How to Think About the Future of War
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You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name's Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, I was happy to welcome General Jim Rainey, the head of Army Futures Command.

We spoke about the future of war and what soldiers, industry, and leaders should expect as technology changes some of the ways that our army fights. We also spoke about some of his insights into the changes unfolding under the Army Transformation Initiative. Enjoy the show.

When you look at the future of war, I understand you like to ask yourself, is what we're looking at evolutionary, revolutionary, or some kind of anomaly? How did you arrive at that way of thinking? Well, the great thing about my job is everybody is...

paying attention to what's going on in the world. But because of the future orientation of part of my main job description, I have the luxury of having a little more time to study and read and talk to people. So since the war started, I've been watching very closely. And the chief and I, General George and I and some others started down a, you know, what is a lesson observed versus a lesson learned?

So we're seeing these fascinating things, but how do you actually understand it, take it apart, figure out a solution, and then institutionalize that solution in a way that you can say you've genuinely learned from it? So as part of that, figuring that part out, I started to look at some of the things that are happening and ask myself, would that happen to a well-trained, well-led U.S. Army unit? Or if that was the U.S. Joint Force, would...

Would we be faced with that same problem or the same magnitude? And it got me to a couple pretty distinct solutions or answers to that is, one, there's things that are happening that are absolutely disruptive that we are certainly going to have to deal with the next time we go to war. I mean, you can't ignore it.

The UAV phenomenon that's happening in the air ground littoral, for example. But then there are other things that I think a well-trained U.S. Army unit that we do maneuver warfare. We don't do attrition warfare. So there are things that we would be able to do with the full force of the joint force.

So sorting those and then the magnitude of the things that are genuinely disruptive kind of fall into, there's a lot of evolution in warfare throughout our history. It's kind of constant change, if you would, but there's periodically gigantic disruptions, precision warfare, etc.

the telegraph, the railroad. And I think some of those AI, certainly data-centric warfare, I personally, you know, nobody knows, I would offer that that is at the revolutionary level. And autonomy and unmanned systems, not just air, but if you look at what's coming, air, ground, maritime, sub-maritime, subterranean, is either a gigantic evolution or potentially a revolution. But they're a little hard to tell ahead of time. Yeah. Yeah.

especially when they haven't achieved their sort of full flowering as far as how we would use it anyway. Well, when the Wright brothers flew the plane, somebody didn't say, oh man, we need an air force, right? It's a branch of service. But I think people looked at the airplane and said, okay, this is going to do something.

to warfare that we better figure out. Radio, telegraph, radio, certainly the railroad. I mean, generals looked at the railroad and said, oh man, I can reposition forces and having interior lines and access to a railroad. So I don't think you totally understand it, but you need to be on the leading edge of figuring it out. So how have you and Futures Command looked at these ongoing and recent conflicts, whether we're talking about probably most prominently Ukraine, but also Gaza,

and a little bit more distant to us now, the wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and how do you sort through what does and doesn't or might and might not apply to us and how? It's not just AFC. It's the whole joint forces studying it very closely. We cross-talk with all the other services because we fight as a joint team. It's the whole army. Training and doctrine command is our primary lesson learned vehicle. Right.

We've had soldiers around Ukraine, so talking to our people that are over there, and we have great relationships with the Ukrainians. So it's everybody doing it. A couple big ones. So I mentioned one, the impact of data-centric warfare. So AI, large language models, whatever happens with quantum, you know, agentic AI especially, that is going to do something unprecedented. The speed, the complexity.

And whoever figures that out is going to have a marked advantage. And I personally believe that it's going to have a deterrent value. If you demonstrate the ability to move at that speed, it is going to have a huge deterrent value, you know, I think as big as nuclear weapons potentially. So that is the number one. We're doing good on that in the Army with our next-gen command and control.

We validated, we're going to start fielding it to our first division next year. Because you can't unlock everything that we think is going to happen with AI unless you have control of your data. That's the difference between the mission command systems and next-gen C2. Unmanned systems, you know, not just the error, the error is the immediate problem. But like I said, that's coming everywhere.

