Future War and the Defence of Europe
General John R. Allen, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired); Lieutenant F. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Retired), and Julian Lindley-French.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021. 326 pp. Biblio. Index. $32.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Michael Axel, U.S. Navy
Bookended by two scenarios of a future Europe at war, three experts, with more than a century of combined military and academic experience, examine the changing face of modern warfare in the context of the defense of Europe. They do so, as they state at the outset, to sound a powerful warning to U.S., European, and NATO leaders: Continental Europe is ill-prepared for the next war, and the United States is less capable of riding to Europe’s defense than the leaders on either side of the Atlantic will admit.
Future War and the Defence of Europe could be described as three works packed into one: a history essay examining the long arc that brought NATO to its present situation as an essential, if aging, continental defense pact; a politico-military analysis of Russia, China, and the Middle East/North Africa, representing the three adversary regions directly affecting Europe and the United States; and an impassioned plea to Western leaders to commit to the changes in posture and defensive philosophy required to reinvigorate the stagnating continental defense of Europe. Bracketing the main body are two fictional narratives depicting a coordinated Russian/Chinese offensive.
The authors use two current issues to tie the book’s main points together. First, the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic and political crises, framed as a catalyst event, exacerbated the effects of recent incremental reductions in defense spending and military readiness. Adversary nations are now eagerly exploiting those reductions, to induce unrest and disunity in Europe. Second, and perhaps more critically, the old model of European defense (deterrence guaranteed by NATO via U.S. military superiority) is no longer viable in the face of rapidly developing warfighting domains. Revisiting these two issues at various points throughout the book provides an effective through-line to emphasize how the consequences of European and U.S. actions in the present will affect the eventual (they argue, inevitable) conflicts of the future. Even with a focused eye on the future, they rarely allow readers to forget the important lessons from today’s crises.
Casual readers may find the dense and highly developed prose a bit difficult to traverse. This book was definitely intended for an audience of policymakers and senior military staffs, who will find plenty to challenge the conventional thinking on European defense. The authors’ depth and breadth of policy and operational experience is evident throughout, as they draw on their many collective decades of experience to create frighteningly plausible narratives of a future European war.
Though the overall tone is largely somber and insistent, the authors remind readers continually that all is not lost. Europe and the United States will have to adapt to the changing realities of European defense and come together as they did after World War II. The defense of Europe, the authors argue, will require nothing less than a complete redefinition of European unity; truly transnational military cooperation, divestment from adversary-nation industrial bottlenecks, and a rededication to the cooperative ideals on which the postwar order was built. Their proposed solutions require both political resolve and fiscal discipline that they admit will not be easy to maintain. However, they remain just optimistic enough to keep readers believing in a defensible Europe.
Future War is a largely effective exhortation to convince Western powers that the old means of ensuring European defense are no longer viable in the modern battlespace. COVID, Russian disinformation, and Chinese industrial adventurism have all done damage to the long-held conceptions of European unity. However, with some innovation, skilled statecraft, and a bit of luck, Europe may yet prevail in the next great war, but it will need to adapt quickly before the rapid pace of warfighting advances leaves them, and the United States, far behind.
Lieutenant Commander Axel is an E-2 naval flight officer. He has flown combat support missions over Iraq and Afghanistan and led strike-group air defense in the South China Sea. He currently serves at the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center as an air warfare officer.
Going Circadian: The United States Navy’s Slow Road to a Change
Captain John Cordle, U.S. Navy (Retired). Independently published, 2020. 102 pp. $19.95.
Reviewed by Captain Scott Smith, U.S. Navy
Every naval professional dreams of making things better for our sailors and our Navy. This charge is ingrained from the time we are division officers, but by the time we reach the pinnacle of unit-level leadership, we have learned how hard institutional change can be and tend to focus on items within our span of control that generally can make only a local difference. Not so for Dr. John Cordle, a retired Navy captain who commanded the USS Oscar Austin (DDG-79) and San Jacinto (CG-56) and now serves as the human factors engineer on the staff of Commander, Naval Surface Forces Atlantic.
In Going Circadian, Captain Cordle documents his quixotic journey to change the way the surface navy thinks about sleep. More than that, though, this collection of writings is a treatise on organizational change and the tragic outcome of ignoring science.
