Podcast: China’s military, EVE online, and the future of combat with Thomas Shugart

Jordan Schneider: [00:00:36] The US China’s strategic military balance and how Eve online explains… everything? To discuss on another edition of China acquisition talk Thomas Shugart  joins the show.

He’s an adjunct fellow at  CNAS and previously spent 25 years in the U S Navy on subs and ended his military career at the defense department’s office of net assessment. Tom, welcome to China acquisition. Okay.

Thomas Shugart: [00:00:59] thank you so much. Or it’s great to be here and Eric, thank you.

Jordan Schneider: [00:01:02] recently you testified in front of Congress talking about the U S China military balance, specifically in the Indo-Pacific and relayed your sort of state of the game and how it may be changing in the upcoming decade. Why don’t you throw it over you, Eric?

Eric Lofgren: [00:01:16] Sure. Yeah. , I found the testimony quite interesting. And you started off with this nice quote that said, quote, the PLA, which is, of course the people, liberation army has been engaged in what could be accurately described as the largest and most rapid expansion of maritime and aerospace power in generations.

So how would you articulate this problem and what China is doing to a person who argues, DOD is overfunded and we need to reprioritize our effort onto social issues.

Thomas Shugart: [00:01:45] so I guess the way that I would look at it is I try not to think of Myself as a China Hawk on our alarmist, I just pointed facts. So the facts are what they are. The areas that I pointed out in that testimony are the ones where you can see trend lines and facts that are really very obvious that the things that can be seen literally seen from space in some cases, in terms of things that can be counted from space like bombers, aircraft and and ships.

So what we see that the kind of three most obvious manifestations that I talk about in the testimony are the expansion of China’s. Long-range conventionally, very precise, ballistic missiles, the expansion of their bomber force and the expansion of their Navy and the facts are what they are in terms of comparisons with previous expansions.

And the reason why I say the biggest in generations, Is just in terms of sheer numbers and size. The expansion that we’re seeing in the,  Chinese Navy is equivalent to what we saw for the U S Navy’s expansion during the, legendary 1980s Reagan buildup to the 600 ship Navy that people have talked about ever since then.

The numbers are exactly the same in terms of the numbers of ships launched over the last five-year period for which we have really good data, which the numbers that I came up with for 2015 to 2019 in terms of the missile force I just use the numbers provided by the department defense and the 20, 20 China military power port that just straight up the number of DF-26 IRBM launchers is 200 plus.

And if you just look at what the normal practices for Shina to have reloaded missiles available that would imply a force of if you just had one reload per missile launcher, a 400 plus missile intermediate range, ballistic missile force. This is the dramatic expansion from what anybody expected over this timeframe.

I think we’re in the past, we typically we’re worried about dozens of anti carrier missiles. We’re talking hundreds now of much longer range missiles that are able to reach through the, throughout the second Island chain and across across the Indo-Pacific, especially if you consider the possibility of them being launched from Western China.

I think  if people talk about characterized for people as China, Hawks are alarmist, I I see myself no more a China Hawk or alarmist. Then if something that I would be, let’s say we’re sitting in a car together at a railroad crossing, and I see a semi-truck bearing down on this.

In the rear view mirror that doesn’t look like it’s going to stop. If I point the pointed out in the rear view mirror and say, Hey, look at that. Does that make me a tracker tailor alarmist? This is, these are just the facts. They are what they are. If they’re alarming, I didn’t make them alarming.

They just are what they are.

Jordan Schneider: [00:04:09] Let’s walk through some of the strategic implications  of this expansion and in military capability. So what does a long range missile force and long range bombers do to how China can reach out and touch America and its allies.

Thomas Shugart: [00:04:23] We’ve known for quite some time ever since basically the, the Chinese watched what happened in the Gulf war with Iraq, they watched what happened. Twice with Iraq and they saw how, what our way of warfare looked like, where we were able to with the Iraqis build up these iron mountains of munitions aircraft and operate with relative impunity from sanctuary from the Iraqis.

And I think, they saw how that worked and realized they didn’t never want it off, that happened to them. So that was I think the first stage of the, that prompted the development of  you know, we call  A2/AD. That’s not really a Chinese term.

So that was the first phase. And so we saw with that, the development of their medium range, ballistic missile land attack version, and also the carrier, the traditional, who knows the carrier killer, the DF-21D and that’s prompted responses on the part of DOD now where we have the Navy’s distributed maritime operations, the Marine Corps  expeditionary advanced base operations concept, Ebo DMO that the air force is dispersed has its own concept of operations for dispersed aircraft operations. But to some degree, what I think we see with the DF 20, the large numbers of DF-26s for example is that China, those concepts that we’ve come up with are, were probably pretty predictable from their perspective. And they’re upping the game even more with the putting out an even larger numbers of weapons.

It’s this is, shouldn’t be too surprising. that We have an action reaction situation happening where they’re seeing the predictable responses to the  threat that they’ve been posing now for a couple of decades.

And now they’re, I think they’re moving on to the next phase of the game.  We should be clear that the number of weapons that we’re talking about, if there, if it really is what it is, if the scale of expansion really is what it looks like, and if they’re able to tie together the sensors and communications to make that all work like it’s intended to, then that’ll even make the concepts that we’ve come up with difficult to actually work in combat, because even those will be threatened with the number of weapons we’re talking about.

Jordan Schneider: [00:06:17] Maybe the acquisition talk side of the house  has a full grip on  all of those battle concept, but Tom, why don’t you do a brief overview of  what the us reaction has been thus far to these to this development

Thomas Shugart: [00:06:28] . Uh, So the, the us reaction to China’s  construct has largely been one of dispersion across all the services. It’s how can we disperse our forces? So they’re not as, as vulnerable, so they’re not concentrated in large bases that or concentrated in carrier groups. And none of this  was done except in reaction.