It's going to be two years from now. I personally think we'll be talking about ground-based unmanned systems the way we're talking about UAVs and countering them now. Those would be the biggest two places we need to close some ground quickly. The data-centric warfare and figuring out autonomy and unmanned systems, the UAV, counter-UAV, EW focus that the chief has us working on right now is absolutely the thing we got to figure out immediately. So that would be up there. How do you think about the relationship between mass and

precision as the future of war comes upon us? So precision and mass. And I've been talking to a lot of people, General Donahue, our commander over there, and others. So I've been in the Army 38 years, so while my entire career, we have always had access to mass and precision. I've had the ability to call a lot of 155 artillery on the far side of a river, prepping an objective. We could employ joint fires.

So you had masks, that was an option. And we've had precision weapons, especially the last couple of decades. The absolute ability to hit a 10-digit grid coordinate, to fly around through the window of a building, some terrorist on a motorcycle moving. So that's always been a capability. But up until recently, you've had to choose. They're both good solutions, low cost, $5,000 a round, 155 artillery, solves a lot of problems.

The precision stuff was exquisite, but expensive. So what I think is most fascinating about the UAVs specifically is those two things appear to be merging. So now at a low cost point, you can deliver mass with great precision. So 100 UAVs, lethal UAVs landing on 110 digit grid coordinates. So that is very, very interesting. And whoever brings that to bear is going to have a marked advantage also. ISKRA The

The howitzer, the future howitzer probably still has a role on this as that platform and its munitions evolve also can be more and more precise. But the army has paused that competition. I think the secretary of the army and general George on this podcast said that there were some issues related to cost and that it wasn't nixed. It was just paused for now.

Do you have any insight as to what... I don't. That's part of our Army Transformation Initiative. I think there's a clear agreement that artillery is going to remain a decisive part of combined arms maneuver, all arms maneuver. So we have a lot of

things that we're working on. I mentioned network, UAV, counter UAV, EW. We got long range fires. We got massive efforts going on in terms of layered protections, all things air and missile defense. And you get down to the armored force. We're working on a new tank. We're

We're working on a replacement for the Bradley. And our artillery is pretty good right now. There's some potential to make it better, extending the range of the rounds we're working on very hard and having some good success with advanced munitions. So it's not at the top of our list.

The chief likes to say, we got to budget our jobs to deliver the best army we can for the generous amount of money we get from taxpayers. So paused would be the right answer, I think, but I don't think it's something we're going to walk away from. We just got to figure out the way to do it. And this idea of mass precision that you alluded to earlier also gets into this cost per strike. And I know this is another service, but it was hard to watch.

The Navy, even though these sailors were delivering on some amazing operational achievements in the Red Sea, shooting down these Houthi missiles and drones, but the cost per strike to shoot those down was pretty hurtful to watch. It was not a favorable strike rate, you know, cost ratio. How do you see the future of those cost curves? Yeah. And I'm not being flippant, Ryan. I know how much you love soldiers and care about the military.

First of all, the soldiers who didn't get hit by that round and their parents probably don't think it was too expensive. But yeah, from a purely business point, we can't shoot million-dollar weapons at thousand-dollar rounds. It's just cost and magazine depth is the other big challenge. So I think the way I would answer that question is there's a good case for cheap mass, and I believe there's a case for exquisite capability, even if it's expensive. The United States...

Why would we surrender our superpower we have of technological excellence? I don't want people to stop aspiring to have innovative breakthroughs and stealth fighters. And, you know, you look at the Patriot and the Tomahawk, those are exquisite weapon systems and still very much in use. What I think we got to stop doing is on a scale of one to a hundred, you got on one end of that spectrum, you have exquisite capability that is expensive.

On the other end of that spectrum, you have low-cost mass, so cheap mass. So if those are 10% on both ends, what we got to do is quit spending money on the 80% of things in the middle that are neither cheap mass nor exquisite.

So pushing our spending into one of those two categories, getting the cost point down. I think there's a lot of potential in things like high power microwave, lasers, electronic warfare, where you get out of a kinetic solution to every problem. As ranges on these new capabilities grow, part of the problem you have is if you can't acquire it and you can't engage it until it's close to you, you're going to have to buy it.

