It’s been 20 years since black-and-green footage of Baghdad under attack flashed across television screens worldwide, broadcasting the explosive U.S.-led push to unseat Saddam Hussein and dismantle the Iraqi civil and military service.

The overwhelming show of strength represented the largest international military effort since World War II and the biggest U.S. operation since the Vietnam War. The air campaign relied on 1,800 aircraft — half of which belonged to the U.S. Air Force — and fired more than 500 cruise missiles in its first day. Airmen gained control of Iraqi airspace less than three weeks later, with limited American losses.

But could the United States do it again? Like most questions of military strategy: It depends.

Fighter technology has advanced; bombers have not. Their logistics chain has rusted as planes grow older and it becomes harder to supply spare parts. Cyber and drone warfare would be a cornerstone of any offensive, even as U.S. forces would face many of the same threats from an adversary. Battlefield tactics are increasingly complex and attuned to the digital age.

“It’s got a big asterisk,” said retired Air Force Gen. T. Michael “Buzz” Moseley, who led the air campaign in Iraq before becoming the service’s chief of staff in 2005. “Philosophically, can you do it? Yeah. Are you prepared to do it? Yeah. Are you trained to do it? Yeah. But do you have the assets to do it and sustain it?”

What that may look like largely depends on the precipitating event, and where the invasion happens, current and former Air Force officials and defense experts told Air Force Times. Is there an advanced military on the other end? Was the groundwork laid ahead of time for a smoother takeover? How far would American jets and their weapons need to travel?

And, they said, what’s the long game?

“There’s a bunch of things the United States could do to quickly blind [an adversary],” said Peter Bergen, a vice president at the Washington-based New America think tank and co-director at Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War. “Regime change is something that we seem to be able to do very quickly. … The question is, what comes next?”

From Iran to North Korea, any air campaign must make sense with the political and military objectives it hopes to achieve, Air Forces Central commander Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich said.

In the precision-attack era, backed by savvier cyber operations, that may not require weeks or even months of nonstop bombing.

“When I have seen the term ‘shock and awe’ used, and people say that ‘shock and awe’ failed, I often find that what we’re really talking about is, ‘We tried to do something cheap and easy at the beginning with a limited amount of military force,’ rather than thinking about how we could apply pressure and lethal effects across the entire enemy system at once,” Grynkewich said.

Harlan Ullman, the military consultant credited with coining the term “shock and awe,” believes a true shock and awe campaign would rely much more on psychological warfare and diplomacy to keep adversaries in check and shape conditions in America’s favor. Those operations have dwindled in the decades since the Vietnam War as the Pentagon prioritized a more traditional approach to combat.

“Let them know from the beginning: They’re not going to survive the war. … We’re going to turn them into the Stone Age” without putting a single plane in enemy airspace, said Ullman, a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council.

‘Not a meat ax’

If the U.S. were to go to war first with its electronic attack planes and a strong disinformation campaign, followed by cyberattacks and standoff weapons, Ullman said it could prove more effective and efficient than dispatching legions of hardware and troops.

For instance: Shock and awe in the Pacific could look like a defense force capable of preventing China’s military from reaching Taiwan, without striking first, he said. If that force also threatens to cut off China’s access to air and sea shipping, Beijing could capitulate.

“We need to be able to use a scalpel and not a meat ax,” Ullman said. “We don’t, because our default position, ultimately, is always military force.”

What people tend to envision as shock and awe, though, comes after containment fails. Then it’s a race against the clock — and enemy forces — to gain control of enemy airspace.

“You’re going to have to figure out a way to campaign plan the usage of the existing F-22s and F-35s, and at some point you’re going to end up having to use F-16s and F-15Es and perhaps A-10s,” Moseley said. “But not on day one, not on day two. You’re going to have to damage that [integrated air defense] and damage that opposing force.”

Today’s surface-to-air missiles are much more lethal than those wielded by the Iraqis. They’re also harder — but possible — to take down, he said.

“There’s a million ways to go after an integrated air defense system,” such as the Russian-built S-300 or S-400 surface-to-air missiles teamed with other radars, anti-aircraft artillery and command nodes, Moseley said: Confuse them, or the people running them. Attack them kinetically or non-kinetically. Stress them. Target their command and control. Jam them.

That could require a more sophisticated approach than the bombing runs against surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery in Iraq.

Current Air Force officials envision a network of drones that would act as decoys and add frontline firepower without putting Americans in harm’s way. Those would be paired with more advanced electronic attack tools, long-range munitions and stealthy aircraft than existed in 2003, plus a more diverse array of intelligence-collection and communications nodes to maintain situational awareness.

“If we try to do shock and awe in a traditional sense of, ‘Oh, we’ll bomb a bunch of stuff and then wait,’ that sounds a little bit too ‘Rolling Thunder’ and not quite enough ‘Linebacker II’ to me,” Grynkewich said.

Operation Rolling Thunder was the three-year U.S. bombing campaign that tried to halt North Vietnam’s takeover of South Vietnam from 1965 to 1968; Operation Linebacker II came in 1972 to bring Hanoi to the table for peace talks.

