Ep 90: Andrew Krepinevich on Military Revolutions

Andrew Krepinevich, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers, joins the show.

[00:00:00] Aaron MacLean: Welcome everyone in this episode with Andrew Krepinevich. We are going to pick back up on some of the threads we were pulling on in last week's episode about how to study the past and the present to discern, to the extent possible, the character of future wars.

[00:00:12] We'll linger on the concept of military revolutions, what their paradigmatic structure is, and whether we're in one right now. For those interested, just this week, Krepinevich has a new publication out on, “archipelagic defense 2.0” with the Hudson Institute that applies some of these lessons to present day concerns in the Pacific.

[00:00:29] Let's get into it. [00:01:00]

[00:01:08] Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks so much for joining School of War. Delighted to be joined today by Andrew Krepinevich. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He's the founder of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which he led for 21 years. Before that, he served a 21 year career in the United States Army, author of numerous books and publications, including most recently, The Origins of Victory, How disruptive military innovation determines the fates of great powers.

[00:01:35] Andrew, thank you so much for joining the show.

[00:01:37] Andrew Krepinevich: Pleasure to be here, Aaron.

[00:01:39] Aaron MacLean: So, I've read your work  and been a bit of fan for some time. I read your Marshall book, The Last Warrior some years ago. And I, I thought if, you'll permit it, we might, we might start with your service in the, in the military and how you came to be associated with, with Marshall and the office of NEDA.

[00:01:54] Which I think will, will lead us into the, the work that you're doing now pretty smoothly.

[00:01:59] Andrew Krepinevich: Well, I started [00:02:00] out as an air defense officer served tours in in the States here and in Korea, a little bit of time in Germany. And then the army sent me off to graduate school at Harvard after two years there went back to West Point where I graduated. And taught for four years in the social sciences department then spent a year at the Naval War College and then on to the army staff, and then worked for four years as a personal assistant on the mil on the secretary of defense's staff.

[00:02:30] So that was an interesting learning experience and then finished my army career serving four years in the office of net assessment, which in a way is kind of the defense secretary's personal think tank. So that's, that's the military career. And then as you mentioned when I left went to what became the center for strategic and budgetary assessments.

[00:02:50] Aaron MacLean: And so how did you first encounter Andy Marshall?

[00:02:53] let me add, who was Andy Marshall for purposes of listeners who, who may not be

[00:02:56] Andrew Krepinevich: Andy Marshall, as somebody once said, is the most famous [00:03:00] man you've never heard of. He was very influential in the defense department. He ran the office of net assessment from 1973 to 2015. So. 42 years as head of the defense secretary's personal think tank both Republican and Democratic administrations.

[00:03:18] They both wanted Marshall highly valued in Congress. And so, he was known as A great strategic thinker an informal name for him. Among the cognoscenti was Yoda. He was a man of few words, but his words were very impactful. So came to know Marshall when I was working for Secretary Weinberger back in the late eighties.

[00:03:41] And I was the person in charge of putting together what at the time was called the Posture Statement. And it's a comprehensive assessment and, and of U. S. defense policy, strategy, programs, budgets, alliance relationships. So I was more or less the editor in chief of that and [00:04:00]worked a little bit with Marshall staff in putting that together and then was put in charge of something called Soviet military power which if you read the, the annual reports on Chinese military power today, that was the Cold War analog to the Chinese report and wanted Marshall's staff to do a net assessment, a comparative assessment of U.S. and Soviet forces. So I got to know Marshall rather well through that because he was the gatekeeper obviously on what his staff would or wouldn't do. And he ended up liking me well enough that he hired me on from the secretary's staff and that's how I concluded my military career.

[00:04:39] Aaron MacLean: So what was distinctive about Marshall's approach or the net assessment approach? As opposed to other ways to thinking about strategy. What, I guess another way of asking the same question is what, what on earth is.

[00:04:49] Andrew Krepinevich: Well, net assessment is a comparative assessment of the military capabilities and military potential of the United States relative to a particular rival. [00:05:00] And, of course, during the Cold War, the rivalry was between the United States and the Soviet Union. And there were two kinds of assessments. One was a regional assessment.

[00:05:09] So the key regional assessment during the cold war was the central European military balance. So what was the, the military balance between the United States and Russia, or actually NATO and the Warsaw Pact at that time. And another, there were also, functional balances. So these weren't tied to regions, they were more or less tied to areas of the military competition.

[00:05:33] So there could be an assessment on space forces or on nuclear forces, or in an area like anti submarine warfare submarine versus anti submarine warfare. Areas that Marshall thought were critical to have an advantage in if we were going to have an overall favorable military balance. The assessments were comprehensive, and so, Marshall did not like simple be what we [00:06:00] call bean counts.