I think for the most part to that challenge, because that’s not the most efficient way to operate. If the most efficient way to operate absent a threat like that is that from large faces is from a carrier groups that are, they concentrate their fire power. So this is a reaction that is going to cause More, it’s going to be more challenging to do the things we wanted to do.

So it’s not something that I think we’re we wanted to have to do, but it is what our reaction has been for the most part. There are some aspects of hardening as well. At least there’s certainly been plenty of talk a bit. And in the Pacific defense initiative recently no more funds being looked for to continue down that road of additional hardening of basis as well.

But I think most people understand that hardening aspect is only going to be so successful. We know that the PLA rocket force  has penetrated warhead as we’ve seen them be tested or it looks like that’s what they’ve been testing at their impact ranges in Western China. So that’s an effort to make it harder for , the Chinese rocket force to do what it seems like they want to be able to do, but it’s not going to be the end all be all.

It’s going to have to be a combination of all those actions.

Eric Lofgren: [00:07:44] Yeah. So Tom, one of the things that you were pointing to in one of your papers was that the Chinese strategic thinkers are really rationalizing this idea of a preemptive strike policy as being defensive in nature. Can you explain that a little bit and what you think the us needs to do in order to respond?

Thomas Shugart: [00:08:01] what you’ll see oftentimes from China’s strategic writings is they’ll talk about how their military is defensively in nature and that their strategy is one of what they call active defense, where they’re only gonna respond militarily in response to a provocation or a military action on the part of others.

But what that really belies though, in terms of what that term means to them is that sometimes that provocation to them can strictly be on the strategic level or the political level. So for example, let’s say I made the most extreme end.

Let’s say that Taiwan declared independence said that the tomatillos president came out and said that they had declared independence, China could per their strategic writing, they would consider that to be they would consider an kinetic attack on their part in response to that, using weapons, killing people, blowing stuff up to be a defensive action in response to what they consider to be an offensive action in the political realm.

I think this has somewhat to do with  the idea that the PLA and Chinese strategic thinkers,  don’t think necessarily of a struggle as the, in the black, white peace wartime construct that many Western thinkers. Used, but rather as a continuum of struggle.

So they may take a kinetic action response to merely a strategic or political challenge. That’s only a matter of words being said out loud or statements being made.

Jordan Schneider: [00:09:14] Tom, can we talk a little bit about what’s on the U S side of the ledger? Where do you see America’s strengths now as well as in the next, five, five to 10 years, if if it should come to conflict.

Thomas Shugart: [00:09:24] So I think some of those strengths are existed in a couple of different areas. One, one is just a greater worldwide operating experience of the U S military. So it’s clear, you know, we’d been involved in combat operations worldwide since 2001 in terms of actual kinetic combat operations. So there should be some element of combat experience that we have that others don’t.

But on the other hand, the types of combat operations we’ve been involved in bear very little resemblance. To what we would expect to see in  a high end conflict. There’s some historical parallels here, I think with a world war one, for example, where, and we’ll work to for that matter where, when you see the German army engaging in combat operations, for example, the Blitzkrieg in world war two against Poland and in the West against France and Britain, one could look at the Germans and say the German army hasn’t fought for 20 years and the British army has been involved, engaged in combat or operations worldwide.

So they should have an advantage missing the fact that as in this specific example, the operations, the British had been involved in in the years, both before world war one and world war II were largely Imperial policing and brush fire Wars around the world. That combat experience was essentially useless in high-end combat operations.

So we’ve seen this movie before. So there’s a kind of a give and take there. And in terms of what are the U S military has combat experience could provide benefit for, and maybe not So there’s a potential advantage there. Another potential advantage is the fact that  number of observers have pointed at the platform focused nature of the U S military as a liability because, w when we place our combat power in expensive platforms, such as destroyers carrier aircraft carriers bombers as opposed to swarms of weapons or a missile focused military such as the Chinese military and the PLA rocket force that they’re one thing to consider is that if you do have a very, system disruptive information warfare intensive type of conflict, those multi-purpose platforms that the us military is used to operating may provide a source of advantage, specifically example, that PLA Rocca force that I’ve talked about, your DF 26 intermediate range, ballistic missile unit.

If it is cut off from communications, It is completely useless in combat it has no ability to find its own targets. It has no ability to defend itself with except the most limited local security force protection, for example. So a system like that or for example, unmanned swarm air, aircraft, if they don’t have, very robust autonomous capabilities with the type that I don’t think we’ve really seen yet.

If it, if those units are cut off from communication, they’re going to be fairly helpless in contrast us guided missile destroyer, for example, or us submarine has organic sensors on board. It has the ability, at least within its local area to find classify and attack and still conduct combat operations in multiple different domain.

So that’s an example of where the, the traditional multi-purpose capabilities that we have may come to the fore in the event of conflict where both sides are suffering from extensive degradation of of command and control networks. I think we can see Chinese respect for that to some degree in the fact that for all the talk of them being next generation swarming, unmanned, they sure are bending a lot of iron building ships.

So to some degree there as they say, you know, um, what’s the term, what’s the phrase invitations, the sincerest form of flattery when we’re seeing a fair bit of that from the Chinese side.

Jordan Schneider: [00:12:35] It’s interesting. Like to what extent that is  from a conception of like we’re a first rate power and first way powers have big navies. So we should have a big Navy. As opposed to it being actually, as you frame it, a sort of appreciation of the command and control challenges that confronting a first-world power would almost certainly entail.

Thomas Shugart: [00:12:54] yeah. It’s cause it’s something that, it’s hard to really put a put a pin on exactly what the balance is in those realms. It’s and that’s why, what do I do? And a lot of discussion, I count ships. I count aircraft. Those are the things that we can keep track of the leisure.

Is there a military balance in cyberspace? Of course, is there a military balance? In space, of course, it’s just a lot harder   to be able to easily track the trends there in terms of where things are going. We know that they put incredible importance on those areas as well.

