Sea Control - Sea Control 450 - Autonomous Systems & Military Revolutions with Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

Links1. “Looking Back to Look Forward: Autonomous Systems, Military Revolutions, and the Importance of Cost,” by Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia McDonald, Journal of Strategic Studies, January 24, 2023.2. “Does Technology Win Wars?” by Jacquelyn Schneider, Foreign Affairs, March 3, 2023.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Walker Mills returns as host today. He's joined by Dr. Jacqueline Schneider to discuss her new book on Autonomous Systems and Military Revolutions. This episode was edited and produced by William McQuiston. We are rapidly approaching our 300th episode since relaunch. To celebrate, we're going to attempt a bit of a mailbag, so if you have a question about the podcast that you'd like me to answer on the air, please send it to seacontrol at simsec.org. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website, simsec.org, so if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men.

Welcome aboard the Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. My guest today is Dr. Jacqueline Snyder, and we'll be discussing her article co-authored with Dr. Julia McDonald, published in the Journal for Strategic Studies, titled Looking Back to Look Forward. Autonomous Systems, Military Revolutions, and the Importance of Cost. Jackie, welcome aboard. Can you start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background, please? Sure, sure. And thank you so much for having me. So I am a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, but before working at Hoover, I previously

was an assistant professor at the Naval War College. My PhD is in political science, so I study the intersection of technology and conflict. generally from a kind of political psychology human behaviors frame. Before I got my PhD, I was an Air Force officer for six years, and I have served almost 12 now in the Air Force Reserves. So I've kind of done the gamut of Air Force missions. Awesome. Well, we're excited to have you aboard. As a reminder to the listeners, all the opinions that we express here are purely our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we may be otherwise associated. So getting right into kind of the heart of what you were writing about in your paper,

what question were you trying to answer about the concept of autonomy and why did you think it was important to ask that question? So this paper is a bunny trail from the book. And if for anybody who's written a book, you know, sometimes you spend years on a bunny trail and then it doesn't make it to the book. And that's what this was. So the book is called The Hand Behind Unmanned. And it's all about the people, the beliefs, the identities, the kind of non-tangible ways in which they explain our investment in different types of unmanned systems. But as part and parcel of that book, we were really coming at it with this puzzle of, gosh, there's this kind of vocabulary of inevitability when it comes to unmanned systems.

And yet, I'm not even sure that we're all talking about the same thing when we say unmanned systems. So what makes unmanned systems any different or better, or are they better than any other type of systems? And the first thing we found was that this was a false dichotomy, right? This idea of unmanned versus manned is actually not strictly the way unmanned kind of works as a category or how autonomy works as a category. And so the paper really came from, well, let's look back and see what are the characteristics of technologies in past giant leaps that have really led to major changes in battlefield effectiveness and that we can trace to strategic victories. And maybe if we have some understanding of what historically the role of technology has been, that'll give us a better understanding of the ways in which autonomy and different types of autonomous systems might influence not only the battlefield, but ultimately who wins and loses wars. And before we move on, Jackie, can you just remind us, is that book out already? Can listeners find it? Or is this something that we're going to have to bring you back on the podcast later to talk about? Oh, yeah, you'll have to bring us back. It is this. Do you know that that when you are working on like an update for your computer and it's like it'll take three hours and like the 90 percent takes like up to two hours and 50 minutes and you're like, yeah, we are on track. And then the last two minutes, 10 minutes takes like a day. Yeah, that's the book.

So the book is pretty much dead. It's already gone through revisions. It just needs the final copy edit blessing. But Ukraine happened and it's been hard for me to let go of the baby. I understand. Right. And obviously at this time when there's so much going on with unmanned systems, I'm sure it's just always that decision.

Like, should we move forward or do I have to go back and add this in? Exactly. So you talk about revolutions and military affairs and military revolutions in your paper. And I was wondering if you could define both of those and talk about them a little bit for us. Yeah, thank you. And, you know, these are kind of trigger words when it comes to the military. So I think it is important for us to understand exactly what we're talking about. So I'll start with RMAs because I think actually those may be more well known.