Tactics that emerged in 2003 have continued to evolve as well, from the B-2 Spirit bomber’s combat debut to the first use of EC-130H Compass Call electronic attack planes for psychological warfare.

Airmen think more comprehensively about those options now, and are better at seeing a variety of solutions to a problem than they were 20 years ago, Grynkewich said.

Considering the full spectrum of military options has grown more important as America’s air arsenal ages. The average fighter jet is nearly 30 years old; the oldest tankers first deployed in the 1950s.

Its workforce is shrinking, too: The active duty Air Force now has about 51,000 fewer troops than it did in 2003; the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve have around 33,000 fewer troops in total.

Some experts worry those trends would weaken any U.S. attempt to gain control of enemy airspace and pummel them into submission.

“I believe we can do it. It’s just going to be harder because of the nature of the equipment that we’re forced to use,” Moseley said.

The Air Force’s stealthy F-117 Nighthawk fighter jets used during Operation Iraqi Freedom were replaced by the fifth-generation F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II fighter jets after 2003. No new bombers have come online since OIF; the Air Force’s cargo, surveillance and refueling fleets are largely the same.

Future platforms like the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, E-7 Wedgetail aerial target tracking plane and a sixth-generation fighter remain years away. And going to war with older aircraft complicates maintenance and supply chain needs.

Moseley argues that, in lieu of a newly designed fighter, the Air Force needs more of the non-stealth F-22s in order to control enemy airspace. It would need a bomber fleet that can sustain airstrikes over longer periods of time. And it needs more KC-46 Pegasus tankers, now.

“The thing I worried about the most, the single-point failure for the entire campaign, to include air and ground campaign, was the tanker,” he said. “Do we have a new tanker in sufficient numbers, so that’s not a problem? … We don’t.”

Another potentially major point of failure: what Moseley believes is the U.S. military’s overdependence on satellite communications.

“If we can’t command and control forces, we don’t go blow stuff up,” he said. “Given the capabilities that we have seen with malware, cyber, [kinetic and non-kinetic attacks, and anti-satellite weapons], are we absolutely confident … that our command and control systems are intact and resilient? I suggest we’re not.”

The invasion of Iraq marked the first time the head of American airpower in the Middle East was put in charge of space operations. Now that’s the Space Force’s job.

Its new unit, U.S. Space Forces-Central, plans how to wield and protect space-related assets as part of an overall mission. That can help GPS, missile warning systems and other satellites and radars stay reliable when needed, and explore new ways to integrate them into offense and defense.

That expertise can come in handy especially as small drones continue to grow as a centerpiece of modern warfare. Those systems are also crucial to protecting overseas U.S. and coalition infrastructure that could be pelted with rockets or drones in retaliation.

One thing experts hope gets left in the early 2000s: the phrase “shock and awe” itself.

It’s too flippant for an act of war, misunderstood in its intent, carrying too much baggage 20 years later, they said.

“Frankly, I don’t care if they’re awed, I just care if they’re shocked,” Grynkewich said. “I care if I get the military outcomes that I’m looking at, from the perspective of having their … decision-making apparatus seize up, having their sustainment fall apart, and having them freeze in their place.”

The request, which is about $15 billion more than the FY23 ask, designates $1.4 billion for the connect-everything campaign known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control and $687 million for the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, an effort spearheaded by Undersecretary of Defense Heidi Shyu that aims to fill high-priority capability gaps with advanced tech.

The details were disclosed in budget documents published March 13.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said Monday that the spending request will help the Pentagon “build bridges with America’s dynamic innovation ecosystem, with the traditional defense industry and well beyond it.”

JADC2 is the Pentagon’s vision of a wholly connected military, where information can flow freely and securely to and from forces across land, air, sea, space and cyber. The complex endeavor likely will never have a formal finish line, defense officials say, and is fueled by cutting-edge communications kit and cybersecurity techniques, as well as an embrace of artificial intelligence.

Hicks on Monday described AI as one of several “key technology areas” for the Defense Department and highlighted the request’s $1.8 billion allocation for it. The Defense Department cataloged at least 685 ongoing AI projects in 2021, including several tied to major weapons systems, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Exactly how the Pentagon intends to apply the funding for JADC2 development was not immediately clear. The budget documents describe the money as necessary to “transform warfighting capability by delivering information advantage at the speed of relevance across all domains and partners.”

The figure for JADC2, while not “the biggest number in the budget,” Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord said, is a “very central organizing concept of how we’re trying to link information together.”

Congress has sought to audit JADC2 spending and implementation. An overall price tag or metric for the endeavor is difficult to ascertain, as the Army, Air Force and Navy each have their own contributions, and certain details are considered too sensitive to share publicly.

Investing in innovation

The Pentagon’s $687 million funding request for its Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve is a significant jump from last year’s $358 million spending proposal. Hicks said the money will help speed technology delivery by “hastening the pathway from joint concept to experimentation to fielding systems.”