And we’ll certainly see challenges there too.

Eric Lofgren: [00:13:23] I guess it’s easy to count things, but then it’s the intangibles that might make a big difference. And, you mentioned two things. One is like American operational experience. And then two is like the large multi-mission platforms that we have been building over the past several decades.

in one respect, I think I’ll just go with what former DEP sec Def Bob work had been describing when he was talking about, the jazzy to joint, all domain command and control kind of concept and. I think  a lot of the trend is moving towards what you’re talking about.

More networked, more treatable types of systems that can bring quantity of force to bear and be composable in various different ways. And he said something interesting about the combat experience as well, which was, the U S does have that distinct advantage, but the relevance of the personnel advantage might be going down pretty fast.

As he pointed to Gary Kasparov, who said, look, you can have a poor chess player with a pretty okay algorithm. And that team will beat the very best algorithm or the very best player most of the times. So he looked at that and thought about, China, they might have Less highly skilled individuals operating the systems, but if they have better algorithms, they have a better networking.

They have better of these intangible things that aren’t just counting numbers of things that they will eventually win. Maybe not now, but like in five, 10, 15 year timeframe. What’s your thoughts on that?

Thomas Shugart: [00:14:48] I think that there’s a lot to be seen there for sure. And I’m sure that we are working on ways that we can use that kind of center construct of where you’ve got AI helping out there. I think that to some degree is going to be limited by what policy is going to allow, there’s certainly concerns about lethal autonomous weapons.

Although what I find interesting is that oftentimes when people describe. What a lethal autonomous weapon is a lot of us who’ve been in the military for a while, look at each other and say, we already have those. If you look at the Egypt system, if you look at the captor underwater mine, these are all, it’s, all these autonomous weapons are already out there.

So the horses left the bar to some extent. In a related vein there, as we’ve talked about A2/AD and, and autonomous weapons. One of the things I’ve talked about in the paper was an Axiom that I came up with for three, three things we don’t want to count on in the Western Pacific, in that competition with China, one of them is systems that require continuous communication.

Either we’ve got to be using manned platforms  or we need to get over our policy issues with lethal autonomous weapons, because we know that th that communications and C2 networks are a major area of focus. For the Chinese in disrupting them to warfare.

I don’t think we gonna to count on something that requires being able to talk to humans if you’re actually, if you really want to rely on something like that to win the war. And I’ve got a couple more areas in that Axiom that folks and look at, and the testimony, if you’d like

 

Eric Lofgren: [00:16:07] I would like to get your perspective here on a little argument between the army and air force that’s come up recently. So the army has been working on these long range fires missions. And so they have precision strike missile. They have their own long range, hypersonic weapon and different actually types of long range artillery that are coming out.

But the air force kinds of look, looks at that as duplicative of their own mission set, where they had the B 21 bomber and development, and they also have their own arrow hypersonic missile, and they see what  the army is doing as duplicative, especially in this era of declining budgets.

So that’s creating this a little bit of inner service rivalry. I’d be interested to get your view on that spat and where America needs to, how they need to think about the long range fires mission, but also, compare that to what the Chinese have. They have their own. Service for the rocket forces.

So they split that out and made it its own thing rather than, dispersing that mission across all of their services. So any thoughts there?

Thomas Shugart: [00:17:01] Of course.  I think he can look at that argument for whether it’s duplicative or not and whether we should be investing in army long-range fires from both a theoretical and a practical perspective from a theoretical perspective, I think it’s just beneficial to provide an additional target set for the PLA to have to worry about for one thing and an additional vector of attack for them to worry about from a practical perspective.

If we know how hard it’s going to be to break the kind of one-third one-third one-third system resource allocation construct that we’ve gotten used to for so many decades. And from our practical perspective, with my point of view, that the challenge in the Pacific is the greatest.

If the, if we can, rechannel some of those army resources to contributing in a different way to the fight that I’m all for it. Assuming that, that, that allocation is it probably going to be resistant to change to, to a significant degree. I think the air force argument, quite frankly, and I don’t, think this is an air force organizational position by any means.

My only recollection is of one person saying that in one forum, which then caused a lot of heat and light

Eric Lofgren: [00:18:01] exactly. That’s right.

Thomas Shugart: [00:18:02] I don’t think there was an air force position that to be opposed to army Longreach fires. But I don’t think that argument if there was has a lot of know, a lot of water for a number of reasons, one is that we know that using mobile missile launchers is a very, it can be a quite effective and in terms of where you are on the cost curve and how hard they are to kill can be quite effective.

We know from the Iraq war that we had extraordinary difficulty finding and destroying Saddam Hussein’s, mobile missile launchers, even with the, Perfect shooting gallery of a desert, where we had complete complete air dominance and could go wherever we wanted. We had a lot of difficulty in finding an destroyable whistle.

So we know that the Army’s missiles, if they are able to develop them will have inherent advantages and survivability over platforms that have to operate free of clutter out in the open air and out in the open sea. So there’s certainly a survivability angle that we should be trying to capitalize on.

Some folks are concerned about while we’re going to have a hard time finding allies that will host those and we shouldn’t develop them until we have allies that, that have signed up for them. I think that’s a static point of view that doesn’t recognize the dynamics, how the dynamics in the region will continue to change over time.

If the trend lines continue as they have assuming they do, and the China threat becomes ever more grave and and And comprehensive those political positions could change dramatically pretty quickly. And then I would hate to see us not have the capability, which takes years to develop because we chose to, just to be conservative about it.

And and assume that the political environment is going to stay the same.

Jordan Schneider: [00:19:39] I have a question for you, Eric. Do you have any Like your relative confidence in the air force versus the army to pull off developing this capability. Is everyone equally good at, or not good at managing these sorts of projects?