So RMAs, revolutions and military affairs. This is really a concept that was introduced in the early 90s by a series of different scholars and thinkers and policy wonks and defense strategists that were working on how does technology affect warfare. They're coming off the end of the precision-guided or the beginning of the precision-guided munition revolution, and they're thinking about, like, wow, there's something distinctly different about these technologies. What is it, and how does it affect what we should be buying in the U.S. military? So the idea behind revolutions in military affairs is that, in general, the way that warfare progresses is somewhat linear, right? And the effectiveness gets better as technology gets introduced to the battlefield. But quite often, these are very incremental changes. But sometimes there are these revolutions, these kind of punctuated equilibriums, in which case the introduction of a technology, and some would also say there's a few kind of non-technology examples here, but the introduction of the technology significantly changes the way in which a state fights war.

And the states that are able to adopt that revolution in military affairs are therefore more likely to win conflicts. And there's a huge debate over kind of like, what are the RMAs? I think probably the piece that captures this the best is a piece from the 90s by Vinovich, who lists, I think, 10 or 11, going back from the infantry revolution all the way up to modern warfare. So these revolutions in military affairs really dominated a lot of the thinking about weapons and technologies in the late 90s and early 2000s and leading into coin. And then they kind of became a little bit of a bad phrase. And so you don't actually see RMA that much anymore, but it's still there. It's like the third offset.

They still say revolutionary. We'll hear, you know, industrial revolution, information revolution. So it's still like lurking in our memory about technology. So that's revolutions in military affairs. But at the same time that this was happening, these ideas were circulating. There was also kind of a current happening in military history. And to be honest, a lot of this was actually funded by the Office of Net Assessment, who was also funding this work of revolutions and military affairs. But the military revolutions is actually a larger concept. So historians look at these RMAs and they're like, these are awesome. They don't actually always lead to significant shifts or changes or changes in balance of power, right? They might change the balance on the battlefield for a short period of time, but states are able to catch up. And so there's a limited RMAs, you can think of them as kind of like aftershocks or smaller earthquakes. But military revolutions are these much larger situations that happen much rarer and occur for a much larger kind of period of time.

And they are not just about introducing new technology, but how a new technology affects the way societies generate GDP or generate goods and products and how these societies then are able to sustain conflict over time. So these giant military revolutions, you think of it kind of like the industrialized revolution, might include kind of a whole bin of different technologies, but those technologies are fundamentally shifting or shaping the way societies are organized, the way militaries are organized, and these military revolutions are really the ones that kind of create these tectonic shifts in power in the international system. awesome yeah i think that's a like you made that distinction in the paper and i think that's really important for the audience to understand and so you wrote that we find ourselves in in what many are calling the information revolution so that's maybe the current revolution that's ongoing and and what is that and and how do we define it and and where do autonomous systems fit within that information revolution yeah so the information revolution or actually as it was first as they were first looking at it, they were really thinking of this as the precision guided munition

revolution, and that actually like morphed to information revolution. And I think you can see a few different kind of terms for it now, but it's the idea that digital information and the ability to transport large amounts of information, to be able to process large amounts of information and how that information shapes a whole kind of array of different technologies, that this is the information revolution. And so it's not necessarily like the computer, right, or the internet, But instead, how these particular types of technologies and the way we've implemented them affect our ability to get information and how that information influences how states fight wars. And actually, there's a strong argument to be made that this is actually a societal revolution and that digital information also is shifting balances of power in the international system and the have and the have-nots within societies and between states. So autonomy is, I would say, a characteristic within information revolution.

So if I'm saying what are the tools in this toolkit of information revolution, there's computers, computing, networks, servers. But when we start talking about military technology, we start thinking about kind of how computing and microprocessors affect like sensors, the ability to make machines smarter. And so autonomy, we actually had autonomy for thousands of years. It's just been very dumb autonomy. So, you know, if you look at, for example, the history of mines, we have examples of mines going back to the Revolutionary War in which, you know, we're floating kegs of gunpowder down the river. But these are like largely contingent on the environmental conditions.

So you completely lose control. What's different about today's autonomy is because of the information revolution and the digitization of information and also the shrinking of the hardware that's required to process that information, we can have smarter autonomy. And so autonomy becomes this kind of range of different technologies that allows a weapon system, a machine, a platform to function without a human being. So it increases either the distance physically or the distance kind of metaphorically when it comes to situational awareness. So I know most people will think, well, we're talking about remotely piloted aircraft, but it's really not just remotely piloted aircraft. And actually, in some ways, remotely piloted aircraft are like strangely not as autonomous as some of the other systems that we have in our arsenal.

