A “proliferation of precision” weapons and the spread of styles of warfare displayed by Russia in Ukraine risks ending “the American way of war that we have grown accustomed to over the last three decades”, the Pentagon’s No 2 official warned on Wednesday.



In a speech likely to be hotly debated in defense circles, US deputy defense secretary Robert Work outlined a vision of ground warfare for what might be called a post-insurgency era, one in which US adversaries cycle between using subterfuge tactics and high-tech precision artillery – “conventional weapons with near-zero miss”, in his warning – to potentially overmatch the US military.

“I tell you now, our technological superiority is slipping. We see it every day,” Work told the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Work’s extended meditation on the future of ground warfare marks a departure for the Pentagon in the Barack Obama era, which has thus far forsworn large-scale land campaigns in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, to the point where some army officers have wondered if their reward for those grueling wars is irrelevance.

“It’s certainly possible, even probable, that we will fight similar campaigns in the future,” Work said in his prepared remarks, expressing a sentiment rarely voiced at senior levels in the Obama administration.

But instead of battling an insurgency as in Iraq or Afghanistan, Work suggested future US ground opponents would look more like the Russian-backed conquest of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. He warned that the army must prepare for future wars that see foreign-backed adversaries launching subterfuge operations alongside highly precise artillery. Advanced missiles once only available to regional powers have dropped dramatically in price, converging with a spread in drone technology and sophisticated cyber knowledge.

“We’re not too far away from guided 50-caliber rounds,” Work said.

While Russia’s fight in Ukraine is closer to the conventional combat for which the army has trained since the cold war – a training focus that earned it an avalanche of criticism during the vastly different wars it has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan – Work warned that US ground forces are underprepared for an enemy that matches an irregular force’s paramilitary skills to a conventional force’s high-tech weaponry.

Russian-sponsored Ukrainian separatists and Hezbollah often blur the lines between militias and armies, “using agents, paramilitaries, deception, infiltration and persistent denial”, Work said, a “zone in which we don’t typically operate but one in which we must become more proficient”.

Work’s answer, which he conceded was preliminary, is to push some of the US military’s most sophisticated weaponry and tools down to its lowest organizational units. The infantry squad of the future, he mused, should be prepared to jam enemy signals, disrupt its command networks, pilot drones and operate alongside highly autonomous ground robots – all part of what Work called “free-play combat at the squad level … with enhanced situational awareness and lethality”.

Work suggested mashing up electromagnetic railguns – experimental weapons that fire bullets at hypersonic speeds – and the army’s Paladin howitzers to fire GPS-guided ammunition, particularly to neutralize a future adversary’s cheap smart-rocket barrage. In theory, ground forces at low levels would have a mobile, highly accurate artillery piece with “deep magazines, high volumes of shots – it’s going to change the cost-imposing strategy on its head”, Work said.

It is also a significant technological challenge. The navy has worked on railgun technology for decades with marginal success, arousing congressional opposition. Nor have military engineers figured out how to design a precision-targeting package that can withstand the enormous heat and force that an electromagnetic weapon generates.

Beyond technological questions, Work’s speech focused entirely on military capabilities, avoiding the contentious first-order concerns about which imaginable US adversary is developing in tandem to his fears. Not even Russia hawks advocate placing the US army in Ukraine against Russian proxies; since 2006, even Israel has sought to avoid a rematch with Hezbollah. The US military has an expensive history of developing sophisticated weapons against anticipated adversaries that do not materialize, which can lead officers to prioritize the enemies they wish to fight over the ones they actually confront.

Work, a former marine artilleryman and leading seapower expert, acknowledged his reputation for fetishizing technological futurism. He conceded that he was interested in provoking answers rather than presenting his own as finished products or fixed ideas. Work gestured at a decade’s worth of defense debates that have occurred on military blogs, academic conferences and email listservs: he explicitly cited blogger Tyler Cowen’s theories about machine-enabled cognition; namedropped influential army general HR McMaster; and his theories about Russian proxy warfare appeared to borrow from former Navy War College professor John Schindler’s “special war” concept.

While a goal of Work’s speech was to reassure army officers that ground combat has a place in current Pentagon planning – and, even amidst congressionally-mandated defense cuts, purchasing – the deputy secretary broached a provocative, even taboo subject: the lack of clear victories for the world’s best-funded military during an era of relentless conflict.

“Our enemies have gone to school on us, at least since 1991 [in] Desert Storm,” Work said.