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FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGE
Technological innovation has long been critical to the United States’ military success. During the American Civil War, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln used the North’s impressive telegraph system to communicate with his generals, coordinate strategy, and move troops, helping the Union defeat the Confederacy. In the early 1990s, Washington deployed new, precision-guided munitions in the Persian Gulf War to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.
But history shows that military innovation is not simply the process of creating and using new technology. Instead, it entails reworking how states recruit troops, organize their militaries, plan operations, and strategize. In the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, France and Germany both developed tanks, trucks, and airpower. During World War II, Germany used the combined potential of these innovations (along with the radio) to carry out its infamous blitzkriegs: aggressive offensive strikes that quickly overwhelmed its enemies. France, by contrast, invested most of its resources in the Maginot Line, a series of forts along the French-German border. French leaders believed they had created an impenetrable boundary that would hold off any attempted German invasion. Instead, the Nazis simply maneuvered around the line by going through Belgium and the Ardennes forest. With its best units concentrated elsewhere, poor communication, and outdated plans for how to fight, France swiftly fell.
It is not a coincidence that France didn’t gamble with new military systems. France was a World War I victor, and leading military powers often forgo innovation and resist disruptive change. In 1918, the British navy invented the first aircraft carrier, but the world’s then dominant sea power treated these ships mostly as spotters for its traditional battleships rather than as mobile bases for conducting offensives. Japan, by contrast, used its aircraft carriers to bring attack planes directly to its fights. As a result, the British navy struggled against the Japanese in the Pacific, and ultimately, Japan had to be pushed back by another rising power: the United States. Before and throughout World War II, the U.S. Navy experimented with new technology, including aircraft carriers, in ways that helped it become the decisive force in the Atlantic and the Pacific.
But today, the United States risks being more like the United Kingdom—or even France. The Defense Department appears to be biased in favor of tried-and-true capabilities over new tools, and its pace of innovation has slowed: the time it takes to move new technology from the lab and to the battlefield went from roughly five years, on average, in the early 1960s to a decade or more today. Sometimes, the Pentagon has seemingly dragged its feet on AI and autonomous systems because it fears that adopting those technologies could require disruptive changes that would threaten existing, successful parts of the armed forces, as the story of the X-45, the X-47A, and the X-47B clearly illustrates. Some projects have struggled to even make it off the drawing board. Multiple experiments have shown that Loyal Wingman, an uncrewed aircraft that employs AI, can help aircraft groups better coordinate their attacks. But the U.S. military has yet to seriously implement this technology, even though it has existed for years. It’s no wonder that the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence concluded in 2021, in its final report, that the United States “is not prepared to defend or compete in the AI era.”
If the United States fails to develop effective AI, it could find itself at the mercy of increasingly sophisticated adversaries. China, for example, is already employing AI to war-game a future conflict over Taiwan. Beijing plans to use AI in combination with cyberweapons, electronic warfare, and robotics to make an amphibious assault on Taiwan more likely to succeed. It is investing in AI-enabled systems to track undersea vehicles and U.S. Navy ships and to develop the ability to launch swarm attacks with low-cost, high-volume aircraft. If the United States lacks advanced AI capabilities, it will find itself inevitably moving at a slower pace—and would therefore be less able to help Taiwan fend off an invasion.
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