Eric Lofgren: [00:19:51] . I agree with Tom, I think, and even in general, heightened, who’s an air force guy. He’s the vice chief.

He said we need all the services to be able to accomplish this mission. So I don’t see it as like the air force or the army is better suited in their acquisition role to take this on. I just think that there’s a lot of uncertainty all around and redundancy and competition in development is the surest way to get something functional that works.

And we saw the arrow missile launch failure last week. I don’t think that’s a setback. I think that’s just the reality, but it also shows the.  I guess the wisdom of this kind of redundant overlap and the ability to innovate in those overlap seems cause if you only have one service doing the one thing to rule them all, then you have an observation of one, and you can’t make any inferences about what works or doesn’t work or whether it’s too expensive or not expensive enough.

Thomas Shugart: [00:20:41] On the question you had, and it’s a great one of should we have a separate rocket force? I’m not one to say that we should go do that right now. That would be having just established the space force. That would be an extraordinary lift to establish another service. But what I will say is that as an observer of the PLA rocket force and as somebody who’s discussed it with folks in all kinds of different levels I’ve said in my original, when I first wrote about the rocket force in 2017, that there’s a bit of a, I think there’s a bit of a blind spot in the us military to that development because we don’t have anything like that.

And what we do have is still in development. And I still think that’s true to this day. I can tell you that I’ve had,  conversations with people in a really well-known defense writers, flag, and general officer level folks within DOD who had never heard of the PLA rocket force.

We even within the last couple of years, we’re talking about entire branch of the U S is, primary military competitor that these people had literally never heard of. It’d be like saying, it’d be like ask talking to a Chinese thinker and they’d never heard of the U S air force. It’s really extraordinary to some degree what, what blindness there is to that.

Jordan Schneider: [00:21:45] . As of yesterday, we’re recording this on April 13th, the the first 40 episode, long TV drama about the PLA rocket force just hit the just hit the airwaves. You can find it on YouTube. It’s called how show Joe way.

So how show like a bugler like stands in position, like bugler at the ready, so I’m I’m not sure if there’s English subtitles out there yet, but definitely on my to watch list in the next few

Thomas Shugart: [00:22:11] me too. For sure. I saw that I actually saw that, that was happening and I’m very excited to to take a look at it. I It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen the rocket force shown on Chinese TV. There’s been various animations and short pieces that I’ve talked with the capabilities for them to make an entire series out of it.

Shows tells you how important it is to the Chinese military, which again, makes it shocking to me that, senior executive level folks within DOD potentially are, I have seen, have never even heard of it. And that blind spot really does exist. Then I I think you see it also with  the attack on our base in Iraq on al-Assad airbase by the Iranian missile forces that we saw.

And it was so dramatic and that really shocked a lot of people that, that capability exists and then consider the fact that what the Iranians have and were able to do to us. That’s patty-cake compared to what to what the PLA rocket force could bring to bear

Jordan Schneider: [00:22:59] that’s fascinating that it just hasn’t sunk in because there’s no analogy. I don’t know. I feel like there’s like a Michael Polanyi thing in that Eric.

Thomas Shugart: [00:23:08] the black, the blind spot in our case was to a great extent, was driven by legal  treaties that we’d signed up for. We signed up for the inf treaty. So , by following that for decades had never built anything with that kind of range.

And we also have never had any long range, ballistic missiles that were not nuclear. They’ve all been all the nuclear tips. So we have a very different traditional idea of what ballistic missiles are for particularly with that kind of range.

Eric Lofgren: [00:23:31] Yeah, it’s funny. Back in the fifties, they actually thought  hypersonic cruise missiles would be the easier technical challenge in the DOD and even had Vannevar Bush saying we’ll never get to ballistic missiles and it turned out to be the exact opposite kind of in terms of difficulty. And so I guess that just shows when do you should trust your experts or not?

Is a hard question.

Jordan Schneider: [00:23:51] Another thing you’ve been you’ve been up to Tom after leaving the military is playing a lot of computer games. It seems Eve online, what is it? And how is it relevant to understanding the way militaries work?

Thomas Shugart: [00:24:01] So even online is a massively multiplayer online role playing game, or MMO RPG almost caught him memo from here on out. When the term comes up that is focused mainly on spacefaring, spaceships flying around and for the most part, building each other up human players for the most part.

So when I say a massively multi-player there’s millions of players that are signed up for it, I typically see about 30,000 online at any one time. When I log on, Oh that’s typically what I see. So a lot of people play in this game.

I didn’t start because I wanted to learn things about it that could be useful for defense thinkers. I started because it just looked like a fun game. This was six or seven years ago that I playing. And, initially when you first play the game, it’s just you versus the computer.

And, if you want to get into fighting with other players, you tend to die very quickly and learn to stay in the kitty pool and of the the environment. But after being online for a bit, I joined a corporation which is players in the game. I have self-organized over time into groups , what are known as corporations, which is just players who band together to operate together and pool their resources, et cetera.

And. What I found was I was just really impressed by how effective they were at what they do in that game, in terms of communicating scouting coordinating their actions coming together as a fleet. And then again, this was years ago, and then I quit playing. I went off to command a submarine and go to sea and I didn’t really have time to do that anymore.

Fast forward to COVID 19. And all of a sudden we’re all stuck at home. I’ve got a bit more time on my hands. I was geographic bachelor at the time from my, where I was doing military or dual military family before I retired. And I thought, let me go check this out again and see if there’s useful things that that I could learn now.

And I joined a corporation that has, whereas before I flew with dozens of players the last time around, I joined a corporation with more than 10,000 members and that fields much larger groups to see what they had to provide.

Jordan Schneider: [00:25:54] And just a few more points of clarification for the folks who’ve made, maybe played world of Warcraft, or what have you, the difference, the main difference between Eve and wow, is that Eve is one server, not these sort of like clutched off little like servers, which only have a thousand or two people.