The overview documents don’t offer granular detail on how that funding would be spent, and much of the experimentation itself is classified. The department is in the midst of soliciting ideas from industry and the military services for its third round of experimentation, which is focused on defending installations. Earlier rounds were geared toward long-range weapons and contested logistics.

Supply chain risk-reduction also features heavily in the Pentagon’s budget proposal. The request includes nearly $3.6 billion to address “critical vulnerabilities” in five industrial base sectors: microelectronics, casting and forging, batteries and energy storage, kinetic capabilities and strategic critical materials.

Finally, the budget also calls for $115 million in FY24 for the department’s Office of Strategic Capital, which it created in December to drive private sector investment in key technology areas to help the military services field new systems faster. Officials plan to release OSC’s first investment strategy this summer and announced earlier this month a plan to partner with the Small Business Administration to help fund and incubate high-need technologies.

At a news conference last month, Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, who oversees U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, commended the full and active participation of all six GCC states in increasing the patrol units of maritime drones. The council’s members are Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman.

“Bahrain and Kuwait have publicly committed to acquiring these systems. Every other country in the region is to some degree along that path of [further] acquisition,” Cooper said. “If you’re a country in the region that can see 20 miles off the coast, given the existing sensors and ships that they have, you can imagine what could be achieved by [employing more] USVs with radars and additional optics. You could see 60 miles, essentially tripling your domain awareness on any given day.”

Such an increase would enable GCC members to surveil more of the waters of the Persian Gulf, with Iran situated on the other side at varying distances between 35 miles at the narrowest point and 200 miles at the widest.

U.S. naval officials last year proclaimed the goal of creating an unmanned fleet of 100 platforms by the end of 2023. Regional and international partners are envisioned to contribute systems to the notional fleet, the thinking goes.

At the briefing, Cooper further emphasized a growing trend in illicit drug and weapons trafficking by criminal and terrorist organizations. Over the course of only two months, five major seizures at sea conducted by U.S. and allied maritime forces resulted in the capture of more than 5,000 weapons, 1.6 million rounds of ammunition, $60 million worth of illegal drugs, 7,000 proximity fuses for rockets and 2,000 kilograms of propellant used for rocket-propelled grenades, he said.

In addition, the Middle East also faces a high degree of oil and gas traffic at sea, which USVs can help protect.

“These threats require a type of platform that can conduct maritime surveillance, find and identify targets while also gathering data without colliding with other vessels,” Adam Watters, program manager for maritime domain awareness solutions at Saildrone told Defense News at the IDEX arms fair here last month.

The U.S. military has been experimenting for some time with the combination of artificial intelligence tools and long-endurance USVs to conduct these types of missions. One of the systems under consideration is Saildrone’s 33-foot Voyager platform, most recently deployed in the U.S. Army’s 2023 AI-enabled target identification exercise, Scarlet Dragon.

Saildrone says that due to an increase in the demand for its services, it is scaling up the production of both the Voyager and the 65-foot Surveyor systems for the year ahead. The week prior to IDEX, two of Saildrone’s Explorer drones also sailed in the first unmanned vessel exercise in the Arabian Gulf between the US Navy and the UAE Navy.

“As a rapidly changing technology, we have an obligation to create strong norms of responsible behavior concerning military uses of AI and in a way that keeps in mind that applications of AI by militaries will undoubtedly change in the coming years,” Bonnie Jenkins, the State Department’s under secretary for arms control and international security, said.

She said the U.S. political declaration, which contains non-legally binding guidelines outlining best practices for responsible military use of AI, “can be a focal point for international cooperation.”

Jenkins launched the declaration at the end of a two-day conference in The Hague that took on additional urgency as advances in drone technology amid the Russia’s war in Ukraine have accelerated a trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield.

The U.S. declaration has 12 points, including that military uses of AI are consistent with international law, and that states “maintain human control and involvement for all actions critical to informing and executing sovereign decisions concerning nuclear weapons employment.”

Zachary Kallenborn, a George Mason University weapons innovation analyst who attended the Hague conference, said the U.S. move to take its approach to the international stage “recognizes that there are these concerns about autonomous weapons. That is significant in and of itself.”

Kallenborn said it was also important that Washington included a call for human control over nuclear weapons “because when it comes to autonomous weapons risk, I think that is easily the highest risk you possibly have.”

Underscoring the sense of international urgency around AI and autonomous weapons, 60 nations, including the U.S. and China, issued a call for action at the Hague conference urging broad cooperation in the development and responsible military use of artificial intelligence.

“We are in time to mitigate risks and to prevent AI from spiraling out of control, and we are in time to prevent AI from taking us to a place we simply don’t want to be,” Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said.

The call to action issued in the Netherlands underscored “the importance of ensuring appropriate safeguards and human oversight of the use of AI systems, bearing in mind human limitations due to constraints in time and capacities.”

The participating nations also invited countries “to develop national frameworks, strategies and principles on responsible AI in the military domain.”

Military analysts and artificial intelligence researchers say the longer the nearly year-long war in Ukraine lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans.

