John Ferrari and Dillon Prochnicki explore ongoing developments in military technology.
Killer drones are coming. Shrinking populations and accelerating technology are pushing every military—America’s included—toward machines and software in the kill chain. No treaty, pope, or Congress can put the genie back in the bottle. The live question is whether the US will develop these systems prospectively, with the time to implement safeguards and test, or reactively, in the midst of a crisis. …
… The operational case rests on two coupled problems. First, the proliferation of cheap precision sensing and strike capabilities has made concentration of military forces a fatal vulnerability, as Operation Epic Fury demonstrated. The services have rightly adopted dispersed operations concepts, but dispersal multiplies demands on mass, sustainment networks, and much else that the current force cannot meet. Second, dispersal works only through dataflows, and those dataflows—vulnerable to severance, corruption, overloading, delay, and exploitation—are themselves prime targets. …
… The barrier to fielding these capabilities is institutional. The acquisition system buys platforms and fixed configurations; autonomy is developed like research, updated like software, and consumed like a munition. The Replicator initiative stalled for lack of a permanent home and predictable funding, and service cultures protect the communities that autonomy threatens. History—from the interwar carrier to Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover and Air Force General Wilbur Creech—shows that institutions adapt when their interests are threatened and when protection is balanced with decentralized competition. …
… Route the fiscal year (FY) 2027 request’s $54.6 billion in flexible, colorless, multiyear funding to competing operator-technologist incubators inside the services and combatant commands. Give each a declining charter and condition follow-on tranches on real transitions into force structure. … The bet is not that autonomy will make war clean or safe—it will not—but that bounded American autonomy fielded at scale is preferable to ceding the terms to adversaries and reacting to crises.
