Interview with Greg Grant
SMALL WARS JOURNAL STRATEGY DEBRIEFS
Interview with Greg Grant
This interview is Small Wars Journal exclusive.
Greg Grant is Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. He previously served as Special Assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work helping him develop the Department’s “Third Offset Strategy.” His DoD experience includes serving as Director of the Advanced Capabilities and Deterrence Panel (ACDP), an effort to identify new technologies and concepts to sustain and advance U.S. military advantages against potential adversaries. He also served as a speechwriter for Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Chuck Hagel.
Octavian Manea: As someone who was an insider of the whole process – how would you define an offset strategy, which were the individual/particular traits of the 3OS?
Greg Grant: So you have to go back to 2014, when Bob Work became Deputy Secretary. At that time, the DoD was strategically adrift: at least 12 years into the long wars, with an almost singular focus on the fight at hand – the Global War on Terror. There was little consideration being given to great power competition or great power adversaries. Work believed DoD had lost the competitive strategic muscles it had built over many decades of intense Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. The Third Offset was an effort to push DoD to regain the competitive culture that existed during the Cold War when staying ahead of the Soviet Union motivated nearly every action of the Department.
Proposals for wringing more innovation out of DoD are legion, coming with some velocity from government funded research centers, think tanks, academia. Most are outright ignored, unless they’re mandated by Congress of course. Even then, the result is a realignment of organizational charts and tinkering at the margins of real change. The same is true for senior leaders in the Pentagon who often come in with the intention of making things work faster and cheaper and fail to leave any lasting impact. Work was pressing for much more than incremental change or innovation for innovation sake. Work was trying to shake the Department out of a period of lethargy and get it to make big moves. The Third Offset was an effort to generate a deliberate institutional response to a changed strategic environment. The strategic competitive landscape had dramatically changed with the return of great power competition and the maturing of the precision strike regime had fundamentally changed the operational environment.
I always looked at the Third Offset Strategy as Bob Work’s effort to focus the department. What was the DoD’s biggest problem at the time? A lack of focus and a lack of prioritization. The Third Offset Strategy was designed to concentrate the building’s attention on great power rivalries – primarily the China challenge, but also Russia. Every conversation about new military capabilities, technologies, and sources of military advantage began with the Third Offset Strategy. It framed the discussion. In this way, the Third Offset Strategy served as a forcing function, bringing senior leadership to the table and focusing them on a specific problem set, the challenge posed by a rising China and an increasingly antagonistic Russia.
Work focused his efforts on that aspect of great power competition that he, as Deputy Secretary, could most actively shape – the ugly trends emerging in the military-technical balance between the United States and China. Various analytical offices within the DoD were raising alarms about an eroding military balance with China – particularly that China was driving the military-technical competition while DoD was doing very little to create new sources of military advantage. In fact, the United States hadn’t created any real new military advantages in terms of weapons systems since the development and fielding of precision guided munitions and stealth technology in the 1980s. For its part, China was in the midst of a massive military buildup and was producing advanced capabilities that in a number of areas were superior to comparable systems in the U.S. inventory, hypersonics of course being the most commonly cited example. It was this failure on the part of DoD to respond to an eroding military balance that prompted Work to push the Department to pursue the Third Offset.
When Work began advocating for DoD to pursue a Third Offset Strategy, he was wary of assigning a “brand” to the effort. Work appropriated the offset strategy construct for a specific reason, because offset strategies are deliberate Departmental technical competitive strategies in response to changes in the relative military balance. The Third Offset was an effort to organize the Department for a long-term military-technical competition with China. Work was trying to shift DoD’s mindset, to shake it out of its complacency as regards China’s advances in weaponry and to think in competitive terms. I’ve heard people criticize the Third Offset for not being a real military strategy. It never was intended to be. It was a competitive strategy, not a military strategy.
Associating that effort with a previous Cold War effort was by design, because it was the last time the Department had rallied to compete against a specific adversary. Of course the question was whether that period of dynamic innovation in DoD that generated the Second Offset Strategy could be replicated? The Third Offset Strategy was an effort to push the Department into thinking big, to imagine the art of the possible in solving for major operational challenges posed by China and Russia.