So, you know, other examples of autonomous systems or autonomy to some degree would be cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, mines. We don't really use mines that much in the United States, but mines, torpedoes, satellites. So it's actually an extraordinary amount, and there's a lot of variance within this category of autonomy, to include, like, how autonomous it really is. and I just want to ask so where did like where does this discussion of RMAs fall short in your paper you allege that you know there's a little bit of a lack or a bit of immaturity and part of the discussion around military revolutions and revolutions in military affairs and what is that so my argument is that the RMAs focus too much on battlefield outcomes and not enough on how those battlefield outcomes end up shaping who wins and loses wars. And I think maybe some of that is

the product of me being somebody who signed on the dotted line on September 10, 2001, and has lived through, you know, 20 years of campaigns where it's hard for us sometimes to assess strategic victory, but we can pinpoint actual operational innovations and battlefield effectiveness. So my argument here is that if you think about RMAs as simply aftershocks and revolutions being the big earthquake, what the big difference is, is that revolutions affect how states are able to maintain conflict over time, whether that's the economic cost of warfare or the political cost of warfare. And actually, these are often related because sometimes in order to maintain the economic

cost of warfare, you have to levy taxes, for example, which could influence your ability to control your regime or your populace. So it's when technologies are able to decrease that cost to sustain conflict that you get these like fundamental shifts in who wins and loses wars and that the RMA conversation had not thought enough about what happens beyond the battlefields and had not spoken to this larger question of, OK, we won on the battlefield. How do we win the war? I think that's like an absolutely a key argument. And I was super excited when it was actually Jared Samuelson, one of the other hosts that put us in contact. And I saw the paper and knew that this is what you guys had been planning on talking about. And I think that this idea of how states finance and continue war and maintain and regenerate capability over time is kind of underappreciated sometimes in the military discourse. And I think we're watching it play out in real time in Ukraine as one of the key discussion points for both Russia and Ukraine is conscription and the draft and how do you sustain forces over time. And that's, you know, may end up being more important than whether or not they have Western tanks or Western aircraft or more HIMARS, but like the decision making and bureaucratic efficiency of drafting new bodies into their respective militaries.

So then, Jackie, I think the question becomes, how do or how can autonomous systems contribute to changing the economic and political costs of warfare? And are they or is this something that we're failing to develop in the U.S. military with our use of autonomous systems? So this is some place where I think we don't interrogate ourselves enough as America, the American way of warfare. So I think looking at our arsenal and really the dominance of remotely piloted aircraft and our focus on systems that are exquisitely controlled, we are focusing on the use of autonomy to mitigate political risk. So the idea being you're not actually decreasing the amount of manpower that's required to fly that sortie. You're just removing the manpower from a situation that might cause the public to lose support for a conflict. And this idea that you can use autonomous systems in order to allow the United States to fight conflicts without, for example, reverting to the draft and therefore kind of mitigating any potential political ramifications from a foreign policy use of force choice. the other way however this is actually i mean that's really important when you want to manage a crisis when you want to manage escalation when you want to be able to use force without

worrying about potentially losing support from the public which is extremely important for an all-volunteer force it's not potentially tenable when we're talking about economic costs Because you're not using autonomy to substitute really for manpower. You know, if you look at remotely piloted aircraft, you get some advantages in manpower because you don't have to deal about kind of the physiological limitations of the actual cockpit, but you're not getting mass order changes in manpower. You have a whole crew of individuals that are making sure that you have the remote control connection working, that you're flying the plane correctly.

So you're not getting a great return for manpower. And these systems are, while cheaper than a lot of the kind of cutting edge manned systems, they're actually not that much cheaper in general, right? So the loss of them is still relatively expensive. I think if you look at the difference, for example, between the Global Hawk and the U2, here's a really good example where the manned system, you know, good old U2 that's been around a really, really long time, relatively inexpensive compared to the global hawk, but may have higher maintenance costs.

But once again, right, you're not getting like this clear cost winner between the global hawk and the U2. Now, where you can get real cost winners, and I think this is actually where you see Ukraine being extremely innovative, is when you think instead of autonomy being, I'm going to take the human being out of the platform, instead of thinking, what are the ways in which autonomy can increase our ability to see things, to be able to use different missile systems. And that's the idea of autonomy as part of missiles, as part of sensors, as part of satellites and comm relays, and the idea of autonomy in mass and the use of autonomy to

