know, sort of sort of not not animated by the spirit of the more

qualitative kinds of thinking. I'm being very crude here. Um, that net assessment seems to demand and and not animated by the need to think in time, actually will pretty reliably lead you to think things that are obviously not the case, that, like, for example, the French Empire will successfully resist Germany in 1940, right, et cetera. Yeah, no, look, I think that's right. Look, quantitative assessment can serve perfectly, capably in some cases, right? If you want to find out who's going to win the war, Kuwait or Iraq in 1990, you probably don't have to go too far beyond the bean counting. But if you're in a competition with a capable competitor, a capable adversary, you do need to go beyond the bean counting for several reasons. One is that we count our beans and they count their beans and they may count their beans very differently than the way we do.

And if we were in the deterrence business in the Cold War, if we're in the deterrent business now, it's probably more important to understand what beans. they're counting, how they perceive our beings and their beans, then it is just to think, to imagine that there's this sort of, you know, abstract calculus that everybody's following. And I think what we learned after the end of the Cold War, certainly was confirmed after the end of the Cold War. I think we suspected it earlier was, yeah, that the Soviets measured the military balance very differently than we did. That there wasn't this universal strategic calculus that everybody was following.

And the net assessment approach really, really emphasizes that. And I'd say the Office of Net Assessment, among others, so they weren't the only ones. But the Office of Net Assessment really sponsored some pathbreaking research into how the Soviets perceive the military balance. And so, yeah, I think, yeah, that would be my response there. Well, could you just say more about that? That's really interesting. What was the Soviet self-perception and how did it differ from, you know, what one might have thought to be the sort of objective way of understanding.

the balance of power. Yeah, look, I would say, you know, to take, you know, to take one example, the Soviets thought about nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence very differently than we did. You know, if you ever, if there was ever a form of warfare that, you know, that came closest to war by mathematics, one would argue, and indeed a lot of, you know, Western nuclear thinkers argued, well, it's, it's, it's nuclear warfare, right? It's all, it's all basically physics-based warfare and it's all it's all just sort of inescapable and yet what we learned over time is that the Soviets perceived things very differently and again I'll take the story back to Andy Marshall gosh during during some of his early days at the Rand Corporation I think this was a

definitive experience for Marshall in in developing his thinking about net assessment first at Rand and then in the Pentagon. Marshall was part of a very small group of of people who had access to the full range of sources that we had on the Soviet Union during the early Cold War. And even more than many of his colleagues at the Rand Corporation. And that deep understanding, such as it was, of the Soviets and the 50s, showed him some important things. And it was that the Soviets were taking their limited resources and investing them in different

ways than we were taking our limited resources and investing them. So for the United States, we basically had in the early Cold War two megaprojects, right? The nuclear megaproject, nuclear, thermonuclear weapons, and ballistic missiles. The Soviets had three nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and air and missile defense. And Marshall was aware fairly early on that Yeah, the Soviets had very limited resources and again, just tangible things like steel, concrete, rubles, intellectual capital. And they were dividing them against, into across three mega projects instead of two. So from the very beginning, the Soviets were interested in defending against nuclear weapons, bombers and ballistic missiles, whereas we sort of gave

it lip service. So that's just an example of a propensity, right? And then over time, The Soviets allocated significant parts of their GNP, not just of their defense expenditure, to air and missile defense, whereas we basically gave up on it. You know, I mean, we used to have surface-to-air missiles ringing urban centers, you know, in the United States. By the way, they were nuclear-armed interceptors. If you drive, I live in Fairfax County, Virginia, you drive down the Fairfax County Parkway. there's a marker of what used to be the Fairfax County missile defense site.