And the sort of degrees of freedom in which the players can operate is way broader than the likes of a world of Warcraft. As opposed to being, more of an amusement park ride, this is really like a creature own adventure sandbox thing where the game itself is really an emergent thing where these corporations, which have thousands of people in them, battle and trade and take over and lose territory.

And what have you making it a much sort of more, representative facsimile of how organizations are run then then you’d get in a sort of more tightly wound online experience you’d see, in other games.

Thomas Shugart: [00:26:41] so I’ve never played world of Warcraft, but that is my, the things you talked about are for the most part, my impression that are some of the main differences.  There is only one server. So everybody out there , can interact with anybody else in different parts of the universe.

And they’d have to travel there to do it, but it also never goes away. Everything. There is permanent. There is no, you don’t win E it’s not. And there is no reset button and there’s no, you don’t respond again. When you lose a ship, you just lost the ship period. So there’s no getting it back.

You basically, if whatever it is, you lose, you have to go mine recreate by whatever all over again. And in fact, the IEPs game developers say out loud and tweets and press announcements, that the sense of loss is something that matters in their, even in their Eve universe. And they want it to be there.

The game actually has brief counselors available for newer players that have trouble handling the rough handling. They get at the hands of other players and the, and also quite frankly, the environment at times. So it is a bit different. I think it’s also a 24 seven environment.

So what you’ll see, for example, in a large corporation, like the one that I’m in is that you have basically cadres that operate in different time zones. And it’s rolling operations 24 seven, where, and you have certain fleet commanders that are associated with different time zones. And different style of play that happens.

And it  also drives resourcing decisions by the organization in terms of when they want to make things happen so that they can either log on their pilots that are at an unusual time in order to overwhelm their adversaries, or just aware out an adversary to group by really pushing 24 seven operations

Eric Lofgren: [00:28:11] Can you just talk a little bit about like the role of information and the role of  these self-organized groups, the corporations, and relate that back to the military? How is this almost like a substitute for what we traditionally think of as like a top down hierarchy in military organization operations?

Thomas Shugart: [00:28:28] So first of all, with the information you definitely see within the Eve universe the importance of information and warfare it isn’t just a matter of it’s far from just a matter of whoever shows up with the biggest ships wins. In fact, showing up with the biggest ships can be a disaster at times , if you don’t know what’s happening around you you see routinely within the game a lot of deception baiting, espionage the importance of OPSEC.

One of the things that’s true about my corporation is that it takes all comers. Anybody who wants to sign up is welcome  and so what that means is that they’re always operating with  the understanding that, their systems, that their communications can be compromised at the most basic level.

And that encourages the colors, the way that those systems are used and how information is is chopped up. And it kept a higher level. It’s when it’s more important. This mirror’s obviously, anybody who’s got the most passing familiarity with the DOD is. Systems of classification, it mirrors some of that to some extent that you’ve got different stratifications of information control, and then different levels of vetting that are involved for for players to be able to have access to it.

But in terms of the hierarchical nature of what you described there, Eric , this has all evolved organically. There’s, there is a hierarchy within, to some degree within the org. Some of the organizations in the indeed universe, , my corporation that I operate within has different levels of interaction that people can engage in depending on how long they’ve been around, how many kills they have what their skills are.

So there is some hierarchy there, but it’s evolved organically over time. It’s not something that’s driven by a lot of the sometimes counterproductive factors that drive things in DVD.

Eric Lofgren: [00:29:59] When you describe this the Eve environment,  I had never heard of you before, but when you, when I read your article and Jordan shot it over to me I started, I sent it to a bunch of my friends and they all thought it was really great, but it immediately made me think about the StarCraft paradigm where, we’ve been hearing about, we have the AlphaGo AI that had been playing StarCraft and like beating humans, like in this one-on-one where in StarCraft, you’re controlling your own world and like all of your units, like simultaneously, and you’re putting those into combat, but it seems like Eve is A different paradigm where you have the massive online game, where you have teams of humans and teams of machines having these individuated roles.

And so how do you see the future of warfare in terms of this kind of StarCraft vs. Eve paradigm?

Thomas Shugart: [00:30:49] So I think certainly when you described the one V one and I’ve seen that story about how the computer beat a player, a one-on-one and StarCraft. There’s no such, there’s no model like that for one-on-one within the Eve universe. , Eva’s not like chess, like it is infinitely more complex. I’m sure chess players would disagree, but I would say it’s that the world is infinitely more complex than that because it’s not, you never have a one versus one.

If you do, it did have a one V one encounter, that’d be one sole little encounter between  two players playing each other and an entirely different factor than what we see here. And quite frankly,

 

Bunch of things that the game isn’t even in the game, there’s the metagame that is so much of what happens in the universe, which is like the folks that might the, for example, the level of the sea, my corporation CEO, Those people hardly a lot of them hardly every log in like the game that they’re playing is organizational contest where there it’s, whether it’s propaganda on Reddit or how they’re organizing their, how they’re selecting their leadership, their leaders, or fleet commanders, how they’re incentivizing the members of their corporation to engage, to play the game, to commit resources, et cetera.

We’ve seen, I’ve seen within the game or adversaries, for example, issuing war bonds where you literally had the corporation came up with a way to borrow in game funds from its previous players. I’ve seen them call up their reserves. A lot of it is, them like when I’m reaching out via email to players that haven’t played in years to try to call it, call them up and get into the war that we’re involved with.

Much of the contest isn’t even really in the game. It’s the metagame that I don’t think any AI would have, have a hard time imagining them being able to compete with.

Eric Lofgren: [00:32:24] Yeah, that’s interesting. When it feels like in the StarCraft world, right? Like the computer has this bird’s eye view of all of its units and everything going on, and it can choreograph that  in a perfect way. And it feels like in some ways, like the StarCraft version of, for this kind of top-down style, that kind of aligns with maybe my naive perception of, the Chinese strengths and how they could beat the U S and if America tried to play the StarCraft version of war, then , that’s playing to Chinese advantages and they would beat us in that.