[00:06:00] You know, how many tanks do they have, how many tanks do we have, how many divisions, how many fighter aircraft, and so on. He wanted to know how the two sides planned to operate, their operational concepts. And one of the studies that he had done was on, the situation in France in 1940, when Germany defeated France and Britain in six weeks, even though the, the quantity of forces, the number of planes and tanks and aircraft, were roughly the same on two sides.

[00:06:29] So if the balance is equal, how does somebody manage to win in six weeks? So he looked at that. He will look at demographics. So he would look at for example not just the military balance today, because in a sense, you go to war with the forces today that you have today. So he was looking primarily to help the defense secretary understand, how do I better position myself in this long term rivalry with the Soviet Union?

[00:06:56] And so he would look at trends like demographics [00:07:00] to see if there would be more stress on, say, Soviet manpower. He would look at things like well, you know, every six or seven years, they come out with a, a new version of, of tank. Are they on, on sort of schedule to come up with a new version in six or seven years?

[00:07:16] If they're not, that might indicate that they're looking to compete with us in a very different way. So a very in depth approach and quite frankly, you can be assigned to the office for three or four years. And if you produced one assessment one net assessment for Marshall that he would forward to the defense secretary you sort of patted yourself on the back.

[00:07:37] You felt that you had done your job.

[00:07:39] Aaron MacLean: And did this approach attract critics and what were the, the main lines of criticism? If so,

[00:07:45] Andrew Krepinevich: Well, one of the one of the things that Marshall did that actually minimized criticism, what he, was he viewed net assessments as being very diagnostic. And so if you wanted to use a [00:08:00] medical analogy, his, his point was. A, good diagnosis of, of whatever is ailing you will enable you to write a good prescription.

[00:08:10] A poor diagnosis will not. So his emphasis was not only on what does the military balance look like today, but what are the key factors driving the balance? Where are the big opportunities, the big risks? And so he really didn't get into the prescriptive aspects. He didn't come away and say, well, therefore you need this many more tanks or this many more aircraft.

[00:08:32] And of course that diffused a lot of criticism from the services, which are constantly looking at the budgets and things like how many tanks, how many planes we have. On the other hand he was He did attract criticism for the fact that even some of his diagnoses could be rather provocative.

[00:08:53] And the one that I did that I'm best known for was the one on the so called military technical revolution or the [00:09:00] revolution in military affairs, which was the only unclassified assessment that I'm aware of that the office produced. And this attracted the attention of the defense secretaries in the 90s.

[00:09:11] And there was a great push at the time to say, okay, well, if we think that there's this disruptive change in the warfare in warfare's character, then we're going to have to think about a very different mix of capabilities. And of course, that raised the alarm bells in several of the services.

[00:09:28] While some officers embraced it, others saw it as a threat to their traditional way of doing business. And so Marshall could attract criticism. For you know, for those kinds of assessments

[00:09:40] Aaron MacLean: well, this gets us right to the subject of the day then because your, your, your new book which I, I just have to say is truly fascinating. Is essentially about military revolutions and how to think about revolutions and perhaps the revolution we are undergoing as we speak. Maybe start with the one then that you that you wrote about back when, when you were in the service, this is sort of the [00:10:00] first revolution, I suppose, that you, you, you sketched out in great detail. What were the, what were the the main elements of the military revolution that you were describing at the end of the Cold War?

[00:10:11] Andrew Krepinevich: well, the the background to that was I was serving in the office of net assessment and we were in that period where President Bush had decided to combat the the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Marshall had been doing some thinking about. Writings that the Russians have been doing and beginning in the late 1970s, the Russians began to write about something called the military technical revolution, and they said this revolution would be driven by something called the reconnaissance strike complex.

[00:10:46] And this complex would be enabled by rapid advances in information technologies. And if you recall the 70s was a period when we actually start to see the results of the the IT, the [00:11:00] information technology revolution personal computers, pocket calculators, you know, these sorts of things.

[00:11:06] And at the time the Russians were particularly worried because we had an enormous advantage in this new technology. Nobody was buying Russian made personal computers or pocket calculators. And so by the By the late 80s, Marshall approached me, I was doing the, the balance on NATO, NATO Warsaw Pact, and he said, well, we need to find out if the Russians are really onto something here, they say that if you can create this reconnaissance strike complex, reconnaissance in the sense of being able to see over an enormous area, a far greater area to do scouting, say of enemy forces than we'd, we'd ever been able to do before.

[00:11:48] And if you can move this information very rapidly. And you can strike these targets at a great distance with precision, and again, precision weapons, thanks to the IT revolution, are coming into their own. This could [00:12:00] give you an enormous boost in military effectiveness and military capability. Think of the German military's development of Blitzkrieg, that obsolescence.

[00:12:09] In a sense, trench warfare certainly overcame it or the, the American Navy's development of the aircraft carrier and the fast carrier task forces that obsolesce the battleships. So Marshall's question to me was do we think the Russians are right? Tell me if you think the Russians are right.