The Consequences of Parity
Octavian Manea: Surveying the key speeches that shaped the Third Offset Strategy, one notion recurs again and again: parity – more precisely, parity in the regime of guided-munitions warfare. Yet the Third Offset was simultaneously about restoring overmatch. Why, then, is parity seen as a danger zone – something to be avoided at all costs and a central driver behind efforts to regain decisive advantage over competitors?
Greg Grant: Let me address the issue of the parity question because that’s a really important one. For a long time, mainly because of the costs involved, the US was the only nation that was able to put together a guided munitions battle network, which includes satellites, stealth aircraft, highly precise GPS guided munitions, the aircraft carriers to get your strike packages across trans-oceanic distances. The US was and remains the only military in the world that can carry out a sustained global strike campaign due to the fact that we have a large strategic bomber force. And the key enabler for that is the refueling capability – the hundreds of tankers to support that bomber force.
Bob Work’s thesis was that the guided munitions contest had matured to the point where other great powers – particularly China – were achieving parity. We had dominated that contest for so long. But China, in particular, began investing heavily in the capabilities needed to wage guided munitions battle network warfare. The result? The PLA has always emphasized and heavily resourced its rocket forces. China now possesses the world’s leading missile force and the sensing and targeting networks, including space based, to generate robust battle networks – the A2/AD challenge.
Both China and Russia saw what we did in Desert Storm in 1991 and recognized that guided munitions, battle network warfare had become the dominant warfighting paradigm. They both spent decades developing the ability to launch sustained guided weapons’ salvos as dense, as far, and as precisely as U.S. battle networks. Making things worse, you have to remember that any conflict with either China or Russia is very much ‘an away game’ for the United States. In either a Taiwan contingency or a Baltic contingency, both are a long, long way from the United States.
In the Taiwan case, which of course sits adjacent to the Chinese mainland, the Chinese can mass all their military capability, whereas we have to drag ours all the way across the Pacific Ocean – a massive undertaking – stage it on the limited number of airfields and ports we have in the Pacific, and then try to wage war. If we no longer have an overwhelming advantage – if they’ve achieved parity in guided munitions warfare – then the question becomes: what advantage do we actually have at that point?
Because if you’re going to go into a fight with someone, you’ve got to have some kind of military edge/advantage, especially if you’re going to be vastly outnumbered. If you’re losing the ability to achieve air superiority, if you’re losing the ability to blind them – take out their AWACS and over the horizon radars – it becomes painfully obvious that if we end up in a fight with China, the situation would be dire. Are we really going to drive straight into the teeth of this A2/AD buzzsaw they’ve built and try to fight it out on their doorstep – without any real advantage to speak of?
They enjoy the advantage of proximity and the resulting numbers that come from having proximity. So, if you’re going to try to fight in that scenario where you’re vastly outnumbered, you absolutely need some kind of advantage. And it’s never going to be numbers. So, what’s it going to be? It has to be technology leading to qualitative superiority. It’s the same conclusion the US Army came to in the 1970s facing a vastly larger Soviet Army on Europe’s Central Front. Fight outnumbered and win was the mantra the Army adopted to give a sense of urgency to achieving technology driven qualitative superiority.
That’s where I think a lot of people misunderstood. They’d say, “Well, the Third Offset Strategy is purely technology-focused”. And my response was always: “Well, what military advantage do you think you’re going to have?” If you don’t have some kind of technological edge, and you’re not going to win the numbers game the relative military balance begins to look really bad. At that point, what advantage are you going to rely on? Your fighting spirit? That’s a fine notion – but a shaky one to stake your strategy on. So yes – the focus was primarily technological, in the sense that we needed to restore some kind of decisive edge – parity wasn’t going to do it.
To conclude… parity is a danger zone. If you get into a military conflict with an adversary that has a numbers advantage, that has overmatch over you – how do you expect to win? In many ways, it’s a numbers game. If you’re going up against an adversary that can mass its forces, and you don’t have a significant technological edge, you’re in real trouble. That’s when battlefield exchange rates begin to look really ugly.