But if the us plays an Eve version of war, where you have this imperfect information, lots of distributed people, making decisions that overlap with one another and are coordinated in this kind of more social way, then that can create the complex actions that beat the automated, but hierarchical version of a Chinese force playing StarCraft.

So what’s your reaction to that?

Thomas Shugart: [00:33:19] I think there could be a fair bit to that. A lot of people  have said certainly that historically the strength of the U S forces in combat has often been individual initiative that’s that’s been the hallmark of many of the us military service members. And I certainly see individual initiative as mattering a lot within that universe.

If that’s the contract we’re going to see, you can see it within the game in, how your small units handle things. There’s been times for example, where I was with a small standing fleet, it was just doing defensive operations and we saw an opportunity to take advantage of a situation.

And we had a player who wasn’t a designated fleet commander, but just said, Hey, I’ll take it, let’s go do this. And do you have a rapid response there to deal with this situation? As opposed to following the usual hierarchical way that you would call up forces and get people to log on and get a designated fleet commander involved.

So certainly within the Eve universe, some of those strengths , that play to traditional Western American or Western strengths, really more American strengths do matter within that universe for sure. I certainly wouldn’t when you look at the complexity of warfare and we see some of this in the universe, I just have really have a hard time imagining AI that could work with that.

In a sense of the deception that happens, the the espionage all that’s really been baked in over decades over almost 17 years now, I think of that it’s been going all these years of competition and conflict.

Eric Lofgren: [00:34:38] Yeah, it seems like AI really is it can optimize narrow things, but when you have a big complex tapestry of events going on,  how is it going to, provide causation when it’s just looking at all these correlations and has no idea what real things are in the real world.

Thomas Shugart: [00:34:53] , there is some AI within the game. So there are, while it is technically illegal within the game, there are players that use bots to automate some things that their that their characters are doing within the game. And it’s, it is the same kind of stuff that you, we typically people talk about dull, dirty, dangerous.

For example, asteroid mining players will have bots operating multiple characters where they’ve got robots essentially controlling their ships that are doing mining operations, for example, that are where they can have large numbers of ships that are being controlled at the same time.

But what is a back and forth to the deployment of those sorts of things. Both in the terms of the game developers, in which they try to  stamp that out from happening. But also in terms of the competition within the game. So I can tell you for example, that my corporation and this is just a sign of how they’re always experimenting and the, how the cop, the crucible of competition always drives adaptation and evolution and how they fight is that, my understanding of one of the new ways that we’re employing ships in my group is that we figured out that the adversary is having players controlling multiple ships at one time.

And so our response was to use a much more dynamic shift that goes a lot faster and basically overwhelms our ability to have the bandwidth to control multiples multiple ships at the same time. So I think you see that competition going on all the time within the game.

Jordan Schneider: [00:36:10] another one of the things that you pointed out, Tom is the corporation, the way its schools up people and teaches them those sort of rules of the road and how that and how like the state-of-the-art and Eve land is far ahead of what you’ve seen in in the U S sorry.

Thomas Shugart: [00:36:24] As I said, the first time I joined a corporation years ago, there wasn’t anything like this. It was a much smaller group. But when I joined my corporation and now that again has more than 10,000 members the onboarding process was really quite striking.

Most of it is not within the game.  There’s links within the game that you just click on the link and it sends you to a third-party website that my corporation, for example, maintains. And it has page after page of things you need to read and do to be ready to just to operate at the most basic level.

Within the corporation. So here’s how we communicate. Here’s the shorthand we use in text checks, chat to, to provide intelligence information. Here’s how we deal with neutrals, so Alliance management, rules of engagement how to communicate, how not to communicate, things you can do will get you kicked out all those basics.

You’ll also see in terms of the buttonology instead of what I’ve oftentimes seen in the defense world of,  electronic tech manuals that are difficult to understand and and that make operating equipment challenging. They literally have video animations, that show where you arrow up and click on this thing here.

So that they’ve already worked through helping you to get past a lot of the challenges that folks will tend to deal with from a tactical basis and making, making the systems work. But the real thing that’s. That I find really effective is, was the personal interaction that you get.

And again, it’s all virtual, but it works in the sense that there’s, for example, always an instructor available for new pilots to reach out to there’s a text chat channel call the new being initiative, new being, being short for a newbie and a new player to the new player initiative within the group, where there are their duty instructors available at all times for you to go reach out to, and if you are having trouble, figure out how to do something, they’ll help you out with that.

When you join a fleet and a larger fleet, that’s going into a significant battle. There’s a voice sub chat channel that you can join where you’re there with an instructor and other new pilots. And so that an instructor can help get help translate for you, the voice commands and the fleet commanders giving to help you understand what it is that they’re talking about and to be able to operate effectively.

So whether it’s in voice chat, text chat YouTube videos to show you how to do things. There’s just a hybrid multi level. And multi aspect way of onboarding and training that helps  people to get back to it quickly within the game.

Jordan Schneider: [00:38:32] Tom, how much easier would your life have been if the 21 year olds on your sub had access to the similar, like a similar level of of training and feedback?

Thomas Shugart: [00:38:41] I think it would work really well in some cases, in other cases, not, I wouldn’t make quite as much difference. It depends a lot on the roles that we’re talking about. Quite frankly. I think that much of what we see within the Eve universe, in terms of what it teaches people is more at the war-fighting level than it is at the technician level.

So much of what the us military does in terms of the folks on our ships, for example, is their technicians, right? They’re there to fix equipment maintain it, operate it. And that’s a little different than what I think is of the.

