President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
These essays represent ongoing efforts at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Defense Analysis Department to investigate operationally relevant emerging technology. These efforts must continue if defense officials are to create a competitive innovation landscape across the services. Producing a collaborative ecosystem that fuses emerging technology with multifaceted operational challenges is an excellent start.
Experimentation resources are hard to find as they are widely and obscurely scattered throughout the Department of Defense. They are all but invisible, and discovery learning, while necessary, is not sufficient for the scale on which progress is needed. Implementing a digital Department of Defense exchange for experimentation funding creates a conduit that moves information, provides a price, and enables prompt brokerage of the requisite transaction in order to meet the innovation demands of a multidomain battlefield.
This analysis does not seek to prove that any specific organization is superior to the other, rather it provides an initial framework to begin organizing the myriad of technological organizations that support the United States Government. Without specific technology case studies, a determination cannot be made whether any individual factor or category determines the success of the organization. However, this framework provides an initial understanding of these factors to help a potential customer leverage these organizations for rapid development and implementation of new technologies.
What’s missing is a strategy that accounts for latent and emerging technology-enabled threats and matches them with prioritized military requirements. Such a strategy would include an optimized mix of new and old technologies designed to exploit adversary vulnerabilities and minimize American weaknesses. There is reason for optimism in America’s potential to leverage technology for its own security as long as leaders make the hard choices around national priorities that will allow planners and strategists to engage technology with focus and purpose.
The U.S. military has enjoyed a comfortable lead in the race for new battlefield technology since the end of World War II. In recent years, however, the rate of technology change has challenged the U.S. military’s ability to remain strategically superior to near peers while providing the warfighter with nimble and fiscally sustainable technology.