Unpacking the Legacy American Way in Warfare
Octavian Manea: Most recent US National Defense Strategies are, in one way or another, statements about the obsolescence of the post–Cold War American Way of Warfare, with its characteristic legacy expeditionary approach. This is a theme you have explored extensively in your work. From your perspective, what were the core traits of that legacy American Way of Warfare, and what rendered them obsolete? Why, in short, is the traditional post–Cold War model no longer fit for purpose?
Greg Grant: The American way of war was predicated on the centrality of air power, on achieving air supremacy, which has been the case since World War II. If you look at the campaigns of World War II, the outcome was decided largely through air power, be it the war in Europe or in the Pacific – because we achieved air superiority over our adversaries. The same was certainly true in Desert Storm. I think it’s safe to say that the U.S. would never send ground forces into a major conflict until it had secured air supremacy. The principle around which the American way of war hinged was straightforward: achieve air superiority over the adversary – first. Of course that idea is not lost on our adversaries that the American way of war is entirely dependent on achieving air superiority over the battlespace.
But say you can’t – then what are your options? Your ground forces become extremely vulnerable. Your surface fleet becomes extremely vulnerable. In a mature precision-strike regime, it’s not exactly a pleasant idea to send your battle fleet steaming into range of an adversary equipped with mass A2/AD capabilities. This reality called into question the entire notion, because our adversaries – both the Russians and Chinese were structured to fight without first establishing air superiority – both have developed increasingly advanced integrated air defense systems. So how do you fight that? What are your options when you’re operating without air superiority – when the primary way we’ve traditionally delivered fires is suddenly no longer guaranteed/feasible?
We can get very reductive and think about high-end warfare as simply delivering high explosives on a target set – on a high-value or priority target. As we’ve seen in Ukraine, close air support is a battle winning capability – the amount of explosive that can be delivered by air is so much larger than anything on the ground. The primary way the U.S. military was configured to deliver those fires, to deliver those high explosives, was through air power. We didn’t develop a large ground-based missile force like China and Russia developed, because we began with the assumption that we would wage war only after achieving air supremacy.
Russia and China, on the other hand, assumed they might not have air superiority, so they built up extensive ground-based air defenses and relied heavily on rockets and missiles to deliver fires. We, of course, went purely with aircraft. Hinging your entire warfighting approach on dominating a single domain is destined to fail because any thinking adversary will always develop a counter. Case in point, China accurately identified weaknesses in our approach – specifically, a reliance on achieving dominance in the air domain. They recognized our vulnerability and set about developing the capabilities to take away both our fixed airfields through missile bombardment and our mobile airfields – our carriers – through long-range missile strikes.
Then what are we left with? We’ve got the strategic bomber force, and that’s about it. That reality called the entire notion of the American way of war into question. How do you get fires onto the adversary’s doorstep if they can take away every air base within range and push you all the way back to Australia – or even force you to stage out of the continental United States? At that point, you’re in real trouble. So Work was trying to convince the Department that it needed to change the game entirely and come up with a new American way of war.
Octavian Manea: What was the Overmatch brief and what picture did it paint? I think it is highly indicative in terms of the structural trends that produced 3OS.
Greg Grant: The Overmatch Brief was purely an ONA project. It really had nothing to do with the Third Offset. The interesting thing about the Overmatch Brief is that it didn’t contain anything fundamentally new – it was all in the presentation. It was very much a “military tech advantage erosion 101” kind of thing; or, put another way, “how to lose a great power war for dummies.”
What made it powerful was the way it was presented visually – the idea of show don’t tell – it drove the message home. David Ochmanek was always the one presenting the brief, and he’s both a brilliant thinker and a brilliant briefer. I remember going up to brief Senator McCain and company on the SASC on Capitol Hill, and you could literally see the light bulbs going on above their heads as they flipped through the pages. Visually, they could see – clear as day – “Oh my God, we’re really in trouble.” Whether it was the PLA’s missile rings around Taiwan or just how vastly outranged we were by Russian artillery, ground fires, and ground-based air defense systems, the graphics made the threat understandable and unmistakable.
