America’s long-standing military dominance is being threatened amid the autonomous evolution, and without significant transformation, the United States could be left behind, according to former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.
Kendall, who served as the secretary of the Air Force during the Biden administration and as the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics under President Barack Obama, outlined his concerns and what he believes is the appropriate pathway forward in his new book, Lethal Autonomy: The Future of Warfare Whether We Like It Or Not, which was released on Tuesday.
Recommended Stories
“American military dominance is not a birthright, it’s not assured,” Kendall told the Washington Examiner. “You have to work to sustain it, and that means taking new technology and applying them as effectively as possible, and accepting the need for change.”
The book, which dives into the future of warfare regarding the growing use of autonomous systems with lethal objectives, originated as a project he undertook during his time in the Obama administration but did not complete before leaving the position. Specifically, it builds on the Third Offset Strategy, a DOD initiative that focused on range, autonomy, and quantity at cost, though Kendall admitted the group’s work was ultimately left unfinished.
“I first became alarmed about this in 2010, 16 years ago. I came back to the government after being out for 15 years, and I saw what China was investing in from the intelligence we had at the time, and it was quite clear that they were building a force military designed to defeat American power projection,” Kendall warned. “If we weren’t in a race for military technological security with China, none of this would be hugely important. We could take our time, but we are in a race, and China is being very creative about their investments.”
He describes what the future of warfare could look like far beyond the autonomous systems that have defined recent conflicts, such as drone usage in the Russia-Ukraine war and the U.S.-Iran war.
For the Army, Kendall described a future in which there are no infantry soldiers or manned armored vehicles. Instead, they would be autonomous. Instead of risking soldiers’ lives along the front lines, the army would need and rely on autonomous mobility, autonomous small-unit tactical behaviors, and high-confidence target-acquisition capabilities to use machines to capture and hold territory.
Last year, Ukrainian troops were able to recapture a fortified Russian position in Kharkiv Oblast using unmanned ground vehicles. Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said Ukraine carried out 9,000 missions in March alone using UGVs.
When it comes to the Navy, Kendall posits that U.S. adversaries could develop capabilities that make America’s aircraft carriers and the sailors on board vulnerable and, as a result, obsolete. He said the same of large submarines, that they will become too vulnerable, but noted the service’s pursuit of both unmanned surface vessels, and unmanned undersea vessels as a possible long-term solution.
A USV rescued two Army pilots whose Apache helicopter was brought down by an Iranian drone near the Strait of Hormuz last month.
Standard aircraft will also be replaced with unmanned aircraft, according to Kendall. He said U.S. aircraft, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, were at risk during the Iran war, and he specifically referenced the targeting of an American E-3 Sentry airborne early warning-and-control system aircraft.
During his tenure as Air Force secretary, Kendall began the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which is intended to deliver affordable aircraft that operate as part of a manned-unmanned team. The Air Force announced new contracts with multiple defense companies for the CCA program last month.
Both wars have demonstrated the importance of cheap, attritable systems, especially when they can be used to target much more expensive and sophisticated systems. Russia and Ukraine are mass-producing attack drones, and their capabilities continue to develop, often with developments being made routinely.
Similarly, the cost curve problem was on display for the U.S. in the Middle East as it used precision-guided munitions and systems that cost millions of dollars to stop drones that cost a tiny fraction of the price.
EUROPE PRAYS FOR UNEVENTFUL NATO SUMMIT: ‘NO NEWS IS GREAT NEWS’
Kendall noted that senior leaders will need to expand their minds to lead the services into the next era of warfighting.
“I think there’s a reluctance of our operators, and it’s understandable to let go of what they’re used to imagine a world in which the things that they’ve spent their entire lives learning how to operate, mastering, figuring out how to organize effectively, training people to operate, that that may all change, and what we may have in the future is a force built around autonomous platforms. Generally speaking, the military services are looking at uncrewed systems as ways to help the existing current systems, and I think they’ve got to think beyond that,” he said.