[00:12:27] If you think they're right, what are the characteristics? You know, what changes as a consequence of this? He also said, the third question was, if you think they're wrong, how do we. convince them what, what things can we do to convince them to keep following this dead end that we believe is the dead end.

[00:12:43] And fourth, he said, how do we hedge against the possibility that if we think they're wrong, they might be right and we're wrong. So how do we hedge against the fact that we can recover quickly if it turns out we're wrong? And of course the, the first, Gulf War, Desert [00:13:00]Storm the Soviets before they, they went out of They went into chapter 11 at the end of 1991, they said, this, what the Americans did in Desert Storm, this is the reconnaissance strike complex, at least in its, its, its first form, its first primitive form.

[00:13:17] And so we were doing the work on what became known as the revolution in military affairs, what the Russians were calling the military technical revolution. And of course, Desert Storm provided a great testing ground for whether some of this thinking was actually correct. Thank you. And so that and of course, then we began to see the displacement of mass bombardment with precision bombardment in places like Kosovo, for example, the second Gulf War where the percentage of precision guided weapons shot up amazingly.

[00:13:49] And of course the, the time between when you could see a distant target and engage it compressed rather substantially. And so, We are at the point now, and I mentioned this in the [00:14:00] book where and this was one of Marshall's questions as well. Tell me what it looks like when we lose our monopoly in this kind of warfare, because we were the first to introduce it.

[00:14:13] And there were concerns that if you looked at earlier revolutions. Rivals relatively quickly caught up and because it was a great incentive not to be at a great disadvantage. Our advantage because of the unipolar era really extended several decades. But now, as I mentioned in the book particularly in the case of China the revolution has matured.

[00:14:37] And so once you lose your monopoly how do you compete then when, when your opposition has its version of a reconnaissance strike complex? So that, that's kind of the background of that work.

[00:14:49] Aaron MacLean: Yeah. So I want to, I want to come back to the, to the present day here in a minute, but just stick sticking in the past and just sticking at the end of the eighties, early nineties for a second. What should we conclude from the fact that this [00:15:00] revolution, which the United States you know, enjoys first and then dominates for a substantial period of time is actually first noticed by the Russians that the office of net assessment starts studying it because the Russians are writing about it and that we don't notice it first.

[00:15:13] Andrew Krepinevich: Well, as I mentioned in the book, we did not entirely ignore it. So, the Russian head of their general staff, General Orgarkov begins to write about what, what's going on here in the 1970s. They're, they're very much concerned that they can't do IT and we can. And in fact, Harold Brown, who's the defense secretary in the late seventies.

[00:15:36] developed something he calls the offset strategy. And the offset strategy basically is a response to the fact that by the early 1970s, we've lost our great advantage in nuclear forces. In the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, we had this phenomenal advantage Even though obviously any war at that time with nuclear weapons would have been highly [00:16:00] destructive by the seventies.

[00:16:01] We don't have this advantage. And so Brown is looking for a new source of advantage. And he says it's going to come in. I. T information technology. We're going to be able to do sensors better. We're going to be able to, because of that, we'll be able to do things like identifying targets and I submarine warfare, these sorts of things much better than the Russians.

[00:16:20] One of his deputies Bill Perry, who eventually becomes the defense secretary in the nineties, he's head of defense research and engineering and in 1976 he starts to look around as to how we might exploit this revolution and he's looking a bit at our Kharkov, but he's also looking, there's something called the, the LARDEP the long range research and development plan, and that says we, we had some experience with precision weapons in the Vietnam war.

[00:16:47] We should exploit this and we should exploit information technology. So it's this sort of mix that Perry starts to advocate and Brown matches onto it and says, this is where we need to invest you [00:17:00] know, have our investment priorities increased. In areas like Precision Weapons and things like Stealth, for example, Advanced Stencers.

[00:17:08] So this is where you get the, the Have Blue program that develops the F 117 Stealth Fighter that begins in the late 70s. So we're not asleep at the switch, but it's the Russians that are really writing about this much more than we are. And in a sense you could argue that their strategic thinking was in some ways superior to ours in terms of thinking about where warfare was headed.

[00:17:32] And of course, what you always want to know in particular, if you are a, a senior defense department official, if you're secretary of defense or chairman of the joint chiefs. You want to know not, you don't want somebody to come in and tell you, well, warfare, the characteristics of the characteristics of warfare are going to be pretty much the same five years from now as they are today.

[00:17:53] You want, you want to know when they're going to be very different. And that's where Marshall began [00:18:00] to raise this issue in the mid to late 1980s when the IT the information technology was really starting to show results where this, and particularly because the Soviets seem so nervous about this even if it didn't work, like I, as I mentioned earlier, Marshall wants to know, well, if we, if we think the Russians are just you know, scaring themselves.

[00:18:18] How do we help, how do we help them become more scared? So again, just for that reason looking into what they were doing was valuable. But again there was thinking on the American side as well.

