Drone Swarms to the Rescue The Pentagon’s latest idea is no substitute for a bigger Navy.
The Pentagon said last week that the U.S. will build thousands of drones to counter China, and a 24-month timeline fits the urgency of the Pacific military threat. But beware the idea that nascent technology can patch growing U.S. vulnerabilities on the cheap.
The Pentagon is rolling out an initiative called Replicator that aims to speed up the “shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap and many,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks in a recent speech. The Chinese Communist Party “has spent the last 20 years building a modern military carefully crafted to blunt the operational advantages we’ve enjoyed for decades.”
Ukraine has deployed cheap drones to great effect, from reconnaissance to apparent sea explosives cobbled together with jet-ski parts. Drone swarms could help the U.S. jam or distract enemy radars and surface-to-air missiles. Armed seacraft could offer more offensive missile power at lower risk to U.S. troops.
Ms. Hicks says new systems will “help us overcome the PRC’s advantage in mass: More ships, more missiles, more forces.” The new drones, styled as “all-domain, attritable autonomous systems,” will help defeat the Chinese plan to push U.S. forces out of the Pacific.
Innovation is welcome, but so is caution about thinking that the U.S. can use better technology to make up for a smaller military, as the U.S. Navy looks set to shrink to 285 ships in the coming years. Ms. Hicks invoked the Cold War example of offsetting Soviet advantage in forces with precision weapons. But Ronald Reagan also built a 600-ship Navy and rejected a false choice between better tech and more ships and ammo. The U.S. won the Cold War with both.
America will again need tech breakthroughs and deeper stocks of everything from aircraft to munitions. The Pentagon plan is all the more curious because Ms. Hicks says the program “will not be asking for new money in FY2024. Not all problems need new money; we are problem-solvers, and we intend to self-solve.”
Yet a technological revolution on the quick will almost certainly require more new investment, given inevitable failures that come with experimentation. The Navy has struggled to introduce even an unmanned aerial refueling tanker that is needed to increase the reach of aircraft carriers.
An example is Task Force 59, in which the Navy and friends have exploited commercial technology to monitor the Middle East seas with unmanned vehicles. This was stood up quickly and improved intelligence and mapping. But it also hasn’t deterred Iran’s military, which has tried to fish the boats out of the water.
The Pentagon is right that the threat from China will require ingenuity, an enduring American advantage. The U.S. military will be better if it has unmanned tech that makes the force more lethal within two years.
But equally urgent is building two Virginia-class submarines a year and fielding thousands of long-range weapons so U.S. forces don’t run out of their best firepower after a week in the Taiwan Strait. That means defense budgets will have to increase above the modern norm of 3% of the economy. No deus ex machina on drones can change that reality.
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