It was the visual impact that drove the point home more than specific data points. Anyone who had been following the military competition already knew how bad things had gotten. But it was very effective. It changed minds on Capitol Hill. It woke a lot of people up to the problems we were facing. The Overmatch brief confirmed many of the ugly trendlines in the relative military balance that spurred the Third Offset. That we can’t achieve air superiority over key geographic areas of interest and those areas are increasing. That we’re losing the ability to achieve maritime superiority across more of the world’s oceans. That we have no effective defenses against hypersonics. That our space constellations are at risk. The list goes on.
Influences & Influencers
Octavian Manea: What were the intellectual roots of the Third Offset Strategy? When reading Bob Work’s speeches, one repeatedly encounters an emphasis on a triad of new organizational constructs, new operational concepts, and new ways of doing things. This resonates strongly with Andy Marshall and the wider 1990s debate on the Revolution in Military Affairs. To what extent was the Andy Marshall/ONA intellectual universe a distant – or perhaps not so distant – influence on the Third Offset?
Greg Grant: A lot of what became the Third Offset Strategy – much of the underlying thinking – was certainly spurred by the old Andrew Marshall clan, if you will. Many of the war games coming out of ONA, like the 20XX war-game series, were looking specifically at the China problem. These had been long-running and served as something of an intellectual foundation for Work’s thinking and the Third Offset Strategy.
In many ways we faced a very similar operational problem that Bill Perry and Harold Brown confronted in the Second Offset. Back then it was how to penetrate the Soviet’s highly effective air defenses and kill massive numbers of Soviet tanks. Their answer was combining various emerging technologies – new sensors, advanced command and control, stealth, embedded computers, and precision guidance – all of which would allow the US to overcome Soviet defenses and destroy lots of Soviet tanks. Today, the operational challenge in the Pacific is how to defeat highly effective Chinese counter-air and counter-surface systems and sink the PLA’s amphibious fleet. In Europe, it’s how to crack the Kaliningrad A2/AD nut and stop Russian tank columns from overrunning the Baltics.
Before he actually became Deputy SECDEF, Bob went and talked to the “godfathers” of the Second Offset – figures like William Perry, Paul Kaminski – who had been around the Pentagon at that time. He asked them how they had gone about achieving the Second Offset Strategy. Essentially, the Second Offset was driven by the same kind of realization: back in the late 1970s and into the early ’80s, there was a growing recognition that the Soviets were achieving parity in many weapon systems. It was that same sort of “oh my gosh, we’ve got to do something now” moment. And nothing concentrates the mind quite like being on the losing side of a potential military competition – or worse, a military fight. Much of that intellectual energy came first from ONA and then from the Second Offset veterans who were still around to share their lessons.
Legacy & Brain Trust
Octavian Manea: How do you see the broader strategic legacy of the 3OS? There’s a tendency to equate the Third Offset purely with a technology-driven focus. And yes, technology played a central role – but, as with its predecessors, an offset strategy is also about developing new operational concepts. In fact, I think the ripple effects – the fruits – are what we’re harvesting now. The services began that work back then, and we can see it today in the multi-domain focus, in the U.S. Marine Corps’ transformation to prepare for a First Island Chain contingency, and in other evolving approaches. Fast-forward to today – where are we, from your perspective, in terms of progress toward truly developing effective operational concepts and new ways of fighting?
Greg Grant: Back then, we faced obstacles from the Services who were set in their way of fighting and their approaches to the problem set, a Navy and Air Force that couldn’t get away from the Pacific A2/AD meat-grinder because it perpetuated the capability and capacity combinations they love. The Navy always wants larger numbers of ships – but they’re finding that more and more of their volume is taken up by self-defense capability and living on the surface of the ocean is getting more hazardous, not less. The Air Force is about fighter jets – lots of money spent on being able to drive into the denied zone and shoot down the other guy’s aircraft or drop bombs on mainland China. The competing vision we were after aimed to render an adversary’s A2/AD architecture irrelevant, not to drive across the ocean to try and bludgeon it to death.
I do think the 3OS was definitely the intellectual foundation – the genesis if you will – for much of the subsequent thinking on new operational concepts. In one of his speeches, Bob charged the Army with coming up with a new “AirLand Battle 2.0” and tasked the Marines to continue developing new operational concepts. It was all about pushing them to extend their boundaries and think more creatively. Work’s effort to push the Department to pursue a Third Offset Strategy led directly to discussions about acquiring new capabilities in a time of constrained resources. It was the organizing idea that began all discussions on the subject. It focused the senior leadership on a specific problem set and prioritized developing response options.
