View / ‘We’re not keeping up’: Why the future of war still eludes US leaders

For Bob Work, the big red flag came with reports that Iran appeared to have damaged two half-billion-dollar radar installations at the outset of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

“The fact that we didn’t have any air defense capabilities around those radars told me all I needed to know,” Work, a retired colonel in the Marines who served as deputy secretary of defense from 2014 to 2017, told me this week. “These guys did not think all the way through what would happen if Iran exploited all the capabilities they had.”

Work is not just another armchair commentator on America’s tactical success and worrying vulnerabilities in the new Iran War. He’s one of the leading Cassandras of the US military. More than a decade ago, when he held his powerful Pentagon role, he sounded the alarm that the United States had lost track of the future of war: As the US Special Forces waged small, secret, tactical battles across the Middle East, the US had lost the capacity to manufacture weapons en masse, and had lost its focus on a future battlefield defined by surveillance, new technologies, and intelligent weapons and countermeasures, all at scale.

In those days, he convened what was known in the Pentagon as the Breakfast Club. Senior officials from across the sprawling defense bureaucracy met biweekly in a conference room by Work’s office to tackle the new problem and change how American military leaders think. Work, an aide recalled, would occasionally poke his head in and ask, “What have you come up with to screw China today?”

Now a generation of defense intellectuals are watching their warnings come true from the Gulf and Ukraine, where drones and counter-drone measures dominate, to the Taiwan Strait, where China has amassed a vast arsenal of missiles. Even as the US continues to succeed at the targeted killings and precision strikes against an outmatched Iran that it mastered during the long “global war on terror,” the country is — as Work and his allies fear — literally moving its scarce, expensive weapons platforms out of Asia to keep up.

There are any number of frameworks and factions across two decades of defense officials panicking about the direction of the US military. Work’s was the quest for the “Third Offset.” (What, you ask, were the first two? The First Offset was a US nuclear strategy to balance superior Soviet numbers in Europe; the second was precision weaponry.) This was the search for a durable technological edge against a rising China.

Many analysts of modern warfare believe the future arrived in the fall of 2023, when Azerbaijan’s Turkish drones poured over the horizon and routed the Armenians out of the long-contested Nagorno-Karabakh. Now Russia and Ukraine are deep in a future defined by access to Starlink’s satellite communications and the two sides’ ability to produce and combat cheap drones.

The US and its allies in the Middle East, meanwhile, are doing exactly the thing Work and others — like the former John McCain aide Chris Brose, now at the defense startup Anduril — warned about. They’re using million-dollar missiles to shoot down $20,000 drones. Vast investments in cutting edge platforms to fight in the air and at sea have come at the expense of the American ability to produce artillery shells for Ukrainian allies.

“When you combine good intelligence surveillance reconnaissance with guided munitions — that was the future we were worried about,” Work, who is now a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said in an interview last week. “The US is not ready for that future and the US has to do a lot more to get ready for it.”

The private equity titan Steven Feinberg occupies Work’s role today, and he’s fighting many of the same battles of a decade earlier. Among the Pentagon’s most promising initiatives is its Drone Dominance program, an effort that looks quite a bit like Operation Warp Speed (don’t tell Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) in its effort to use market forces to quickly ramp up American drone manufacturing.

And yet: That initiative has budgeted about $1 billion, about 6% of what Ukraine allocated to drone production last year. There’s a similar imbalance when it comes to more basic munitions, like artillery shells.

“It’s taken four years of people screaming at the top of their lungs, and putting tons of money against it to get to a place where we’re producing as much in a month as Ukraine fires in a week,” laments Jim Baker, former director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, who is now a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Perhaps the strangest part of the whole debacle: The transformation of the US military, from basic manufacturing to high-level strategy, stalled out despite near-total, bipartisan agreement in Washington and an almost unique line of continuity from the Obama administration through Trump, Joe Biden, and Trump. Some point fingers, others are resigned. Stasis in the US government is “a social science phenomenon,” laments Dan Patt, a former top official at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The scariest reality may be that most defense innovation comes from desperation. Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur War, for instance, produced the Second Offset insights about deploying precision munitions. Work’s eyes, like most of his peers’, are now on China.

“Our attention is diverted once more into the Middle East, and China is just going crazy with AI and hypersonics and cyber-warfare and space,” he said. “We’re not keeping up.”