This vendible previously appeared in Defense News. It was co-written with Joe Felter, and Pete Newell.
Today, the U.S. is supporting a proxy war with Russia while simultaneously attempting to deter a China cross-strait invasion of Taiwan. Both are wakeup calls that victory and deterrence in modern war will be unswayable by a state’s worthiness to both use traditional weapons systems and simultaneously rapidly acquire, deploy, and integrate commercial technologies (drones, satellites, targeting software, et al) into operations at every level.
Ukraine’s military is not taxed with the DoD’s 65-year-old vanquishment process and 20th-century operational concepts. It is learning and adapting on the fly. China has made the leap to a “whole of nation” approach. This has unliable the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) to integrate private wanted and commercial technology and use them as a gravity multiplier to dominate the South China Sea and prepare for a cross-strait invasion of Taiwan.
The DoD has not washed-up either of these. It is currently organized and oriented to execute traditional weapons systems and operational concepts with its traditional vendors and research centers but is woefully unprepared to integrate commercial technologies and private wanted at scale.
Copying SecDef Ash Carter’s 2015 strategy, China has been engaged in Civil/Military Fusion employing a whole of government coordinated effort to harness these disruptive commercial technologies for its national security needs. To fuel the minutiae of technologies hair-trigger for defense, China has tapped into $900 billion of private capital in Civil/Military Guidance (Investment) Funds and has taken public state owned enterprises to fund their new shipyards, aircraft, and avionics. Worse, China will learn from and wield the lessons from Russia’s failures in the Ukraine at an overly increasing pace.
But unlike America’s wily strategic rival, the US to stage has been unwilling and unable to transmute and prefer new models of systems and operational concepts at the speed of our adversaries. These include attritable systems, voluntary systems, swarms, and other emerging new defense platforms threaten legacy systems, incumbent vendors, organizations, and cultures. (Until today, the U.S. effort was still-born with its half-hearted support of its own Defense Innovation Unit and history of lost capabilities like those that were inherent the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force.)
Viewing the DoD upkeep as a zero-sum game has turned the major defense primes and K-street lobbyists into saboteurs for DoD organizational innovation that threaten their merchantry models. Using private wanted could be a gravity multiplier by subtracting 100’s of billions of dollars outside the DoD budget. Today, private wanted is disincented to participate in national security and incentives are aligned to ensure the U.S. military is organized and configured to fight and win the wars of the last century. The U.S. is on a standoff undertow to wits catastrophic failure in a future mismatch considering of it. Only Congress can yo-yo this equation.
For the U.S. to deter and prevail versus China the DoD must create both a strategy and a redesigned organization to embrace those untapped external resources – private wanted and commercial innovation. Currently the DoD lacks a coherent plan and an organization with the upkeep and validity to do so.
A reorganized and refocused DoD could reap traditional weapons systems while simultaneously rapidly acquiring, deploying, and integrating commercial technologies. It would create a national industrial policy that incentivizes the minutiae of 21st-century shipyards, drone and satellite factories and a new industrial wiring withal the lines of the CHIPS and Innovation and Competition acts.
Congress must act to identify and implement changes within the DoD needed to optimize its organization and structure. These include:
- Create a new defense ecosystem that uses the external commercial innovation ecosystem and private wanted as a gravity multiplier. Leverage the expertise of prime contractors as integrators of wide technology and ramified systems, refocus Federally Funded Research and Minutiae Centers (FFRDCs) on areas not covered by commercial tech (kinetics, energetics, nuclear and hypersonics).
- Reorganize DoD Research and Engineering. Allocate its upkeep and resources equally between traditional sources of innovation and new commercial sources of innovation and capital. Split the OSD R&E organization in half. Keep the current organization focused on the status quo. Create a peer organization – the Under Secretary of Defense for Commercial Innovation and Private Capital.
- Scale up the new Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to be the lead agencies in this new organization. Give them the budget and authority to do so and provide the services the ways to do the same.
- Reorganize DoD Vanquishment and Sustainment. Allocate its upkeep and resources equally between traditional sources of production and the megacosm of new from 21st-century arsenals – new shipyards, drone manufacturers, etc. – that can make 1,000s of low-cost, attritable systems.
- Coordinate with Allies. Expand the National Security Innovation Wiring (NSIB) to an Allied Security Innovation Base. Source commercial technology from allies.
Why Is It Up To Congress?
National power is ephemeral. Nations ripen when they lose allies, economic power, interest in global affairs, wits internal/civil conflicts, or miss disruptive technology transitions and new operational concepts.
The specimen can be made that all of these have or are happening to the U.S.
There is historical precedent for Congressional whoopee to ensure the DoD is organized to fight and win our wars. The 1986 Goldwater/Nichols Act laid the foundation for conducting coordinated and constructive joint operations by reorganizing the roles of the military services, and the Joint Chiefs, and creating the Joint Staff and the combatant commands. US Congress must take Ukraine and China’s dominance in the South China Sea as undeniability for whoopee and immediately establish a legation to determine what reforms and changes are needed to ensure the U.S. can fight and win our future wars.
While parts of the DoD understand we’re in a slipperiness to deter, or if that fails, win a war in the South China Sea, the DoD as a whole shows little urgency and misses a crucial point: China will not defer solving the Taiwan issue on our schedule. Russia will not defer its future plans for overstepping to meet our dates. We need to act now.
We goof to do so at our peril and the peril of all those who depend on U.S. security to survive.
