Battlefield 2040–A conversation at the Army War College.

Episode 9:  We speak with six students at the Army's War College. A handful of colonels, lieutenant colonels, and one civilian. We talk about the future of warfare, what war will look like in 2040, and how the United States Army is preparing for that future. We get a chance to hear from a group of War College students while they're in the midst of finishing their year-end research project and thinking about how they will return to their commands and put to use some of the thought and research they've conducted over their time at the War College.

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Transcript

  📍  I don't trust myself to provide The amazing introductions for these individuals on their behalf. I'm going to turn it over to them and let them introduce themselves  Thank you Great to be here. Colonel Mike Isbell army strategist previous assignment was with army futures command my primary mission was to Explore what is the realm of the possible with respect to emerging technology and help describe how future wars will be fought  Upon graduation, I will be returning to Army Futures Command to work in the higher command to help drive operations. 

Good afternoon, Aaron.   My name's Colonel Alex Poncho Perez. I'm an armor officer, which means I'm on tanks usually, or if I'm in a cavalry unit reconnaissance. Last assignment was in the 3rd Infantry Division, for those that I don't know what a division is.

It's a unit that's at the tactical level composed of multiple infantry, armor. So tanks and guys that walk around with rifles and artillery. And I was the operations officer. So think of the COO of a company, about 20, 000 people. And then after war college here in two weeks, I'll leave to be the COO of the NATO rapid deployable  Core in Turkey, which is a mouthful.

So a unit in Turkey. That was a great job If you can't tell I've asked these guys to spell out all the acronyms And that might have been the first time that ponchos ever actually said that one all the way out. Thank you pretty close Good afternoon and thank you for having us. My name is Colonel Cecil Piazza.

I am a civil affairs officer in the United States Army Reserve.  If you're not familiar with civil affairs, our primary mission is to enable military operations with the civilian population. An example would be during time of conflict to help liaise with and restore essential services to affected populations.

Good afternoon I'm Lieutenant Colonel Damian Krantz, I'm an Army Logistics Officer. I'm coming from Defense Logistics Agency which is a national strategic level provider for logistics, supplies and equipment for all the Department of Defense.  

Hi, my name is Lieutenant Colonel James Cobb. I am a dental corps officer coming out of command at Fort Stewart, Dentac, and entering into command at Fort Liberty Dentac this coming summer.

Hi, good afternoon, Aaron. My name is Kirk Wagner. I'm a Department of the Army civilian, so I don't wear the uniform anymore, although I did in a past life as a former active duty soldier. I currently work down at Fort Belvoir, and that is where I'm returning after the War College. There aren't a whole lot of civilians here at the War College.

There's approximately 25 of us here in our current class. I was fortunate enough to apply and be accepted and happy to be here. Do you, at Fort Belvoir, do you work as a radio DJ currently?  No, but I've been told that I should really try that out. Yeah, so I've been told I have a voice for radio and a face for radio.

So we're here we're at the Army War College and I'm going to turn it back over to Mike here in a second to  tell you all what these gentlemen were up to. During their time here, and we're gonna treat today's conversation a little bit like a war council. We're gonna, we're gonna talk about this topic that they're gonna talk about today as though we're considering it as a war council and thinking about what we're up against as a country what our military is gonna be thinking about  as we look towards the future and from there, I'll turn it over to Mike so he can describe, one, a little bit about what happens here at the War College, and then, number two, a little bit about this specific project that these folks have worked on 

mike?  Thanks, Aaron. Ostensibly, the Army War College is a higher education institution not unlike any other civilian academic institution. It's regionally accredited to confer primarily master's degrees. At the culminating point of our particular focus of study we spent the last year studying strategic issues the elements of national power, diplomacy, information, military, and economic with a heavy emphasis on the M, military.

Within that, we have a, what we refer to as a strategic research report, which is the collected group studied particularly on behalf of Army Futures Command, the problem set of how does, how is war fundamentally changing? How is the character of warfare fundamentally changing in 2040 timeframe to help inform some of the concept development efforts how we're going to man, train, equip, organize our military or army specifically for that time frame to fight the threats that we anticipate.

During that period of study, we've conducted numerous interviews. Obviously the bulk of our research has been conducted within classroom, without classroom. We've participated with Army Futures Command for several of their  future studies program war games. We've actually run workshops within that, which included people from across the army, across the national defense enterprise, including research scientists, technologists, etcetera. 

And what we were trying to ascertain,  we had individual focus areas for each member of the group. But overall, we were trying to understand one What is the changing character of warfare? How does technology impact that? Two, what does the strategic environment look like with regard to some of our multipolar world threats that are emerging peer adversaries is what some may have heard them referred to as, such as Russia, China, et cetera. 

And  going further, what does that mean for operations with respect to the Army and the land component? and how it fits into the joint force.  Also, we looked at things like competition and grain zone activities. And I'll let some of these other gentlemen chime in on their particular focus area.

But we also looked at information operations,  the role of information and swaying public opinion, military opinion, etcetera. We looked at trust and A. I. We looked at  Logistics, the problem with logistics moving forward in that future timeframe, and an emphasis on  medical considerations.  I will just highlight here, as I think about this, , for folks who maybe don't pay attention to geopolitics as much as we do.  This really is a major change for the United States.

, since the Cold War, it's been a unipolar world. 

But that is no longer the case. We, at the very least, have one  near peer or peer competitor in the People's Republic of China. And you'll hear us today either talk about it as the government of China or the Communist Party of China or the PRC is how folks from this side of the fence often refer to it.

And that's done very deliberately because.  It is important to note that much of what we're up against right now really is a government. A nation state, a state led autocracy in this case, making decisions that affect the whole world. If we had to go up against 1. 3 billion Chinese we'd be in much greater peril than we are now, but we don't, and we shouldn't  cause that to be the case.

If we can keep this small that's the way to go. But we are going to talk mostly about  Thinking about conflict with China. The idea is to avoid conflict with China.

So I appreciate that introduction. I'd love to jump into it  and just ask one of the folks around the table here to, describe what, if they look out to 2040 and they think about warfare. How should we view it? What should we think about 

 Basically, some of the things you just said are interesting. One, following the first Gulf War, there was a power vacuum that resulted in what we call a unipolar  war. 

Even prior to that, 1989, 1990, with the fall of Soviet Union we had a very explicit adversary in the Soviet Union. We knew who we would most likely fight and where we would do it.  The Gulf War happened shortly thereafter. We  into that conflict, but then following that, the fall of Iraq and the resultant global ripple of how our combined arms maneuver, our way of fighting that war really showed how quickly and effectively we could fight a land war. 

It scared a lot of the geopolitical players of that time, and there was a power vacuum throughout the 90s, and even with certain aspects of the political administrations at that time, they downsized the force  as they were considering who might be the next threat, what might be the next threat.

Fast forward to 9 11. We all know what happened on that fateful day,  but that led into large scale counter insurgencies once we conducted. invasions into Afghanistan and then subsequently Iraq. A counterinsurgency was primarily fought against non uniformed combatants. Trying to disrupt what we were doing to set up a new government in those countries.