The greater value in the Eve universe, which is the fighting ended, but the tactics and the the ability to make decisions and employ forces to, to achieve objectives. And the reason for this is just because of that constant competition folks that are operating in there, even if there are say a 19 year old fleet commander, they had this because they’d been doing this for years.

In some cases, they had this marrow deep understanding, a really dynamic concepts like deception, baiting, espionage, concentration of force defeat and detailed logistical support lions management. And in terms of acquisition and acquisition, something that happens there too, like he players  have an intimate understanding of the trades and involved with, swap, see traits.

Power versus weight versus versus firepower. Those trades are being made all the time. As you’re specifying the ships that you’re going to operate in and achieve the combat mission. So to some extent, I think it’s that kind of higher level thinking that we’d have the most benefits

Eric Lofgren: [00:40:01] One of my friends Bruce Goodmanson, he runs a  decision forcing case study, group where they go through , either old campaigns and like dissect what happened operationally, or like even like class wits, like tabletop exercises and then go through how they were thinking about it.

And, I think there’s a lot of value in that and see, what happened and what those decision processes were to build up people. But it also, you made this a really excellent point. I think that, sometimes lessons from the past Wars are potentially less relevant than, some of these kinds of like simulations, like Eve where you’re bringing in, potentially more relevant types of capabilities and things like electronic warfare and communications and all this type of stuff.

Why not study world war II campaigns or Napoleon type tactics, for the future of great power competition, or is that like a compliment to like studying even stuff like that?

Thomas Shugart: [00:40:54] I think it is a compliment. I think there’s different lessons to be lawn, to be drawn from a lot of those different perspectives. my point in bringing those up with in my article was just that don’t sneer at this just because it’s a video game. , cause I know there are people that, wow, this is just a video game.

We don’t have even learned from from from some silly computer game. But on the other hand, it is simulating a lot of things. And I shouldn’t say simulating, it is a notional employment of some of those factors  at do exist in modern warfare.

Again, electronic warfare rail guns missiles, a lot closer than, if you’re going to simulate the battle of Waterloo to what we are likely to see in the real world. I could tell you that. , within the game itself, I have seen players in the game, whether they knew it or not, they were doing commerce rating, convoy, operations, choke point defense choke point seizure, attritional warfare, industrial warfare Island, hopping, siege, warfare that they were talking about.

I’ve seen him talk about war termination there’s propaganda information warfare. And in many cases they don’t even know that’s what they’re doing. But that is what they’re doing. I can tell you as a quick example, I was out on a very small group of players, maybe a dozen players, and we had a, somebody decided there I’m going to be the fleet commander.

This is a person that wasn’t really trained to be a fleet commander, but decided just to, we’re going to run this small gang out to deal with some folks. And here you’ve got this person he stopped and we had a quick discussion and here you’ve got somebody who, as far as I know, has no military training.

But it’s talking about. Doing risk assessment. Okay. Here’s what they have available. Here’s what we have. We don’t have a strategic objective. And if we engage in a traditional fight and that’s not to benefit for us, so let’s be conservative here. And and w we’re going to take this route instead.

So you’ve got fairly sophisticated risk assessment going on by somebody who has no military training. And it’s all began because they’ve got that marrow, deep understanding of competition from what they’re dealing with in the game 24 seven.

Eric Lofgren: [00:42:37] yeah, those are those emergent properties of these complex situations. , there’s a lot of information in there and it’s hard to fake that except for getting a whole bunch of people to engage in this and see what kind of emergent features come out of it.

Jordan Schneider: [00:42:51] Yeah, I’m just thinking of like how much more you learn from experiencing all of this than you would from like an extra round of call of duty, which, way more Americans , way more people all around the world. It just and I’m guilty of this too.

Just it’s fun to just have like very dumb interactions with PC games and shoot things and watch them blow up and wash your hands of it after a 10 minute round versus seeing the sort of like richness of a really complex system, which is on display and Eve, Tom.

Whenever you start your lessons from Eve DOD consulting for sign me up, I am I’m right there with you. But in all seriousness I totally agree with Eric in that I’m not looking at this, there’s enough money in DOD. You figured there’d be at least , a million dollar contract out there for someone to explore, like the campaign histories of of Yvonne live and the lessons that can be plumbed for them

Thomas Shugart: [00:43:39] I agree. And to be clear I don’t necessarily think I’m the guy to go do it. I, I’m not a PhD, I’m not an academic. I’m not really looking to go be the guy to do a detailed anthropological study of. How the corporations work,  but for me, it’s a more, a matter of game recognizes game that as a generalist, I see what’s happening there.

And I recognize that there’s gotta be things we can learn there. To give like a granted or example of how efficient they are and what they do. Let’s say another player that’s in my corporation gets attacked somewhere. Several systems away comes under attack from an enemy that player doesn’t get out a piece of paper and write down a nine line what their latitude longitude and, pecking out some sort of description of what’s happening.

They literally only have to type three letters in their chat channel, www, which is short for work to me, I’m under attack at that point. The other groups that in the corporation, everyone will see that all you have to do and that person, or that person has to do is click and drag the system that they’re in.

From  this place on the screen, it shows where they’re at. They just got to click and drag that to the text chat channel, www, click and drag. Everybody else now can just right. Click set destination. And then that gives them a path to that system. Once they’re in the system, they can just, again, click right, click, select that person and, and work to a specific distance. There’s no typing.  There’s no putting it latitudes longitudes is all this is taken care of. And while I recognize that’s not the real world, why couldn’t it be something like that?

That if somebody, has over Jad C two or whatnot, that we really have systems that, know where everybody is and what they’re doing, why couldn’t we do things like that? I think it’s just could be a very useful source of inspiration for techniques that could be useful.

Jordan Schneider: [00:45:19] so I want to give a shout out to this book, empires of Eve, a history of the great Wars of Eve online  which does a bit of this from the sort of like grand strategic level. Looking at the tactical and operational levels as well, I think is absolutely super awesome PhD, which I really hope someone out there listening to this gets on.