You have two problems, speed of decision-making, and it dramatically decreases your options for knocking that down. Yeah, especially when you're not going up against the Houthis, but against China, which has this incredible magazine depth. They're not going to be able to keep themselves safe or deliver on the mission with the current way that it's structured. Yeah. Layered protection is something. And I'm a little more encouraged. I try to be as optimistic as possible.

One thing that's interesting is I personally, in my travels and engagements, we spend a lot of time with industry. I think all the pieces of the puzzle are there. I think there are companies that have moved to data mesh, data-centric capabilities. I know that because we have some of them on contract with NextGen C2. I think there's a combination of radars and sensors that exist.

If you take everything we can do in space, acoustic and traditional radars, and there's no shortage of companies that are delivering both kinetic and non-kinetic solutions to knocking things down. What we haven't done and what I hope industry will do is kind of self-organize. What we really need is people to quit trying to sell us pieces of the puzzle and somebody to pull that team together with the sum of those capabilities, right? Purpose built. Yeah.

And extra credit if they would provide that as a service. So let's hear an example of that, like a real need that you wish. Counter UAS. Counter UAS as a service with different industry partners working together to provide different parts of the solution. Yep. A prime, a tech prime, a new prime, a bunch of companies come together, go find the best high power microwave guy or two.

get the best radar people, bring them into an integrated data-centric AI-driven capability, have offense and defense of electronic warfare, have a do everything you can to knock it down in a safe manner, but have a final protective fire.

Everything I just described exists in some company somewhere. Industry, you just heard General Rainey throw down the gauntlet, so. They've heard it before. All right. Again. The as a service thing is also interesting, and I'm not a businessman, and I certainly don't spend a lot of time figuring out business, but this stuff's really expensive. So if there's not a dual use, we're not going to be able, unlike 155, I talked a lot about great, I love 155 artillery, if you haven't picked up on that, tank rounds.

You can buy them and put them in a bunker. You got to do a little bit of maintenance, but you can keep them for 20 years. I wouldn't buy a UAV today if I couldn't use it for 12 months. So you can't stockpile them. So I think the solution to that is we got to go into dual use type capability. So in the case of protecting a facility, the same company that would protect a

A major airport, a sporting event would be the same set of capabilities that if we deployed and got into combat, we would need to dramatically increase the scale of. I mean, as a service, business models and software make a lot of sense because it creates stability for the software company.

which also pressure on them to innovate and provide the best service on the market. And that can work in defense if the contract vehicles can keep up. And there are some defense companies providing, for example, aerial refueling as a service, and I can see it extending. And I think companies would actually welcome this. So let's hope that it works. When you look at the role of infantry in the Indo-Pacific and armor in the Indo-Pacific, this is all stuff that the Army Transformation Initiative is meant to transform, hence the name.

How do you see that happening in the future? Well, let me start with the rifle squad.

That is absolutely our best weapon system, period. I mean, that is the most important thing we have in the whole United States Army. Everything we do exists to put a rifle squad in a position of advantage. There's going to be a lot of things changed in the future of war, and I don't understand all of them. One I feel very confident about is the requirement to close that last 500 meters at the end of a long foot march when nothing's working and it's dark and it's raining.

And that lethality, number one, that's not going to go away. Number two, I think that is the thing that has the most deterrent value. So making sure we have rifle squads and tank platoons and good artillery formations that can deliver devastating effects is not going away, period.

I don't see that happening. I don't know how you would ever have an army that couldn't do that. Now, it should be the last thing you do and you should exhaust every other means because it's also the most costly. So I say that to say, if you look at the Pacific and the chiefs talked about this, General Flynn, now General Clark, I mean, we have our best commanders out there. We fight as a joint force. So the army in the Pacific, there's no air maritime theater, there's no land theater, we have joint theaters of war. So we're going to be on the team and we got critical roles to play.

delivering land-based long-range fires we're working very hard on. Not to compete with the Air Force or the Navy, but to provide Admiral Papparo more tools in his kit bag. The Army's responsible for logistics of the Joint Force, so the entire sustainment enterprise that's going to get laid in, protection, air and missile defense, command and control,