And it was very focused on, on, on that particular mission set, but it wasn't really what was traditionally considered large scale combat operations. For instance, Poncho's tanks weren't really used in a role that tanks are typically used on a battlefield. Artillery really wasn't used in that role.

Primarily we were worried about roadside bombs and people disrupting fair and free elections, et cetera.  Over the course of that 20 year period some of our skill set atrophied in large scale combat operations  to where we did not quite anticipate some of the belligerent actions of Russia in Crimea in 2014,  uh, Georgia before that, 2008. 

Fast forward now, we're seeing a lot more much greater belligerence out of Russia, i. e. they invaded Ukraine.  Additionally China has begun to extend from their internal borders and really expand their sphere of influence from regional focus within their borders regionally or around their borders and then broader globally, creating this area of competition.

And given that we're a democracy Democratic Republic  our ideals that we uphold they're not really compatible with autocracies like Russia and China.

And so therefore we find ourselves in a persistent period of pretty intense global competition. And that's some of the areas that, that Poncho's portion of the research project focused upon. As we look and we extend out into 2040 we recognize that,  People's Republic of China are rapidly and aggressively modernizing.

We know that their defense spending, even though publicly, does not seem like it's on par with ours. If you do a significant one for one calculation, you'll realize that really, they're much more  with U. S. defense spending than what is written on paper. And that means that they're working very hard to create a peer military capability that is specifically designed, in many cases, to counter our capabilities. 

What that means is that  We're worried that as we move forward into 2040, things like Taiwan, which wants to remain independent from China, but China has a one China policy where they believe that it's actually part of their country. This leads to,  an environment, a strategic environment where conflict could be possible as we continue to modernize and we head towards a inflection point  where large scale combat operations may be inevitable. 

In that environment,  what we consider or what's going to be available for us to fight that war in 2040 if we were to go to conflict now.  Make no mistake, conflict could erupt at any point in time but China has stated in some of their public strategic planning documents what their timeline is for execution.

There's three primary phases culminating in what they call building a world class military. And the first that they talk about is this concept of mechanization. This is their term, not ours. And ostensibly what they're trying to do with mechanization is be able to conduct combined arms maneuver.

That is, use all elements of their military in a concerted way to achieve their military objectives. When I hear mechanization, I think, again, tanks and large vehicles. Absolutely. But when I think of Taiwan and the fact that it's an island and  a lot of the war there will not necessarily be fought in the streets and mechanized.

Ways am I thinking about that incorrectly? I mean I think you it's just one of one aspect from a joint perspective that the land component would be mechanization of that, but they're also talking about their naval capability, their air capability and then using that in a concerted way  using that in an orchestrated way so that they can achieve their objectives with greater effects ed on a faster timeline. 

They believe and I don't know what their current wisdom is on this, but they believe that they could achieve mechanization by 2023, which if you check the calendar is now  looking forward, there is another inflection point that they believe that they will achieve what they call informatization in 2027.

And that's only four years away.  What they believe to be an informal participation is the ability to conduct operations across all domains, a domain being air, space, cyber land and sea.  And they believe that they will have that capability in place by 2027, which has been one of their potential  decision points for invasion of Taiwan. 

Attempting to, I'm I'm going to take a shot at  informatization there, I wish they had picked an easier word for this particular  milestone for 2027, but when they're thinking about that and they want to connect these domains what do they see as a gap that they're trying to fill? What are what's missing that they're trying to catch up to in the most basic of terms?

Building the capabilities through mechanization and being able to conduct limited Operations is one thing, but as you get more complex across all the domains, command and control becomes increasingly difficult, and communications becomes increasingly a challenge.

So those two gaps are two of the things they really need, and they understand that they need to shore up. Additionally, there's other things, which we'll talk about here, logistics being one of them. How do you sustain those kind of operations, and how do you ensure that you can deliver all of these different effects across all of these different domains?

At the time and place of your choosing to, to achieve your objective.  So with informatization, obviously, we have something similar in the U. S. Army that we call multi domain operations, the joint force , is working off a similar concept. The idea  is roughly congruent in that we're trying to use a variety of capabilities cyberspace, land, air, sea, et cetera and use them in a sequence or simultaneously to achieve the effects that we want 

looking out further to 2035 roughly  the Chinese have a concept which is even harder to say than informatization, it's intelligentization.  And this is the full integration of what we refer to as data driven warfare and the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into operations to achieve faster and faster speeds of decision. 

As they move into that intelligentization, they believe that shortly thereafter, around 2050 timeframe, they'll have a world class military, they feel like they will have eclipsed the U. S. military at that point.  Yeah, this is this is where we really start to, I think, focus in on moving from near peer to, If things continue as they are right now, potentially being eclipsed, the jury's out right now and if they will eclipse our overall economy by GDP, it looks like that's an ever changing target as demographics become a big problem for them.

But as I understand it, the ultimate irony there is  If they don't catch us with their economy and their population is aging too quickly 

and as that happens, they're going to lose their chance. To have the economy that they need to reach that goal by 2050. And if they see that risk coming sooner than 2050, it could encourage them to make attempts at military gains sooner because they'll see  that opportunity be lost to them if they wait too long.

And for me,  this is one of those issues that keeps me up. None of us that are in the Chinese president's head, Xi Jinping  he's not a young man as seemingly is a requirement for all world leaders right now is to be very old  and if he truly wants to leave his legacy behind  and things are starting to look a little bit dire for them  hard to guess what he might wake up one day and decide,

  It's absolutely a game of when do we have a relative advantage, i. e. when does China have that relative advantage against the U. S., and you made a great point about his age.

Unless the Chinese have cracked the code on being able to transfer his consciousness into an artificial intelligence capability. He's got a ticking clock to cement his legacy is unifying China and cementing them as the global power. A couple of things to consider about 2040 and what emerging tech technology trends are showing us, what we believe to be that future operating environment. 

You'll notice  you have one on you. Battlefield sensors or the ability to detect things out in the open. You watch your mouth. I says radio, my sensors that I'm wearing are not to be disclosed to the public based on my Mike is wearing and Mandalorian shirt. Just so everybody knows out there, tit for tat.

This is the way, and this is why I didn't want to be photographed.  So ostensibly many futurists believe that in 2040 timeframe, that battlefield sensors will be prolific, so ubiquitous across the environment that hiding military formations, hiding units, hiding platforms will be extremely difficult. 

 Militaries have to understand the power of data with respect to Those sensors are fairly useless unless they can transmit that data and that data can be collected Analyzed and come up  provide an output that actually provides actionable intelligence. 

And so data will become Central to operations militaries will actively work to gather as much of that information from battlefield sensors and other  capabilities as possible to understand as much as they can about the environment. But not only that, they'll be fighting actively to deny the enemy the ability to do the same.

So what that leads to is what we call a battle for decision advantage. It's been called information advantage. It's been called decision dominance. There's a number of different terms, but the bottom line is this fight for information in order to gain a relative advantage. in decision making over your adversary.

