There are no silver bullets for SOCOM, DoD

Ethan Brown

The Department of Defense has a tech-obsession problem. It goes as far back as the rise of the American military industrial complex in World War II. Defense spending underwrote the complexity of the Cold War, pushing the Soviet Union towards financial ruin trying to pace a compounding arms race. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq inculcated this mindset of technological supremacy as the end-all of force development, with security architecture wholly dependent on advanced integrated systems requiring dominated battlespace.

The key phrase here: dominated battlespace. Everything which the American war machine needed for battlefield supremacy in counter-terror operations depended on systems that were never seriously challenged by an opponent capable of threatening the networks, infrastructure, and honeycomb installations that enabled our longest war.

And now, as we are looking towards the potential next conflict against a peer, or at least an adversary capable of challenging our basic capacity to operate, the defense enterprise continues to believe in silver bullets. There are no silver bullets, and the defense enterprises belief in singular systems overmatch above coherent strategy and force organization and preparation is the culprit for this mentality.

Ukraine’s self-defense against Russia, with a great deal of Western aid of course, has proven that there are no silver bullets. Winning a war requires volume, willpower, and no simple or easy solutions. Combined arms and adaptive tactics by a determined force are the key variable in this scenario: Ukraine (with Western aid) has adapted, Russia has consistently failed to do so, and failed to challenge the diversity of its opponent.

But as crisis looms in the Indo-Pacific, the American military enterprise remains fixated on the silver bullets of technological supremacy. While the technology gap remains important against an adversary like China, the failure in the Defense Department’s compounding investment in programs and projects—the silver bullets—it its own detriment.

What is the silver bullet(s)?

There are many, and like a Jack-of-all-trades, none of them are the singular solution to contending with a peer adversary. Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is one such tool. Not even the different services can unify effectively on a network of networks which can crosstalk and data-share from Army to Navy, to Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force. Hypersonic glide vehicles, a buzzword-garnering headline and useful information coup for our adversaries, strike fear into Western defense and academia for its impossibility to intercept by air-defense systems. Those same ultra-fast weapons are a fixation in Western weapons development as a result. Other strategic-level silver bullets like maritime vessels, new long-range vertical lift indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity programs like the F-35 round out the bandolier of silver bullets.

Those are strategic-level assets, which have a disjointed impact on the soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardians and marines who are going to have to fight the literal war when it comes. Ukraine has taught valuable lessons on a state military’s reliance of strategic assets to resolve tactical problems, as noted by Matthew Arrol in a piece for the Modern War Institute last year:

“First, [Russia’s use of the Kinzhal hypersonic weapon in Delyatin] demonstrated the adversary’s reliance on strategic, expensive, low-density weapons, to achieve tactical effects against an operationally insignificant asset in the face of a difficult targeting environment.”

At the functional level, the endemic of faulty acquisitions, poorly managed requirements generation, and decreased emphasis on warfighter preparation for the next conflict are just as prevalent as those strategic level programs.

Resolving the problem

There are three main components to addressing this issue. First, correcting unclear requirements being generated by developers who are not the end-user device operators. Trust shooters to develop the tools to shoot, especially since the defense enterprise is no longer perpetually cycling units into places like Afghanistan. The systems are built to requirements established by people who don’t understand the needs of the end-user. This shouldn’t exist within an elite organization such as the Special Operations Command, but remains damned by the stove piping of offices, program managers, and information sharing.

Second, focusing on the strategic tools and foregoing management of the human inventory are certain to create a security apparatus that, when the tech-tools fail, will have limited operators capable of holding the line. More money spent on the tech means reduced development of warfighters who are far more likely to innovate solutions and carry out commanders’ intent on the battlefield.

Third, and perhaps most controversial, is the limited playing field of commercial enterprises who provide the ‘silver bullets’ to the defense enterprise. The DoD fails to engage smaller businesses who are more inclined to meet explicit requirements via innovation, because innovative and cost-effective deliveries are the only option for venture capital/small businesses looking to enter the industrial complex. Many of those small defense business enterprises are looking to deliver a singular component or deliverable, sell the proprietary data to DoD, and fade from business forever having made their lone sale. It’s the nature of the business.

Competition drives efficiency, and when the enterprise has but a small number of large tech titans whose anti-trust legal teams can threaten lawsuits when the defense enterprise cries foul over unmet requirements, the DoD has no choice but to funnel more money into indefinite arrangements.

Of course, this entire segment could be summarized by saying “fix the acquisition and requirements process and build a healthy human inventory”, or simply boil the ocean.

The hard right versus the easy wrong

There isn’t an easy road out of this paradigm. But it stems from ineffective oversite by congressional leaders, the stranglehold of the industrial complex on the business and tech development, and the defense enterprises obsessive search for a bandolier of silver bullets over building its warfighters.

For congress, not enough members of the armed services, appropriations, and defense sub-committees understand the requirements generations process or impact of human as buzzword-laden powerpoints that brief well lead to funding poorly managed programs. For the industrial complex, not enough competition exists to force contractors to deliver goods promised. And for the defense enterprise, too little critical assessment, too little accountability of program management, and far too little functional knowledge of the force requirements are to blame.

It's bad enough that the lean towards revolutionary tech has reduced the investment on the human hardware—the DoDs most critical asset—but it’s far worse when the drive for new tech is so poorly and unabashedly mishandled by the personnel entrusted to put the tools in the hands of our service men and women who will have to fight the next war on our behalf.