All the services do it, but the army is big. We have a lot of very capable command and control, two and three star generals that can exercise command and control over JTFs. So all those things will be contributing to the fight that happens out there if it does. As far as the more specific question, I don't know. I think the requirement to take ground and hold it, whether it's to emplace a weapon system or

to help the Air Force exercise agile combat employment. We got the world's best Navy. Very glad they're on the team. You know, we talk a lot of crap on each other, but I wouldn't go to war without them. But they have to touch the shore periodically. I mean, they have to have access to facilities and supplies. So that means somebody is going to have to control. I'm not talking about clearing a giant city somewhere in the Pacific, but the ability to control terrain and

to enable the joint force. I personally think even in the most confined potential engagement, I still think just laying in the logistics, I mean, you can't just like put stuff places. You got to go control the ground. You got to interact. Even if the population is friendly, you still have to be able to control things. So I think there'll be plenty of work for the entire joint force if we have to fight in the South Pacific. And then if it escalates, if it goes horizontal, if it goes vertical,

If it turns into a much larger conflict, then you're certainly going to need well-trained combat arms forces. That's one of the things I love, you know, the chief and secretary about Army Transformation Initiative. It's not about cutting. It's about making sure that the people we have are in the places we need them. On the organizational side, it's about optimizing, getting as many men and women into companies, troops, and batteries, and battalions, and brigades, and division as we possibly can.

What about air defense, especially with this idea of the air literal, the air littoral? And when you talk about whose responsibility is it, is this the Army versus the Air Force, these swarms of drones that come in beneath 1,000 feet? How do you figure that out and how do you train for it? Yeah, well, that's one of the things we're experimenting with, we're training with. It's part of our concept. The Joint Force is talking about it now. So there's always been a coordinating altitude. If it's below this, the Army owns it. Air Force got to coordinate. If it's above this, Air Force owns it. Army has to coordinate.

And that served us well to date, but it's too high. And I think we need to start thinking about the ground actually being a three-dimensional. So some amount of airspace above the ground is going to be as integral to a maneuver plan as the ground itself. So that level needs to come down? No, you'll still need a coordinate, I think. I'm not advocating we get rid of a coordinating altitude. That exists between two components for a lot of purposes.

I think the army needs to start thinking about, I'd say the first thousand, 2000 feet as maneuver space. It's kind of like my thing about precision to mass. I've always had it. It's new. So we've always, I've been trained since I was a Lieutenant and a captain, like every great commander, not saying I'm a great commander, but all of our great commanders, they've had to de-conflict airspace. We,

We built RASs to restricted zones to fly UAVs. And when you take an artillery shot, you got to clear the gun target line. That has always been something. That's not what I'm talking about. I think we are going to have to be able to attack and defend and take pieces of the first couple thousand feet of airspace away. So some unit's going to get told, hey, I don't want to get attacked by UAVs from your sector.

This is all new ways of thinking. And the Navy and the Marine Corps, I mean, they're awesome. I mean, the current littoral or the maritime land littoral is fundamental to the way those two great services fight. I mean, it's feet wet. They use that. I think there's a great opportunity to use the air-ground littoral or the air littoral to have the same kind of synchronization. I know you talk about the evolving relationship between fire and maneuver as the character of war either. Yeah.

undergoes a revolution or an evolution. We're not sure yet. How do you think about that? I don't think this is revolutionary. I mean, if you look at the history, there have been times where the predominant application was you maneuver to emplace your fires so you can kill people without having to commit rifle squads to direct firefights. I mean, that's not a new thing. Over the last 20 years, two decades or so,

We in the Army have moved more towards, okay, fires shape or set the conditions for maneuver. So one of the things we're offering in our emerging concept work, and it's always going to be some combination of the both. It's not black and white.

It's like offense and defense. You got to be able to do both. But given the dramatic increase in lethality and certainly the extended ranges in the Pacific, I think we are going to spend a lot more time maneuvering to emplace fires more traditional than we have in the last couple of decades. And it's not a wicked problem, but we're as good as we are because we train. You're not talking about the last 500 yards anymore. You're talking about. No, no. Now I'm talking, go take a piece of ground so we can emplace fires so the Air Force can operate.

