The Future of Military Power

The future of military power demands a shift toward adaptability, producibility, and the integration of autonomous systems to counter peer competitors like China. Current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East highlight the necessity of maintaining a continuum of conflict, where legacy systems coexist with new, mass-producible technologies. The United States defense industrial base currently struggles to meet the high-volume requirements of protracted warfare, necessitating a move away from exquisite, manual-intensive systems toward AI-enabled, scalable solutions. Strengthening alliances through co-production and export control reform remains critical, as the U.S. cannot rely solely on its own capacity. Furthermore, the evolving battlefield requires a rebalancing of human-to-robotic ratios, where humans supervise larger fleets of autonomous systems to achieve greater operational reach and effectiveness against adversaries who are rapidly modernizing their own military capabilities.