That's long gone, right? But for the Soviets, and I'd even say for the Russians today, they have this propensity towards air and missile defense. We can argue about how effectively that's proving to be, you know, in Ukraine and so forth. But that's the point. And so that the notions of being able to defend against bombers, being able to defend against missiles represented a real, a real difference between American nuclear thinking and Soviet nuclear thinking, and then in turn opened up opportunities as we understood those proclivities,

those propensities, opened up opportunities for us to at least try to influence Soviet perceptions of deterrence, Soviet resource allocations and so forth. Yeah, my dad was deputy commander of the military district of Washington for police curating intelligence in the 60s. And so I'm familiar with that air defense system just from, you know, him pointing stuff out to me as I was decades later driving around with him as a kid. And it is a sort of fascinating fact of history. Well, not that this is what we exactly plan to talk about, but can you, can you just say a little like how, what did that mean? So we understood that this is how they were thinking and that it was different from how we were thinking. They were

prioritizing something that we kind of prioritized. And then, as you put it, gave up on. And so what specifically then we're redoing to leverage our our insight. Yeah. So that's one half of the equation, right? A set of Soviet predilections. And I should say, look, that didn't just come out of nowhere, right? I mean, we're talking about the Soviet Union had been invaded by Nazi Germany. And the war against Nazi Germany was extremely costly to the Soviet Union left. And I would say in some ways still leaves, you know, a massive scar on the national psyche of Russia. And so they were really focused in, you know, on on defense, defense of the motherland, defense of the homeland.

We flip things around and look at the U.S. Because again, it is net assessment. It's not all about the other. It's also about you. You could see, you know, in the U.S. Air Force, an organization, well, built on organized around manned flight. but particularly an organization from its birth that was focused on strategic bombing. And so what you see unfold over the Cold War is first unconsciously, but then very consciously by the end of the Cold War, a U.S. attempt to leverage strategic bombing and the threat of

strategic aviation, the threat of strategic bombers as a tool of deterrence. as a tool of cost imposition against the Soviet Union. And you can actually track it out. Again, first, initially this is unconscious. It's the Air Force doing what the Air Force wants to do, which is invest in lots of bombers, and the Soviets doing what they want to do, which is figure out how to shoot down bombers.

But then over time, it becomes much more of a conscious effort. How can we use our acquisition of bombers to force the, Soviets to invest more in defensive armaments, which means all other things being equal, they'll have less resources to invest in offensive arms. And it really reaches, I'd say, it's, you know, it's, it's apex with what became the B2 bomber program, the stealth, stealth bomber program and the decision to unveil our development of stealth. The records are pretty clear about that, that we, among other reasons, we unveiled stealth in order to impose costs upon

the Soviet Union, in order to force them to double down on their investments in air defenses, to adjust as frankly, we had unveiled the B-1 bomber to force them to double down on previous investments in air defenses, to spend more and more on defensive arms so that they have less and less resources to spend on offensive arms. I think that's probably the best example of how kind of deep knowledge of a competitor. And I should say also deep self-knowledge, right? Because it only works if if the U.S. military is going to do things that that influence the competitor. But deep knowledge of the competitor, deep self-knowledge are actually, you know, put into practice to strategic ends. You were hardly twisting the Cold War Air Force's arm by asking them to build

more, more bombers to be flown by pilots. But let me ask a dumb, probably obvious question, because I'm not a student of this episode at all, and this is really fascinating. Why were we confident that the unveiling of stealth would have that effect, forcing them to double down into their defensive efforts, as opposed to the opposite effect, which is say, well, we're probably not going to be able to shoot these stealth bombers down. That's really hard.

So maybe we just need to adjust course dramatically. Yeah, well, that was one potential outcome. Another potential outcome, right, was one could imagine that the Soviets were so good at air defense that they would have been able to adapt really quickly to the advent of stealth, right? So that would be another thing you'd want to guard against. Because if in unveiling stealth, you wanted to impose lots of costs and you wanted to come out ahead in the competition, what you didn't want them to do was, I don't know, flip some magic switch and say, aha, now we, you know, we have you. And I would say, you know, in both cases, U.S. decisions were guided by, supported by that, that deep knowledge of the Soviet Union.

