From the Crows' Nest

Bryan Clark (00:02)
If adaptation is the heart of military competition in the 21st century, the investments we need to make are those that support adaptation rather than investments in some next game-changing technology, right? So there is no precision weapon and stealth combination that seems to be emerging. There is no nuclear weapons revolution that's going to happen, right? There is not some wonder weapon that's going to get us out of the current competition that we're in. It seems to be like adaptation really is the central competition.

Ken Miller (00:31)
you

to From the Crow's Nest. I'm your host, Ken Miller from the Association of Old Crows. It's great to be here with you and as always, thanks for listening. In today's episode, I welcome a regular guest back to the show, Brian Clark. He is the Senior Fellow and Director at the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute. We're going to talk about his new report, The Quick and the Dead, How Adaptation in Contact Drives Military Advantage, which he wrote with his co-authors, Dan, Pat, and Ian Crone.

Now, before we get to Brian Clark, this week, starting April 16th, I will be in Dallas, Texas for the inaugural Military Creator Convention. This event used to be part of a larger podcast event, but it became so popular that it's now a standalone convention. From the Crows Nest is supporting Military Creator Con as a leading sponsor. We've been attending their previous efforts with the podcast conventions. The purpose of the event is to serve the warfighter community.

both active duty and veterans, to help them tell their stories. And so here at the From the Crows Nest have focused heavily on technology and concepts, but we do this for the warfighter so that they have the capabilities they need to conduct successful missions and return home safely. Similarly, it's why the Association of Old Crows exists, to serve the warfighter. And oftentimes it's not about member benefits, ROI, recognition, it's just about listening and letting our warfighters know that we care about them.

So obviously the event is happening this week and unless you're in the Dallas area or you're already planning to attend, you probably won't be there. However, I encourage you to go to militarycreatorcon.com, follow the event, be a part of this growing mission. Success in anything comes from growth and adaptation. So this is just the inaugural event, but the mission will continue. It's just the start and we want to see it grow. Of course, if you are planning to be there,

please flag me down, reference this episode and I may have some extra swag there for you. It'll be a fantastic week. I'm looking forward to it and I'll share a report when I come back in a future episode. Now, talking about adaptation and growth and success, let's get to my interview with Brian Clark on his report, The Quick and the Dead, How Adaptation in Contact Drives Military Advantage. Brian, welcome to From the Crow's Nest. It's great to have you on the show.

Bryan Clark (03:00)
Thanks, Ken. Great to be here. Great to see you. I'm glad we were able to catch you.

Ken Miller (03:04)
Well, I wanted to have you on the show. Your Hudson Institute just released a new report. And as is tradition, I'd like to have you on because you always raise very interesting concepts and approaches that really kind of stretch your thinking in terms of how we typically operate. Your new report is called The Quick and the Dead, How Adaptation in Contact Drives Military Advantage. And you were joined by your colleagues, Ian Crone and Dan Patt. Tell us a little bit about this.

report and then we'll dive into some of the specifics, but how did it come about and what was the original goal of focusing on this topic?

Bryan Clark (03:39)
So Ken, yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. This is work that we've been doing or working on for about a year now. But it originally came by looking at the events in Ukraine and how it is that Ukraine has been able to hold up against the Russian onslaught, despite the fact that Ukraine started with essentially almost no military and ⁓ had a very obvious, obviously much smaller force than the Russians have, was not really prepared for defending against a Russian assault. Yet somehow they were able to

not only stop the Russian advance, but also turn back the Russians. And now we are in a stalemate essentially in Ukraine, despite the fact that Russia in theory should have a huge advantage over them because of their size and long standing military prowess. We wanted to look at that and say, well, what is the lesson from this really? And I think a lot of times folks in the military analytic world will draw from Ukraine the insight that, well, it's unmanned systems, it's drones, it's software, it's AI.

But I think what we found is actually the advantage is ⁓ adaptation. The Ukrainians have been able to adapt faster than the Russian counterparts. And now both sides are essentially in an adaptation competition. Part of the reason we're in a stalemate in Ukraine is because the Russians also have started to adapt and they're able to keep up with some of the dilemmas that the Ukrainians impose on them. So that sort of was the germ of an idea for, well, what is that?