And that's going to be one of the central themes of 2040. Now, because there are this ubiquity of sensors, so many sensors and so much data flowing one of the major key pieces of this is that is gonna easily and rapidly overwhelm human command and control elements, people on the ground, commanders, their staffs, without the aid of something to help manage that cognitive load of all this data.

To be able to parse through it and understand it, not unlike chat GPT today, and being able to use it to scrub through a bunch of different papers to come up with a very smart sounding research project.  This is what they're trying to do is gather this information, use AI to rapidly manage it, and then  make decisions at the speed of thought that's going to be.

Very critical to massive engagements on large scale combat operations in that time frame.  What does that mean? That means that militaries like China and the US are working very hard to use AI and integrate it into Operations to the point that we can make decisions better decisions faster than the other guy. 

That makes sense And I see you looking over at Kirk right now, and we gotta get him back in here only because I fear people are like where is that beautiful voice for us to listen to again,   alright, thank you, Aaron. As Mike was saying,  the department's been really looking at AI for years, and particularly, or more acutely, , recently, knowing that AI will play a huge role in the future of warfare. 

What they look at primarily from their lens is,  reliability and trustworthiness,  in the sensor shooter loop or in the decision making sphere. And there's been a lot of thought, a lot of energy and a lot has been written about that 

And so what I wanted to do in my research was to take a kind of a different look at it. And that was in the realm of trust between the U. S. military and the people, and could AI have an effect on that trust relationship  between the public and the Army, and additionally between our U. S. Army and our allies and partners.

And what could the implications  AI hold for the future? And what I was looking at, again, primarily is that Yes, AI will have an effect at some point, but it's undetermined, , what that could be. There's been, again, a lot of directives published, a lot of guidelines, a lot of pathways, whether it was from EU,  from the UN, NATO, from the DOD the NIST has their guidelines, etc.,

etc. But what it doesn't really get after is how AI could affect trust between the U. S. public and its military. And as you know Recently, there's been a decline in trust between the public and our national institutions, and the military's I've not heard this yeah, no, I had no idea. Yes.

Harris and Gallup polls will tell you that trust between, American institutions and the public has been on the decline in recent years. The military has been largely immune to that. There has been an effect, but it's been relatively small. And the conclusion I came to is hey, we've, we've gone from, and the period I studied was essentially 1964 to 2024. 

The trust between the public and the Army has largely remained steady state. It's really remarkable, just small deviations and dips here and there, but if you think about that, from  initial involvement in Vietnam, the buildup, My Lai, Kent State, these major events where you could say, hey, the military really messed it up here.

They really should take a hit in a trust relationship, whether it's MILI or whether it's a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and that just hasn't occurred. What do you think, what, as you said that, and I thought about, I immediately went to Vietnam and the protests and all that happened in the intervening years, going from  an involuntary army to a voluntary army and all of that, I would have bet. 

trust increased or that there was at least a measurable difference. But it sounds like no.  Yeah, what's the reason? It's been relatively high. And I think what it comes down to is the American public has a very different relationship with our military than other countries do. , for instance, they've never had to fear Our military, the way other countries have.

For instance, there hasn't been a coup in the United States like there are in other countries, such as Thailand, which has, I think, endured approximately 13 over the past 100 years. So it's a very different relationship. You don't have military units on roadways extorting travelers for,  kickback, etc.,

etc. Any scandal we have is handled. , there is an investigation, inquiry, and punishment is doled out. So any scandal , or, Unethical behavior is punished, and it is rooted out, and it isn't widespread and endemic in the military.  How could we mess this up becomes the question.  If we can't mess it up through these various events through, , Vietnam scandal,  or perceived failure in the case of Afghanistan or Iraq, the question becomes not, , how do we build trust, but how could we screw it up and could A.

I. play a role in that? And essentially, there, there's three different conclusions I, I drew from, , my research, which is,  It could be lost,  for instance, between for, from military sales programs or transfer programs, I should say, from the DOD to The police forces here in America.

 What happens when AI enabled systems are transferred to police and what effect could that have on that trust relationship, particularly if it's perceived as a primary cause of a, of an erosion of our civil liberties?

Do you have an example of one of a type of system that would transfer from the military to the police that would. Potentially cause this or I think certainly ISR type or intelligence surveillance reconnaissance type platforms could have that effect. You're meeting drone, airborne drones at this point.

Airborne drones essentially could have that effect. And again, there's laws and regulations that affect the type of equipment that could be transferred. But as AI and AI enabled systems are developed, the regulations need to keep up with that.  That makes sense.    I think it's absolutely impossible at this point to stop the train that AI  is traveling on with warfare systems, or at least  we might be able to change it, but it's definitely coming.

There's no future where the army or the U. S. military doesn't have AI in the loop. Somewhere. In fact, it will probably be in the loop to an enormous degree. And so when you're thinking about that, and thinking about trust and safety and all of that,  How's that going to be guided? 

 Where do we get in on this in the military domain, especially when our competitors are going to be racing towards this, at least as fast as us. And probably racing towards the left  ethics and morals built into the production.  So there's a couple of things to consider when we talk about  integrating AI and operations within the 2040 timeframe.

And the first is that. A lot of people, first thing they want to talk about is something along the terms of Terminator, Skynet,  but what we refer to as general AI and that is an AI, artificial intelligence capability that is somewhat self aware and replicates human thinking on a higher scale is  currently not in the developmental trend line, something that will be possible in that time frame. 

Potentially not even possible for decades after,  unless there's some significant breakthrough that we don't foresee. So with that projection in mind, what we really are talking about is extrapolating some of the things that we're familiar with today.  Two of the flavors of A.

I. That we talk about with respect to operations are first those systems that we can use to help humans.  understand an unstructured problem or a problem that's not well defined. And then there's also systems that help with the routine or those well structured problems that humans do and can sometimes get complacent.

Cause it's something that it's fairly repetitive, et cetera. Those two things are commonly referred to the first being a decision support systems. Those help with those unstructured problems. And the second being expert systems. And those are those structured problems or routine capabilities. Now, when we think about some of these things  Humans in a command and control headquarters, trying to control the battle. 

They have to use traditional staff elements and a wide variety of those sensors we talked about earlier and communications with various nodes and pieces and parts of the warfighting machine to achieve objectives. To do that, there's a considerable planning effort that has to go into that, and there's a considerable coordination effort.

That's why we call it command and control.  When considering what to do, it takes us time and effort and a considerable amount of human cognitive ability to actually make those plans and execute. And oftentimes we don't have the full time that we need available to do the entire  process of planning out those operations.

So that's really where those decision support systems, AI could really assist human decision making by giving us the ability to take in all of this data, crunch it much faster than humans could, typically with a more holistic view of the battlefield, a better understanding, and create better course of actions that they could give to the commander, and the commander then could make decisions. 