Ukraine’s digital transformation minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, told The Associated Press in a recent interview that fully autonomous killer drones are “a logical and inevitable next step” in weapons development. He said Ukraine has been doing “a lot of R&D in this direction.”

Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven. But there are no confirmed instances of a nation putting into combat robots that have killed entirely on their own.

Russia was not invited to attend the conference in The Hague.

China’s ambassador to the Netherlands Tan Jian did attend and said Beijing has sent two papers to the United Nations on regulating military AI applications, saying the issue “concerns the common security and the well-being of mankind, which requires the united response of all countries,” he said.

The site will feature a new facility of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Biden had arrived to tout the company’s newly announced $40 billion investment in U.S. microelectronics manufacturing following the July enactment of the CHIPS Act, which included $52 billion in subsidies and tax incentives for businesses that produce semiconductors within the country.

“American manufacturing is back, folks,” Biden proclaimed.

The president’s speech in December focused on creating news jobs in a swing state — the bread and butter of economic and political victories. But he also announced a “gamechanger.” In 2026, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company would begin building the world’s most advanced microelectronics in Arizona: 3-nanometer chips.

That’s on top of the approximately 20,000 5-nanometer chips per month TSMC intends to start producing in Arizona next year.

Mounting tensions with China have spurred a new push in Washington to lessen U.S. reliance on East Asia — the global epicenter of semiconductor production — for the vital microelectronics needed to create both conventional arms and the artificial intelligence algorithms integral to building the weapons of the future.

But left out of Biden’s Arizona speech is a similarly urgent effort the U.S. government is undertaking to slow China’s advancements, including new restrictions that limit Beijing’s access to these highly sophisticated chips.

In October, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security announced a sweeping range of export controls that severely curtail China’s ability to obtain some of the world’s most cutting-edge microchips. The bureau had argued that Beijing could use them to “produce advanced military systems” — although these semiconductors are also used in civilian technology.

Alan Estevez, the undersecretary of commerce for industry and security, said in December that the export controls will “slow China’s ability to produce the highest-end semiconductors, for a period of time.”

“They will figure this out,” he added. “But what we’ve done is pretty comprehensive.”

The Commerce Department’s restrictions put the U.S. on the offensive against China’s ability to procure the advanced microelectronics needed to meet its long-term military modernization goals. The export controls prohibit businesses such as TSMC from continuing to produce these sophisticated microchips in China — even as the Taiwanese company begins manufacturing its advanced semiconductors in Arizona.

Several days after the regulations were unveiled, TSMC obtained a one-year U.S. waiver to continue operating its semiconductor production site in Nanjing, China — with one condition. Its China-based operations must remain limited to producing lower-end semiconductors and not the advanced chips integral to China’s AI development, which are subject to the new U.S. export controls.

China has set 2030 as its target date to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, with the subsequent goal of putting the People’s Liberation Army on par with the U.S. military by 2035 — a goal the export controls intend to complicate.

“This severely limits China’s ability to access advanced nodes or build its own capabilities,” said Jay Goldberg, a specialist on Asia’s electronics supply chain and the chief executive of D2D Advisory, a consulting firm. “I don’t see any way that they can build their own advanced processors for like a decade. There’s no avenue there.”

The Biden administration in December added Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. and 21 other Chinese companies involved in the nation’s AI microchip sector to the Commerce Department’s export control list.

That same day, Congress passed the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, including a provision banning U.S. defense companies from using Chinese semiconductors in critical weapons systems — legislation that will force them to keep better tabs on their lower-tier suppliers.

Coupled with the export controls, “it’s a one-two punch,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who introduced the semiconductor provision in the defense bill, said in December on the Senate floor.

“The 21st century will be largely shaped by our two giant economies,” he added. “For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has cheated their way to the top by piggybacking off American technologies and American [intellectual property], with huge implications for our national security and for our edge in AI, cybersecurity, telecom and other major technologies.”

‘Quasi-containment’

The groundwork for restricting Chinese exports dates back to the second half of former President Donald Trump’s term. The administration’s export controls prohibited two Chinese microelectronics producers — Huawei and the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. — from obtaining U.S.-produced semiconductor equipment and software.

While the U.S. is no longer a major player in producing semiconductors — something Biden hopes to rectify — American companies still play a leading role in designing these chips and exporting the equipment needed to physically manufacture them. This gives the U.S. significant leverage over the global semiconductor supply chain.

Biden’s export controls greatly expand the Trump-era restrictions; they require U.S. microelectronics companies, or foreign businesses that use American technology, to obtain licenses from the Commerce Department to sell to Chinese firms the equipment needed to produce the most advanced semiconductors — licenses Washington is unlikely to grant.

The restrictions also block blacklisted Chinese microchip companies from employing American citizens; those who remain with the companies risk losing their citizenship.

On aggregate, these restrictions strike a major blow to China’s ability to produce supercomputers needed to generate AI algorithms.

Goldberg said the export controls hinder the Chinese military’s ability to build “advanced capabilities into their systems.”

“Especially for the Chinese military, the really limited things will be around supercomputing, which is really important for weapons design, for nuclear weapons simulation, advanced weather modeling, those kinds of things,” he explained.