What does that mean in terms of military competition going forward? And how should the US be posturing itself to succeed in that competition? And then we worked out since then with DARPA on this project to evaluate what the implications of this are for kind of the investments and the technologies that the US military should be investing in. Because if adaptation is the central competition, it implies that maybe you should be looking for

the next kind of game changing weapon, instead you should be looking for the next game changing way of adapting.

Ken Miller (05:36)
talked a lot about in the MSO world about adaptation and the need to adapt to ever-changing threat. And we kind of use that term to mean a lot of different things. And it really kind of brushes up against the term agility as well. The two go hand in hand. But a lot of times I feel like when we talk about adaptation in military, we're talking more linear adaptation. There's a threat that we're planning for, so we have to adapt to that one threat. But somewhere early in the planning, adaptation seems to stop.

once we feel like we have an idea. And so it's more of a linear one time we adapt to an adversary, you're talking more about, I would say kind of cyclical or circular adaptation, an ongoing process that never stops, regardless of the operation or the planning or analysis.

Bryan Clark (06:22)
Yeah, when we talk about adaptation in the military, it's normally adaptation to perfect the thing that we're building or the operational concept that we're fielding. So it's spiral development. It's these other approaches where we're trying to iterate our way to some solution that we think will be the perfect version of that product. And what we're finding in reality is in Ukraine, there really is no final answer, right? There is no perfect solution because your opponent is doing the same thing to you. And so as you...

As you adapt towards a different solution, they are also adapting their countermeasures. And now you're into move, counter move competition. And the reason this is happening in part or large part is because of technology proliferation. One of the reasons we are in this world where we can't just build a really good weapon and then ride the coattails of that for a long time is because everybody's out access to essentially the same underlying technology, digital communications, computer-based processing, satellite communications in a lot of cases.

digital sensors, software-defined radios. So you've got this whole set of technologies that have emerged out of the telecommunication industry, out of the computer industry, out of the internet and what it's given us. So now everybody has access to the precision strike capabilities that the U.S. used to have a corner on the market on. And what that means now is that we're in this state of everybody's got the same underlying technology and the competition really is how can you reconfigure it to give yourself an advantage and then

be ready to change because your opponent will come up with a way to undermine that advantage. You're both basically playing with the same cards and it's just a matter of now how do you play them best in the current moment and then how do you play the next change to be able to give your opponent something to worry about.

Ken Miller (08:03)
Obviously during the Cold War, we planned for one major opponent on one front. ⁓ then after the Cold War ended, as we kind of went into the war on terror, we had this major pivot. And every five years, it seemed like there was this new grand concept. Is it your understanding or is it your belief, kind of looking at where technology is going these days, that the days of planning for the big war are over? It's more of...

how many different types of conflicts can you manage at once in different theaters using different technologies? Because I don't feel like we have, we still want to think of Indopaycom as this red line or Eastern front, but that's really not the world we live in. is this adaptation, this focus on adaptation, is that about trying to get us to think outside of this planning for the big war and fighting the smaller or is it just a,

a matter of, hey, its proliferation is so great that the idea that one country is going to possess everything against another is obsolete. It's now going to be how many different people can possess it and frustrate a common opponent.

Bryan Clark (09:14)
Yeah, so I think there's a couple interesting ideas in there. So one is, like you said, we're already seeing, because of technology proliferation, it's really difficult to get a decisive result in a conflict, because you really can't completely overpower your enemy. We're seeing this with Iran, right? Despite the fact that the US has been pounding Iran with precision weapons for weeks and hitting thousands of targets, the Iranians are still able to close the Strait of Hormuz, because they have access to this same technology, right?

digital processing, communications, uncrewed systems, and they can use that to do precision strikes on ships in the Red Sea, also in the Persian Gulf and close the Strait of Hormuz. So because they have access to the same technology that we do, they're able to fight even though they're doing it at extremely small scales and lower levels of intensity. But still, you can't achieve a decisive result. Same with Ukraine, where now you've basically got both Russia and Ukraine.

moving and counter moving against each other. There's no resolution in sight there. And it's likely we'd see the same thing if there was a China Taiwan conflict where if Taiwan decided to continue to fight, certainly have the technology and the means of doing it. And it could be the same kind of result for China, a long slog that turns into a protracted conflict. So the proliferation has resulted in seeing the trend towards protracted conflict without a clear resolution militarily. And then you have to look for a diplomatic or economic path to.

achieve in resolution. And I think the other thing you brought up, which is really interesting, is the idea that because we are now into this world where adaptation is the central competition, you're not necessarily going to build out a set of capabilities that are going to allow you to win the war and just stockpile those. So in the past, that would have been the approach. just find those the wonder weapons that we think are going to be decisive in the future conflict, build up a stockpile of those, and we go in and we're going to be able to win the fight.