Or we might want to put a weapon system in place to range and attack a UAV manufacturing facility. So some unit will get told, we need you to attack far enough to get this weapon system in range of that target. I think you'll see a lot of that. Back to that last 500 meters, and certainly what we've seen along the front in Ukraine, the FPV drone. Do you think that adoption of these systems...

should or might change the way that the rifle squad works? Because you do see this sort of movement down the chain of authorities to deliver munitions in ways that before you'd have to go to the battalion or the brigade to deliver those effects. And now it happens or can happen at the squad level in some cases. Do you think we're marching towards something that will change the way that flattening hierarchies and authorities? There are things that are not going to change.

rifle squad and its lethality is more a leader and soldier competency thing than anything. But yeah, there are some things that are going crazy in terms of disruption. So one is the ability to sense to unprecedented distances. I mean, even 15 years ago, I was commanding a brigade, armor brigade. I could influence really artillery out to 30 kilometers, but direct fire to

tows and tanks are in the 3 to 5K range if you're in open terrain and your guys are really good. And that was limited by my ability to see with anything other than my organic UAVs and whatever access I had to my higher headquarters. So now it's near ubiquitous sensing. Soldiers, squad leaders, platoon leaders, company commanders can probably, if they want to, sense 50, 100, 200 kilometers. Coupled with things like

UAVs, launched effects that now give a unit, a light infantry unit that used to be in the 900th, a couple thousand meters can now strike 25, 30, 40 kilometers. So that's certainly going to change the way we fight. You mentioned soldier competencies, which I agree are totally critical. You talk about building leaders and units with the right skills and the right characteristics. And I know those skills and characteristics are changing, but there's also a lot of constancy in there. And what do you view as those skills and characteristics? And

One thing I worry about with the Army is, and I brought this up in an earlier podcast, the Army has this great learning concept that TRADOC produced. I know it's a different command, although it's about to be the same command. I spent a lot of time at TRADOC. I love TRADOC. I worry that it's being underutilized to make sure that we're delivering units and soldiers that have the right skills and characteristics. Well, it starts with figuring out what are those skills exactly.

You're right. We are very good at delivering professional military education and training, both. We believe you train for the known, educate for the unknown. That's been a core driving principle since the 70s, led by TRADOC. So we're good at both of those things. The trick is it's not delivering the education, although there's dramatic room for improvement. I think AI is going to change that. I think we learned a lot during COVID-19.

one of which was we could be doing distributed education a lot better. And we've been working on that. We just got to go a lot faster. But it's really, what are the skills that soldiers are going to need to add? Because I don't see anything that they used to have to be able to do going away. It's not like you can say, hey, good news, quote, training on marksmanship and go learn data. Or, hey, we're skipping PT today. We're going to do some 3D printing. I mean, you have to do it all. And then there's a cognitive load and there's

Although I've not seen any limit from our people. You know, the all-volunteer force is a superpower and the ability to, I think, young people. But some of that has to do with delivery.

How are we going to deliver them most effectively? What of what we're doing still makes sense? Same kind of thing. What still makes sense? What do we got to do differently? Do we have to take people in PCSM to schools as frequently as we do, or could we get better at delivering that? The biggest one is data. It's more mid-tier. I'm not worried about young people coming in the army being good with technology, and they really have a phenomenal understanding of

We're very proud in the Army of the software factory, which I'd love to have you come see sometime. But basically, we said- No, I visited it. I was very impressed. Yeah. We got 1.2 million people in the Army. Degrees from world-class universities matter. But when it comes to coding, especially if you're doing it in the rain, in the prone, you know, at JRTC in the middle of the night, you got to be a good soldier who can do that. And we found no shortage. We're up to, don't quote me on the numbers, but we get about 300 qualified applicants for every available position. So-

Those are examples. So it's more of the mid-tier leaders. We're a commander-centric army. We're focused on soldiers, but commanders are what win and lose fights. So if we have commanders out there that don't understand how to ask questions in a way that will unleash the potential of a data-enabled formation, then we're going to have problems. So a lot of work in this space. I think you'll see some big progress from the Army over the next year or so. ISKRA,

One of the things called for in the Army Transformation Initiative is, of course, the combination of TRADOC and Army Futures Command with sort of TRADOC, the way it was phrased, at least in the documents, is TRADOC coming, sort of being subsumed by Army Futures Command. I don't know if that's the right way to describe it. That is a perception that's inaccurate. So TRADOC, no single organization in the Army is more responsible for the Army's recovery from coming out of Vietnam in the early 70s than

through Desert Storm, OIF-1, the army we have today. I mean, that's 50 years plus of incredible history and tradition and excellence. AFC, eight years ago, Renew.