China has the largest number of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. It surpassed the U.S. in quantity in 2016, according to Top500, which tracks the world’s most powerful supercomputers. These computers are necessary for developing artificial intelligence algorithms, and they can also simulate nuclear and missile tests. But they require the advanced semiconductors now subject to U.S. export controls.

For instance, China seeks to develop a new military construct it calls Multi-Domain Precision Warfare, which is roughly analogous to the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative. These systems require advanced AI algorithms and supercomputing to rapidly sift through data that informs battlefield decisions under very compressed time frames.

The restrictions will also hamper China’s ability to use supercomputers for dual-purpose activities like space exploration, vaccine development and weather modeling.

Jon Bateman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who previously served as a special assistant to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, said the export controls effectively amount to an economic policy of “quasi-containment.”

“With each year that goes by, AI algorithms at the cutting edge require more and more computing power, and therefore need more and more advanced chips,” Bateman told Defense News. “If the rest of the world moves forward and China can’t, then it’s going to face bigger and bigger problems.”

But Bateman said he’s “skeptical about the immediate impact” of the export controls on China’s defense-industrial base, noting they wouldn’t thwart a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan within the next few years.

China considers Taiwan a breakaway province, and Beijing has said it will take back the island, by force if necessary. Such an attack would rely on more conventional weapons systems that use less advanced semiconductors.

“If there were to be war over Taiwan in the next five or 10 years, the outcome of that war wouldn’t depend on artificial intelligence,” Bateman said. “It would depend on China’s amphibious landing capabilities; it will depend on China’s political will — really traditional stuff.

“China has a lot of the chips that it needs already and probably has a certain level of stockpiling and will be able to do a lot of the same things with chips that fall slightly below the threshold for export controls just by buying more of them.”

Suspicions of sabotage

China does not yet have the capacity to domestically mass manufacture the world’s leading semiconductors, but it still produces plenty of cheap, less-sophisticated microchips — many of which it exports to the United States.

The National Defense Authorization Act, which became law in December, includes Schumer’s provision that will eventually ban U.S. defense companies and other federal contractors from using these semiconductors in critical national security systems. However, it remains unclear to what extent Chinese chips are currently used in U.S. weapons.

But even low-end semiconductors could potentially disrupt U.S. weapons systems.

“China’s capable of building low-end semiconductors, and those tend to be low-value, overlooked chips that sell for a few dollars or a few pennies a piece,” Goldberg said. “From a national security perspective, I think we should be paying more attention to that and being more concerned about that.”

Proponents of the ban fear a faulty semiconductor could sabotage an entire weapons system, or that Chinese chips could give Beijing access to technology, systems and classified information relevant to U.S. national security.

The congressionally mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s 2022 report to Congress warned “low-quality, counterfeit microelectronics” could compromise U.S. military equipment. For instance, Air Force Times reported in September that several faulty semiconductors in a malfunctioning ejection seat — which caused the 2020 death of F-16 pilot Lt. David Schmitz — may have been counterfeits, though it’s unclear if they came from China.

The commission’s report also found “the United States faces exposure to backdoor vulnerabilities from integrated circuits that undergo final assembly, packaging and testing in China.” It noted 38% of the world’s semiconductor assembly, packaging and testing occurred in China as of 2019.

“I don’t think anyone has seen active exploits out in the wild, but they’re theoretically possible,” Goldberg said.

Some defense industry groups raised the alarm over an initial version Schumer’s legislation, arguing it was overly broad and that the implementation period was too short.

Schumer and the other senators behind the legislation, including Republican Roger Wicker of Mississippi, significantly revised the language before Congress passed the defense bill last month.

“There’s no question that when Chinese-owned companies do the manufacturing, there is a security risk which allows them to gain sensitive information that they have no business knowing,” Wicker told Defense News. “I don’t think that’s subject to debate. The only question has been the practicality of getting that done in a short time frame.”

The version that became law expands implementation from two to five years, only bans Chinese semiconductors from critical systems, and allows the Pentagon and other agencies to issue waivers. It also requires the Pentagon and several other departments to “establish a microelectronics traceability and diversification initiative” with industry.

The Pentagon is currently weighing a zero-trust policy that would assume no microelectronics are safe, thereby requiring validation for every chip in the supply chain, Defense News reported in December.

But defense contractors often have trouble tracing equipment down to the lowest rungs of their supply chains as in the case of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 aircraft, which used a Chinese-sourced cobalt alloy in its Honeywell-made turbo-engine. The cobalt alloy posed no risk to the F-35, but it did violate so-called buy American laws, prompting the Pentagon to grant a waiver for the fighter jets.

Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet noted the issue took 15 years to identify.

“Three or four layers of suppliers down, they will be sourcing from distributors. Small parts, microelectronics, magnets … those come in pools,” Taiclet said in early December at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “It’s hard to figure out where the commercial distributor that sells [to] the fourth-level-down supplier got that magnet material.”