Arguably, this is what China's doing, right? China's doing with their long range ballistic missile program. And they can be frustrated if it turns out that we come up with countermeasures to those and they don't really have a plan B, right? Because they've not prepared for adaptation.

Ken Miller (11:22)
That is an interesting point about China with adaptation, because we just had ⁓ Dean Chang on the podcast a few weeks ago, and he was talking about China kind of reaching the apex of their modernization in 2027. But they really haven't fought a war since the 70s. So would it be your assessment, at least, this notion of adaptation almost requires constant operations? Because you can't just.

plan to adapt. Adaptation is an ongoing process you have to participate in.

Bryan Clark (11:55)
Yeah,

exactly. That's why we talk about this idea of adaptation in contact, because you need to be able to engage a thinking opponent to be able to understand what are they doing on their side, understand what things seem to be problematic for them or which seem to be not so problematic for them so that if I'm evaluating my next adaptation, I want to choose things that are maybe seem like they're a problem for my opponent as opposed to things that seem like they're easily dealt with by my opponent. But the only way to get that kind of information

is to interact with your opponent. And that doesn't have to be combat operations. That can be gray zone operations. So I think what the Chinese have done with their gray zone operations in a lot of cases is exactly this. They are trying to gain information about how the US or its neighbors will respond to these aggressive acts that are short of war, but certainly more than peacetime. And they use that information to then guide, normally, their diplomatic efforts. But they could be using it to guide their military technology development efforts, too.

So we're arguing in the paper that the US needs to think of it in the same way, that we need to think of all of these interactions as opportunities to better understand the opponent and also to shape the opponent's behavior, but then use that as part of the intelligence that we're feeding into the adaptation process.

Ken Miller (13:08)
It almost seems as I was trying to visualize it as if you're looking at basic frequency chart where the height of the frequency is the high intensity and low intensity and then you almost have this circular adaptation going right straight through that. So you're either adapting from an intense conflict or you're adapting from a more of a soft power engagement. But it's still that process is still ongoing and picking up whatever pieces it needs to along the way. Is that a fair assessment of visualization?

Bryan Clark (13:35)
Yeah, absolutely. And we would argue, or we do argue in the paper that even in peacetime where it seems like it's less intense, there's still a lot of intense interactions happening. And this gets to the MSO dimension of this, where a lot of this is happening in the spectrum, the cyberspace in the spectrum, where we can have these intense interactions without combat, without damage or destruction or kinetic effects. And then also just what you see at the gray zone operations, the efforts to use positional advantage to gain control of territory. So I think

In both cases, we're seeing where there's these opportunities in peacetime to do the kinds of interactions we would need to guide our adaptation efforts that we could then turn around and use in wartime. But more importantly, we can use them to drive adversary behavior in the near term.

Ken Miller (14:18)
I was remembering a way, way long time ago back in college, I read a great book, it was called Origins of Wars by Donald Kagan, a well-known historian. And he makes the point in the book, or at least the point that I got out of the book was, that I remember getting out of the book, was that really each next war, the terms are established in peacetime. It's peacetime that is actually kind of maps out the next war. And it got me thinking back then about how,

we oftentimes think pieces we're not fighting and then we are fighting, but actually we're fighting the entire time is just low intensity. that was the first. And so when I started reading all this gray zone conversation, like five, 10 years ago, it started triggering. I'm like, that's kind of what we were talking about back in the early 90s coming out of the cold war that you're gonna have this cycle, but we just didn't know quite how to think about it yet.