We had a meeting in Norfolk with the concept developers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps – under the umbrella of the Joint Forces Association – to talk about new concept development. It was interesting because General McMaster was there representing the Army; he was leading their concept development at the time. And I distinctly recall him saying, “You know, we’ve never actually had all the concept developers from all the services sitting in the same room together until now.” And Work’s response was, “Exactly. We need to bring the Services together to generate future concepts that employ the entire Joint Force, not just a part of it.”
Work emphasized the importance of confronting China with multiple dilemmas. You don’t want them to focus solely on taking out your Navy or your Air Force. You want to hit them with multiple dilemmas from the ground, from the air, from the sea, from under the sea, from space – to overwhelm the adversary’s ability to react and present them with as many dilemmas as you can possibly devise. It goes back to this idea that you need a new American way of war.
That’s why Work tried so hard to re-energize wargaming in the Department. He realized that progress towards a Third Offset would only happen when the Services began to incorporate new ideas and new capabilities into their own operational concepts. Work knew that it’s inherently difficult to get military officers who have spent their careers thinking about fighting in a specific, doctrinally proscribed way to begin to think in terms of fighting in new ways. He viewed wargaming as a tool for bringing the Services along in embracing a vision of future warfare and as a means for discussing possible solutions to an eroding military balance that includes new capabilities. Work was also determined to spark an effort to expand the degree to which defense professionals think Red. It was part of rebuilding the competitive culture that had existed during the Cold War.
I do think this period and the Third Offset was the genesis of some of the thinking on new concepts – in the Marine Corps and in the Army as well. Multi-domain battle was, in many ways, born out of this. The Third Offset kicked off a wave of thinking about new ways of warfighting and concept development. A lot of the people who were in those meetings with us back in the 2016–2017 timeframe were the ones who stayed in the building – or stayed in the services – after we left. General Smith, for example, was one of Work’s senior military assistants. There was this core group of people – O6’s from the Services, a few folks from ONA, some from J5, and a strong wargaming cadre. It was a brain trust that developed in that period, and then dispersed into key positions across the force.
This was one of the real impacts of the ACDP – the Advanced Capabilities and Deterrence Panel. It brought everyone together. The Breakfast Club, which became the “Deputy’s Action Group” if you will, met every other week in the conference room adjoining the Deputy’s office. It really pulled together a kind of brain trust inside the building. The goal was twofold: go out and sell/proselytize about the Third Offset, and at the same time, scout the building to find the good ideas. And meeting in the conference room adjoining Work’s office sent the signal that this was a priority. And he would stick his head in the room during breakfast club meetings and ask: “What have you come up with to screw China today?” He’s a former Marine so he’d use more colorful language of course.
This goes to one of the key lessons from William Perry and the Second Offset folks was that there are a lot of good ideas floating around the Pentagon. There’s a ton of smart people there. But unless those ideas are brought to the attention of senior leadership – and unless you have a senior leader willing to champion that program, capability, technology, or concept – it’s not going anywhere. That was the function of the ACDP: to identify those good ideas, elevate them to the Deputy, and present them for consideration. If he said, “Yeah, you’re right – this is a good idea, this merits further funding,” then it could actually move forward. Project Maven is probably the best example of that.
We’re seeing today a strong trend of land forces embracing a sea-denial role. I actually have a story about how that began. It was around 2014 or 2015. At the time, I was working closely with the Secretary’s speechwriter, and Secretary Hagel was preparing to address the Army. In Bob Work’s office, we were trying to get the Army to embrace the idea of using land-based anti-ship missiles. So, we slipped a line into the speech about how the Army, back in the 1800s, had been responsible for coastal defense artillery. That line sparked a conversation inside the Army about striking ships from land and gave cover to those inside the Army who were supportive of getting in the ship killing business.