Still, Goldberg said, the problem comes down to “people’s willingness to do the work.”

“If they have a concern about counterfeit products, that’s just a basic supply chain problem,” he added. “Forget about national security. If you’re building a system, you should actually be deliberate in not getting counterfeit parts.”

China’s countermoves

In response to U.S. efforts, China is trying to lessen the dependence of its defense-industrial base, economy and AI development on American technology. Beijing is preparing a $143 billion package to bolster its own semiconductor industry, Reuters reported in December.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Megan Hogan, both fellows at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote in December that Chinese alternatives to U.S. advanced semiconductor technology are likely “decades away.” In Australian National University’s East Asia Forum publication, they added that Beijing’s investments will help it eventually procure this technology despite export controls.

“Many engineers and computer scientists are likely to be assigned to semiconductor design and manufacture, assisted by espionage against U.S., South Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese and European chip firms,” they wrote. “If China needs more advanced chips for AI-driven weapons systems, it can likely produce them, albeit at a very high cost. Many semiconductor industry experts agree that China has the technical capability to produce cutting-edge chips yet lacks the commercial capability to scale up production.”

Goldberg said that even with export controls, “there’s going to be some leakage” that China can use to circumvent U.S. restrictions. “Chinese companies are really good at setting up byzantine corporate shell structures,” he added.

China in December also launched a dispute with the World Trade Organization against the Biden administration’s export controls. Taiwan on Jan. 5 joined the consultations on the dispute, but stressed in a statement to Bloomberg News that doing so does not indicate “any dissatisfaction with the United States’ measures.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. is in talks with Japan and the Netherlands — both of which boast prominent microelectronics industries — in a bid to persuade them to instate their own export controls that would bar China from using Japanese and Dutch technology.

Still, most of the physical semiconductor production remains concentrated in East Asia, raising the prospect of a global economic crisis and trouble for the U.S. defense-industrial base should a war occur over Taiwan or elsewhere in the region.

“Almost all the production is moving to three places: China, South Korea and Taiwan,” said Taiclet, the Lockheed CEO. “The real issue of a nightmare scenario is not of the defense-industrial base alone, but for the entire economy.”

The lab said in May it was working on a Concept for 21st Century Amphibious Operations at the behest of the commandant of the Marine Corps. New concepts such as stand-in forces and expeditionary advanced base operations have gotten much attention since the Marine Corps began its Force Design 2030 effort, the lab’s former commander noted, but traditional amphibious operations also needed to be modernized.

The term stand-in forces refers to the idea of having Marines be able to operate within heavily defended no-go zones that would-be adversaries like China are expected to erect in times of war. It, like the expeditionary advanced base operations concept, is focused on small, agile units — whereas traditional amphibious operations involve larger Marine formations on large warships.

Brig. Gen. Kyle Ellison, who assumed command of the lab in June, said Dec. 6 the concept was being drafted now and “on glideslope to get it towards completion here with our partners, the naval force, and up for review and signature.”

The previous commander, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Watson, had said the concept was due at the end of the year.

Ellison said at the U.S. Naval Institute’s annual Defense Forum Washington that the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab had looped in U.S. Navy organizations such as U.S. Fleet Forces Command to ensure the concept remained naval in nature. It also included both warfighters to understand what’s happening in amphibious operations today and organizations like the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment to understand what the operating environment could look like well down the road.

“We’re going to take our time on it and make sure we get it right,” Ellison said about this effort.

He explained the new concept assumes anti-access/area-denial capabilities will be in play as amphibious forces try to get to and operate around key maritime terrain such as islands and straits.

To compensate, he said, the concept calls for more agile platforms to supplement traditional amphibious ships, long-range unmanned systems that can get inside the enemy’s threat range, dispersed formations of manned and unmanned ships that challenge enemy targeting, and the adaptation of disruptive technologies.

Asked about the technology the Marine Corps would develop and field to support this new concept, Ellison said the service had no choice but to move quickly, getting fleet input and working through potential concepts of employment even as the acquisition community still works the formal requirements for future programs of record.

“What we really need to do is incorporate new technologies into every exercise that we have going on,” he said.

The administration’s first National Defense Strategy highlights Beijing’s growing military strength as well as its provocative rhetoric and coercive activity toward Taiwan as part of a broader pattern across the Asia-Pacific region. The 80-page unclassified version comes six months after it was sent to Capitol Hill and two weeks after the White House released its long overdue National Security Strategy.

“The NDS bluntly describes Russia as an acute threat, and we chose the word ‘acute’ carefully,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters. “Unlike China, Russia can’t systemically challenge the United States over the long term, but Russian aggression does pose an immediate and sharp threat to our interests and values. And [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s reckless war of choice against Ukraine, the worst threat to European security since the end of World War II, has made that very clear for the whole world.”

Pentagon officials said they did not substantively change the strategy, which was completed in March, in response to Russia’s 8-month-old invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the U.S. has sent more than $17 billion in military aid to Ukraine, the fight has severely degraded Russian forces and Moscow is threatening to employ nuclear weapons.