Bryan Clark (15:12)
Yeah, and in the paper, we talk about this being an opportunity, right? So the gray zone interactions that the Chinese are presenting to us are opportunities to gain information on how they intend to operate or how their systems work. And it's also opportunities for us to show or exhibit behavior or demonstrate systems that we may want them to consider, even if they're not things we might really use in combat. But it's these opportunities to start to maybe undermine the opponent's confidence in the way it plans to do things. So if you think about

China's military and its operational concepts. It's really designed around a assumption about how the US is going to fight. It's based on the assumption that the US will fight a war with China like we fought Desert Storm or even Desert Storm or I guess OVF. So this idea of using precision warfare at large scale guided by satellite intelligence and satellite communications to execute attacks across a wide area.

So they've built a system of systems that's designed to undermine that approach. Well, if we are practicing an adaptive military concept, then we are going to change how we fight or change how we operate more frequently. And so the Chinese now have built this whole system of systems to counter precision strike warfare as they perceive it. And if we start doing it differently,

then they're going to have to rethink that entire approach and that might undermine their confidence and maybe even dissuade them for pursuing aggression like an invasion of Taiwan.

Ken Miller (16:39)
We were talking about proliferation and you mentioned in your paper that the technology proliferation that we're witnessing kind of looks more like that of the commercialization and of the transportation revolution and building of railroads and this notion of needing the infrastructure. And my mind went to, there was a book written by Fred Kaplan about the history of US cyber warfare called Dark Territory. And the term Dark Territory is a stretch of track that

You're driving on without any signal. And so it's a stretch where you kind of lose contact with anyone around you and you hope to appear on the other side when the next signal picks you up. It almost seems like a lot of this proliferation that we're talking about that you raise in your paper is almost its own new version of dark territory in some ways where we have to kind of democratize that adaptation because there's going to be stretches where

Bryan Clark (17:21)
Right.

Ken Miller (17:38)
we lose fidelity in terms of our signals and certain capabilities, and we still have to keep going and trust that we're on the other side. Does that kind of fit in terms of the thinking of this?

Bryan Clark (17:49)
Yeah, so I think that's a really good point. That's a good argument. Because you could say that our experience with the Houthis would be a great example of that, where if everybody has access to these same precision strike technologies, obviously less sophisticated, but the same basic kind of capabilities that the US has, then you're in this dark territory where I don't know really what the Houthis can bring to bear until we begin interacting with them. So when they start attacking, then we realize, OK, this is what the Houthis have available to them.

And this is how they can cobble it together to create these kill chains. And initially we had to defend against that like we would normally defend against anything that we've had from a high end competitors. We burned through a lot of high end unitions to counter that. But then over time we adapted and figured out, how can I use electronic warfare? How can I use guns? How can I use less expensive defenses to counter the Huthy threat? And we got to a place where it was a more sustainable defensive scheme.

But still, it required that interaction. you would prefer, we argued in the report, we should be more proactive in trying to obtain that interaction rather than simply being reactive and then responding when it happens. So we are in this kind of dark territory where both us and our adversaries have access to the same basic technology, but we're not exactly sure how each of us will use it. We should be forcing interactions to begin to understand that and also begin to shape their understanding of how we might fight and hopefully

maybe even drive them in disadvantageous directions because we may do some faints or do some things that we would not actually use in combat and drive them in a bad direction.

Ken Miller (19:20)
What do you mean then by infrastructure? Because we oftentimes think of infrastructure as brick and mortar, but you're talking about different types of infrastructure here. How do we need to shift our thinking on that to meet some of the requirements that you raise in this new concept?

Bryan Clark (19:35)
That's really the central idea here is that if adaptation is the heart of military competition in the 21st century, the investments we need to make are those that support adaptation rather than investments in some next game changing technology. So there is no precision weapon and stealth combination that seems to be emerging. There is no nuclear weapons revolution that's going to happen. There is not some wonder weapon that's going to get us out of the current.

competition that we're in. seems to be like adaptation really is the central competition. So we need to invest in the infrastructure for adaptation. And you hear a lot of people talk about how we need to renew the defense industrial base. And usually when they talk about that, they mean just building out more production infrastructure to build the current generation of bombs and airplanes and ships and all that. But what we're talking about is the digital infrastructure to allow us to be able to adapt and innovate at scale and then

push those things out to the field very quickly. So that's the virtual environments where we can do concept development and evaluate new system of system combinations. So to generate new ideas, it's also the infrastructure to be able to translate those ideas into the software builds that are gonna need to go on to autonomous systems, the electronic warfare techniques that we would need to use to be able to generate effects downrange.

