Christopher Kirchhoff on military innovation and the future of war

From the interview:

[T]he US military has had to ask the Ukrainians to remove from the front all 31 of the M1A1 Abrams battle tanks that we gave the Ukrainians because a quarter of them had been destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones. So, not only is it the ascendancy of an era of drone warfare, but it’s probably the end of man-mechanized warfare, as well, on land. We can also talk about similarly epic changes at sea, in the air, and in space.

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I think drones are primarily offensive dominant in the sense that there are, right now, almost 300 companies in Ukraine that have faster innovation cycles at this moment than all of the Western military companies fielding drones.

If you go to the front lines today in Ukraine — I got a chance to visit there in October with my co-author, Raj Shah — you’ll find predominantly Ukrainian drones operating. The reason why is that they’re literally able to go back to garage shops all over the country and overnight change the algorithms in the drone to respond to rapidly evolving Russian electronic warfare tactics that change from day to day.

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What’s really remarkable about the Ukrainian drone ecosystem is, they’re not just building simple kamikaze drones. They’re building surveillance drones that will automatically go fly, surveil the battlefield, return, upload images that can then be uploaded to killer drones that then go out.
On top of this, you have people using open-source software to build fusion systems that take sensor data from EW [electronic warfare] detection systems’ live feed from drones and put them all together on a controller that an operating unit, going forward, actually uses to mount a coordinated attack using multiple drone systems.

This is to say, in effect, Ukrainian start-ups have replicated the entire battle management system of the US Air Force. They have, effectively, AWACS drones, attack drones. It’s quite remarkable what they’ve done with open-source software and hardware that is pennies on the dollar compared to any system in the Western arsenal.

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I think drones are good for anybody looking to defeat a conventional military operating in conventional ways. I’ll just list off a couple of examples. One, how was it that Hamas fighters bridged the border in Gaza, which is essentially a modern-day Maginot Line with multiple lines of defenses? The key tactical maneuver they pulled off on October 7th was using quadcopters to drop small charges on the generators powering the border tower surveillance systems.

Similarly, the Houthis have effectively harassed shipping now with a combination of loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and autonomous drones. Then, in northern Israel, perhaps most strikingly, Hezbollah has depopulated the first 10 miles of northern Israel using loitering munitions and cruise missiles because the IDF can’t effectively defend their northern border, and that has displaced 85,000 Israeli civilians. And the IDF is a very modern military.

(The interview was before the Israeli offensive started.)

Oh, by the way, there’s no way to defend against [hypersonic weapons] so forget the fact that they’re nuclear capable — if you want to take out an aircraft carrier or a service combatant, or assassinate a world leader, a hypersonic weapon is a fantastic way to do it. Watch them very carefully because more than anything else, they will shift the balance of military power in the next five years.

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[R]ight now, they’re incredibly hard to produce. Right now, they’re essentially in a research and development phase. The first nation that figures out how to make titanium just a little bit more heat resistant, to make the guidance systems just a little bit better, and enables manufacturing at scale — not just five or seven weapons that are test-fired every year, but 25 or 50 or 75 or 100 — that really would change the balance of power in a remarkable number of military scenarios.

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Hypersonic weapons are very difficult to make fly for long periods. They tend to self-destruct at some point during flight. China has demonstrated a much fuller flight cycle of what looks to be an almost operational weapon.

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[T]he way to think about large defense primes is more akin to a utility company than it is a private-sector company. The result of that, of course, has been very slow innovation, a culture of cost overruns, even as some phenomenal technology is produced.

What’s really important is a rise, thanks to Ash Carter’s starting Defense Innovation Unit and starting off a whole new cycle of venture capitalism — you have companies like Anduril and Shield AI and other defense start-ups that are joining Palantir and SpaceX, that are becoming a new breed of product-oriented defense companies that are not burdened by the system of requirements that have turned our defense primes into electric utility companies, to be honest.

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I think we need to be spending way less money on legacy systems that are demonstrably defeatable today. Anybody that’s been watching Ukraine in the last two months should decide that tanks are not a great investment for modern military. Similarly, anybody that’s read even news articles about hypersonic weapons should decide that buying more aircraft carriers is not a good thing.

But we do need some of those resources shifted to this new defense ecosystem that’s very experimental, that’s building swarming weapons. The Air Force is very commendable, under the leadership of Secretary Frank Kendall. They now have what’s called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. This is a 10,000-aircraft buy of supersonic stealth drones who will fly alongside manned fighters in the largest change of Air Force doctrine since, really, the Wright Military Flyer.

Oh, by the way, guess who the two finalists are for the production contract for this massive program. They’re Anduril on the one hand, and another nontraditional defense contractor, General Atomics. The traditional primes lost to those two companies for this revolutionary contract.