This speaks to a broader point: progress depends on senior leadership committing their time, energy, and resources to good ideas – and then relentlessly pushing them forward. Look, driving change in any large organization is difficult. Doing so in the hidebound DoD is incredibly challenging. The resistance and inertia inside the building are so strong that, without that kind of leadership focus, even the best concepts will go nowhere. Looking back, I feel we were fortunate to be working for Bob at that time, when he was driving the Third Offset Strategy. It was a period of real intellectual ferment within the Department – and it was exciting to witness. I believe a direct line can be drawn from Work’s efforts to spur a Third Offset Strategy and the strategic direction contained in the 2018 NDS. Much of what was in that document resulted from conversations between Work and then Secretary James Mattis on the major ideas and challenges the NDS should address.
Work shifted the strategic focus of the building toward great power competition – particularly the military-technical competition. – emphasizing the centrality of guided munitions battle network warfare and the imperative for devising new concepts within that framework. He also highlighted the importance of new capabilities, such as AI and increasingly autonomous systems. In doing so, he effectively kick-started the momentum behind all of it. Work was determined to advance a vision of future warfare, even if it was incomplete, to spur the Services to explore new ways of warfighting in an age where AI and autonomy began to make significant impacts.
Octavian Manea: Back in the 3OS days, Bob Work was calling for the creation of a multi-domain operational fires network to deter great power rivals in both theaters. A similar concept has been debated over the past few years in the Indo-Pacific context – the need to build a joint fires network. To what extent can the 3OS vision of a multi-domain operational fires network be linked to the ideas we see playing out today?
Greg Grant: He was certainly pushing things in that direction. It goes back to the notion of how do you gain advantage in a mature precision strike regime? He believed that, ultimately, it would come down to a contest of battle networks – where whoever can see first can hit first. And we see that playing out in Ukraine right now. The notion of a transparent battlefield is very real: if you can see the enemy, you can hit the enemy, because there are so many capabilities you can bring to bear. For him, the contest of battle networks was the decisive arena – and one in which we had to achieve an advantage. Within that battle network, there are core components: the sensor grid, the command-and-control (C4I) grid, the effects grid, and a sustainment or logistics grid.
Much of this thinking was influenced by the Defense Science Board. In 2015, the Board’s summer study argued that we were on the cusp of AI delivering real advantages in autonomous systems and urged the Department to lean into the latest advances in AI and autonomy. That became a central hypothesis of the Third Offset Strategy: the more AI and autonomy you could inject into the battle network, the greater the potential to achieve an advantage.
We can see echoes of that today. Take the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. Early on, DARPA was experimenting with concepts like quarterbacking and picket lines in the air – using autonomy not only to extend range and increase striking power, but also to absorb hits from the adversary. And now, DoD is actually building out those capabilities. The war in Ukraine, in many ways, has validated what he foresaw about autonomy. Work used to say, ‘If the first one through the door is a soldier, we’re stupid. It should be a robot.’ Increasingly, that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Some Ukrainian units no longer even run resupply missions with people – they rely on ground robots, because the battlefield has become so lethal. He was early, and insistent, in pushing autonomy deeper into the force, even if the U.S. military – especially the Army – has been slow to fully embrace it.
Octavian Manea: So the Third Offset Strategy (3OS) is about both autonomy and AI – it’s not an either/or proposition. Yet at times, AI was perceived as the primary dimension of 3OS.
Greg Grant: We began the Third Offset effort with two realizations in mind. First, that our competitors and adversaries were catching up, and in some cases, passing us in terms of advanced weaponry – particularly in the Mature Precision Strike Regime – which was the motivating force behind the Third Offset. And second, the realization that new technology – particularly in the fields of autonomy, artificial intelligence, and robotics – would dramatically impact the way wars were fought in the future. AI and autonomy are closely intertwined in what he called algorithmic warfare.
Take, for example, the situation in Ukraine. A major focus there is achieving what they call ‘last-mile targeting’ or terminal guidance. So how does terminal guidance work? Essentially, it involves running an algorithm on the drone itself – on its onboard computer – to detect, identify and lock onto a specific target. Here’s how it typically plays out: a drone pilot operates a first-person view (FPV) drone, watching the live feed. When the pilot spots a target, all they have to do is tap the screen – on a tablet or similar device – and the system locks on, creating what’s known as a ‘bounding box’ around the target. From that point on, the algorithm takes control and completes the targeting process and autonomously guides the drone into the target. These operators are collecting combat footage daily and using it to train their machine learning models every night. So, AI and autonomy are very much interdependent – you really can’t achieve meaningful autonomous systems without AI.