Also, at the same time, at the more tactical level, typically, maybe at the operational, there's these expert systems that we can put into play, think self driving cars.  AI excels at the routine at those structured problems. It's still struggling with some of those unstructured problems. We see some pretty significant steps forward, but most, most often those unstructured problems, if it falls outside the range of the AI's data set, can really throw off the output of that AI and give you outcomes that you weren't anticipating and quite frankly are probably bad to what you're trying to achieve.

But with expert systems you can automate those things that a lot of times a human has to sit there and push a button over and over again. Some of the things that we're looking at expert systems for are things like aided target recognition. You have thermal imaging from various sensors on the battlefield.

They might see something  to a sensor that doesn't have AI. That's just a thermal image. It's just taking an image. But an AI could extrapolate that, compare it to a bank of like images, and come out with a An output that says this is a tank  with this level of confidence. And then you could aid somebody on the ground to, to make targeting decisions.

Or you could  identify  appropriately someone on the ground that should be shooting at that. What we call that is a sensor to shooter kill thread or kill web.  Because we take what the sensor sees and then we rapidly use AI to identify it and say what kind of weapon system do we have available with the right ammunition at the right place with the field of fire that can actually see it and actually engage it and achieve the effects that we're looking for.

And that takes humans a long time and there's a lot, a string of A chain of custody that has to go through in order for us to make that happen, but with AI, we can trim that way down by having it do a lot of those structured tasks that would take a human, a menial amount of effort, but  a larger pool of humans.

So when we look at AI on the battlefield in 2040, we're really looking at those two kind of flavors and we're trying to develop both simultaneously, but we're not necessarily going to have. Arnold Schwarzenegger roaming around shooting insurgents on the battlefield at that time. Yeah  let's hope not.

But it's interesting because I heard or read this week  and I'm going to have to  begrudgingly disclose where I got it from, but it was actually a tweet from Elon Musk now, and I'm not generally basing a lot of my information space knowledge on Elon Musk's tweets but he is a futurist and he's obviously quite good at a number of things in this category but he said and this was not particularly enlightening, but it was important for me that we're just as far from 2006.

. As we are now from 2040. 

And you spoke about Artificial General Intelligence and this is an interesting one, right? Because  in 2006, I think if you had pulled all of the AI theorists at that time, some huge number of them would have said AGI is not happening. It's not possible. It's not even something on the roadmap of AI.

It's a dream that will never come to fruition. And if you pull them now, and they have been pulled now, almost none of them say that it's no longer possible. They Now, we'll argue over decades, in some cases years, and at the very outer end, maybe centuries. And those people that argue centuries right now are the outliers. 

And we are at the point where  a very well compensated and expert AI engineer will quit his job at Google,  , arguing over whether or not the Google AI model is sentient or not. So we're in an interesting space. And I agree, I don't know that we'll  I actually I hope that we don't see artificial general intelligence by 2040 because I think the consequences are just crazy.  So if you're looking at how do we predict how these systems are going to be used and how then we should use them in a way that doesn't harm trust in the general public, what do you find yourself thinking when you're thinking about these problems and how to solve them? 

I'm thinking that,  the department has done a really good job of developing policies Scott McEvoy, working for you. As this technology is developed, because we don't know exactly where it's going to go and how it's going to manifest itself. Is it going to be Skynet? Is it going to be lethal autonomous weapon systems?

Hovering over some target for days on end and committing assassinations and all of this. Likely, likely not, but to your point, our adversary might not have the same set of ethics that we have, either in employment or data collection, . And so we might find ourselves at a disadvantage in some cases because of our ethics, but we certainly shouldn't abandon them.

And the department is looking very closely. And monitoring exactly how to develop these AI with ethical principles in mind and they have their ethical principles, they have directives , which I think will form a good foundation moving forward, acknowledging that they will need to change as the technology changes.

You spoke to one that I think comes up very often, a, an unmanned aerial system, a drone hovering, being driven. Almost predominantly or totally by automation on a mission to kill someone. Assassination or however you wish to define it, but its mission is remain in place for as long as possible.

Identify a target that you've been programmed to find and then use weapon systems to eliminate that target. You said not likely. This strikes me as one that almost is certainly going to happen, and I say that because let's say hypothetically that the CIA ever had a drone program.

It definitely didn't, that the agency would never have a drone program. But if it did it would have gone from very early days to not doing any of that to rapidly doing all of that with the exception of automation. The only thing that wasn't entered into that loop was just do this automatically.

Make the decisions yourselves. And you go back to Mike's example of AI being able to discern a target  probably much better than humans once the model is trained well, like that's not only a tank, that is a enemy tank, that is an enemy tank of this exact model, and I'm certain, I've looked through a number of thermal imagery as probably everyone around this table has, and it's not usually that easy to do, but an AI can, in many cases, do it exceptionally well.

Why wouldn't we just cede that to the AI and have it make targeting decisions that are much better than humans, and if we would, What stops us then from having a drone linger? And do that act for us once we feel confident that the target is going to be identified correctly. Yes. And when I said unlikely, I think I need to clarify a little bit.

I thought you might. I said it dramatically. Yeah. Yeah. When I said unlikely, currently the principles of AI as laid out by the department, want meaningful human control, whether it's humans in the loop, human on the loop, et cetera, at this time. Again, maybe that will change in the future.

Certainly our adversaries have different views on this. So that's why I said  unlikely. 

And when we're talking about, , humans in the loop and on the loop and meaningful human control, I think we need to also acknowledge that this is sometimes fairly thinly sliced with autonomous modes within some weapons systems that are current and in the inventory, such as the Sea Wizard Defense System or the Patriot Air Defense System, and I know Pancho might want to chime in here. 

Yeah, I hear a lot of people, we'll never do certain things.  But  not only are we already doing it. We have an open environment in which we're testing, if you look at the Ukraine model. Loitering munitions are just that, right?

They're an AI, really, that understands what they're targeting. And when you launch it, it's either going to destroy. It's either going to have some type of energy that either does electronic warfare or captures something  emitting,  and tells you what's out there. 

But right now we could just look at the ones that are loitering to destroy. A lot of the weapon systems we've given the Ukrainians and we, the larger NATO community  is a paradigm shift. So if we're having a paradigm shift, the  worst part about a paradigm shift, you can't see it. You're in it. You can't see it until it happens. And then you look backwards and say, Oh, it happened.  And at that point, it's too late. It's already happening and the new science is the new way of doing business.

And I think that's maybe what we're seeing right now is that the new science will be loitering munitions, identify the  whatever it is it's looking for, and it automatically shoots. Knowing that the battlefield in front of you is nothing but enemies.  You may have to have some actual measures to protect your own people and to protect civilians and something you don't want to actually destroy  . 

,  , And, you know, as we talk about the battlefield and we talk about conflict and warfare right now we're anticipating changes and we're thinking about some of the ways these technologies are going to affect it. But at the end of the day, it is warfare and actually using Ukraine as an example is a fascinating one.

