I think it’s time to drastically reduce the active military, and turn to a citizen soldier society. That doesn’t mean we don’t need things like a nuclear force, but a vastly slimmed down standing military most fits with the world we have today. Happy to hear the loud counters.
That was General Robert Spaulding (ret.) on Twitter. There’s a lot to that idea, but I just heard Balaji Srinivasan talk about this idea more fully on the Tim Ferriss podcast. He talks about how technology is changing society. Humans went from hunter-gather nomads to a farming society (which required standing armies… Sparta > Athens) and the future of the internet may turn humans back into a new version of the nomad paradigm which could send us back to citizen armies. Here’s Balaji:
Now the US basically didn’t have a standing military for a long time until essentially the permanent wartime mobilization of the 20th century, especially post-World War II. And before, the ideal was to have citizen soldiers. If you’ve seen the movie 300, well, the Athenians come out and it’s like I’m a potter, and I’m a baker, or whatever, and they grab an ax and go to war, but they’re not permanent military.
Now, whether we can get back to a standing military, or rather away from a standing military to a citizen military, I think that’s going to have to wait until midcentury when it’s all drones. At which point, then it’s all computer programming.
… I don’t know if you’ve followed the, just as a footnote on a footnote, the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, which was heavy on drones. That’s a glimpse of the future of warfare. “The future is already here, but it’s not evenly distributed” kind of thing. So I do think that eventually, once you get full automation of everything, it’ll actually be just drone on drone. And then people will surrender rather than have civilians killed. It actually might be more ethical in some way.
There’ll be obviously a transitional phase. The transitional phase of human versus drone will sort of be like early in World War I, there are cavalry charges versus machine gun nests, and the cavalry were just kind of this outdated way of war that quickly went away. Human versus drone, human versus robot will be like that I think. And then people will quickly be like, “Okay. We just need robot versus robot.”
You can imagine that in a world where computer programming will make up a bulk of military capability (even for hardware development), and that might be pretty “dual-use.” Of course, there will need to be some standing military aspect, but a lot of it could be in dual-use technology development, and the private workforce can be turned over to rapidly scale new solutions if there’s a conflict.
Another area Balaji talks about is in media, which is run by these large incumbents that hand down power to their families. Their goal is to maintain a stranglehold on what is “true.” The citizen-journalist is one potential way forward, and we’re already seeing it (like on this blog!).
This is a great point Eric…in some ways I think this is already underway when you look at the size of the Reserve and Guard units supporting the active duty side. There have been numerous examples of total force units that might be commanded by a reservist but have AD and guard members. In the space world, its not uncommon for reservists to make up 20%+ of the operational crew. Maybe we just need to take this to the next level.