And the test and evaluation infrastructure that virtualizes more test and evaluations. So we don't have to do that in physical environments that take a long time and are sometimes problematic from an operational security perspective. we need to think about the rail. So the reason we draw this comparison to the 19th century in the report is that in the 19th century, militaries gained an advantage by using the civilian rail infrastructure and the civilian telegraph infrastructure.

to move troops and coordinate operations. In the 21st century, we need not to think about using that civilian infrastructure of the ⁓ virtual kind of from the gaming world, virtual environments where we can do concept development and system of system construction and composition, the kinds of continuous development pipelines that we use in software deployment today.

and the kinds of automated tests and evaluation that we use in software development today. So those civilian techniques and that civilian infrastructure that we use in the commercial world all the time is the kind of infrastructure we need to bring into the military because that's how we get an advantage in 21st century warfare is by adapting faster. And that's mostly via the software or the digital designs that we employ in systems that are on the battlefield.

Ken Miller (22:14)
It's an interesting point about having to invest in the commercial infrastructure, how we use it on the commercial side. I was doing a webinar for AOC the other day and we were talking about how in today's world, the civilian population here, even in the US, is in many ways just as close to the front lines as our war fighters. And I don't say that out of heroism, like it's not about sacrifice. It's just, you can target John Smith in Kansas.

almost just as easily as you can target a platoon or a fighter on the front lines because you know what they're doing, where they are, what they're using, how they're engaging in the spectrum. If we're going to use the civilian infrastructure in the digital space, this almost seems to grow this notion that even in the civilian population, we're all nodes in the network. How do you...

how can you do that but still maintain these lines, these barriers in between civilian population and military application? Because if you're getting in your Tesla or you're opening up your smart refrigerator, you're still a node in this communications network and still susceptible to adversary attack and everything. So are these lines, especially in light of this adaptation requirement, are we at the end of the difference between military and civilian?

Bryan Clark (23:39)
Yeah, so I think that's an excellent insight. So I'll look at it in two ways. So one is we argue in the report that the US advantage in these digital technologies, so AI, as well as our software development pipelines and the virtual environments that we can use for concept development and system-assisted development out of the gaming industry, these are all huge advantages for the United States compared to our adversaries. Our allies can do some of these things too, but I would say

If you look at us compared to China, for example, in these technologies, the US definitely has a lead. We've been seeing that play out in the Ukraine war, the Iranian war too. So we have an advantage in these areas. Now the downside is that this means that the infrastructure that these technologies rely on, which is almost all commercial, is in some data center somewhere probably in the United States. It's probably...

going to use a lot of the software that comes out of the civilian or commercial ⁓ software industry and is getting brought over into the military. And you can kind of see already with AI how there's concerns about bringing these technologies out of the commercial world into the military world. And it's going to go back the other way too, to your point, to say that does that mean that these technologies and the infrastructure that they rely on are viable targets in a wartime context?

Ken Miller (25:00)
This is going off in a tangent, we cover so much ground so quickly on here. a recent episode, we were talking about ⁓ space signals and ⁓ PNT GPS jamming. And what's interesting is how using just basic commercial technology, you can really spoof a lot of these mapping systems and so forth. we were talking about a domestic situation where hijackers hijacked a.

a shipment here in the US using GPS spoofing. And it got me thinking about like when we talk about how we leverage commercial technology and the speed and the scale that we have, what happens when gaming becomes control of military capability without people even knowing? Because you can actually infiltrate a game and almost have someone control what's happening without even knowing.

based on simply what they think is fake, but it's actually real. And those types of differences scare me to death when we're talking about civilian population versus military. Military, we know what the risks are, but I feel like we're reaching the stage where we're almost in dangerous territory with how we adapt to what's going on.