Back during the Third Offset era, one of the big challenges was that people struggled to contextualize what AI could actually deliver in terms of improved capability. It was difficult to grasp the real advantages it could provide. Work was determined to demonstrate the impact of integrating AI into military operations and needed something impactful that the warfighter could understand. Along came Project Maven. Maven was all about getting AI to the warfighter. DoD AI projects at the time were mostly “hobby projects” with no real outcome. It was important to get something concrete forward with the troops to see how it could impact operations.
At the same time, one of Bob’s big pushes within the Department was to embrace autonomy and drones. His view was: while hypersonic missiles are impressive weapons, they’re far too expensive. You can’t build or field enough of them to generate rapid, large-scale effects. The only way to achieve massed precision is through low-cost systems. Without that, you simply won’t have the numbers you need. That’s why he was advocating for a new generation of lower-cost autonomous systems. In a mature precision-strike environment, where you’re dealing with a high volume of missiles and targets, AI becomes essential. It’s what enables you to close the kill chain faster than your adversary as AI does very well at identifying targets.
That push was harder to get DoD to focus on, but I think they’re starting to come around – especially in light of the lessons from Ukraine. If you want precision at scale, you can only get it with affordable systems. Interestingly, the Europeans are actually leading in this regard. The British appear to have embraced the concept of attritable mass, and Poland along with the Baltic states are exploring what they’re calling a ‘Baltic line’ of drones as a deterrence concept stretching along the northern flank into Finland.
Reflecting on the Lessons of Ukraine
Octavian Manea: An argument can be made that the development of the AirLand Battle concept in the 1970s was, in part, kickstarted by lessons drawn from the dynamics of the Yom Kippur War. So, what should we be learning from Ukraine today as we think about the next wave of defense transformation? What are the key lessons from Ukraine that highlight the changing character of conflict and inform how we must adapt to future war?
Greg Grant: Bob Work often referenced the 1973 war as a defining battle – one of those moments that fundamentally shapes warfighting, doctrine, and training. In 1973, it was the battlefield evidence of precision air defense systems and massed use of wire-guided Sagger anti-tank missiles along with RPGs that served as real eye-openers to the implications of precision systems deployed at scale. I believe that this war it will be drones and autonomy deployed at scale that will drive the realization that we are in fact witnessing a revolution in warfare. As much as people hate the whole revolution in warfare concept.
I’ve been spending the past two years traveling to Ukraine and working with Ukrainian frontline units. There is a real transformation in warfare happening there. I’m 100% convinced that Ukraine is going to be a defining battle. It’s going to entirely change the way militaries fight. In force design terms, there is a before Ukraine war military and an after Ukraine war military…and they will look very different from each other. And if militaries don’t adapt and adjust their organizations and their concepts and their capabilities to the way the Ukrainian military has they’re just going to flat out lose. Because the Russians have had three years of fighting this way whereas NATO nations do not. It doesn’t matter if you’re reluctant to fight that way, because the Russians are going to fight that way and they will have an experiential advantage. They’ve created drone centric units, Rubicon is the most well known, that are very good and are expanding those across their force.
I firmly believe that autonomy, drones, and increasingly AI have dramatically changed the battlefield. The idea of a ‘transparent battlefield’ is very real. When you’ve sat with Ukrainian drone pilots or inside a brigade command post, surrounded by 60 monitors tracking their entire sector 24/7, where nothing moves without being seen, you realize just how radically different this is – the concept of a reverse slope no longer exists as a defense. The saturation of drone surveillance has made nearly all troop movement visible and therefore vulnerable. Any grouping of forces, anything that moves near the frontline will be hit in minutes. The familiar maxim: “What can be seen can be hit” is truer on today’s battlefield than at any point in history. It’s a new world, and it’s going to reshape the way wars are fought. There’s no doubt in my mind. Autonomous systems – both aerial and ground-based – will be central to that transformation.
