Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Design for Great Power Competition

It's unthinkable insofar as both sides are prompt for action. Planning for it is in itself a clear signal of capability and intention.

I'm pretty sure many foreign officials just read it too.

You are assuming succssful missile delivery.THAAD is aging but is it that ineffective?

No - nearly all life on earth would end within hours. Europe, Asia, etc won't just sit around. Think more like 5 billion dead in a few hours...

Any real war involving the US vs Russia or China draws in all allies, goes nuclear, and results in the complete annihilation of civilization. Anywhere untouched by direct bombing will be dealing with a radiation cloud which will slowly kill them on top of a global ice-age

Fun reading about that prospect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)

I know it's cherrypicking but:

>The DOD needs to look at a startup/agile mentality

Please god NO! That's a really a bad idea not just for the DOD but for most government services. 90+% of startups fail. This is fine because most startups are not very essential. Government is often inefficient, but it rarely outright fails. Can you imagine how a government run as a startup would be? Garbage collection went bankrupt the other day, won't be another five months until another one is spun up. Oh yeah we haven't implemented the fire department yet, your house might be on fire now but we have it on the roadmap for Q4 2021 so please hold on until then. Oh your wife is in the hospital? We were running an A/B test on that so she's in the part without blood transfusions. Hope everything goes well! When you are taking a VC bet on to get a startup off the ground, many things are acceptable that are not really feasible if people depend on your continued existence for at least the coming decades.

Don't be overly impressed by the Russians and/or Chinese either btw. They suffer from the exact same problems, but "the grass is greener on the other side" is true in defence matters as much as in the rest of life.

Solution to ... what? I work in this area - I don’t think a “monorepo” is going to solve the numerous difficult problems the US has with modern multi-domain ISR. How do you represent and compare different capabilities from different domains? How do you pick which assets to buy? How do you pick which theatre to deliver them to? How do you plan tactical deployment of your assets? How do you dynamically retask assets in the event of disruption by the enemy? How do you fuse the numerous different data formats to interpret the multi-modal data you receive from your ISR assets? How do you retrain users to use the new capabilities? How do you maintain the assets for a long period of time without cost overruns? How do you get the systems to interface with legacy systems? How do you deal with all the intra-military political issues? These are just a few issues faced by the DoD in the ISR space.

I think there’s a bit of Chesterton’s fence in general around the DoD - the military (and the government in general) has many inefficient, slow, and expensive practices, but while it sounds like a good idea on the surface to tear it up and start from scratch, people underestimate the difficulty and danger of hastily changing or defunding things without understanding why they were put in place.

> The DOD needs to look at a startup/agile mentality

If all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

It should be obvious by now that EaaSu (Everything as a Start-up) is a deeply flawed idea.

That seems like a terrible idea... primarily because having a few different heterogenous systems is advantageous. Bugs or vulnerabilities won't propagate as easily and it's much better to compartmentalize from a security perspective.

You have to find a balance... monorepo for defense is dangerous.

This sounds like how DARPA contracts work. Yea, we're in 10 different companies, but we're all collaborating and sharing deliverables.

I agree that the bidding system on normal defense contracts could benefit greatly, but usually you just end up as a sub.

Threaten, sure, but they're unable to destroy us without also assuring their own destruction.

And nations will always be able to harass us cheaply. That's just the reality of the situation and likely always will be, and will be responsible for the US being more selective about the conflicts in which it asserts itself: the Truman Doctrine, for all of its nobility, exposes the weakness of a global posture when everyone isn't panicked about global thermonuclear war: we just have to care less about things that don't impact us as much, or we'd be at war everywhere. Taking all bait would collapse the republic.

The main issue impairing US military development is entrenched corruption. Any reorganization which fails to explicitly address that is as doomed as a cancer treatment based on diet and exercise.

Like this you mean? https://steveblank.com/2016/01/26/hacking-for-defense-stanfo...

"Russia and China will be able to continue to threaten us"

Really? Russia and China threaten you? How?

I predict a lot of comments that ignore the fact that the United States military provides free-as-in-beer global free trade to the entire planet, all while maintaining a readiness to fight a two-front war on any two fronts. (Yes, there's plenty of reasonable debate about the US's readiness.) Other militaries don't include that in their remit, so budget comparisons are largely fruitless for anything other than political purposes (one way or the other).

I'm as opposed to wasteful spending as anyone–and I think that we have plenty of it–but this idea that the US military budget is strictly and solely about shooting wars completely misses the point. It has held together the world's first peaceful, global free trade in exchange for cooperation in security policy since 1946. That isn't cheap.

Nor is it easy or even viable for anyone else. It's not that anyone else could do it if only they had the budget, there just isn't another piece of land on the planet that could do it, short of assuming some impossible alliances.