Bryan Clark (26:18)
Yeah, I agree with you. think there needs to be a bright line between a technology that has been developed in the commercial world and maybe is still being used in the commercial world. And then when it gets ported over to support military concept development and capability development and adaptation, that needs to be totally separate because we don't want to have a situation where people working in the commercial world are unknowingly supporting a military operation. One, because ethically there's an issue with people not knowing they're supporting military operations.

but also just because it now makes them combatants, right? And so you've created this liability or vulnerability that they have to suddenly becoming a viable target for your adversary. So I think that you definitely want to keep a bright line between the two, it's a great point to say if it, just like in the Civil War, right? So we talk about it in the paper, the Civil War where railroads and telegraphs were part of the arsenal. And so the Union side obviously had access to a lot more.

rails and telegraphs, but also better employed them. So they had concepts for how do you use this infrastructure effectively. But it meant that those were all viable targets for the Confederacy to go attack because they were being used for military purposes. So you could see the same thing here. And I guess I would argue that the reason why that would be okay is we keep talking as a defense community about the need to mobilize. You know, we've got Shamsankar just released a book whose title is like mobilize.

Well, if you're talking about mobilization, well, that means taking civilian capabilities and repurposing them for military ⁓ use in one way or another. And so we need to be ready to do this. And also if this is our biggest advantage as the United States is these digital technologies, and if we think adaptation is the central competition in military affairs now, well, then the right thing to do is take these civilian technologies, employ them for military purposes, and gain an adaptation advantage to hopefully prevent

the next conflict. But we have to do that knowing that this creates this intersection and a potential vulnerability because an opponent will now see civilian infrastructure, civilian digital infrastructure as a viable target.

Ken Miller (28:22)
And to fully understand the risk involved in this, getting back to the report, you talk about the institutional barriers that can interfere with these learning, this adaptation loop. ⁓ And you kind of go, you talk about, highlight three gaps, gap between those who fight and those who equip, the wall between military operations and intelligence authorities, and then the reliance on acquisition budgeting processes on predicted requirements rather than current need.

You go into actually into a section talking about the different, the switch from prediction to a current analysis. And that's a huge leap in how we think militarily. Could you talk a little bit about these barriers and how your model would recommend removing those barriers or overcoming them?

Bryan Clark (29:10)
In the report, we talk about the fact that we've built up ⁓ military decision-making processes. So the decision processes that the Pentagon uses to figure out what kinds of systems it needs in the future and then invest in those systems and then manage their acquisition and eventually fielding. They're all designed to put a bunch of checks and balances in place to avoid buying the wrong system or to avoid fraud and waste. So all those things naturally slow down the process because the expectation is

They were all built at a time during the Cold War when the US's goal was to just continue to field in the next, next generation technology. So we were looking to build the next better nuclear weapon, the next better precision strike weapon, the next stealthy platform. So it was all about long-term technology development. It was all about just keeping ahead of the Soviets technologically. That's how we gained our advantage. And that meant slow processes like these were fine because everything was taking 20 years to build or more.

And the expectation was we want to make good decisions about how do we build those roadmaps. Well, today, technology proliferation and commercialization has advanced to the point where you don't really need to go develop some new technology to be able to get a military advantage. We see that every day in Ukraine, in the Middle East, even with China. So we should be looking to try to adapt technologies in the near term to military purposes, which shifts the focus from

long-term prediction of future need and long-term development programs to how do I harness and adapt technologies today? And you see this happening in Ukraine quite a bit where they're not doing long-term development programs. They're harvesting what's available now and just using it on the battlefield. Well, that's the case. Then I need to think differently about the difference between intelligence and the intelligence community and the military community. Traditionally, intelligence information, we've required to go through a very

deliberate process of being transferred over to military use to avoid the militarization of the intelligence process. Well, today there's so many data sources available and intelligence data is only going to be relevant for a very short time. So we need to close that gap. The timeframe in which we made that, where there was a lot of concern about the ⁓ intelligence community being militarized, think those days are sort of that horses out of the barn, right? So we need to think about.

the intelligence that's coming out of the battlefield. So signals intelligence, electronic intelligence being directly ported into the ⁓ military capability development process. So that barrier should be broken. And there's a lot of ways you can use software to help you do that process of classification management. Because of course, lot of these intelligence sources are highly classified. You need to come up with a way to.

sand it down a little bit so it maybe doesn't reveal sources and methods but still provides you the data you need for capability development. The other big gap is between the people that are making budget decisions and the people that are actually acquiring systems because the budgeting cycle runs on this multi-year path where I have to predict what I need well in advance because I have to build a budget that's not going to be put into place for three years.