[00:18:31] Aaron MacLean: I want to talk a bit for a minute about the structure of, of military revolutions or just how to think about them paradigmatically, which is something obviously you go into it. It's some detail here. You know, sticking with the offset and the end of the Cold War, you know, you, you, you have You have a military revolution that's downstream of technological advances, in particular in I.

[00:18:51] T. technology, right? So you're sort of riding this wave of broader technological developments in the U. S. Obviously gets their first in part because it's their [00:19:00] first on the technological developments themselves. It gets their first and using them in warfare. Is this a through line in earlier?

[00:19:07] For that matter, you know, revolutions to come in your opinion, is this a through line and earlier revolutions? Is this basically how they work? How do they work?

[00:19:14] Andrew Krepinevich: In, in some, well, it well, let's start with technology. Technology is particularly in the. Industrial Information Age plays a, a major role. There have been earlier revolutions going back to antiquity where, for example stirrups enable you to do certain things. Not a heck of a lot of technological input there.

[00:19:37] There's also... You know, the development of the phalanx and the Roman legions, they have different approaches that enable them to be far more effective. But in terms of, say, beginning in the period of the industrial revolution, so mid nineteenth century forward technology typically plays an important role.

[00:19:57] And so in [00:20:00] some cases it's a technology that's proprietary. It's technology that only a country or only a military has. So the nuclear revolution, obviously a huge change in the character of warfare. Most of the technology associated with that at least early on is is proprietary. You know, nuclear weapons are not something that is being produced by the commercial sector.

[00:20:23] Ballistic missiles not being produced by the commercial sector and so on. There are other cases, and I think it's the case of not only the precision warfare revolution, but the one that we may be experiencing now. That rely on widely, generally widely available technology. If you have the resources, you can get the technology and you can develop it.

[00:20:44] And so if you look at, for example the revolution that occurs between the world wars, you look at blitzkrieg, well, blitzkrieg basically in terms of technology fuses radio technology, wireless. mechanization[00:21:00] and aviation and those are the, the, the major technological peace parts of, of the panzer divisions cooperating with the Luftwaffe and the Stuker dive bombers and so on.

[00:21:11] If you look at the, the revolution in naval warfare that occurs toward the end of the 19th century, early 20th century. A lot of that has to do with the perfection of submarines and torpedoes, which again is proprietary. There's no commercial sector in France or Britain or any other countries trying to produce these except for the military.

[00:21:31] So it, it really does depend. The, there are other elements though that help determine whether a military is first to market, you might say with the military revolution. So one is, is figuring out, well, how does this change warfare? It's sort of the vision thing. And so for example Admiral Fisher, who is head of the Royal Navy in the first decade of the 20th century, 1904 [00:22:00] to 1910, he looks in part, At submarines and torpedoes and what, what is happening there is submarines are getting better and better and better.

[00:22:09] And so are torpedoes. And so you can, can be fired accurately at ever increasing ranges. And so Fisher says, well, if that's the case. Then we need to rethink the whole fleet. And so he goes for all big gun battleships that can outrange essentially torpedoes, because he, he realizes that if they get in close to the enemy fleet, torpedoes run a higher risk of sinking them.

[00:22:34] So you have, you know, this, this idea of, you know, how is warfare changing? And to certain extent, you have what I call. technological push or operational pull. So technological push is fishers not looking for, for torpedoes or submarines. The, the technology is finally emerging. The American Navy, after World War I, isn't looking for aircraft but here they are, this new [00:23:00]technology, this new capability.

[00:23:01] But there are cases where in the case of say the German military between the World Wars. They're looking basically to conduct what were called storm troop tactics on a much broader level. So, they figured out how to infiltrate the, the ally trench lines during World War I, but they couldn't bring their logistics with them far enough.

[00:23:23] They would make a breakthrough, but they would run out of steam because they had no way to... of persisting, of expanding the breakthrough, they their troops got tired. They didn't have the supplies, the the artillery that they could bring up. Well, you know, they were looking for a technology or a set of technologies that would enable them to transform storm troop tactics into something much, much better.

[00:23:44] And of course, that was the, the value of, of tanks and aircraft and radio. So there's that aspect to it. But again, you have to. Take that vision of where warfare is going, the new tools that technologically enables, and then [00:24:00] figure out how to put them together better than your adversary in solving a particular problem that you have, an operational challenge, if you will, at the, at the campaign level of war.

[00:24:11] Aaron MacLean: Yeah. And so, and this will start to bring us back up to the present day, but then you get these moments where somebody has a first mover advantage, you know, the Germans in 1940, but then, but then people catch up. You know, and by 1944 or so, you know, the United States is capable of similar, you know, similar operational style.

[00:24:30] We seem to be you, you argue persuasively that we are in a similar moment or approaching a similar moment now with respect to the most recent revolution, the precision warfare revolution. What does, again, sort of paradigmatically, and then we can kind of narrow back in what does it look like when you're in the mature regime?