When comparing military budgets you need to compare what it is they're buying: no other country is providing global free trade with their budgets, so of course they're comparatively small. And of course running an insurgency against occupying forces is relatively inexpensive. Of course regional security is less expensive than global security. This isn't comparing player stats on Street Fighter to see how they'd match up in some kind of March Madness bracket.

Like it or not, most modern wars (at least the non-pointless ones that aren't mostly about pork and politics) aren't about winning or losing in classical terms, but about how they fit into the broader security and trade context.

I understand that sentiment - certainly there is quite a bit of waste in your system. But you should consider that in nearly all plausible cases where you would have a "war" with Russia, it will either occur near Russia (granting them advantage of operating near their base, and minimizing cost of projecting force), and/or in a situation/context specifically designed to minimize American advantages.

Russia gets to operate on the cheap since they have a much simpler and tractable goal - they don't need to be a global hyperpower, they just need regional dominance. They don't need to sustainable project conventional power to the other side of the globe - they only need to project power in their region, while having sufficient unconventional power projection (read nukes).

Russia also gets to operate on the cheap since they have just less commitments.

Finally, Russia also gets much looser constraints to operate in. Consider one of the more "realistic" fantasy war scenarios - Russia moves on the Baltic States. Russia is more likely to be able to absorb causalities politically than American forces. This plays into American force and war planning. There is an understanding that American forces require significant overmatch to create conditions where the current American way of war can be sustained long enough to achieve American goals without too much political/public backlash.

Well, Vietnam already did that with probably less than 1% of the US budget.

Relevant reference: War is a Racket by Smedley Buttler - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

Twenty years ago, a bearded man in a cave ("Ali Baba") and his 19 "thieves" have managed to attack the superpower with a combined security budget (military and all intelligence agencies) of around 1.000 billions (1) on its soil, (2) using only box cutters!

The explanation offered to the world by the superpower was: Everyone failed. Yet, no one of those in high positions in the security aparatus of the superpower who has failed at doing his highly responsible job has resigned and no one was prosecuted.

What sounds like a (bad) fairytale really happened. Over 3.000 people died that day and many more thousands have died and are still dying as a consequence of what happened that day.

Attackers budget was probably 0.00...1% of the budget of the superpower.

I think this belies something that isn't really true: that tech rules all in war. If Russia (or China, with ~25% of our military budget) can beat us in a war this is more a statement on the design and execution of the military institution itself. What are we preparing for that Russia/China is not? What are we not preparing for that Russia/China is? Are they structuring themselves in a way that we are not? How? Why?

It goes without saying (as it has been said 1000 times over) that the Taliban was able to befuddle the largest and most technologically advanced military in history for 20 years. Tech and the MIC isn't the problem.

We've been at war for 20 years in Afghanistan and can't win that one and they have far less than 10% of our budget.

Yes and no.

Like many other things, there's probably a power law distribution in terms of the cost of reaching certain levels of military capability.

It might cost 10% as much as our budget to get to 75% of the capability, and 80% of our budget to get to 90% of the capability.

The military question is: is that high-end stuff war decisive or not? Or can you win a war with a better strategy or just more of the cheap stuff?

Bringing up terrorism is a red herring. Terrorism gets lots of attention but it doesn't win true wars. You'd need hundreds of 9/11 events to even dent the US's war capability. A war with a nation state is very different from "asymmetric warfare" against a diffuse enemy motivated by an ideology or a set of resentments rather than a true chain of command.

Well, the US military budget can only be understood as an aesthetic statement, there is basically no scenario were the US defense budget is not vastly oversized.

The obvious counter of getting stuck in Iraq or Afghanistan, there the problem is a political, not a military one. The US forces were easily able to archive military targets, the problem is that nobody bothered to formulate clear political goals that could be archived, and consequently the western forces are stuck in limbo.

You have to remember the US military is projecting power across the globe. What the paper is likely referring to is regional scenarios. Regions take time to reinforce, and other theatres may be active at the same time, while having their own requirements in terms of force projection/deterrent.

To say that military Y has a mere x% of our budget and therefore we should win is a gross oversimplification of the complexity.

No, this means that your entire military industrial complex is geared towards offensive wars on the other side of the globe. Russia has no such goals.

There is a thing called cost of living and big Mac index though, are Russian military budget in this analysis adjusted for those?

I think it would be jumping to conclusions to say because the military has vulnerabilities that the entire military industrial complex is a fraud. Pieces of it certainly are sub-optimal and arguably fraudulent though such as DCGS (the "opportunity to improve" terminology used for it in DOD speak means failure)

Russia would be dominated in a conventional war with the United States. The problem is Russia isn't spending it's 10% on conventional assets so a conventional war is extremely unlikely.