… the leaders and thinkers of this futurist camp have built a consensus that victory in great-power competition, especially between China and the United States, depends upon technological dominance and the mastery of emerging technologies.
National security and technology traditionalists, on the other hand, believe that the futurists misunderstand the purpose and sources of American power. In their view, the fundamental goals of American power relate to security, prosperity, and politics, and technological dominance is simply one means to these ends… To traditionalists, the trinity of security, prosperity, and freedom — not technological dominance — continue to be essential goals of American statecraft.
That was John Meyers and David Jackson at WotR, The faultline between futurists and traditionalists in national security.
This view of futurists and traditionalists is hard for me to understand. In the United States, freedom leads to technological progress, which produces prosperity, which bolsters security. That’s the great thing about freedom — it can shun the misguided opinions of traditionalists and experiment into a speculative future. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally the recognition of errors in current production, speculation about alternative methods and products, and then freedom to take risks. Entrepreneurship is needed in the defense acquisition as well.
By contrast, the DoD traditionalists stand by a system that is built on Soviet central planning techniques. You need “permission to innovate” from 50+ risk averse offices. It’s no wonder that commercial and defense industries have a bright wall between them. But traditionalists are driven by a deep understand of how current methods work and past reforms failed. Moreover, they harbor an honest disbelief of the futurists claims — otherwise they would already have invested there.
That’s the great thing about markets: it allows incompatible beliefs to be tried out to see who is actually right. That’s not wasteful or duplicative, but fundamental to progress. At least on this point, that the DoD should simultaneously support R&D programs with incompatible views of technology or warfighting, traditionalists should come around.
Freedom and competition are hand maidens, you cannot have one without the other. And since the 1960s, the DoD’s intention was to stop interservice (and intraservice) competition. Just consider how one Army general started a $20M missile project (today, nearly $200M) in the face of SecDef disapproval. So, the emerging tech is reliant on freedom and prosperity.
I’ll also say that while irregular/information warfare is on emerging tech minds, it doesn’t dominate it. A fair amount of emerging tech is about improving conventional effects.
Here’s a bit more from the authors:
This different worldview has its origins in a disagreement over the best way to understand the future. Traditionalists look to the past, employing the tools of a historian or a social scientist. It’s no coincidence that the sources in this section tend towards the empirically rich study of the past with a focus on politics and organizations. Furthermore, skeptics avoid information sources such as Wired or Ars Technica that fixate on the latest gadgets and gizmos, preferring instead to wait for when these widgets have been put to the test of battle.
Any “traditionalist” who is a real student of history and science — reading folks like Elting Morison, Harvey Sapolsky, Clark Murdock, and others — would know that what history teaches us is the definite need to harness emerging tech and pair that with new CONOPS. Indeed, the biggest obstacle to the change are traditionalists unwilling to have honest experiments.
The author says traditionalists prefer “instead to wait for when these [emerging tech] widgets have been put to the test of battle.” Well, the problem again is you need permission to innovate in the DoD, and they will block such experimental tests. A lot of that is because in order to get funding, you need to predict out decades what tech and costs will be. If you can’t prespecify outcomes, you don’t get money.
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