[00:24:49] Andrew Krepinevich: Well, in this particular case what it looks like is the Chinese now have their version of the reconnaissance strike complex. And they so [00:25:00] they, we would say that they have the ability to do reconnaissance. Over a large area and move that information very quickly back to what we would call a battle network.

[00:25:10] They have different terms than we do. That would then look at that information and assign it to strike forces, so reconnaissance strike. That could hit targets very accurately, very quickly, at very long ranges. So this, yeah, this enormously expanded battlefield compressed. timelines of operation.

[00:25:29] And in fact, they talk about emphasizing what they call the speed and the intangible domains. So it's, it's space, it's cyberspace, electronic warfare, and airstrikes. That is a very different problem that we face say in Afghanistan and Iraq. Or from the Iraqis in the two Gulf Wars. So, we're used to operating in what the military calls a permissive environment.

[00:25:53] Now in the Western Pacific, where we have key vital interests and, and alliances along the so called [00:26:00] first island chain that stretches from Japan down to Singapore the military balance there is shifting in ways that are unfavorable to us. And also the character of war is changing.

[00:26:13] And so the question is, how do we adapt our military to deal with this very different kind of problem, a problem that we really have never seen before?

[00:26:21] Aaron MacLean: Yeah. My, my own experience in that one, one incident that sums up my own experiences in Afghanistan is using an F A 18 using its guns to go after a guy implanting an IED on a, on a dirt road, which from a, from a technological perspective, sort of sums it up.

[00:26:37] Andrew Krepinevich: well, yes, we, I mean, if you look at for example. The MRAPs you know, that we spent 50, 60 billion, um, to basically try and deal with that guy who's playing that roadside bomb. And there's I guess a debate certainly going on as to whether or not MRAPs made a lot of sense. To the troops, I'm sure it made a heck of a lot of sense in terms of and I had [00:27:00]discussions with that with people like General Petraeus and General Odierno.

[00:27:03] The question there was, did it accomplish the mission which was to, you know, win the war. So

[00:27:09] Aaron MacLean: Yeah. I mean, I can argue this both ways. I mean, I am a personal beneficiary of these vehicles. Many of my, many of my Marines are alive today. Marines I knew are alive today as well because of, of MRAPs. And look, I mean, the serious strategic argument I could advance, I'm curious to know your view of this, is you obviously have to consider domestic support.

[00:27:30] Domestic attitude towards casualties is the tolerance level is pretty low. And MRAPs really do, they certainly reduce killed in action very dramatically, very dramatically and did practically.

[00:27:39] Andrew Krepinevich: Well, in, in my, in my discussions and I don't care if we digress because I'm enjoying this conversation greatly. At the time you had people paraphrasing here. I think like Petraeus and eventually Odierno who were saying to bring security. To the people to the point where they will share with us the [00:28:00] information of who the bad guys are and where they are.

[00:28:03] We're going to have to get out of these vehicles. We're going to have to sort of have a personal stake, a personal risk and security for this area with the local inhabitants. And so, you can't go and you might be able to use MRAPs, but at some point you have to get out and risk your troops.

[00:28:22] And I remember having a conversation with General Casey, who was chief of staff, and his problem is, as you kind of alluded to, is public support for the war. Recruiting targets, you know, could we in a volunteer military, could we continue to recruit soldiers and Marines if we had high casualty rates and it, it did it did remind me, there's this scene in the movie Gettysburg which, you know, pulls from the, the book, the killer angels, which pulls from history.

[00:28:52] There's this exchange between Lee and Longstreet and Longstreet keeps arguing. For, you know, being careful, not risking the [00:29:00] troops because the Confederates don't, you know, don't really have the means to fight that kind of war. And Lee gets angry and cuts him off and says to be a good soldier, you have to love the army.

[00:29:12] To be a good general, you have to be willing to risk the loss of the thing you love. And so the question was, was it more important to minimize casualties or to win the war? And of course, as you say That's, that's a very rich debate and we'll never know.

[00:29:28] Aaron MacLean: Yeah. Well, like I said, I could argue it either way. And when I was there, I can also remember, I mean, so on the one hand, the benefits were obvious and you couldn't get away from them. On the other hand, it wasn't just the MRAP, right? I mean, it was this question of force protection and casualty aversion more broadly of which the MRAP was a part.

[00:29:44] And we were constantly complaining about, and we knew, we knew that we were, it was less about contact with people and more about just tactical flexibility and speed. You know, if we, I can remember very clearly an incident where we, we heard that there were some some unsavory [00:30:00] characters kind of down the road from us and the locals wanted us to go look and, you know, the time it takes us to like, you know, get on our gear and, you know, like everything, it's the body armor, it's the vehicles, it's the fact that circuit to 2010, you know, a Marine rifle squad, a Marine patrol had to be minimum eight people, minimum eight Marines or seven Marines and a corpsman or whatever, you know, whereas what, correct.