The fight for information advantage, the ability to form and maintain resilient recce-strike complexes over the battlefield is the operational center of gravity for both Ukraine and Russia. The frontline has become a battle of recce-strike complexes, the fight to maintain your own and simultaneously take down your enemy’s. Six months or so ago Ukrainian drone units listed Russian air defenses as their most high value target. That has shifted to targeting Russian drone pilots. Early in the war Ukrainian brigades used NATO’s ISTAR approach for targeting but quickly realized that the ISTAR targeting process that was far too slow for the scale of the fighting. They’ve put together a system that directly connects the reconnaissance and strike pieces in much faster kill chains.
And it’s in Ukraine where we see AI deployment accelerate. The incredibly complex EW environment along the frontline served as a forcing function. It’s a radio operators’ nightmare, it’s such a dirty battlespace. Skilled pilots can sense the EW jamming as they get closer to the source and the best of them can often find a way to get inside the jamming either by flying low enough to get under it or coming in around from uncovered directions. But most can’t and thousands of drones are lost to jamming. That’s why terminal guidance is the focus of so much work right now, it’s the AI enabled autonomous piece that restores effectiveness to drones in EW saturated environments. Autonomy will continue to increase the capability of drones, there is a big shift currently underway and increasingly software will supersede the skills of a pilot.
The adaptation piece is absolutely central. Ukraine is proving that innovation and speed of iteration are just as vital as traditional metrics of combat strength on the modern battlefield. The key is their lightning-fast feedback loop from operator to engineer. The most effective Ukrainian drone operators are both tactician and technician able to make modifications and improvements on the fly. Drone operators are supported by R&D labs and manufacturing facilities with the brigades located just behind the frontlines. Drone producers integrate frontline feedback within hours. Pilots report issues via secure chat. Engineers adjust software or hardware in real time. Software to counter jamming is routinely patched within 48 hours of field use. It’s something else to watch how fast the whole process operates.
Octavian Manea: Many observers are pointing out that we are on the precipice of a defense dominant world to some extent.
Greg Grant: FPV drones provide operators with an incredibly precise and mobile anti-tank weapon that can immediately respond to any armored assault within tens of kilometers, unhindered by terrain. It’s the mobility piece that makes them such a game changer – FPVs move orders of magnitude faster than anything on the ground to an enemy’s point of attack whereas anti-tank guns and ATGMs would have to be sited along the avenue of approach to be effective. Both NATO and Russian military plans for mobile anti-tank defense placed a heavy reliance on ATGM armed helicopters. Because of the sheer numbers of air defense systems on both sides helicopters are not survivable over the FLOT. Low cost FPVs and bomber drones dropping anti-tank mines have replaced missile armed helicopters. Ukrainian soldiers say it’s senseless to use tanks on this battlefield as they don’t survive very long – 90% of vehicles are destroyed by FPVs and drone dropped remote mining.
Western militaries haven’t reconciled this yet, the challenge of operating on a drone swept battlefield. It fundamentally challenges the traditional notion of massing. Concepts like AirLand Battle, maneuver warfare, and other legacy doctrines are all based on the idea of concentrating forces – massing at the point of effect. But today, that very act of massing gives off an enormous signature and turns you into a target. It really calls into question the whole blitzkrieg concept, whether an attacker massing forces to breakthrough a defenders positions is even viable anymore. In Ukraine it has become nearly impossible for either side to mass and maneuver along the frontline, since any attempt to concentrate forces is quickly detected and targeted.
The incredible lethality on the Ukrainian battlefield is due to the intersection of two dynamics, the proliferation of precision and the transparent battlefield. This combination violates the main foundation of classic military thought: the concentration of effort and mass at a decisive point. On the modern drone swept battlefield any massing of forces is met with precision strike by waves of drones within minutes, well before reaching the FLOT. The primary guiding principle of the western way of war has been concentration of combat power at the decisive point. In Ukraine, concentration equals destruction. To survive on a drone swept battlefield units must be dispersed, which in AirLand Battle doctrine is a dilution of lethality. Offense is now based on the concentration of fires as the means of defeat rather than on the concentration of forces and maneuver. Proficiency in targeting is now the principal determinant of success on the battlefield not proficiency in maneuver.