So when it came to how, you know, how would they react? Well, you never know 100%, but the Soviets had such a track record of emphasizing defense. And again, it was backed by dollars. It was backed by bureaucracy. I mean, the Soviets had, the Russians have a whole service that is dedicated to the air and missile defense of the homeland. So again, back to bureaucratic interest, what the Air Force wanted to do. Hey, this is what PVO strani on the, on the Soviet side, wanted to do as well.

And I think it was also, you know, backed by the basic insight that, yeah, that bureaucracies don't, like, turn on a dime. So that's the one. The other, again, that that people worried about was how, how fragile is stealth? I mean, is stealth something that we should hold on to for wartime use? And if we unveil stealth, it'll basically start the clock on on Soviet efforts to defeat stealth. And what if stealth is actually very, very fragile? We could wind up imposing costs on ourselves, not on the Soviets. And there, again, based on what we know on the archival record, declassified documents,

their U.S. decision makers were really assisted by some very good sources of information on Soviet aerospace research and development. And I would say particularly intelligence that we gained from a Soviet aeronautical engineer named Adolf Tolkachia, who volunteered his services to the United States, and worked in the design bureau that dealt with radar. And so he was in the catbird seat for Soviet radar development and presumably Soviet stealth and counter-stealth development. And so what we know, again, from the declassified record is that the U.S. went into the decision to reveal stealth with confidence that a Soviet response to stealth would be at least five to ten years down the line. And of course, it was more than that because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I would say in a lot of ways, stealth is still pretty robust after all of these decades. So it now. that case, intelligence, I'd say some key intelligence insights, really gave comfort to defense leaders who wanted to unveil stealth. This is really fascinating. So we're at the sort of the end of the Cold War in your story.

So this hopefully sort of brings us in the direction of where I want to go, which is up to the present day. You know, the process you just described of an innovation that's then going to be met with countermeasures and then at a sophisticated level, being aware of that and trying to use the way in which that dynamic is going to flow to achieve strategic advantage. You've written extensively on this dynamic, which is a kind of obviously core dynamic of strategic thinking. We, of course, are at this moment now where we, you know, we are downstream of what was widely regarded as a revolution in military affairs. The evolution of a goes by different names. Reconnaissance strike, complex, precision strike, revolution, et cetera, et cetera.

but the kind of war fighting that seems to get rolled out in the Gulf War, where we basically make mincemeat of actually a fairly vaunted Iraqi military prior to the onset of the first Gulf War. And then I'm sort of summarizing here because we've talked about this on the show a number of times. But then flash forward, our adversaries paid attention to what we did there in the desert in the early 90s. They've spent a fair amount of time catching up and developing these capabilities themselves. You predicted this and sort of more than predict you, you were thinking seriously about what this was actually going to mean, practically in this brilliant article in 2011 and data list called Weapons, the Growth and Spread of the Precision Strike regime, which I commend to listeners,

because it holds up, as it were. And here we are today in 2024. And there's a number of ways into this moment. So let's start with this. The Houthis have built a precision strike complex and are using it to shut down the Red Sea. And just within the last 24 hours, there's been some kind of response from the Biden administration. What does this, feel free to, by the way, expand on my extremely schematic summary there,

about our subject. But what is what is the fact that of all of all world powers, powers and air quotes there, the, the Houthis of Yemen have something like a precision strike system that is compelling us to respond? What can we, and what can we learn from this episode as it's playing out about the broader questions of what this maturity of this revolution is going to mean for us in China? Yeah. So I'd say just with regard to the Houthis, I think there's, there's two things that you take away from it. One is they have friends. Right. Right. So, yeah, I don't, I don't know that it was the Houthi, you know, research and development complex. Houthi DARPA didn't, didn't come up. Although I think you just, you just coined a meme there, Aaron. That's, by the end of this podcast,

I expect to see Houthi DARPA out there on the internet. But no, so, I mean, I think that's one, that, you know, that they had friends. They didn't, they, they, they didn't do it on their own. But two, it can it just signifies just how broadly the precision revolution has spread. And in fact, they're not the first, you know, non-state group to employ precision, you know, precision strike. Hasbola has, you know, other terrorist groups have. And again, I just think it's evidence of, of how, you know, how far we've come, right? I mean, you mentioned, you mentioned the Gulf War. Precision munitions were a small fraction of the munitions that U.S. forces dropped during the Gulf War.