[00:30:21] What the locals were envisioning and expecting to happen was something like out of being West's the village were like, you know, the three or four of us who happened to be sitting around, grab our rifles and go running and fight these guys. And that's not it's just generally speaking, not what happened.

[00:30:35] We weren't agile.

[00:30:36] Andrew Krepinevich: yeah, it is very interesting because when I wrote the Vietnam book I went back and looked at Korea and you had a general van fleet. who was commanding 8th Army at the time saying I want so many holes, so many artillery holes in Korea that, that that a soldier can walk from one end to the other you know, just by stepping in one to the next.

[00:30:57] And certainly in Vietnam, it was [00:31:00] similar. You know, why send a, bullet. And, of course, the debate was particularly in Vietnam, is that the best way you know, to fight a, a firepower war as opposed to a, a more what the, well, actually what the Marines did with the combined action platoons. So, yeah, it's, and that is the debate that's not going away.

[00:31:19] And if you look, for example, At the recruiting crisis that we're confronting now particularly in the army it raises questions about how do you fight? And whether you do have volunteer military or whether organizations like the army science board that I was a member of start to look at things.

[00:31:40] Well, how, what is the, the potential substitution of say robotics and AI for manpower if we can't recruit manpower?

[00:31:49] Aaron MacLean: Well, that brings us back nicely to our actual subject for the day. I don't know if you follow Walter Mead's work at all. He obviously

[00:31:56] Andrew Krepinevich: I'm a, I'm a fan of his, I don't read everything he writes for the Wall Street [00:32:00] Journal, but I really enjoyed his books and enjoy his, his his editorials.

[00:32:06] Aaron MacLean: Well, so alongside those and I'd recommend to you and to readers, he's been writing these great essays in tablet magazine, actually on sort of domestic. And he makes a point early on in this series that he's embarked on that seems to me to be relevant to our subject, which is in our domestic life today, the pace of technological change is so fast that it seems like we're approaching this kind of singularity where it becomes borderline impossible, certainly for, you know, like the average guy on the street to, to like, just picture what the world is going to look like in 10 or 20 years and to plan accordingly.

[00:32:41] And the obvious. Look, there's an obvious counter argument to that, which is okay, so fine, but 100 years ago, people would have said the same thing, which is a is a fair enough point. But I'm sympathetic on some level to what Walter says. It does feel like things are just changing even faster when than when I was a kid, and I'm not, I'm not [00:33:00] that old.

[00:33:00] And so when you think about warfare, You know, the laundry list you can offer of things that you have to track because they're probably going to matter should we fight today in, you know, the Taiwan Strait, let alone in 10 years, you know, whether it's technologies new domains of warfare I mean, we could just talk for minutes, just listing the things.

[00:33:20] So help us in this, obviously, you know, the core of your project, but help us. Think about thinking about the change in warfare. How should we structure our thinking about this revolution that you propose we are, we are going through right now,

[00:33:35] Andrew Krepinevich: Well, as you know from reading the book My I, I readily confess that my ability to predict the future is, is highly limited. And when I, for example, when I did the, the assessment on the revolution of military affairs, basically I was focusing on information technology. And in the book, of course, I'm sitting there and [00:34:00] I'm looking and it's, it is artificial intelligence, which is.

[00:34:05] profound. It's synthetic biology, it's quantum computing, it's robotics it's additive manufacturing. And not only as I go through, individually, do they have the ability to greatly alter the character of war, but their interrelationship, I mean, AI is important in terms of additive manufacturing, it's important in terms of robotics and, you know, the ability if you're going to if your battle network is broken up you know, can you infuse the various components of your reconnaissance strike complex with artificial intelligence?

[00:34:41] So you don't need a battle network or you need a very modest version of what you know, the military is trying to build today. There is, this great short story I came across Arthur C. Clark, he writes this in I think it's 1950 or 51, and it's called Superiority, and of [00:35:00] course it's, it's science fiction, and it's about this dominant military that loses against an inferior rival because they, the scientists keep telling them that they've got, you know, if you just add this new technology in, and it kind of gets to your point, Aaron, that at, at some point, The question becomes, can we really absorb effectively all that's out there?

[00:35:25] And my current project is the issue of, you know, basically how do you engage in disruptive innovation? And I'll just say a few points on that. One is in the early 1930s, you know, apropos of your point Winston Churchill said. The, the level of destructive power that's becoming available is outstripping our ability to, to try and figure out how to, how to basically confide it in, in ways that we can manage it, not get out of control. If if you look at the current situation, it's very difficult. One of the things I mentioned in [00:36:00] the book is up until the mid 19th century. Warfare is essentially fought in two domains. You're either fighting on land or you're fighting in the sea, and there's not much the forces on land can do to influence what's going on in the sea or vice versa.

[00:36:14] You know, the three mile limit because mechanic can fire, you know, barely offshore. Then you get the electronic domain, you get the telegraph you get wireless, you go under sea with submarines, you go into the air with aircraft. And then after World War II, you go into space, you go into the seabed, and then you go into cyber.