Just as they're using,  drones right now to target artillery really effectively and they're using massive analytics of signals on the battlefield to interpret what the Russians are doing with their forces in a way that allows decision making to happen at a speed that's never been foreseen.

At the same time they're doing that, they're still digging trenches which just tells you it is not that easy to change sometimes. I think it's, that's probably.  Not proving very effective because trenches at this point is just effectively that the whole you dug for your own grave, but it's ingrained in us that not everything changes.

And so I guess I'd like to know a little bit about what you guys have thought about warfare and the nature of warfare and how some things just won't change. And you'll still just need to factor those things in or maybe use technology to think about them differently.  Yeah, thanks, Aaron. I'd like to chime in on that and pull along that thread just a little bit specifically regarding the information space. 

Mike mentioned earlier how to achieve decision dominance. Kirk discussed ethics and legal ramifications of how we sway public opinion. All these things operate within the information sphere. What we've learned from the Russia Ukraine war is that Russia  Particularly is interested in misinformation campaigns, we've seen examples of that, disinformation campaigns, as well as malinformation campaigns.

Could you describe the difference? Could you give me an example of each? I've thought about this a lot where misinformation, disinformation, and malign information. And I think this is a really important factor for folks to understand because this is literally the future of our government ability might rest on some of these terms.

Sure. Misinformation.  In simple terms, it's just inaccurate information, providing information to mislead you or  have a particular public opinion or influence. Malinformation would be information that simply doesn't exist. An example by Russia was at the onset of the Russia Ukraine war. the information campaign that President Zelensky had committed suicide and then he was dead.

That simply did not happen. So that was a malinformation campaign. And this information obviously just to promote and exploit  inaccurate information.  And we see that across multi. Social media platforms is their primary means of  disseminating that information and providing that to the public.

We've learned from China, if we look at our pacing threat, and this kind of goes back to answering your question, are we down a road of AI and machine learning? Or can we turn back? And the answer for me is no. We can't is because our adversary won't allow us to China's primary influence within the information domain or information sphere is just simply expanding and trying to own that information environment as much as they can.

We see controversy through various social media platforms. We've seen it within the political domain in the discussions of tick tock. And how it's being used by China, China versus how it's being promoted and used in more Western or democratic institutions. So all of these things absolutely have an impact on the way dec decision makers look at the information space, particularly in 2040.

One benefit of AI and machine learning to circle back to your point earlier is that because. AI and ML will allow us to process large amounts of data so much more quickly. It'll give us an advantage, or at least at a minimum, allow us to keep pace with our adversary. And that's going to be extremely vital to our success or failure in 2040.

Can you provide an example, of how that would create advantage? If we can think about some bits and bytes and data. That might be out there that are relevant to a war zone or a battlefield or even, adversarial actions in advance in the gray space, the grace examples I think we're seeing right now is what China is doing in the South China Sea or in the Strait of Taiwan where they're constantly moving their ships and their aircraft.

Closer and closer to Taiwan past points that were thought to be red lines in the past, but are no longer and  all of that. So I just yeah a little bit about What the bits and bytes are that we're thinking about when we say we have this information We have information dominance and now we can make a decision  And then yeah how that's relevant to the threat we face   we can look at a  a quick example of China's prediction of having approximately 400 or plus naval ships  by 2025. 

 The U. S. has a capacity of approximately 300 or so naval vessels that are in operation. And also understanding that it takes years to produce and deploy functional operational ships. So having that information  gives a decision maker, how do we still contend with an adversary that has a higher throughput than we are capable of.

And it may be an increase in lethality. It may be another operational advantage that we have to look, but it does give us a planning factor to, to to learn from.  We also understand that quantity does not equal quality. So just understanding that and having more qualitative and the way we employ our naval vessels will give us an advantage over our adversary.

I'm thinking about just naval operations in general, and obviously the  Pacific has always been home to storied naval battles and big navies attempting to command space, and the U. S. Navy obviously for a long time has been the entity that has secured the seas across the whole world, but the Pacific being a particularly interesting place.

And as we see the Chinese Navy continue to push further and further out, do we think that the wars in 2040 then therefore will be predominantly naval battles? Or are we looking towards something where, the two navies are at such a size that there's almost a  a desire to avoid a naval battle for that very reason.

And therefore, those the fact that there's almost parity between those two navies forces these conflicts to move elsewhere. No, that's a great point. That's something that we've wargamed and considered a great deal at the War College. Some of my colleagues get into, what does that contested environment look like?

Contested logistics, contested  medical operations. But I think you're speaking specifically a little bit more to gray zone activities and how we operate across all domains.  Against our adversary in the South China Sea. So I'll let Poncho speak to that a little more freely. So I actually, as you're talking about that, my, my first thought is first off, general Flynn, the commander of the Pacific Theater Army would tell you that the Pacific is in is meant for the Army in a lot of ways because if you look at all the places that we have, people when you look at all of the C2 structures that we have all the partnerships. So what he always says is humans live on land. So therefore, if you want to have partnerships and you want to have access to all these places, you have to have an army on the ground. You have to have humans on the ground.

So with all the technology and the technology will enable them to be better to do better. But if you even want access to the ports, the deep water ports. And the pacific doesn't just start in the first island chains. It's not just Guam. The pacific is our coast and it's our neighbor's coast. So if you look at our backyard in South America and Central America last year, the Chinese  overspent.

The U. S. By 450 billion in investments in South America. So that's over 550 billion. I think is what they spent somewhere around there. I think it's what our general Richardson. I think she might have said 450 billion. And we only spent under 100 billion. They're putting ports all over South America.

They're They're actually using illegal shipping vessels. So we would talk vessels, right? So we only talked about their 400 vessels they have for Naval operations. What other operations are they conducting? Because they have naval Small Navy,  fishing ships off of Ecuador and they're basically pillaging America's resources In the Americas.

North and South America. And that's part of that gray zone operation. That's not war, right? That's not going to trigger a war and who's paying attention to it. So when we talk about sensors, there's a lot of sensors out there that we have to pay attention to, to understand what is China doing.

And this sort of where my research came into play is looking at gray zone operations. What is China doing all over the world that we're not really paying attention to? Because it doesn't trigger, outside of the competition spectrum.  And in that, what are we going to do to be able to, over the next 20 to 40 years, do as we're competing with them?

Because we want to stay in competition. And part of that is we need to keep people there. Good people who understand the humans, have good connection with their militaries, with their government, with their economy, and engage so that we can  Stay in competition, because if not, we're just ceding it to our adversaries.

Makes sense. And yeah, I think the gray zone, especially in our near abroad, is such an underappreciated threat. And the Chinese government has proven very capable of operating in this space. And we actually are in a tricky spot, because when we have operated in the gray zone, we've done so.

In a way that's tricky, at best from a historical perspective, and democracies are just not good at being able to operate in the gray zone because we obviously are responsive to our population, whereas  the Communist Party of China is not. I'll take a couple of  points on what you said. I believe sailors will disagree with you that humans live on land but I do agree with you that it is an army. 