If you had the advantage of starting over and designing something, you would do some smart things. And during the last, President Trump's last administration, army leadership, they decided to create the requirements and experimentation and concepts and modernization slash transformation was so important. We're going to make a four-star headquarters. I think it worked pretty well. We made a lot of progress, cut procurement times down. So we're small. We got a small company.

but experienced, mainly civilian-led, you know, hardcore STEM engineer type folks, because you want people to do this for decades, not two or three years at a time. We got the uniform people we do have are some of our absolute best, and they're all experienced warfighters. We're in Austin, so not on a big installation. We're deliberately positioned in a way to increase our ability to interact. You don't have to go through a security checkpoint to come see AFC if you're a tech company, big or small.

And we're pretty fast. Which is not to say you can just rush the office buildings for those listening. There is security. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make an appointment. But anyways, my point is, pretty un-army-like thing, right? Stand up a major headquarters, put it in one of the tech epicenters of the country. Also coupled with some of the best university systems in the country. So all good. What we found is when we did that, we disconnected some things. So you solve some problems, but the requirement to...

recruit a force, develop the force you have, and design the force that you want next is now split across two commanders. What the opportunity that's presented itself after looking at it and the chief and the secretary have directed is, let's put these two organizations together. And AFC didn't just spin out of TRADOC. It was built on parts of the entire army. DEVCOM came out of Army Material Command. We added the software factory. We

One commander, less staff, right? But putting that entire process, everything from first handshake of a soldier, basic training, graduation, go to your unit, go fight for force comm or use a pack or use a raft, some great unit, all the combat development, all the design of the future, all under one commander. It's great unity of command. And oh, by the way, it creates some efficiencies.

Or we'll be able to take some people and put them back in rifle squads and tank platoons. And that, we don't know who that commander is going to be yet, but you and General Brito will be replaced by a single commander at some point, I assume next year.

I just don't know that person. I'm sure General George does, but yeah. General Britter and I have been friends and served together for 38 years. Oh, yeah. I'm a big General Britter fan. He's been on the show. Yeah. My point was it's not things are broken. It takes way more coordination. We're not dropping balls, but we're spending way more time collaborating laterally. So it's a chance to close that gap. What are some great books that you've read lately? Yeah. So halfway through rereading Ender's Game.

Right now. That's my current one. Classic Army answer. I don't know, man. I tell you, some people haven't read it. It's old enough. But the reason I'm reading that is that we're thinking real hard about bringing what's happening with simulation. You know, we do a lot of simulation in the Army. We should definitely be doing simulation when we're making big decisions about taxpayer dollars, but also wargaming, the future concept. You know, we don't want to do a two-week wargame. We want to do a two-week wargame, dump it into a simulation vehicle and run through the Netflix, you know, a thousand simulations.

Yeah, I love that.

just finished The Hard Thing About Hard Things. So I've read a lot more, much more tech and data and industry and things that I've read previously. And then I try and read Lonesome Dub once a summer, just because that's my all-time favorite book. It centers me and it's a luxury. I allow myself the pleasure to read for a couple of weeks every month. So that's a few. I

I came to value education later in life than some folks. So one of my realizations as a good solid C student was that it was up to me to close a whole bunch of gaps in my education. You know, I got a professional responsibility to be great. So self-study and reading is something that I've always made time for. Thanks for being on the show, General. Well, thank you so much for what you do. I appreciate the invitation.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the show. Don't forget to check out our membership program as well as our new show, Cogs of War, which is our vertical on defense tech and industry, sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton. Stay safe and stay healthy.