If Washington fails to grasp the true nature of autonomous warfare, it will end up with "autonomous trinkets instead of autonomous warfare." That is the blunt verdict of David Petraeus and Isaac Flanagan, who argue the U.S. military is fielding increasingly capable unmanned systems without any of the intellectual infrastructure needed to use them effectively.
The phrase caps a sweeping Foreign Affairs essay that lays bare the gap between America's hardware investments and its institutional preparedness, "Hvylya" reports.
The authors' critique is structural, not technological. The Pentagon is buying drones "without adequately considering how coordinated autonomous forces should be structured, coordinated, commanded, and controlled." The entire chain of institutional adaptation is absent: operational concepts, codified doctrine, organizational structures redesigned around human-machine teams, education for commanders leading "programmed, software-defined subordinates," and training for degraded-communications environments. The military must "create dedicated units that are built from the ground up around solving the challenges of human-machine teams rather than adding autonomous systems to organizations previously designed around crewed platforms."
"The central contest," Petraeus and Flanagan write, will be between forces that treat autonomy as just faster versions of conventional weapons and those that redesign their entire command architecture to exploit it. The first approach produces trinkets. The second produces a military advantage that could prove decisive. Washington also faces an overextension problem across multiple theaters that makes the institutional deficit even more dangerous.
The Replicator initiative, the flagship effort to field autonomous systems at scale, epitomizes the problem: it focused on procurement and delivered only hundreds of systems instead of the promised thousands. Without the right concepts, doctrine, organizations, and educated leaders, even the most advanced unmanned systems remain gadgets. Petraeus has separately warned of a "missile math" problem in current conflicts that compounds the challenge.
Previously: Petraeus Names the One Theater That Matters More Than All Others Combined.