Zone in the Pacific and I think what you meant there was that the Marines are part of the army That's what I took away  From that. I don't think General Flynn would say that or any of the guys in the Pacific, but 

we don't have to compete against each other. I think we have to use all the resources we have appropriately Right in the pacific. 

And by the way, those countries want us to be their partner because we don't do  The gray zone operations. Actually,  they believe that for us We're gonna do the right thing. We're gonna do right thing for them. And then we're the partner choice Where we're looking at it the same like in the Philippines I think we're how many bases are about to be open with US sailors And U.

S. soldiers and U. S. Marines and Coast Guardsmen and , air warriors. So I think that, there's a lot of space for our soldiers and our Americans to be on the ground. Yeah, and I get, and you brought up a good point.  You talked about logistics there, and this is if a conflict does start to grow with China, even if it's before an actual military conflict, if this is just adversarial gray space that we're talking about logistics is going to play an enormous role because the distance, just the distance alone between most of the United States capability and where that capability needs to be or where that capability would be employed is quite great.

And if the logistics aren't in place or aren't optimized for that, Type of a conflict it won't matter how good the forces are at the front. If they're not adequately supplied and set up to win, then all of that is for not. So I, yeah, I wonder I know you, you all have thought about  one, how this is going to work and then two, how it's going to be affected by AI and ML in the future of warfare. 

, poncho mentions pre positioning and that reminds me of something, a point you made earlier about,  what our competitors want,  and I think that,  we take it for granted that the United States  currently maintains a huge competitive advantage regarding power projection, really our ability to mobilize globally and get what we need, where we need it, when we need it, better than anybody else in the world.

That's a competitive advantage to that.  China and other competitors are looking to narrow as we go forward. The other thing I think is interesting that Mike mentioned when he was discussing, what 2040 looks like is, that transparent battle space. From a logistics lens,  when the enemy can see you and reach out and touch you wherever you are, that becomes extremely dangerous for, a logistics soldier of, service within the joint logistics enterprise.

And one of the things I looked at in my research was emerging technologies. And I think there's a lot of really exciting opportunities here. I think, we tend to talk about AI and  it goes to a doom and gloom place, but there are also really interesting opportunities with additive manufacturing and producing things, where we're at the point of need.

So you don't have to  transport it and get it there, you just produce it what you need, where you need it. Similarly with emerging technologies in energy production, things like small nuclear reactors. One of the biggest challenges currently we face in Indo Pekom, is the tyranny of distance and how do we project fossil fuels and other things forward.

And thinking about what if future brigades actually have the ability to produce and store the massive power requirements that they need in a future war space.  I think those are among some of the most interesting opportunities in the future environment.  As we think about logistics and all that needs to happen where do you see  the most interesting aspects of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced technologies playing a role?

If we had to think about again, I always putting myself in the mindset of An army sergeant in the Philippines in 2040 and being told you wake up and  the People's Liberation Army has started to make their way towards Taiwan and you're going to be called up to do whatever the battle plan is there.

And you're thinking about logistics, even, if you look on the map, it's amazing how far the Philippines is from Taiwan. If growing up in our era, the map changed the further away you got from America, and I have this forever  cemented in my mind that the rest of the world is quite small and that was obviously a failure of imagination because it is.

It's enormous and having been the deputy chief of operations for Southeast Asia, Japan for CIA and having to use flashcards to learn all of the capitals of the countries for which I was responsible I learned quickly that my geography was lacking. So if you think about just the movement of things and the design of things, is there anything that stands out where you're like, I suspect it's going to be  amazing and here's what it looks like? 

A few things come to mind. I think, you asked.  from an artificial intelligence standpoint. And I think looking through the sustainment lens, it's a few things. One is predictive analytics, predictive maintenance. Instead of, right now we're contingent on really identifying a need and then sending that information back somewhere.

But with artificial intelligence and machine learning predictive analytics, we can have the ability to identify that something's needed before, a human even really realizes that's a problem or that it needs to be reordered.  So instead of you take something like, repair parts and how much time we spend identifying something, how much redundancy there is in the system between the services, there's no single, we don't have a single requirement repository currently, the idea that, you know, instead of this massive logistics tale of, maintenance and warehousing that currently accompanies combat elements, the idea that we could just . Rely on machine learning and, algorithmic, artificial intelligence to say, this is when we expect this thing to break, or we're keeping track of, round counts, by weapons system. And we know exactly what's going to be needed. So a human doesn't have to make those decisions, I think is pretty interesting. 

Yeah, it's exceptionally interesting. And I managed to never think about it one time when I was in the army, I just knew that if we got low. On ammunition or water that somehow it fell from the sky into the forest and then we picked it up never having thought about how it got there and that was in  Fort Stewart, Georgia.

And I just can't imagine what that would be like on the shores of Taiwan or, even all the way out to Guam. And, yeah, I think the idea that, 3D printing and some of these new advanced manufacturing techniques, especially when aided by AI will just be such a transformative way of doing business.

And whoever can do that the fastest and the best and the most effective will definitely have an enormous edge. And I know from having talked to you guys that you've thought a lot about medicine. As well in this and as we move Towards the potential for conflict, obviously we're all praying and hoping that diplomacy wins the day here and deterrence returns and we have The ability to avoid a wide scale conflict But if we go to conflict and we have to use a lot of these things that we've talked about today  there it's  depressing to think about but we need to think about it because it's the consequences the casualties will just be  unfathomable And one of the areas that A.

I. and M. L. are making unbelievable strides is in medicine. And, yeah, I'm just curious what y'all's thoughts are on, on what we're going to see in 2040  There's a lot that, that won't change on the battlefield in 2040.

I think we're still going to have, we feel there's still going to be human agents performing a lot of tasks on the battlefield soldiers and such. They're still going to require care on the battlefield. What I don't see changing is still seeing humans providing care. So, A medic that we would associate today, still providing care. 

Protecting potentially at a higher level, a higher skill set, aided by AI, aided by decision support systems, with AI to help recognize wounds and how to treat them faster. Also being trained to a higher level, using augmented reality and systems in the stateside to train them , so when they're on the battlefield, their performing procedures may be a little bit more advanced than they do currently. 

Another thing that won't change, I believe, is having that need to Move patients CASEVAC. One of the six principles of Army medicine right now when it comes to operational medicine,  um, is continuity on the battlefield. So taking a patient from the point of injury and getting him back to  to return to health, to return to duty. 

So the front line, having a more advanced medic at that role in care, getting him back to a potential a surgical node to have that early intervention of a life saving intervention. They don't go to an hour of care. That may be now, it may be a more robotic, potentially robotic system that can aid providing more surgical capability at that role too,  as a combat multiplier.

And then as you get, as you move back , the role threes, I'll see when you get back to more  comprehensive healthcare being provided in time to recover and then hopefully return the patient  back to the fight.  I still need to clear the battlefield in having CASEVAC. 