Only a handful of aircraft types could drop them. The limiting factor was really the number of targeting systems that we had. There was a period after the Gulf War where we were genuinely concerned that we were going to outpace even our closest allies. I remember there was a piece that came out of the 90s called Mind the Gap. Mind the gap between the U.S. and other NATO members over precision strike. That is worlds away from where we are now, where precision is just considered routine, not just by us, but by others. And where the means to launch strikes with precision has spread far beyond

the United States, first-tier, you know, first-tier militaries, second-tier militaries, down to non-state actors. And it's, in a way, it's sort of echoes of, you say, past revolutions where, you know, it's the old ditty about, you know, how the colonial powers had the maxim gun and yet the, you know, the local forces didn't have the maxim gun. Now everybody has it. You know, it's like, again, the machine gun, everybody's got them. And so it's, it is a, a very different world. And it's a world that I don't think we're fully prepared for. Let me get to probably the most, to me, at least alarming statement you made back in that 2011 paper. Because we're kind of, we're living, you predict and we're, and we're now living

in in the world where your prediction has come true that the Chinese, among others, will develop such a robust precision strike complex that the American strategy of forward deployment of resources to allies sort of in theater is going to come into question. Because that's the whole point. That's the whole reason why the Chinese would build such a complex is to prevent us from doing what we did in the Gulf War, which is to leisurely over the course of several months, use what four deployed forces we had already to build up a really massive war-mighty, war fighting potential, you know, right on the border of our enemy.

That's going to be hard. Hard may not go far enough. That's going to be hard in 2024 when there's this anti-access area denial sort of dome imposed over much of the Western Pacific. And you, but you actually made the point in such a way that was, everything I just said is pretty widely observed in a matter of general agreement. Now, you put it in a way back in 2011 that actually gave me real pause where you suggested that in a way, this actually has a grand strategic impact that, you know, this question of our forward to plan, I don't think you used the word Rimland, but it's what came to my. The American grand strategy, just to make a very broad comment and feel free to disagree with this, but one way or the other, since the 40s on, whether we were thinking of it in terms of containment, whatever terms we were thinking of it in and whatever president we had, in effect, there is a strong

continuity, and we occupied the littorals of Eurasia in three major theaters, Europe, East Asia, and to some level, though this is always the matter of greatest debate, it seems, the Middle East, such that we supported our allies and were prepared to for-deploy in the event of war and mostly we're working to deter war. You suggest that the mature revolution of precision strike actually calls this grand strategy into question. It's 2024. Do you still have that worry?

We're still doing it. We're still over there. Well, I think there's, you know, there's bad news and good news. And I think the, you know, the bad news you highlighted, which is the, the, basically a strategy based on power projection is increasingly open to question. The good news is, though, that I'd say the spread of the precision strike regime also gives, look, the U.S. is a status quo power, right? We are about defending our interests.

We're about defending our allies. We're about defending, you know, our territory. And so in a way, actually, the spread of precision strike gives. gives an advantage to a status quo power like the United States if we adopt, we adapt our strategy, rather. And I think our, so our strategy, we need to adapt our strategy to include a little bit of anti-access of our own. The fact that we have territory, we have allies in the Western Pacific, we talk about first island chain, second island chain. Look, first island chain, U.S. allies and friends. Second island chain, U.S. territory is probably a good shorthand for it.

So we have allies and friends in the Western Pacific that are capable and working with our allies and friends in the Western Pacific. We have the ability to kind of create our own anti-access challenge to a non-status quo power, a revisionist power that, you know, that seeks to dominate the Western Pacific. That's the opportunity. We just have to grasp it. And I think we are. I think we're starting to.