decrease the overall cost of a system. And in general, for the U.S., munitions are going to cost less than platforms. But we may have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about autonomy as simply a platform decision and not enough about kind of the innovations in cruise missile technology, in torpedoes, in we have almost no conventional long-range ballistic missile strike. And these are things that we really haven't thought about because we haven't had to worry about the maintenance of economic cost over time. And even these systems are increasingly expensive. So like, how do you get that cost ratio down so that you can use the innovations in autonomy to make weapon systems cheaper instead of making weapon systems solely

that mitigate the political risk? Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. And obviously the audience can't see it, but I'm taking furious notes because if people don't know, I'm actually going through the Air Force's course. I'm a Marine, but I'm going through the Air Force's course to be a remotely piloted aircraft pilot or operator in the future. So this is particularly interesting to me. I think the point about how the United States uses remotely piloted aircraft specifically is not actually reducing significantly cost or manning is really well taken. And obviously, there are some metrics like cost per flight hour that are probably way, way cheaper with remotely piloted aircraft. But sometimes the squadrons are actually bigger because if you're

doing more like 24-7 operations. You need more pilots than you would in a manned squadron. And there's other things like you have to have often a forward basing location. So even though you might be most of your personnel are farther from the battlefield, you still have to have some forward stage. So it's just, I think, more like you're saying, complicated in terms of a cost benefit calculation. And we haven't really designed it to maximize cost. And then I think the point on autonomy is whether you think about it more than munitions or in the aircraft is really interesting as well. I helped write a piece recently in War on the Rocks with some friends who are Navy pilots, and we talked about kind of precision as a system and this idea that

you can have a dumb delivery platform and a smart munition, or you could have a smart delivery platform and a dumb munition or somewhere on that spectrum. And that really what is important is that the whole system is precise. Yeah, you know, what's interesting is like watching Ukraine, they don't have a huge air force at this point. And so a lot of the munitions that we have focused on over the last 20 years are generally delivered from platforms, mostly aircraft, sometimes ships. And now you're Ukraine and nobody's giving you new aircraft.

You don't have many ships, but you still want the munitions, right? How do you develop a system that allows you to use those munitions without having the platforms? And I think that's where we're seeing actually a lot of experimentation and innovation occurring in Ukraine, because this is not something that the United States in general, our armed services like to buy platforms. That's kind of our status quo. And so we will conform our munitions so that they fit on the platforms that we prefer. And when those munitions threaten the platform, so, for example, So back in the late 70s and early 80s, the Air Force was like full up trying to sabotage cruise missiles because they were afraid this was going to replace the B-1.

And actually, it almost did. Carter kind of Carter actually nixed the B-1 and was said, let's just do cruise missiles. So, you know, the services have a history of of underfunding munitions if it seems to threaten the platforms of choice. ukraine doesn't have that luxury right so you're watching an extraordinary innovation and i think like if you're you know i i spent my time in the air force and if you're an air power advocate you're watching this conflict and thinking this is you know fascinating because people said it was going to be remotely piloted aircraft that would be the end of the fighter pilots but if you're able to fight basically an air war just with ground-based munitions That is actually more threatening to the theory of air power as victory than remotely piloted aircraft.

Yeah, I think what's going on in Ukraine is really interesting because there's a mix, right? I mean, I'm sure a lot of the listeners have seen a lot of the kind of small quadcopter attacking individual soldiers or quadcopter attacking tank or BMP. I think we see and hear less about what's going on with some of the like Turkish made drones and some of the kind of larger remotely pilot aircraft. But I personally really interested to see what's going on there. And I think it also throws some some doubts on this argument that I feel like I've heard in the United States military that, hey, you know, in a contested environment, the remotely pilot aircraft we have completely unsurvivable, like just take them out of the equation. And I think we're seeing that it's the environment is more complicated than that. And there is some room for that. I don't know if you have any. Yeah, I you know, I think a lot of this comes down to having enough and being willing to lose.

If you want to make our current inventory of remotely piloted aircraft survivable, they then become so expensive that they're almost useless for us. I mean, you don't want to get to a point where the weapons system designed to mitigate human costs becomes more expensive than, so expensive that we can't lose it, right? So I think, I mean, one of the things you see with Ukraine is that they're experimenting. What is the role of these systems? Some of them are going to get shot down. How does that fit within our campaign structure? How do we use different types of systems in order to be missile soakers, right, and decoys? And using unmanned smaller systems as forward observers, we would use an air platform usually for forward observers to call in airstrikes, right?