So still seeing human casualties, still seeing  continuity of care. I think it's still going to take time to heal the patient. We may have ways to speed up the healing process, 2040, but I think there's still going to be a need to where the patient's going back to a higher level of care to recover.

to before being able to return to being able to return to duty and then surgical wounds still having wounds that are going to require care beyond, but we can push to the front line at the current moment. So needing to move the patient back to that higher level of care to have surgery away from the front line where you don't want to expose have low density providers, human human surgeons, which are expensive to train and maintain being lost too close to the front.

So needing to still move patients back away from the front to have that care provided, allowing them to recover and then return to duty.  But some of the things I think they can that will change looking at 2040 would be the AI support to those clinical decisions that are being made either at the rule one provider or at higher roles of care as well to physicians providing care,  , AI, potentially guiding triage and.

And also guiding those medevac procedures,  potentially aided by sensors that are wearable or implanted on soldiers that allows AI to quickly analyze a situation and determine assets that may be needed to respond to it. Also as logistics as well, providing the right support with medical class aid to support areas of conflict.

roBotics come handy in clearing the battlefield. Allowing a robotic clearing agent that's able to help go in the battlefield to move patients away from harm, while  other soldiers are able to  maintain the effort. 

You you mentioned, a lot of the critical care functions may be being enhanced by,  uh, AI and  you just watch the advances in medicine even in Afghanistan where you know we went from when I was in the army to only ever put in put on a tourniquet as a last recourse to Put on tourniquet every single time because it's going to save something like 90 percent of lives 

and I just think that learning curve also is dramatically increasing. . I think a lot about biosynthetics and  some of these potential developments in medicine that will quickly be used. 

On the battlefield faster than they might ever be in clinical care back in the United States when without being tested as we always see for the military. Unfortunately, . I want to just make sure we get a chance to really  Make use of y'all's imaginations  i'd love to  return us to the year of 2040 and just step through  as a group  what would happen and  Unfortunately, this could happen sooner than 2040 but we can think about in terms of 2040 to bring forward the technology that might be available then what would happen if the flare goes up over taiwan and the PLA is steaming their fishing boats all 5, 000 of them across the strait and we are forced to respond to that.

Can we talk about how this would all come together and what you all have studied and what you would expect to see? 

 We've talked at length about how the transparent battlefield with ubiquity of sensors, will create data driven warfare.

We've talked about how that will force  adversaries to fight for information and deny the enemy to do the same. We didn't really speak much about The phenomenon of creating a denied, degraded, intermittent, or limited bandwidth environment communications environment, also known as DDIL in some circles. 

That will make communications intermittent. It will make it spotty. There will be times where you have full communications. There will be times where you have none at all.  Anything in between will be probably more of a steady state. One, operating will have to be flexible. You'll have to be able to adjust on the fly how you operate.

Your AI systems may be starved of data. They may be poisoned. The data may be poisoned, so their efficacy may drop significantly. So while we emphasize speed of decision, we also want to make sure that we emphasize accuracy of decision. Maintain that flexibility to adjust between human control and machine control and back and forth so that there's a synergy between humans and machines, what we call human machine teaming to ensure that we're always working towards that objective and that if the enemy were to jam our communications or do something to blind our sensors or even deliberately deceive us, that we're still able to make quick changes and still execute and achieve our objectives efficiently and effectively.

This will be an advantage, I think as I've heard you all speak to and I've heard in other quarters. This would be an advantage if we're talking about a conflict between the PRC and the U. S. government, right? If there is no way to go back to higher command for decisions this is where the United States Army, the United States military as a whole excels.

So there's a couple of things to consider with that specific scenario we were talking about in the South China Sea.

One is that China has both some advantages with respect to that scenario, and some disadvantages with respect to how they approach AI, in my opinion, and from my research. So the, some of their advantages are they're playing in home turf. They've worked tirelessly and extensively to create an environment that is not hospitable to U.

S. forces within the South China Sea theater ballistic missiles, integrated air defense systems, submarines, , to keep us out.  tHat makes fighting in that context very difficult. When they consider AI, traditionally, China has had problems with operating competently in a joint context, being able to  use both Navy and ground forces and air forces in a orchestrated fashion. 

They believe that  From some of the theorists that I've read they believe that AI is a solution to all of this. And they even believe that they could control an operational theater like the South China Sea from, with just a small group of generals and a small command and control. bunker far from the battlefield using centralized AI capabilities.

Also, if you think about the traditional communist Chinese parties control over the PLA they've been usually pretty strict about how they control the PLA to ensure regime survival that there's no military coups. And that's one of the reasons why they're not like. Certain other small countries with the autocratic leadership where militaries rise up and overthrow them is because of the Chinese Communist party control, embedding political officers, et cetera, to make sure that control is maintained.

So all of the indicators that I've seen point to Chinese developing a centralized AI capability to really centrally control that combat sphere. And what you talked about was the US military's traditional ability to. Execute mission orders and operate off of commander's intent at the lowest level practicable. 

I agree that will be a relative advantage if AI is developed in the the way we, just the way I just described. beCause the US can decentralize operations, use AI with an adjustable level of autonomy based on the situation and the level of information available. You may have chat, GBT or some like decision support system on a, on a. 

A small a tablet or something like that on the, in the tactical area, but it still needs data. The one thing that we've noticed across ai implementations, different algorithms is you can take the best engineers in the world and put 'em in a room and create the most sophisticated AI algorithm, and you can take. 

A bunch of guys who have rudimentary knowledge of how to develop an AI algorithm, and they can build something that's fairly decent. You give that exquisite AI just enough data to operate, and you give that rudimentary AI vast quantities of data, great amounts of data,  empirically we've seen that rudimentary AI with that greater amount of data access will operate better than that exquisite AI starved of data almost every time.

And so That details conditions that we talked about on the battlefield will really hamstring AI if it's leveraged effectively. So we need to be able to synergize how humans and AI work together, emphasizing our ability to operate with mission command and commander's intent,  and use it to empower our subordinates, not control them.

And I think that's what is the difference between the U. S. fighting in 2040 in that context and China fighting in 2040, is they'll try to control their subordinates. We'll with AI, and we'll try to empower or augment our subordinates with the other part of this is looking at how the army fights, 

At this large scale  combat operations, we need to look at its army versus army. So in the end, your nodes are division headquarters, which are two star headquarters, 

so what you have to do in my mind is we are going to have to infuse that AI. We're going to have to do the things that Damien talked about where he's talking prepositioning these logistics nodes, and then infusing AI to the systems we have because the other part is by 2040 we also have to say, how much does the military have, how much does the US have.

And when you talk about 11 activity divisions, and there are just as many and more National Guard divisions, and there are more National Guard brigades, those brigades are not going to get the newest equipment because modernization, when you talk about the sort of the triangle of defense management, which is your, Modernization, readiness, and that, and your force management, right?

There are certain things you can invest in out of those. Modernization takes a long time. Force management, you gotta kinda change things around. But readiness is where you get your money. Because you, it's the people you have. You're gonna go with, you're gonna go with the team you have. And you gotta train them.