And if they do, I’d love to have you on the podcast to continue this discussion.

Thomas Shugart: [00:45:42] no, that’d be great. I’ve read the book. I read volume one volume two is supposedly in the works. Volume one was very interesting. It was all describing things that happened well before my time in the game. But definitely you see, it’s just really incredibly Machiavellian stuff happening and the, and again, lots of deception and espionage and just the dynamics are really impressive.

Jordan Schneider: [00:46:02] If you also just YouTube the great Wars Eve online, the author has a PBT that he walks through which is like a, an hour long overview of this to get you a sense.

And also has some visuals to which you can get a kick out of like spaceships blowing up.

Thomas Shugart: [00:46:15] Yeah. And th the work I’m actually in a war right now, the one I’ve been involved in for the last six or so months, my corporation has been finding that it’s actually much bigger than any of those in the book. They’re actually much larger scale now. Which has been quite something we’ve seen within, in the game.

In the last few months, we’ve had literally Guinness world record breaking. Engagements in terms of the numbers of players involved, where you had 6,006, 7,000 players in one star system which has really been pushed the limits of the game to be able to cope with it. There’ve been issues with weird things happening where the game servers have really been pushed to the limit.

Eric Lofgren: [00:46:47] well, the air force is looking at, they have these prime efforts. I spoke with Colonel Diller on that. And one of them that they’re looking for is digital game prime to support, not just digital engineering, but designing military campaigns. So maybe that effort will have something to learn from either.

Thomas Shugart: [00:47:03] yeah. I certainly folks have asked me could you, do you see either somewhere to go , to war game, basically to, to try things. And I think that you might be able to try to do that. But I think for the most part, it’s a place to go do anthropological study of what they’re doing.

Because people should have no illusions. So you’re not going to go into the Eve universe and figure out how to do things better than they already are. Because they’ve been at it for years now. And I cannot imagine if you took a dozen of your best, whatever within DOD and said, okay, go into the Eve universe.

I guarantee you, they would just get annihilated those folks are going to go into the game and get destroyed by people who are self selected for different characteristics than what the military looks for.

And that they’re really good at what they do they’re. The collection of folks who got over in the barracks at any military base that are selected for. The willingness to hazard themselves, physically their physical characteristics, the fact that they don’t have asthma, they’re not colorblind.

They, none of those things matter when it comes to being able to Excel in a virtual universe. And quite frankly, they’ve worked for Unifor’s maybe a lot more like what the future of warfare looks like when you’ve got remote systems being controlled in large numbers, by people in distributed locations.

Eric Lofgren: [00:48:10] I guess one of their thoughts is if you have a digital engineering environment where you have all these digital twins, and then you can aggregate those into an environment, something like Eve,  you’re not going to replicate Eve, but then put people into into that situation.

And then , what emerges as like winning strategies might be something to learn from in

Thomas Shugart: [00:48:28] I

Eric Lofgren: [00:48:28] of actual yeah,

Thomas Shugart: [00:48:29] You should have sandboxes of your own where you can go learn things that matter. For making decisions about the future of what your organization looks like and how it fights. Absolutely. We should have our own sandboxes. What I would never do is confuse the Eve sandbox is somewhere that you can go figure out how to do things better than they do,

Eric Lofgren: [00:48:42] , so you know what, one of my friends, when he saw the thing he was actually like Ender’s game is similar. There’s a that’s a similar paradigm, how would you push back? I actually don’t think of them as very symbol.

I, it looked like there was more top down command and control in terms of vendors games. So I’d be interested to get your view on how does, how do you see Ender’s game as being different from Eve.

Thomas Shugart: [00:49:04] That’s a great question. And it’s not the first time I’ve seen that comparison and and been asked that so it’s different on a number of levels for one thing and enters game was the. Again, it was the in game experience, not encapsulating, the meta-game experience that you see within the Eve universe where there’s so much of what matters in terms of whether organizations win or lose is that as beyond just the button clicking within the game, it’s the morale, it’s the organization.

It’s the larger coordination much of which happens outside of the end game universe itself. So there’s that aspect to it. But even in terms of the specifics of how the command and control is executed, for example, the, in an Ender’s game, from what I recall, it was a group of people going to one place to operate from one location and control remotely controlled forces somewhere else.

And what I think is very interesting, but the universe is, that’s not what the what the Eve.  Commanding control, it looks like where command control is completely atomized. It is individuals in their houses on just vanilla, plain Jane PCs, Macs, whatever, with no extra fancy stuff involved and completely distributed wherever they happen to live all around the world.

And I think that matters a great deal because we know that in the precision strike era, for example, that efforts we’ll be focused in the case in particular, the Chinese PLA rocket force, we know from the what’s been released into open source what they’re doing marketing categories are and what their targeting priorities are.

That if you did create something like Andrew’s game, where he had a special building, where you got together, a bunch of people together at one place to control things remotely, that would be target. Number one, And w and with one successful strike, whether it was Connecticut or non-kinetic could be neutralized, as opposed to the eave construct where you’ve got thousands of people operating all over the world, you can’t target that in anything like that.

So I think it’s in that way, it’s significantly different than what in Andrew’s game

Eric Lofgren: [00:50:53] And here’s to maybe blockchain being part of that distributed operations and security

Thomas Shugart: [00:50:58] Oh, for sure. There’s going to be ways that people would go after it. Absolutely. But there’s going to be registered out. Of course,

I should say upfront that, and I should have said first thing, but I’ll have to close with as always a caveat that my opinions that expressed today are no way are those are mine alone. And are not those of any organization with which I’m affiliated or have been affiliated.

Jordan Schneider: [00:51:17] Thanks so much Tom, for being a part of China acquisition talk.

Thomas Shugart: [00:51:19] My pleasure. Thank you, Jordan, Eric.