[00:36:35] So, if you're talking about playing two dimensional chess up until the mid 19th century, now you're playing eight dimensional chess, you know, arguably eight domains. And because of the increases in speed and range and accuracy, you're fighting cross domain warfare. So the, the capabilities in one domain can influence the competition that's going on in the other domains.

[00:36:58] And to try and sit down and [00:37:00] think through, okay, well, what does this mean? You know, what is the right way to defend the first island chain? Against a, an adversary that is also has this fantastic mix way of mixing it's, so it's not only the technologies, it's the domains, it's the speed and I came down to sort of two metrics one is the ability to develop. A superior operational concept, so you know you're going to be wrong if you go to war. A good operational concept says you're, you're going to be less wrong than the other guy. And of course the classic example is between the World Wars you have the French and the Germans. The Germans developed Blitzkrieg and the French developed something called the Methodical Offensive.

[00:37:40] Which is basically refight World War I until we wear them down and then we'll attack them. So there's a big bet here. A big bet. Both sides are placing big bets. So somebody's, they could both be really wrong, or they could but only one can be really right. And of course that leads to the second point.

[00:37:57] So the first point is come up with [00:38:00] a, an operational concept that focuses on, again, getting back to Marshall and the diagnosis. What is the problem you're trying to deal with? It's a very, very big different big difference if you're trying to defend the first island chain or you're trying to pacify Afghanistan.

[00:38:16] And you only have limited resources. So what, you know, what is the big challenge? The big challenge in the Cold War was defending Western Europe against a numerically superior technologically, Advanced you know, adversary. So, so that's point number one. Point number two is when you find out you're wrong, you know, again, hopefully you're less wrong than the other guy.

[00:38:37] How quickly can you adapt? And there's an, and of course we've been kind of ignoring that issue until recently with the Russo Ukrainian war. I, when I was serving on the defense policy board, we had. You know, senior military people coming in saying they could not envision a contingency lasting longer than three months.

[00:38:57] Well, now, you know, we've sobered up and [00:39:00] now we realize, and in fact, I'm, I'm working on a piece now. What, what if a war with China is an extended war? Then you, then, then there's this race to adapt. This race, you know, to, to basically now that war has revealed what works and what doesn't, how can you shift and create the ability to wage war in the new right way?

[00:39:21] And so you want to be less wrong going into the war and you want to be able to adapt more quickly once war begins. And there's something that, uh, think in the book is mentioned is the virtuous cycle. The U. S. Navy really is a great example of that between the world wars. And it's, Putting a lot of brain power and figuring out what might work and then through war games and field exercises, you're trying to reduce uncertainty.

[00:39:45] So you, if and when you go into that war, you're less wrong than the adversary. But then you have to look at things like the industrial base, for example. You know, if you're adapting you may have to surge production. And we have, you know, the arsenal of [00:40:00] democracy is, is is history right now. What would you surge produce?

[00:40:04] And when I was with the CNO executive panel we had a session that looked at the issue of what, what if we had a protracted war, and I raised the issue of. You know, I can't, you know, if I lose my carrier trying to be aggressive in defending the first island chain, we won't get another carrier to replace it for five years.

[00:40:25] Assuming that Newport News isn't attacked and so what could I mass produce, you know, what can I produce in a hurry? And you know, we're sitting around the table in this conference room and it's sort of an “aw shit” moment if I could use that term. So, the. As you point out, Aaron we're at a point now where the, the strategic problems are very rich, they're very wicked to use a New England term and it's going to require a lot of hard thinking and I'm I hope as, as you mentioned earlier, you know, is, is our thinking going to be superior to the [00:41:00] Chinese the way that we hoped it was you know, back in the seventies and eighties with respect to the Soviets.

[00:41:05] Aaron MacLean: what is the chance that, and I, you know, it's, it's, it's a struggle even to phrase the question because of all, essentially all the problems you just laid out that. The consequences of the shifts in warfare that we are undergoing right now end up rendering you know, conflict, a conflict that looks a lot more like, fights that occurred before these most recent waves of technological advancement.

[00:41:29] That is to say, you know, Ukraine is something that could be used as an example for a case like this. That is to say, you have sides that exhaust a lot of exquisite equipment and make big plays. They don't work. And then you have. You've kind of run out of expensive things slash you're leery of using any more expensive things because you don't want to lose them.

[00:41:48] And so you're in this, this moment where actually maybe it turns out that mass and. You know, main force or what's called for, but it's hard to summon mass and main force for reasons you just pointed to and you're in a, [00:42:00] you, you, it does look a bit like, you know, 1915 or 1916 and in France, which it's an oversimplification, I think of, of Ukraine, but someone came on the show a few weeks ago and made a case very similar to that.

[00:42:12] So, you know, help, help, help, like it help us assess that, that thought.