How do you go to war? It's by training those teams to do their jobs their functions in a good way. So not everybody can be the Ranger Regiment, but everybody can do the six things a Ranger Regiment does and they always talk about, right? They do PT, they do marksmanship, they do medical, they do C2,  right?

They do maintenance.  Those are the things, and they do battle drills. Those are like the six things that they do.  Every unit should be able to do those so that when they're cut off from the radios that are supposed to be on the mesh network, when they are cut off from their higher headquarters, they can be Audie Murphy.

Because Audie Murphy was part of the, was part of 3rd Infantry Division, my division. In World War II, he was a corporal who ended up being the company commander. And what made him great wasn't that he was six foot tall and, 200 pounds of sheer muscle. Actually, he was under 54 and he was underweight.

And he they told him he wasn't good enough to be a marine. But that young man Had the wherewithal to understand what the higher intent was and to continue to move on to the objective and achieve the mission. And I think that's gonna be the biggest key factor is how do we help our soldiers become better soldiers and better officers who are on the staff to be able to do these  things so that AI, they're super soldiers, right?

But they have to be good soldiers at the baseline. We always, we've come back numerous times to the soldiers themselves and the marines and the air warriors, and  sailors. And, and the people, right? And certainly in a room full of lieutenant colonels and former officers, you put people somewhere in your top three and you just rearrange that from year to year depending on who's in charge, but they're always out there.



I'm thinking. All right, you give me  Taiwan as the problem set and you give me the Chinese People's Liberation Army as the  thing which I'm worried about.  And you say to me, I have all these systems that by that time will likely be able to do a lot automated. Maybe everything automated and if we stop them from doing something automated would only be because we want to remain, keep the trust of the United States population or ensure that decision making still rests with a human.

I get all that. But if I'm designing the next generation of war machine and specifically for that Taiwan invasion, I'm dumping  Millions of sensors if I can into that entire zone such that no matter what you do, they're always out there that, you can jam as many as you want and maybe you can jam all of them, but probably not.

And if you do, we're just going to drop more. We're going to center the whole environment. We're going to use computer vision. Maybe that's a little earth orbit. Maybe that's higher earth orbit. Maybe that's something we haven't invented yet that can see what's happening.  And then why am I not going to just? 

Throw out there as many unmanned drones on an automated mission to identify, as we talked about, anything PLA  and eliminate it, underwater, subsea drones, drones in the air fighter jets that are no longer manned, and I would say surface boats that are no longer manned, and just launch them as fast as I can on automated missions.

To take out all of the possible threats going at Taiwan, even up to and including any threats that had landed on Taiwan, long before I would send any troops into harm's way. I just, if that's possible, and I do think it's almost possible now, and I think by 2040 we can be certain that it will be possible.

If I'm left with that decision, and it's a defensive decision at this point, when I press the red button, that red button says defend Taiwan. Not attack somebody, but defend. And when I press it, almost no Americans are going to die. And we'll likely wreak havoc on the army that's doing the invasion. 

So machine on machine warfare is definitely a name of the U. S. Army for 2040. And you're right. It'll probably be in some form or fashion a reality. However,  the other reality is that warfare will remain a human endeavor. It's still going to be bloody. It's still going to involve humans. It's just After those machines fight machines, at some point, one of those machines, the side, one side's machines is going to win, and then they're going to be machines against humans.

We want to be the side  that wins with the machines, so that we don't have to fight their machines. So yes, we will employ that, but just like any other exquisite munition, or even non exquisite munitions, there's a limited magazine. And if we're playing an away game, we have to bring a pretty deep pocket. 

And we need to determine what it is, priority wise, that we're going to stockpile. Is that going to be these drones? Is it going to be long range munitions? Is it going to be precision strike missiles? What are those things in a limited  time frame and in a limited amount of stockpiling that we'll be able to do?

Not to mention the limitations of production from the defense industrial base. What do we prioritize and how do we make sure we get the right amount and mix? And when we talk about the particular threat that we're talking about, their ability to produce things  exceeds ours in just about every category, it seems.

So it becomes what can we ensure will give us the relative advantage?  And yes, we could  play a game and gamble a bit and put everything in subsurface, unmanned vehicles and assume some risk in short range artillery capabilities. And then we might find that we're, we end up having a land fight somewhere where we didn't anticipate on a periphery, creating a mo a different dilemma for them to consider.

And all of a sudden now that short range artillery capability is absolutely mission critical. So it becomes, the problem that Damien talked about with logistics and that is, where do we put,  uh, how do we prioritize and where do we put the things that we need in the quantities that we can, that we anticipate needing them.

And even then I fear that we'll probably run out and we'll have to adjust tactics once, once we hit that black on ammo. or drones or whatever. And to continue along Mike's point is, when we look at machine on machine warfare, it's almost as though we're discussing or getting into the discussion of a war of attrition. 

WHoever has the most machines can last longer. And I think that was simply not a good strategy moving forward. Although it's a possibility and in the realm of possibility, at some point you will still have to fight human on human and there will still be a land component to warfare. And I think it's important to, to understand and realize that from a strategic standpoint and continue to plan and develop those those means.

To be clear, I think I agree. I can't see. The land component of warfare going away, but then I also returned to our discussion earlier about predictions and how faulty they can be, it does seem very hard for there to be a world which land warfare goes away, but then I can quickly get to where if it's machine on machine attrition, even if both sides don't plan to do that, they could still ultimately designed war machines that, that, that do that.

And I do wonder, As we continue to make those automated systems more and more effective, and it might not, might end up not being numbers as we discussed here, it might be the quality of those machines and how effective they are, and I, what I'm  What's happening as we have this conversation right now, we've, we talked about at the beginning a little bit, we're not so concerned about the Terminator style of warfare, when we talk about AGI and a machine taking over the world.

But then, all we did was talk about machines and the machines, and the rise of the machines, which is exactly the verbiage that was in those Terminator movies. 

But the more and more I have these conversations,  it we should probably be careful of  misunderstanding our own predictions. And then as we design machines that can go to war and think more and more for themselves, be a little bit worried that the machines might at some point be the thing that's our most important dilemma to consider. 

 First off, we want to thank you uh, for allowing us to have this conversation. I think this is an important conversation, and,  I think I was told by,  General  Jeffress, who I think you have on the show as well, you had on the show.

He said, really the research project isn't really about  Creating something new that is going to change the world. It's really, because in the war college at the end, you get a master's degree, right? But, it's not about that. It's about being able to research things that are going to help the army, that are going to help you think, and that are going to help you become a better leader in the future.

And in that, you may contribute something that's somewhat significant, but if anything else, it gets us to think about What the future holds. And for us, that's probably the most important thing.  Great. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And thanks to General Jeffers for actually putting uh, meeting together Poncho back at 3rd ID.  And

Thank you gentlemen very much. This has been a fascinating conversation. My first time at the war college, I feel very lucky to have. I'm excited to be able to chat with all of you and be able to learn through your thinking and have this discussion.  Thank you.  Thanks.

Thank you.