The United States’ capacity for innovation and its strong ties with like-minded partners will continue to serve as key advantages as warfare evolves, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said yesterday.
In her keynote address on the “Future Character of War” at the Royal United Services Institute in London, Hicks discussed key insights from Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine which she said offers “a window into how future wars will be waged.”
The picture that has emerged is a future of warfare defined by the new capabilities and concepts enabled by commercial technology from satellites to drones.
“Decades after talk of ‘network-centric warfare’ first appeared, we’re watching what happens when it’s applied at scale,” Hicks said. “And we’re seeing how dual-use technologies and talent can help deliver it.”
The widespread connectivity and use of electronic warfare enabled by increasingly ubiquitous technology have created new opportunities and challenges impacting warfighters’ ability to maneuver, disperse, sense and conceal on the battlefield, she stated.
“That’s driving innovation in operational concepts, capabilities and even force design,” Hicks said. “It’s also a key factor in our iterative development, deployment and use of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, which draws upon America’s current global lead in software and responsible AI to give us and our allies and partners a clear decision advantage.”
The war in Ukraine has also accelerated the use of low-cost autonomous capabilities alongside traditional forces to increase the scale and accuracy of surveillance and attacks, Hicks said, adding that the Defense Department embraced this trend through its Replicator initiative.
The initiative, which Hicks announced last year, is focused on fielding thousands of “attritable,” capabilities — platforms that are unmanned and built affordably, allowing commanders to tolerate a higher degree of risk in employing them — across multiple domains by August 2025.
Hicks said today that Replicator is “a pathfinder” that will “speed the scaling of responsible autonomy more broadly” while meeting operational goals.
“And we’ll continue to adapt as our competitors and adversaries do the same,” she added. “That’s partly why Replicator’s second iteration will scale systems to counter the threat of small airborne drones, in line with our recently released Strategy for Countering Unmanned Systems.”
Hicks said future wars will require militaries to combine legacy systems with these “attritable” capabilities deployed at large scale.
But as the war in Ukraine has shown, success in future wars will not be determined by technology alone.
Hicks noted the “asymmetric advantage” alliances and partnerships will continue to play going forward.
“We share values. We train together deeply. We provide each other access, bases and overflight,” she said. “Our capabilities are seamlessly interoperable and increasingly interchangeable. Our supply chains strengthen one another.”
She contrasted the United States’ longstanding alliances with like-minded nations to Russia’s “bedfellows of last resort” it has pieced together throughout its war in Ukraine.
“As individual democracies and as democratic allies, we have what it takes to outlast and prevail over any who would see our democracies die,” Hicks said, adding that the U.S. and its allies’ ties span far beyond their militaries.
“Instead, our most enduring advantages come from fundamentals that no military in a democracy can shape or own alone, because they are the lifeblood of open societies that we defend: Our economies, our cultures, our ideas borne of free minds, free markets and free people,” she said. “Those are our greatest advantages, and a source of tremendous comparative advantage. As long as they last, so shall we.”
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