At a glance, the table of contents seems more reminiscent of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific than the Navy. These outrageous titles—“Go to 27 Section Duty,” “Shorten the Navy Work Week”—give way to ruminations about the gains realized during duty-section and circadian rhythm experiments and the science behind the demonstrated benefits.
Those of us who rose in the shadow of Captain Cordle benefited—if ever briefly—from his tilts: 27-section duty became five or six sections; the prototypical statement, “I’ve been awake for 30 hours . . . I’m ready to take the watch,” gave way to “I’m not prepared to take the watch.”
This is not to say that the ideas in this book are without their critics; many are concerned that by allowing sailors to get adequate sleep, the Navy is not sufficiently replicating battle conditions. Science and history, however, show the inadequacy of such arguments. Does the Navy’s preparation for combat really entail operating in a suboptimal state? The capital corollary would be to send ships to sea with broken equipment—to leave redundancy on the pier, in surface parlance—with the mentality that ships may have to operate that way after battle damage. As the United States prepares its Olympic athletes for the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, it uses every scientific test and training protocol to ensure U.S. athletes are at the peak of their performance. Why would the nation not do the same to prepare its sailors for a new Cold War in the South China Sea?
U.S. combat history shows how the nation has wrestled this problem before. Following the losses at Savo Island (1942), the Navy recognized the toll that a prolonged state of general quarters took on a crew and implemented “Condition I Easy,” which allowed sailors to sleep at their battle stations.
Others see lack of sleep and three-section duty as a badges of honor. As we have learned through Captain Cordle’s works, lack of sleep is roughly equivalent to drinking during a long workday. That was once a badge of honor, too.
Professions evolve and become better through circumspection and action. The surface navy’s position on sleep has progressed, but regression to the mean is a very real possibility, and letting go of the yoke that Captain Cordle has borne would be tragic.
To be clear, this is not high literature; it is a journal of institutional change. In its pages, we witness through one man’s campaign that preparing for the fight is a fight unto itself.
Captain Smith is the director of Command at Sea Training at Surface Warfare Officers School and is the Chair of the Naval Institute’s Editorial Board.
Hidden Hand: Exposing How The Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping The World
Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg. London: Oneworld Publications, 2020. 418 pp. Gloss. Notes. Index. $30.
Reviewed by Major Morgan Martin, U.S. Army
Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg paint a sobering picture of democratic values and human rights under siege worldwide by the People’s Republic of China in this lengthy book. The authors draw on volumes of Chinese-language materials and interviews to demonstrate how China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is, in their words, “exploiting the weaknesses of democratic systems in order to undermine them.” Ultimately, they assert that the CCP is infiltrating different institutions in countries all over the globe with the goal of expanding its influence. This surreptitious maneuvering serves to further one of China’s primary geopolitical goals: To replace the United States as the primary global superpower.
Hamilton is a professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia, and has published books on topics such as politics, environmentalism, and economics; his most recent work about China, Silent Invasion (Hardie Grant, 2018), examines China’s increasing influence in Australia.
Ohlberg is based in Berlin and does research on China’s digital policies as well as the global influence of the CCP. She has written extensively on the subject for The New York Times and the Switzerland-based Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
The authors posit that the CCP is expanding its influence worldwide through a variety of means to control its own population and steer global narratives about the legitimacy of its rule within China. It uses means that are, according to the authors, insidious and numerous, such as CCP members seeking out and grooming key political figures in rival countries under the guise of friendship, using the threat of cutting access to Chinese markets as economic leverage, suppressing anti-China narratives on college campuses through Confucius Institutes, propagating pro-China narratives through various international media outlets, and mobilizing Chinese diaspora communities through front organizations posing as nongovernmental organizations.
Overall, the book does an excellent job providing detailed breakdowns of the CCP’s malicious activities. References are meticulously cited, allowing students of the subject to use the work as a springboard for further research. Far from being merely descriptive, the book also provides estimates on the efficacy of China’s activities in any of the given cases. From a Western perspective, these estimates range from optimistic to exceedingly grim; in the case of one key U.S. ally, they ascertain that the country has “passed the point of no return, and any attempts to extricate itself from Beijing’s orbit would probably fail.”