I think in some ways, actually, our allies are starting to grasp it along with us, Japan, as one good example of that. So I think there's both, you know, there's both danger, but also opportunity there. One possibility, we had a fascinating conversation on the show with a writer. Is that your size colleague, at least for the last year or two, Ascander Raymond. And one idea that we discussed on that recording, and I sort of toyed around with in a piece for National Review a few months ago, was the way in which this kind of warfare is so expensive. Because you're relying on really high-end systems. And even the things that go boom themselves are so exquisite and expensive that you could run out of them pretty quickly. And in fact, it's in the war games that I've read about, it seems like in Western Pacific scenarios, we do run out of stuff pretty quickly.

And it's really alarming and it leads to all these questions about the defense industrial base, et cetera. And it seems, I mean, the conventional wisdom right now seems to be the Chinese will run out of them less quickly, which is obviously a big problem. And the longer that gap that is, you obviously are opening up possibilities of just defeat. But what if, what if you have a world where everybody is kind of running out of it after a while? Slash not using their best stuff being really careful with using their best stuff because they don't want to run out of it or they don't want to, you know, in terms of, say, manned platforms. They don't want them destroy because, you know, other contingencies will come along in the context, even of that war, and they're going to want their stuff for it. You see the potential for wars of attrition, for prolonged war. I had a, I wanted to title my essay in National Review, party like at 1699 because, and that's kind of Raymond's point.

He makes it in a more sophisticated way than me, but we are going back to his view is we're kind of going back to this almost 18th century feeling situation in terms of what. great power, direct conflict may actually look like. All of which is to say is that, like, help, first of all, is this possibility that the actual, if you will, net effect of all this is that it will sort of expend itself and then we're going to be in an iteration of conflict where it's sort of a factor, but not the massive factor it was on day one. And we're going to need to find other ways to fight because we probably won't have settled our issues. Does that seem basically right to you?

What are the other possible iterations of how this works? Just help us picture this world. Yeah, look, no, I think it is basically right. And we don't have to go far to picture the world because a variety of that world is playing itself out in Ukraine. You know, if I was to resort to history, I think, you know, one powerful metaphor is the way European militaries thought about war. in the years leading up to World War I. They didn't ignore cannons. They didn't ignore rapid firing artillery, machine guns.

They just made a set of assumptions about the ammunition consumption of those weapons. And those assumptions wound up being wildly out of sync with the reality. So after World War I kicks off, basically the belligerents expend. And they're war stocks and you have this shell shortage and then you basically get into this industrial mobilization contest. And I think, you know, that that's sort of what we've already seen kick off in a certain way with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And I'd say it's just a reiteration of why it's great to be the United States because whether

it's now or, you know, both at the early stages of World War II or before. World War I and before our entry in World War I, by and large, a few of the United States, you get you get clues. The initial wars happen to somebody else, not to you. And so today, as in the past, we have an opportunity to adjust. But I think you're right. The terms of success, the terms of competition in a mature revolution are very different than in the early period. in the mature revolution, it is about industrial output. It is about quantity. But it's also about making adaptations to be more effective, right?

Still, it's not just, you know, two unthinking sides beating each other up. But for today, I think you're right. Now, look, I would say modern warfare is costly. I think you're right there. You know, today's precision munitions, I don't know, many of them are. actually cheaper than their predecessors. It's also cost tends to vary by range. So shorter range systems are going to be less expensive than longer range systems. By the way, that's another reason why our position in the Western Pacific matters. If we need to defend ourselves from short range,

it's a lot cheaper and easier than doing it from long range. But yeah, I think we need to be giving a lot more attention to industrial mobilization. And I mean, not just as a future hypothetical, but we should really be thinking about now. And we should be thinking about second best alternatives. And there, I think the challenges that we face are not the United States as an economy, the United States as, as, you know, U.S. industry. It's the particular configuration of the defense industrial base and the defense acquisition system. We don't have, I would say, we don't have a shortage society-wide in being able to kind of reach out and strike things with precision. It's just the way we've been doing business, particularly since the end of the Cold War,

has biased us towards smaller, episodic buys of things that we now need in much larger quantities. There's another dimension to this, which is probably a good place for us to conclude. And I don't even really know how to start thinking about this. So maybe that's my question to use. How should we start thinking about the following problem, which is so far we've been discussing the nature of this mature revolution and what it means. But as you yourself pointed out back in that 2011 paper, it's easy, relatively easy to tell in retrospect when revolutions have occurred. It's harder to see them happening as they come together. It's harder to understand the processes of which you're a part.