A senior Pentagon official told reporters there was “overlap” between how the Pentagon is meeting challenges from both countries, particularly through investments in cyber, space and undersea capabilities, among others. “I like to think of it as the ‘two for one,’ if you will,” the official said.

The Pentagon is dealing with Russia’s threats to escalate the war in Ukraine, China’s reaffirmation of threats to annex Taiwan by force, an increasing alignment between the two, and mounting nuclear concerns from North Korea and Iran.

The Ukraine crisis delayed the rollout of the White House’s overarching National Security Strategy, which was released Oct. 12. The administration initially planned to release the strategy in February; that delay also encompassed the defense strategy.

The National Defense Strategy’s centerpiece is “integrated deterrence,” or coordinating military, diplomatic and economic levers from across the U.S. government to deter an adversary from taking an aggressive action. But it also stresses “campaigning” to build up the capability of international coalitions and complicate adversaries’ actions.

It also calls for making “the right technology investments” as it points to new threats from space weapons, tactical nuclear weapons, and new applications of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Along with investments in directed-energy and hypersonic weapons, the strategy says it would be a “fast-follower” where market forces are driving commercialization of capabilities the military would use, like artificial intelligence, autonomy and renewable energy.

Nuclear competition

The Nuclear Posture Review, also released Thursday, emphasizes the need to modernize nuclear forces and highlights the dilemma of deterring two nuclear-armed competitors, Russia and China. It emphasizes the need to maintain robust nuclear command, control and communications through satellites and cyberspace.

Biden came to office championing nuclear weapons reduction, and the strategy stresses efforts to reduce the role of nuclear weapons. But administration officials acknowledged that arms control efforts have been stymied by China’s refusal to participate.

Though the document calls for the B83-1 nuclear gravity bomb to be retired and development of the sea-launched cruise missile to be halted, Congress appears poised to preserve the latter, amid support from top generals, through the 2023 defense policy bill. The administration is yet to decide on how it will approach its plan to retire the B83.

Administration officials previewing the strategy said the sea-launched cruise missile and gravity bomb had been deemed unnecessary after broad consultations in and outside the Defense Department.

When asked what message Putin would receive from any move to scuttle the nuclear-armed SLCM, Austin defended the U.S. nuclear arsenal’s ability to deter Russia.

“As you know, our inventory of nuclear weapons is significant. And so we determined, as we looked at our inventory, that that — you know, we did not need that capability,” Austin said of the SLCM-N. “We have a lot of capability in our nuclear inventory, and I don’t think that sends any message to Putin. He understands what our capability is.”

Global deployments

The strategy’s force-planning construct aims for the ability to respond to short, small-scale crises without substantially impairing its readiness for high-end conflicts with Russia and China.

“Our force posture will focus on the access and warfighting requirements that enable our efforts to deter potential PRC [People’s Republic of China] and Russian aggression against vital U.S. national interests, and to prevail in conflict if deterrence fails,” according to the document.

That will include investments in cyber, space and undersea capabilities in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region, a senior defense official said, as well as exercises in those areas.

“And so as we understand our posture, how do we make sure that we don’t just think about sort of folks on the ground, which is just our more traditional view, but, for example, in our space capabilities?” the official said.

Though officials have been mum on any negotiations about changing the mix of forward-deployed and rotating troops abroad, defense officials in recent years have put both of those possibilities on the table.

“My advice would be to create permanent bases, but don’t permanently station,” Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee in April. “So you get the effect of permanence by rotational forces cycling through permanent bases.”

At the time, the U.S. had mobilized roughly 20,000 troops to Europe in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling into question whether a more robust presence in Europe would be necessary going forward.

In the preceding years, the Army had closed some of its permanent garrisons in Germany and replaced that posture with heel-to-toe rotational deployments.

And in Asia, the discussion of whether tens of thousands of permanently based troops in Japan and South Korea is the best way to deter China and North Korea has continued.

In 2021, the Army announced it would move an artillery headquarters from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state to South Korea, while a previously rotational attack helicopter presence would also be permanently based in South Korea.

“I don’t think we’re looking to have fixed bases in fixed places, right?” a U.S. Indo-Pacific Command official told reporters in 2020. “I think that’s, one, too expensive. Two, I think that you rely, then, on all of the agreements that you have to have to do that, and time.”

“The Department is establishing a new framework for strategic readiness, enabling a more comprehensive, data-driven assessment and reporting of readiness to ensure greater alignment with NDS priorities,” the new document reads, but the senior defense official didn’t offer any details on what that should look like.

The strategy itself describes an approach where ships, aircraft and other capabilities will be deployed, keeping in mind that they must be preserved long enough to have a clean handoff when new technology goes operational, with no gaps in availability.

The Africa Data Science Center started as a pilot project in 2018 using data science tools to cull thousands of incident or intelligence reports to find the relevant information an intel soldier needs to analyze for their command.

Col. Mark Denton, commander of the 207th Military Intelligence Brigade, told an audience Tuesday at the annual Association of the U.S. Army gathering that the days of analysts sifting through stacks of paper reports or creating their own spreadsheets to track data are gone.

