Max D.’s Post

Excellent piece by Palantir Technologies on how to make our broken defense industry more agile, outcome-oriented and competitive. Reform is desperately needed. Here are my favorite quotes: “There is no process that can save us. Reform will be painful. We must be very careful not to conflate pain with error.” “Our centralized, predictive program budgeting, management, and oversight process values time spent, not time saved. It values costs and effort, not value and outcomes.” “We must be able to reprogram money inside of 2 months, not 2 years. Messy and imperfect discretion is required.” “The the rules that apply to how military officer careers and promotions are governed must be reformed. Rotations for officers every 2-3 years only ensures they haven’t had enough time to learn anything beyond surface-level platitudes. Knowledge and know-how compound. We need to care more about winning than about providing experiences to fill out a bingo card.” “America should demand that its primes have commercial businesses to subsidize taxpayer R&D and to prove they are competitive.” “Apple didn’t charge you for their failed self-driving car in your last iPhone purchase. Contractors shouldn’t be able to charge you when their lab experiments run amok, either.” “Knowing if your feature request will take 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, or 1 year to implement is critical. Knowing how to bend the software to your will is how you bend the enemy to your will. Software and its malleability will define the clock speed of the OODA loop.”

Sun Tzu said, "All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near." Deception is not rocket science, generally the supporting effort is designed to be part of deceiving the enemy. Deception goes both ways. One of the reasons we did terrible in Afghanistan was because of the Taliban's innate ability to use deception at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. They had us chasing ghosts in remote areas such as Marjah...while assembling forces to attack in key areas. Unfortunately our senior military leaders never caught on...as deception goes both ways. We have great doctrine, challenge is implemention and training...it is developing that innate eye for warfare that Napoleon and Mullah Omar talked about. https://lnkd.in/duTrNnvW

In case you'd like to read the Kirkus Review of Elements of War - "A sweeping, authoritative look at the workings of warfare" - here's the link:

Opening the floor for discussion: Around 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, China militarized the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and Iran was allowed to pursue the bomb. A decade later, we have had more than 300 attacks on U.S. bases by Iran, 1,200 people slaughtered in a pogrom in Israel, an estimated 1 million casualties in brutal combat in Ukraine, and an unprecedented tempo of CCP phase zero operations in the Taiwan Straits. This is a hot Cold War II. The West has empirically lost deterrence. We must respond to this emergency to regain it. We have a peer adversary: China. “Near-Peer” is a shibboleth, a euphemism to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging we have peers when we were once peerless. In World War II, America was the best at mass production. Today that distinction belongs to our adversary. America’s national security requires a robust industrial base, or it will lose the next war and plunge the world into darkness under authoritarian regimes. In the current environment, American industries can’t produce a minimum line of ships, subs, munitions, aircraft, and more. It takes a decade or two to deliver new major weapon systems at scale. If we’re in a hot war, we would only have days worth of ammunition and weapons on hand. Even more alarming is our lack of capacity and capability to rapidly repair and regenerate our weapon systems. Given the vast sums we have spent on defense in these decades of Pax Americana, it would be reasonable to wonder: what went wrong?

I'm happy to share that Scott Savitz and I have published a commentary on military #deception in Modern War Institute at West Point! We talk about the need to sustain this underutilized capability and some of the components of doing so. #mildec #informationwarfare #psychologicalwarfare

WARTIME RESILIENCE   As war would be fought with varied means at long stand-off distances, an ill-defended base may not be able to safely shelter ships, planes and war vehicles. The first requirement of protecting forces is to provide adequate defense of bases. There must be adequate surveillance and self-defense systems must be in place so no enemy surprises are sprung. Bases, vulnerable or not, are the first ones to be targeted and attacked. Ships, aircraft and ground vehicles are best destroyed while on the ground, far away from the battlefield where they are most lethal. Without adequate cover, they can be lost in the opening salvos of a war. Without protection while the platforms are in port, these battle assets can be eliminated with ease. 

"This is a hot Cold War II. The West has empirically lost deterrence. We must respond to this emergency to regain it. We have a peer adversary: China. “Near-Peer” is a shibboleth, a euphemism to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging we have peers when we were once peerless. In World War II, America was the best at mass production. Today that distinction belongs to our adversary. America’s national security requires a robust industrial base, or it will lose the next war and plunge the world into darkness under authoritarian regimes. In the current environment, American industries can’t produce a minimum line of ships, subs, munitions, aircraft, and more. It takes a decade or two to deliver new major weapon systems at scale. If we’re in a hot war, we would only have days worth of ammunition and weapons on hand. Even more alarming is our lack of capacity and capability to rapidly repair and regenerate our weapon systems. Given the vast sums we have spent on defense in these decades of Pax Americana, it would be reasonable to wonder: what went wrong?" https://www.18theses.com/

The Dangers of Total War: Why Civilians Shouldn't Die Exploring the troubling realities of modern warfare, we discuss the impact of advanced technology and intelligence on civilian casualties. Why do we continue to harm innocents when we have the means to target the true enemies? Time for a strategic rethink! #WarfarePolitics #CivilianCasualties #MilitaryStrategy #TotalWar #TechnologyImpact #ConflictResolution #EthicsInWar #ModernWarfare #IntelligenceMatters #HumanitarianIssues

“In wartime, the truth is so precious that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.” - Churchill Magruder's Principle is the idea that it's often much easier to deceive an enemy into hanging onto their pre-existing incorrect beliefs, than to trick them into changing those beliefs. In WWII this belief was that Patton would be the one to lead the invasion of Europe and that the stories of sidelining him due to his outburst with a Soldier couldn’t be true as he was the best general we had. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops “Ghost Army” was instrumental to Allied success during WWII. The ~1100 Soldiers of this organization took their “traveling road show” to over 20 campaigns causing the enemy to believe they were 30K strong and are credited with saving tens of thousands of lives. I agree with the author that the atrophy of our deception skills are tied to not having a legitimate peer adversary in 20-30 years. Much like many of the core skills (combined arms for air defense) that have atrophied it can be argued a portion of this is due to hubris. In today’s environment we need to employ traditional means like camolauge for optical deception but also address other collection methods by staying beneath the noise floor. However, we need to combine this with a modern interpretation of active deception of today’s ghost army. Units should be equipped with emitters that mimic radars and communications nodes, physical decoys, and digital decoys. We should play on what was our hubris as the first “jab“ to set up the counter battery fire “cross”. Like many areas of doctrine the old is new again. It is time to apply the lessons from the ghost army and desert storm and invest talent and resources to well orchestrated and integrated active deception operations again.