It seems to me to be likely, curious to know your view, that we are in the midst of, a military revolution of sorts that we don't understand the contours of right now. The reason why it seems to me to be likely is just the nature of technological innovation across the board. I mean, set aside defense issues, is so amazingly rapid. Walter Mead, I thought really brilliantly in an essay and tablet, described our moment as a kind of singularity in the sense that the nature of life is changing. Human existence on the planet is changing so quickly as a consequence of the evolution.

of technology in whatever field, transportation, healthcare, computing, AI, et cetera, et cetera, it's actually like impossible to picture what the world looks like in 20 years. And so on the assumption that's true in warfare as well, and we have, you have space, you have, you know, really sophisticated evolution and just old-fashioned kind of electronic warfare. You have cyber, you know, you have, you know, the undersea domain looks different than it did, you know, a generation ago. You have all these different changes that are playing out in different spots and how all

these, you know, AI itself, which is very much the sort of topic de jure, all these different changes and expansions of capability in domains and new domains for that matter. And I'm not familiar. I mean, maybe, maybe we've got it all figured out in some highly classified way, but the operating concept that ties all this stuff together and is going to make the U.S. military a successful fighting force, or God forbid, somebody else figures it out first, and it makes them a successful fighting force using all of the new tricks of the trade in a cohesive way, kind of like the Germans do and, you know, 39 and 40. Like, how, help us think about the revolution that I suspect, many suspect, we're already in, but we just kind of don't know what it

is. Yeah. Look, you put your finger on, on the key question or the key issue. And again, it takes us back to net assessment, right, which is in the world that we're in today, you, you know, you just alluded now to Blitzkrieg and the, and the fall of France. For, for a whole host of reasons, we probably don't want to and don't need to emulate Nazi Germany in pioneering the next Blitz Creek. But we sure as heck don't want to emulate France. In other words, we don't, we may or may not pioneer the next revolution, but we don't want to become the victim of it. And it seems to me that is, you know, that is a key argument for looking out for assessing military balances, for assessing trends. It's a, it's a different way of mitigating surprise. Now, in the, you know, in the, in the, in the details, I, yeah, I tend to think that the next big thing will come out of efforts to deal with this mature precision strike regime. Just as Blitzkrieg came out of attempts to solve the problem of the artillery swept attritional static battlefield.

field. So, you know, and we can think about autonomy. People talk about autonomy, talk about AI. I mean, for me, you know, one of the attractions of autonomy is in a world of reconnaissance strike complexes, whatever you want to call it, networks of sensors, command and control, and weapons, what autonomy says is, well, I'm really going to co-locate all of those functions on the same platform and just let it go do its do its thing so autonomy is a you know is a way of solving the problem of all these exposed linkages between weapons sensors and and deciders it may be the right answer it may not and again even talking about autonomy is like talking it much kind of like talking about air power it's it's talking at a very very broad very broad level so I don't know what

the answer is and and I would also say that look as the military historian, we are unlikely to know a priori with great certitude what the answer is before the next big war. You know, the history of strategy, the history of military affairs is a history of surprise. And so that's, again, that takes me back to looking out, looking at trends, looking at what our competitors are investing in, what they're doing as a way of informing senior leaders to make better decisions for us as we approach this uncertain future. Tom Manken of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and of Johns Hopkins Seis, thank you so much for making the time today. I don't know if it's an entirely

reassuring conversation, but it's an important one, and I very, very much appreciate it. I really appreciate it our conversation, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.