The current system can “easily consolidate 3,000 reports in a matter of seconds,” Denton said.

“What this does is transform chaos into clarity,” said Maj. Gen. Todd Wasmund, commander of Southern European Task Force-Africa.

Denton put up a map of the African continent for the audience. Large swaths of it were saturated in overlapping purple bubbles. Each bubble was a report of a “conflict event,” such as a bombing, riots or other significant developments in a city, state, nation or region.

“The purple stuff is the chaos coming in that the analyst needs to make sense of,” Denton said.

The system the data center uses takes machine learning tools and natural language programming to both find the data an analyst will need and combine it into a readable report that doesn’t require a computer programmer to decipher.

Most data analysis done by hand is complicated, takes too long and makes it difficult to spot trends quickly, Denton said.

Using natural language processing, which makes computers deliver information in language a human can understand rather than computer programming language, analysts can categorize text reports and use machine learning tools to automate the process.

During the data science center’s pilot, users saw a 70-90% reduction in irrelevant reports returned from searches. The tools also allow analysts to create visualized reports, with charts, graphics and maps that can give commanders better context and a quicker understanding of the intelligence picture.

Programmers and data scientists sit hip-to-virtual-hip with analysts to determine what kinds of questions the analyst can ask of the available data, and how the answer will be delivered. The analyst tells the data scientists what they need to know and the scientist uses programming and algorithms to query the data for the answer.

After the system delivers those data summaries, users can provide feedback to make the machine-learning model more accurate. A user gets to tell the system what was useful and what wasn’t. That step should help improve the models over time, making them more efficient and accurate, Denton said.

Currently, the data science center runs only for U.S. Africa Command initiatives. But, Denton added, intelligence branch commanders and other combatant commands are working to develop their own data collecting and analysis tools.

The idea is to create a kind of “hub and spoke” system so that all Army intelligence would be linked across regions, Denton said. This will allow analysts to find patterns or pull data to inform their own area’s operations, he added.

These are key future warfare problems that need solutions.

But it is not colonels or generals in the Pentagon or some underground research facility doing the work; it’s cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point piecing the puzzle together.

The above scenarios, involving Cadets Ashley Clegg and McKenzie Arns on lasers and law and Cadet Josiah Gibson on hypersonics, are only a sample of a list of complex work that cadets now undertake at the Army’s premiere university.

The work has not-yet-minted Army officers looking deeply at technical and ethical questions and producing solutions, Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, dean of the U.S. Military Academy, told Army Times.

The institution continues with its centuries-old basic military leadership and liberal arts education, the foundations for critical thinking needed even more than in the past, he said.

“We don’t intellectually coddle them, we can’t afford it,” Reeves said.

The academy promotes an open forum to discuss tough questions. Cadets must be pushed in a way that they’re uncomfortable with intellectually, Reeves said. Faculty expect disagreement in the classroom and want students to argue with each other, but support those arguments with evidence.

The combination of advanced educational tools and approaches with the age-old enlightenment thinking gives future Army leaders advantages in the classroom but, more importantly, also on a future battlefield.

And, Reeves noted, military observers are seeing the reverse play out in Ukraine.

“If you watch the Russians in Ukraine, what’s been most shocking is the second the Russians hit an obstacle, the second that their young officers hit a wall…they froze, they didn’t know what to do,” Reeves said. “And all of the sudden, they had to call up senior leaders, colonels and generals to try to get momentum.”

Reeves pointed to the “very robust” noncommissioned officer corps in the Army and U.S. military at large as the bulwark of what makes it successful. He also pointed to the expectation that U.S. generals have for young officers to think their way out of a problem.

West Point also has a storied history of training young officers to fill military and civil engineering roles in the early years of the U.S. Those engineering problems have only gotten more complex.

What’s happening now at West Point, Reeves said, is a move toward more collaborative, project-based learning and strategic-thinking. A lot of that is mirrored across higher education.

In past decades, colleges operated on a transactional model, where students came to a class, listened to a lecture and were assessed on what was shared. Now, across the academy, students at an undergraduate level are doing deep research, giving them “applied learning” experiences that were formerly reserved for graduate-level education.

Reeves said the shift has helped fuel “intellectual curiosity” and provided “disciplinary depth.”

“They like to be challenged and challenging cadets with opportunities to grapple with, what I would consider real world problems for real world customers,” Reeves added.

Not every new second lieutenant is going to go straight to working with missile laboratories upon graduation. They’ll still be expected to serve where and how the Army needs them.

“We develop them to be selfless servants who have to understand followership and how to be led,” Reeves said.

But, Reeves noted, the larger, ongoing talent management efforts across the Army are better matching soldiers with areas of interest and expertise that serves both their capabilities and the Army’s needs.

For example, the academy graduates 40 to 45 cyber officers into the force each year. That’s a job that didn’t exist a decade ago.

“Cadets as future officers are going to be making decisions under the stress of combat and therefore, they have to be able to evaluate between perspectives through well-reasoned analysis,” Reeves said.