The superstar of the Ukraine War has been the drone. It’s no longer a novelty pizza deliverer or hobbyist’s toy. It’s a lethal weapon of war. It dominates battlefields, humbled the mighty tank and fixes trench lines in place. It also attacks cities and infrastructure, and tests hostile air defense systems, and much more.
Drones’ rapid development in Ukraine has highlighted the centrality of innovation to warfare. The latest new method or weapon can change a war’s course; no warring party can afford not to keep up. That said, a question arises. In a long war, reserves and production capacity are crucial – so what are “reserves” of innovation? And how does a state build them? In World War II, reserves were stockpiled industrial goods, built up by masses of factories and strong supply chains. What are they now, in this age of innovation?
One huge and growing factor in innovation is artificial intelligence. The specter of AI-programmed swarms of drones already haunts war planners – what hardware should we build and what tactics should we employ? As AI models develop, they themselves will devise new algorithms and methods – innovations. As a war drags on, reserves of AI innovation, and/or countermeasures in software or hardware, will be crucial. Again, how does a nation build those reserves, to make their war planning credible?
Meanwhile, innovation also includes the expansion of non-kinetic “war,” by which conflicts are also contested. Terrorism, cyber hacking, and on a yet-quiet front, infrastructure disruption, can have strategic consequences. Drone firms are already developing defenses against drone attacks against bases, power grids, industrial nodes, and the like. One major concern is the potential for an adversary to launch small drones right next to such targets, from the ‘cover’ of a local population center. But shouldn’t a nation’s civic environment make that difficult? Can we count on our people to spot, report, and impede hostile actors in our midst?
In fact, isn’t civic cohesion a factor that we ought to be able to count on in any fight with opponents, be they states or stateless actors? If not, why not?
“Hybrid warfare” also encompasses economic measures: tariffs and embargoes, supply chain disruptions, deals over critical items with friendly actors, or sabotage. But economic contests include countermeasures, and hardships of all sorts can be inflicted back and forth, whether in the higher prices incurred by tariffs, the loss of markets abroad, increased costs imposed by disrupted supply chains, and so on. Which hardships would a population sustain, what would move ordinary citizens to keep the faith, and who would they blame when they can’t?
Key to all these new “fronts,” morale, or national cohesion, is now itself an arena of conflict. The internet not only enables physical disruption of infrastructure, but via social media, creates disorder and sows mistrust among populations. Can we counter such attacks? Should we have to?
In the end, all these matters are decided by what people will accept, support, embrace, believe, or reject. For a nation or a major movement, the determinants for these outcomes rest on the people’s sense of purpose and identity. For at least some Russians, being Russian may trump peace, justify loss of loved ones, and demand victory no matter the justice of any war. For some Gazans, collaboration with Israel was more palatable than Hamas rule, worth dying for.
In building reserves of innovation, in sustaining a conflict as infrastructure is disrupted, in setting a civic ambience that makes sabotage difficult, in seeing a purpose to any international conflict, a country leans on its people, their capabilities, and their sense of collective effort.
Innovation has to do with people. Nuclear physicists concerted their efforts at Alomogordo, as did codebreakers at Bletchley Hall. Werner Heisenberg appears to have equivocated in Germany. Even at more prosaic levels of military practice, the new world draws people further into the process. Where drones disrupt; counter-moves will need innovative counter-programmers. Strategies need to match capacities to ends – and the sustainability of strategic ends will depend on the populace. A society’s support might be enforced by surveillance and police; alternatively it might have its own independent base. Any such base rests on a common sense of who “we” are and what “we” want in the world.
To win whatever is at stake, people’s allegiance and resolve will ultimately set the stage. And they can, at times, determine a contest even before war, kinetic or hybrid, starts.
In the end, it all comes down to people. America is blessed in this regard. We have a founding creed, a basic, core statement of what we stand for and thus who we are. We do not value it well at the moment. Instead of starting with comity in our national identity, a stance from which any range of political paths offer diverse means to those ends, we follow partisan allegiances to set our ends. Founding creed is reduced to rhetorical tool. It is abstract, so the slip is not easy to catch. But if we do not earn to put comity in founding identity first, we will only alienate each other as use each measure, each method, each policy as one more political battleground.
If we can focus ourselves by our founding, then America has a basic reference point by which to set grand strategic ends – the last sustained set of ends drove us to victory in the Cold War. If we have clear ends, we have a basis to assess, choose, test, change, and apply different means, whether of tariffs, military hardware buildup, tactical methods, cyber regulation as well as hacking, civic awareness, and so on. We will have flexibility to counter new developments that confront us, in sustained purpose. If we keep our ends in sight as we move through all the applied measures, our comity will allow us to contest any matters with resilience, determination, and sustained, concerted effort.
Common Conviction 