Misreading the Battlefield
Three ways the Army Futures Commander is wrong about tech’s impact on warfare
General James Rainey, the commander of the Army Futures Command, recently said that technology has shifted the balance, making the defense now outweigh the offense.
He’s wrong. And these are the three ways he’s wrong.
This is a critically important conversation, as it will shape the future concepts and capabilities, into which the Army invests.
First, the defense has historically been stronger. Second, technology is allowing offenses to overwhelm defenses. Third, the cost disparity between offense and defense is enabling a national power arbitrage mooting the effectiveness of the defense.
Defense has historically been stronger
The defense didn’t need recent technological evolutions to become “stronger” than the offense. It has for a long time already been stronger.
In 1991, the US Army Command and General Staff College published its Student Text 100-9, Techniques and Procedures for Tactical Decision Making. This document instructs planners to use as a start point an assumption that for an attack to be successful, the offense requires a 3-to-1 ratio in local combat power.
Today, the Army’s Staff Reference Guide (published in 2020) includes the same direction:
This is not a matter of some doctrine writers anticipating a change in the past few years, either.
Most military students’ favorite, dead Prussian (Carl von Clausewitz) discusses the relative strength of tactical defense—particularly when paired with a strategic offense (Book VI, Chapter V). That is to say, the strongest form of war is to rapidly seize territory through a strategic offensive, followed by quickly transitioning to a defense and forcing your opponent to push you back out. That’s been Russia’s preferred style of fighting for years and they’ve masterfully executed it in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and again in 2022.
So, the defense didn’t need technology to become stronger.
Overwhelming defenses
Technology is lowering the bar to entry to military activities, with a preference for the offense.
The proliferation of autonomous systems and the advancement of technologies that enable those systems (e.g., advanced avionics, propulsion, manufacturing, etc) makes it much easier to overwhelm enemy defenses and to force an enemy to fight in multiple directions at one time.
Take as a simple example, Ukrainian employment of first-person view (FPV) drones to attack tanks. This relatively simple weapon has wreaked havoc on Russia’s systems contributing greatly to the more than 3,000 destroyed Russian tanks.
While that’s a single weapon against a single machine, the increasing strength of the attack is also true at a systems-level. For example, Hamas demonstrated its ability to overwhelm Israeli defenses in its spectacular and infamous attack on Oct 7, 2023. Hamas realized that limitations in defensive technologies created a critical vulnerability that it could exploit. To do so, the terrorist organization fired 5,000 rockets in 20 minutes and combined those rockets with a ground and unsophisticated air assault.
Offense costs less than defense
The cost of offense is dramatically less expensive than the cost of defense.
A few weeks ago, when Iran attacked Israel, the cost of the defense of the smaller state was placed at a multiple of the cost of the offense. That defense cost more than twice the offense. Some others have estimated the cost to be closer to 10- or even 20-times the cost of Iran’s barrage.
As Clausewitz said, war is an extension of policy (politics) by other means. The elements of national power include Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic (sometimes referred to as DIME). These are the various ways that a country may extend its policy (politics) and impose its will on another.
What I’m trying to say is that using the cost disparity, a country (and in some cases non-state actor) can arbitrage national power, in a manner that the United States and NATO arbitraged national power to defeat the Soviet Union. Just as Iran had no expectation of delivering effective fires against Israel in their attack last month, so too may other aggressors launch barrages of tech-enabled offensive attacks without attempting to destroy an opponent’s physical systems.
In other words, the effectiveness of the defense could be moot.
The danger of these economics grow in the face of an adversary that has as much to spend on cheap, offensive weapons as we do on our high-tech defensive systems. This is the case with China, who spends nearly as much on its military as does the United States.
Technology is enabling more robust defenses
While I’ve argued against GEN Rainey’s assertion, I will concede that some technologies are and will continue to favor the defense. We’ve already established that the defense has long been stronger than the offense. And while technology is lowering the bar to entry into warfare, there are some technologies that will continue to strengthen the defense.
Some of these, we’ve been covering here at Building our Defense, such as the notion of the transparent battlefield. The proliferation of sensors and the connections of sensors to effectors will make it harder for militaries to take offensive actions. A military must assume that every action it takes is observed by defenders, forcing the military to operate in a distributed manner, challenging logistics and maneuvers.
Similarly, advances in electronic warfare and jamming will challenge attackers’ ability to use navigation and communication technologies. As such, militaries have to invest in precision navigation and timing technology that doesn’t rely on GPS. We must also invest in terminal guidance for weapons systems that can operate in those environments—computer vision for terminal guidance and similar.
Conclusion
As senior leaders decide how to invest in developing novel capabilities for future wars, it’s critical to understand how technology is evolving and changing warfare.
Technology is undoubtedly changing the character of warfare, lowering the bar to entry, and creating disparities in systems that can be exploited by adversaries.
The United States must continue to invest in key technologies, including PNT, communications, long range autonomous munitions, and capabilities allowing us to target threat sensors and data systems.
And no matter what, we must…
Keep building!
Andrew