That's hard to change because it's a lot of it's written into law and a lot of it's based on congressional approval of budgets. But you're already seeing some changes. You're already seeing Congress with this new portfolio acquisition executive approach give portfolio acquisition executives the flexibility to move money around within their portfolios, which is a degree of flexibility that would allow you to.

take advantage of near-term technologies when they emerge. So if you're trying to be an adaptive military, I need to basically move from a program that I'm doing today to some new program. And I need to do it relatively quickly to be relevant so I can make that money move around even without going back to Congress for approval. And then the last thing is this idea of how do I bridge the gap between the operators and the people in the Pentagon that are building requirements or deciding what to buy. And you've already seen a lot of the

the efforts in the department and Congress to eliminate the requirements processes that we've relied on for a long time. So requirements tend to try to predict what we need in the future, multi years out, and then build towards that through these long-term R &D programs. That's really not needed anymore given the rapid pace of technology development and the fact you can harvest things that are off the shelf and use them in the military today. So if you don't need to do long-term requirements development,

we've shifted now this idea of near-term operational problems. So what is the operational problem of today and what are we doing to try and solve it? So bridging that gap means essentially eliminating this need for requirements analysis and instead focus on solution analysis. So instead of looking and analyzing the need, analyze the solutions against the problems you currently have. And that's the way that the Pentagon's moving today.

Ken Miller (33:56)
With that piece of the puzzle, how does that work with, oftentimes in the MSO world, when we have a conflict, we end up having to field quick response, quick reaction capabilities. And one of the challenges, obviously it's great when we realize we have a problem, we start to throw money at it and get new solutions out into the field, but we oftentimes do that at a quantity that's probably unnecessary and we don't.

certainly build things for sustainment because we're so focused on getting things into the field. We don't build it for sustainment. And then therefore after the fight, we don't adapt, but we then don't know how to use this technology because we haven't built it through the process. We haven't developed it according to our regular process. Is this a concern as we look at the adaptation concept that how do we make sure that we can sustain what we do have that does work if we're kind of

feeling it from a different process that we're not familiar with.

Bryan Clark (34:56)
That's a really good point. And we we address that in the report is this idea that if a lot more of the military becomes essentially quick reaction capabilities, because I'm trying to stay in this adaptation competition with my opponent, then I need to figure out how do I create the training and sustainment pipelines that support that system if it's constantly changing. So there's a couple of ways we talk about dealing with that. So one is when you think about the military is not being one size fits all nearly as much as we used to. So we used to.

Think of it kind of the industrial model of we build the same ships and aircraft and mission systems and EW systems. And then we distribute them out to all the theaters and there's one training pipeline that prepares operators and there's a supply chain that supports them. And we've got some supply and logistics support for all those systems. Well, now we think, well, I probably need to have different systems in each theater because as technology proliferation continues.

the adversaries in each theater are gonna get better and better at countering us and they're gonna do it in different ways and they different geographies they can exploit. The Iranians can exploit geography in a very different way than the Chinese, for example, could. So we face different threats in each theater and those threats are increasingly capable. So we need to think about the military force that's deployed to each theater is gonna start to look more and more tailored to that theater, which means from the organized train and equip standpoint, the military is gonna think about

what stays the same across theaters? So what's the general purpose force, if you will, that gets deployed in every theater? And what are the tailored things that are unique to a theater? And I have to create training and sustainment pipelines that are probably different for those two things. And the things that are unique to each theater maybe are much more like a contractor-owned, contractor-operated model where I'm turning over a lot more of that responsibility to the vendors that understand those systems.

because I'll probably have to adapt and change them very quickly anyway. So they're never gonna be in one configuration for very long. And then the general purpose force that gets divided up across all the theaters is gonna have that same sort of traditional model of common training pipelines, common sustainment pipelines, common doctrine. But you're already seeing the Navy is moving in this direction with the new fighting instructions that the CNO put out. So I think we're gonna see this trend a lot more. We're already kind of seeing each combatant commander start to

really craft a very different vision within their theater of how the force will evolve.