Although the book succeeds in many areas, it would have benefited from more background on the history of China from around 1839 to 1949, the so-called Century of Humiliation. This epoch looms large in the minds of most contemporary mainland Chinese people, and understanding it provides a great deal of insight into China’s decision-making calculus. Readers who are new to the subject likely would benefit from this information, allowing them to better contextualize the book’s arguments.
In short, the insight this book provides regarding the breadth of China’s influence activities is invaluable. It should be required reading for several groups in the active-duty military, regardless of service, such as personnel assigned to Navy headquarters, Indo-Pacific Command, Southern Command, Asia-aligned foreign area officers, and Mandarin linguists. Naval Institute members would benefit as well, as the United States continues its pivot toward the Pacific.
Major Martin is an active-duty U.S. Army psychological operations officer. He graduated from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2010 and is currently a defense analysis student at the Naval Postgraduate School.
I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict
Kenneth Payne. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 321 pp. Notes. Biblio. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Captain Sam J. Tangredi, U.S. Navy (Retired)
It is by design that the title of this book, I, Warbot, evokes that of Isaac Asimov’s 1950s collection of short stories, I, Robot. The motif tying Asimov’s stories together is his three laws that govern robot behavior, the first of which is “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Recognizing that robots being developed for military operations—which he terms “warbots”—will obviously be directed against defeating and possibly destroying enemy combatants, author Kenneth Payne both opens and concludes his book with his own three laws to guide future warbot design, to ensure they remain within the laws of war and retain some human control.
These laws are eminently logical and practical from an operational point of view, Payne’s first being “A warbot should only kill those I want to, and as humanely as possible.” The second directs the warbot to understand the intent of its commander, and the last is indicative of the author’s understanding of the military ethos: “A warbot should protect the humans on my side, sacrificing itself to do so—but not at the expense of the mission.”
Between the introduction and conclusion, the book is both a broad examination of the history of military autonomous systems and an argument for the adoption of Payne’s laws. This book is not hostile to autonomous systems; rather, part of the author’s motivation in examining the issue is
that he believes that political groups (shrilly) calling for “banning killer robots” are misguided, and that such a ban could never work to bind potential opponents. Likewise, he views maintaining a human-in-the-loop in the decision to use deadly force will be problematic at the pace of combat on a modern battlefield, particularly between technologically equal forces. Programmed into the autonomous systems, his laws are intended to retain human morality (in reality, Western cultural morality) as a guide to the automated use of deadly force.
Payne describes the development of autonomous systems in the terms of a comparison with the development of military aviation—from scouting and support craft to combat aircraft and strike weapons. Accurately, he observes that “autonomy is not intelligence,” avoiding what is common in similar books—conflating autonomous systems and artificial intelligence (AI). He also avoids the hype of AI, establishing that it is not really intelligence in the human sense, but predictive statistical programming.
In agreement with my own writings, Payne uses the examples of the naval close-in weapon system (CIWS) and Aegis as early approximations of AI, as well as being autonomous systems that remain within rules even without a human finger directly on the trigger.
But does CIWS in the full auto mode still constitute a human-in-the-loop?
It is Payne’s exploration of this gray area that leads him to develop the
three laws.
Payne is a former BBC journalist turned professor. In I, Warbot the journalist’s grace with words overcomes the scholarly penchant for complex prose. Throughout the book, he writes about AI development from a strategic, historical, and policy perspective in a way that even a techno-phobe can appreciate. I, Warbot is a book for the thoughtful reader interested in military affairs and the future, not for a data scientist.
Perhaps the only weakness in the book—if it can be termed such—is that, as knowledgeable as he is of the military psyche (and Clausewitz), Payne necessarily remains an outsider looking in. This leads him to conclude that “warbots will undoubtedly change the psychological essence of warfare,” a statement that likely would seem premature to most military professionals. Nevertheless, this is an excellent a book for anyone who wants a lucid overview of the issues surrounding military AI and autonomy that has a solid recommendation.
Dr. Tangredi is the Leidos Chair of Future Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College and coeditor of the recent Naval Institute Press book, AI at War: How Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Are Changing Naval Warfare.
