US losing 'military dominance' in shocking new era of 'high-tech warfare': expert

War has existed throughout human history, but the weapons have changed dramatically over the years. Medieval warfare was fought with cavalry, swords and armor; in 1945, during World War 2, U.S. President Harry Truman used nuclear bombs against Japan. The United States still has the world's largest military, but according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, U.S. military technology is behind the times and remains overly reliant on 20th Century methods.

In a late May Times podcast, Douthat examined the "future of high-tech warfare" with Christian Brose, president and chief strategy officer of the defense technology company Anduril.

When Douthat noted that "drones and robots and autonomous weapons are remaking battlefields," guest Brose responded that "in order to talk about the future, we probably also have to talk about the past and present."

"When you look at the future," Brose told Douthat, "I would argue that the assumptions that are now very evident to us in the present are almost the opposite of what we've built our military around. I don't think that we have the kind of military dominance that many of us in the 1990s and early 2000s just took for granted. We have peer competitors and rivals in the world who are adapting to and really disrupting the American way of war. I think that we are going to find a much more contested battlefield, where we're going to lose a lot of planes, ships, satellites and other things."

The defense expert continued, "We're going to shoot a lot of weapons, and we're going to have to replace that as an act of production over a long period of time. I think that is not a future that we're really ready for. All of this points in the direction of autonomous systems, lower-cost systems — things that are much more like consumer technology or commercial capabilities than they are legacy military capabilities."

According to Douthat and Brose, two current conflicts — the war in Iran and the Ukraine/Russia war — show how much war methods have changed since the 20th Century.

Douthat asked Brose if he envisions a "near future where infantry itself starts to be obsolete and you literally just have drones and robots maneuvering against each other."

Brose responded, "I think that's further out, if it's ever something that becomes feasible, simply because, so long as human beings continue to live on and inhabit the Earth — which I'm pretty sure we're going to do for the indefinite future — I think it becomes very difficult for these types of robotic systems to entirely go in, take and then hold ground. We've seen plenty in the war in Ukraine that militaries can be, at various different times in the battle, adept at taking ground. It's the holding of it that becomes very difficult."

Brose added, "The question then becomes: Can those gains be solidified? Can those gains be held entirely through nonhuman means? That's not a bet that I would make at the moment."