Ken Miller (37:19)
In keeping with this, as we kind of reached the end of our time, you were talking about kind of federated ⁓ approach and trying to, we use the term before, democratize some of this capability and so forth. In the MSO world, if we could talk a little bit about MSO rate, just in this piece of the puzzle, when we talk about MSO, we obviously still have the services man, trainer, equip responsibilities. And it's very hard to make sure that all the services are on the same page, have the same

basic training, not core training, core competency in EMSO. Once you start to break that out and democratize that further in terms of other approaches, now you almost risk at least splintering that even more and to within the service and within the region. How do you fight against splintering of gaps that already exist when you get into the man, trainer, equip responsibilities of the services?

Bryan Clark (38:17)
One of the ways to deal with that is to think of the operators that are going out to these, I'll say tailored forces. So the forces in each theater that are sort of unique to their theater and are doing a lot of the adaptation. Those forces, those operators are gonna be coming out of the general purpose force. So they'll spend time in the general purpose force and that's where they get the baseline training on MSO and its importance and obviously the general purpose force units.

fighter aircraft and bombers and ships and that kind of stuff will have those types of systems. So they'll have to still understand the basics of how MSO is a major contributor to all our military operations and how they need to be cognizant of how you fight in the spectrum. But then they'll do tours as part of these tailored forces where they're going to go out to a theater and they're going to be in charge of managing some group of like unmanned systems or some tailored group of crude and uncrewed platforms that

resides out in the theater. doesn't necessarily rotate back to the US regularly. And they would have to bring that baseline knowledge with them. And then they'll have to add to that knowledge an understanding of the dimensions of that theater, both in the spectrum and in the other domains as well.

Ken Miller (39:29)
Last question. So you mentioned at the beginning, the report is out at Hudson Institute and people can go to Hudson.org. And then the title of the report is called Quick and the Dead by Brian Clark, Dan Pat and Ian Crone. So just to kind of wrap everything up, we're in 2026. Obviously we're engaged in conflict in Iran. have Russia, Ukraine. What kind of is the first or the next step in this process?

this year we're going through budget cycles already in Congress. Is there anything that we can put our teeth in around 2026 to really monitor moving forward?

Bryan Clark (40:09)
big thing right now is we're working with the department on the kinds of investments it needs to make in the digital infrastructure to support adaptation. the work that, for example, is being done right now with Project Maven and incorporating AI into it, that really helps on the operations front. But it also can be applied to concept development. So thinking about what is the digital infrastructure that I use to come up with new operational concepts and plans.

think about different kill chains, different system to system combinations I could use, having those on the shelf, and then thinking about how to push those updated software loads out to forces. So I think one part of it is this digital infrastructure for virtualization of the concept development and planning process. And the other part is the digital infrastructure for virtualizing test and evaluation. This has been a big focus for TRMC, the Test Resource Management Center, for a while.

But until we can virtualize more of the test and evaluation process, including instrumenting the units that are now deployed and using them essentially as part of the test program, we are not going to be able to get a force that's able to adapt quickly. Because one of the big lessons out of Ukraine is you have to get the entire process from intelligence gathering to generating new ideas to deploying the new ideas in the form of fielded systems. That whole process has to be sped up. So it can't just be,

idea generation is faster because if you can't test and evaluate it faster, then it's going to sit on the shelf until somebody can run it through a test program at a range. So you got to be able to virtualize it. So I think the keys are going to be virtualizing this, this generation process and virtualizing this test and evaluation process.

Ken Miller (41:52)
Well, Brian, thank you so much for taking time to join me here on From the Crow's Nest. It's always great to have you on the show. I always look forward to your reports. And again, listeners can go to Hudson Institute at Hudson.org to download the report that is available now. Thank you for joining me here From the Crow's Nest. I look forward to having you on the show again in the near future.

Bryan Clark (42:11)
Awesome, thanks Ken. Thank you.

Ken Miller (42:13)
That will conclude this episode of From the Crow's Nest. I'd like to thank my guests for joining me. As always, please take a moment to review, share, and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners, so please take a moment to let us know how we're doing. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.

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