So they're thinking about how do we use these systems and then how do we, is it, if we can lose it, we're going to lose them. Like just factor in that some of these are going to be lost and build the campaigns and the structures around that instead of just trying to make systems that are not survivable at all. So there's definitely a cost equation here where when you can decrease the overall cost of each platform or system, then the loss of one, two, three, whatever is less important. And so, I mean, you really you've got this like war of attrition, right, where like the missiles and the system they're using to shoot down these things, if those cost more money than what they're putting up in the air, then you're winning, right? That's probably not our perspective. Our perspective is we need to build very, very exquisite things, but we've gotten to this gold plating paradox where each of these things has become so expensive that we can't substitute enough quality to make up for the loss of quantity. And I think that's the dangerous situation where we might be. And that's a situation that we might be for some unmanned systems, but it's also a situation we're in for manned systems as well.

This is not like unique to unmanned platforms. Yeah. Totally, totally agree. And I think it's really interesting to watch what's going on in Ukraine, even though it's a real tragedy. And I think that the faster we'll see a faster evolution of autonomous systems and remotely pilot aircraft from not just in Ukraine, because obviously they have conflict pressure, but also, generally speaking, in smaller and medium sized countries that have cost pressure to develop alternative paths to conventional manned aviation. Whereas in the United States, we can afford and have a really, you know, we have the world's best air force. So there's less of a pressure to develop and invest in unmanned systems. And, you know, none of this is actually new when, you know, in the book, which will come out, we trace the history of the investment in unmanned systems over, you know, centuries.

And there's always this period of stagnation in which bureaucratic interests and armed service identities become the default towards which systems we invest in and which we do not. And then war happens. And when war happens, there's no option at that point. And it becomes this very quick experimentation and change. I mean, a really good example of this is torpedoes. Torpedoes actually have been on the battlefield and used effectively going back to like the late 1800s. I mean, it's really remarkable, right? But for the United States, they ended up stagnating after World War I. We weren't really interested. We ended up closing almost all of our torpedo manufacturing. We had like this small manufacturing left in Newport. And that was like just about it. You know, it's basically like artisanal torpedoes. And then World War II kicks off and they realize, I mean, it takes us two or three years to catch up. Like, oh my gosh, like we need to, we need to reinvest in torpedoes.

This happens all the time. Korean War, Vietnam actually, Vietnam is maybe one of the biggest contemporary impetus for unmanned systems because you just saw such extraordinary tactical experimentation. Unfortunately, war does become a driver and it quickly reveals the technologies that are not useful in conflict or where the logistical chain becomes too expensive or difficult to operate. And then it reveals like, what does the warfighter really want and really need? So unfortunately, I think this has historical precedent. and jackie we're we're just about out of time here but i i want to kind of ask one more question

which is just based on this paper that you've written the book that you're still working on if you had a couple of key recommendations for the u.s military or defense establishment regarding autonomous systems what would they be kind of the million dollar question here well i mean i think everyone would agree at this point that we need more munitions And we need more flexible ways to shoot munitions. So we can't be reliant on a small number of platforms. And so looking at autonomy from a munitions perspective, I think most people at this point would definitely agree with that.

But I also think when it comes to autonomous systems across the spectrum, so intelligence sensors, communications relays, strike packages, that we need to move away from just thinking of these as systems that don't have a man in them, and instead think about how autonomy may increase our ability to remain on the battlefield for longer, whether that's by decreasing the economic costs, the logistical costs, which is related to economic costs. And ultimately, I think the American way of warfare, trying to mitigate human costs, I think that's still a noble and important aspect of unmanned systems. But in the end, that is probably going to be a trade-off between economic costs. And so we need to think about the campaigns that we're going to

be supporting and think about that trade-off between economic costs and political risk. Thank you. And I'm sorry, but that's just about all the time we have for today. So I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Jacqueline Schneider. Jackie, where can we find you online? And besides your book, which please plug again, what are you working on next? So I am still on Twitter at Jackie G. Schneid. I also have a website at the Hoover Institution, and I'm pretty good about updating those. The book will be coming out very shortly. It's under contract with Oxford University Press, and that's The Hand Behind Unmanned. But we also will have a series of pieces that are going to be coming out in political science journals. And then I have a recent piece

in foreign affairs. If you liked the Journal of Strategic Studies piece, there's kind of a more pithy, very focused policy take in foreign affairs. Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us. We'll make sure to put the link to that foreign affairs piece below the show notes, along with the link to this piece. And looking forward to having you back on when the book comes out. Thanks again. Thanks so much for having me. And to the listeners, take care. © transcript Emily Beynon

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