[00:42:17] Andrew Krepinevich: well, you know, thinking about it as you know, to your point in the Civil War, we fight the Battle of Manassas and we say, oh, it's not going to be a fast war. And Manassas is fought in the spring of 1861. The next big battle, Shiloh, doesn't occur for a year later because it takes us, you know, that long to basically generate capabilities to, to do what we need to do to win a long war.

[00:42:42] As you point out the allies and Germans are running out of ammunition in the early days of World War I. You know, nobody thought the expenditure rates would be this high. Of course, we're seeing that now with respect to Ukraine. And the way I'm looking at say a coalition war with [00:43:00] China, say it's over Taiwan, there's always the possibility that, you know, the Chinese could win quickly.

[00:43:07] There's the possibility that things could get out of hand in a hurry and we could have a general nuclear exchange. But there's also the possibility that even if they win quickly. As long as things don't escalate out of control neither side will have to quit both sides, you know, again in, in previous wars, certainly in World War II, you know, the way we won that general war was we basically eliminated their ability to resist.

[00:43:36] with nuclear arsenals, you're not going to do that. So if, if you don't blow yourself up and if you don't quit early, you're going to have a long conflict and you're going to have a negotiated peace. That's not going to be, it's going to be more like the end of the seven years war in 1763. It's not going to be on the battleship Missouri.

[00:43:54] And so the question then becomes, okay, well, how do I fight this war? Because I can't cross red lines. [00:44:00] So I can escalate to the point where the Chinese will. Again perhaps escalate to the point where we're out of control. So, in that case, the competition could go into the commons. You know, the relatively safe zones.

[00:44:15] There could be a lot going on in space. We could go after their assets on the seabed. They could go after our stuff in the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico. Cyber there could be a false flag operations, you know, attacks. So, and, but I think it's very important that we make sure we don't lose these key points along the first island chain, because my sense is if we do, it's going to be extremely difficult to get them back.

[00:44:41] You know, this is when we invaded the islands in the Pacific in World War II, we had air, total air control, we had total sea control, and still the cost was, was incredibly high. And so, again, the ability to hold on to the first island chain, I've got a study coming out. In fact, it's coming [00:45:00] out this week from the Hudson Institute called archipelagic defense 2.

[00:45:03] 0 and basically it is air land battle, the Navy's outer air battle, the Marine Corps maneuver warfare doctrine was for the, the cold war in Europe archipelagic defense 2. 0 is that for the Western Pacific the first Island chain in particular against the, the kind of challenge posed by the Chinese.

[00:45:23] Aaron MacLean: last question for you, you, you, okay. you counsel in the book that adaptation, institutional capacity to adapt is, is obviously central to to success in the battlefield. Sitting where we are in 2023 with your experience in government and counseling government. What do you think is most urgent?

[00:45:40] What is most urgently needed? Whether it's at the Pentagon, the military more broadly. The Congress, if you, if you dare that, that we need to do, that we are not doing to be prepared to adapt.

[00:45:51] Andrew Krepinevich: I think We need to establish what is called a virtuous cycle. And this was something that was attempted [00:46:00] with joint forces command and it failed. Okay. And the idea was that the virtuous cycle basically is a lot of thinking about. Just how to address I'll use the example of the first island chain and defense of the first island chain.

[00:46:16] And then, as I mentioned earlier in our talk that's a static assessment. Wargaming gives you some sense of the dynamics, the interaction between the forces. Then you need to take it out into the, the field. And we, we do not have a, what I would call a joint or a combined training center that is capable of conducting exercises at the operational level of war, not the tactical level, the operational level.

[00:46:42] And all along this process, the insights need to be fed into the senior defense leadership so they can make choices about defense priorities, about alliance relationships, about basing postures, and the information needs to be fed back. So you get, you know, you get to the endpoint of these exercises and the information that [00:47:00] comes out of that goes back into the analytic effort to look at, for example, areas where we can improve our competitive position, that's fed into the war games, back out to the exercises.

[00:47:10] And again, the sort of the poster child for this is what the U. S. Navy did in the 1920s and 30s in their own way. These related to that. And in every case I've looked at in terms of large scale transformation in the industrial information age. You have had some senior military leaders with extended tenure because basically you're giving these individuals a job that's going to take them 10 years or maybe more, and you can't give them two or three years to get it done.

[00:47:41] They're, just you know, the antibodies will, will outlast them, the institutional antibodies and so on. So that it's, there's more that needs to be done, but I would say That kind of structure and, and process is at the core of, of what enables you to be [00:48:00] less wrong going into the next war.

[00:48:03] Aaron MacLean: Andrew Krepinevich, author most recently of the origins of victory, how disruptive military innovation determines the fates of great powers. So it's been a really fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for, for making the time.

[00:48:15] Andrew Krepinevich: Thank you, Aaron, for the opportunity. Great talking with you as well.

Cover Image Source: Photoprint by W. Roberts, Hermosillo, Son Mex. Postcard.

No. 166. U.S Library of Congress