[The Pentagon Girds for Mid-Century Wars]
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SPURRING AN ENDLESS ARMS RACE  
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Michael Klare
April 16, 2023
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ The Pentagon Girds for Mid-Century Wars _

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Why is the Pentagon budget so high?

On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion
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budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today’s dollars) since
the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that’s before
the hawks in Congress get their hands on it. Last year, they added $35
billion to the administration’s request and, this year, their add-on
is likely to prove at least that big. Given that American forces
aren’t even officially at war right now (if you don’t count
those engaged in
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operations in Africa and elsewhere), what explains so much military
spending?

The answer offered by senior Pentagon officials and echoed in
mainstream Washington media coverage is that this country faces a
growing risk of war with Russia or China (or both of them at once) and
that the lesson of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is the need to
stockpile vast numbers of bombs, missiles, and other munitions.
“Pentagon, Juggling Russia, China, Seeks Billions for Long-Range
Weapons” was a typical headline
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the _Washington Post_ about that 2024 budget request. Military
leaders are overwhelmingly focused on a potential future conflict with
either or both of those powers and are convinced that a lot more money
should be spent now to prepare for such an outcome, which means buying
extra tanks, ships, and planes, along with all the bombs, shells, and
missiles they carry.

Even a quick look at the briefing materials for that future budget
confirms such an assessment. Many of the billions of dollars being
tacked onto it are intended to procure exactly the items you would
expect to use in a war with those powers in the late 2020s or 2030s.
Aside from personnel costs and operating expenses, the largest share
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the proposed budget — $170 billion or 20% — is allocated for
purchasing just such hardware.

But while preparations for such wars in the near future drive a
significant part of that increase, a surprising share of it — $145
billion, or 17% — is aimed at possible conflicts in the 2040s and
2050s. Believing that our “strategic competition
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with China is likely to persist for decades to come and that a
conflict with that country could erupt at any moment along that future
trajectory, the Pentagon is requesting its largest allocation ever for
what’s called “research, development, test, and evaluation”
(RDT&E), or the process of converting the latest scientific
discoveries into weapons of war.

To put this in perspective, that $145 billion is more than
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other country except what China spends on defense in toto and
constitutes approximately half of China’s full military budget. So
what’s that staggering sum of money, itself only a modest part of
this country’s military budget, intended for?

Some of it, especially the “T&E” part, is designed for futuristic
upgrades of existing weapons systems. For example, the B-52 bomber —
at 70, the oldest model still flying — is being retrofitted
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carry experimental AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapons
(ARRWs), or advanced hypersonic missiles. But much of that sum,
especially the “R&D” part, is aimed at developing weapons that may
not see battlefield use until decades in the future, if ever. Spending
on such systems is still _only_ in the millions or low billions, but
it will certainly balloon into the tens or hundreds of billions of
dollars in the years to come, ensuring that future Pentagon budgets
soar into the trillions.

WEAPONIZING EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Driving the Pentagon’s increased focus on future weapons development
is the assumption that China and Russia will remain major adversaries
for decades to come and that future wars with those, or other major
powers, could largely be decided by the mastery of artificial
intelligence (AI) along with other emerging technologies. Those would
include robotics, hypersonics (projectiles that fly at more than five
times the speed of sound), and quantum computing. As the Pentagon’s
2024 budget request put it:

“An increasing array of fast-evolving technologies and innovative
applications of existing technology complicates the [Defense]
Department’s ability to maintain an edge in combat credibility and
deterrence. Newer capabilities such as counterspace weapons,
hypersonic weapons, new and emerging payload and delivery systems…
all create a heightened potential… for shifts in perceived
deterrence of U.S. military power.”

To ensure that this country can overpower Chinese and/or Russian
forces in any conceivable encounter, top officials insist, Washington
must focus on investing in a major way in the advanced technologies
likely to dominate future battlefields. Accordingly, $17.8 billion of
that $145 billion RDT&E budget will be directly dedicated to
military-related science and technology development. Those funds, the
Pentagon explains, will be used to accelerate the weaponization of
artificial intelligence and speed the growth of other emerging
technologies, especially robotics, autonomous (or “unmanned”)
weapons systems, and hypersonic missiles.

Buy the Book
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is of particular interest to the
Department of Defense, given its wide range of potential military
uses, including target identification and assessment, enhanced weapons
navigation and targeting systems, and computer-assisted battlefield
decision-making. Although there’s no total figure for AI research
and development offered in the unclassified version of the 2024
budget, certain individual programs are highlighted. One of these is
the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control system (JADC2), an AI-enabled
matrix of sensors, computers, and communications devices intended to
collect and process data on enemy movements and convey that
information at lightning speed to combat forces in every “domain”
(air, sea, ground, and space). At $1.3 billion, JADC2 may not be
“the biggest number in the budget,” said
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Secretary of Defense Michael J. McCord, but it constitutes “a very
central organizing concept of how we’re trying to link information
together.”

AI is also essential for the development of — and yes, nothing seems
to lack an acronym in Pentagon documents — autonomous weapons
systems, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles
(UGVs), and unmanned surface vessels (USVs). Such devices — far more
bluntly called “killer robots [[link removed]]”
by their critics — typically combine a mobile platform of some sort
(plane, tank, or ship), an onboard “kill mechanism” (gun or
missile), and an ability to identify and attack targets with minimal
human oversight. Believing that the future battlefield will become
ever more lethal, Pentagon officials aim to replace
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many of its crewed platforms as possible — think ships, planes, and
artillery — with advanced UAVs, UGVs, and USVs.

The 2024 budget request doesn’t include a total dollar figure for
research on future unmanned weapons systems but count on one thing: it
will come to many billions of dollars. The budget does indicate that
$2.2 billion is being sought for the early procurement of MQ-4 and
MQ-25 unmanned aerial vehicles, and such figures are guaranteed to
swell as experimental robotic systems move into large-scale
production. Another $200 million was requested to design a large USV,
essentially a crewless frigate or destroyer. Once prototype vessels of
this type have been built and tested, the Navy plans to order dozens,
perhaps hundreds of them, instantly creating a $100 billion-plus
market for a naval force lacking the usual human crew.

Another area receiving extensive Pentagon attention is hypersonics,
because such projectiles will fly so fast and maneuver with such skill
(while skimming atop the atmosphere’s outer layer) that they should
be essentially impossible to track and intercept. Both China and
Russia already possess rudimentary weapons of this type, with
Russia reportedly firing
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of its hypersonic Kinzhal missiles into Ukraine in recent months.

As the Pentagon put it in its budget request:

“Hypersonic systems expand our ability to hold distant targets at
risk, dramatically shorten the timeline to strike a target, and their
maneuverability increases survivability and unpredictability. The
Department will accelerate fielding of transformational capability
enabled by air, land, and sea-based hypersonic strike weapon systems
to overcome the challenges to our future battlefield domain
dominance.”

Another 14% of the RDT&E request, or about $2.5 billion, is earmarked
for research in even more experimental fields like quantum computing
and advanced microelectronics. “The Department’s science and
technology investments are underpinned by early-stage basic
research,” the Pentagon explains. “Payoff for this research may
not be evident for years, but it is critical to ensuring our enduring
technological advantage in the decades ahead.” As in the case of AI,
autonomous weapons, and hypersonics, these relatively small amounts
(by Pentagon standards) will balloon in the years ahead as initial
discoveries are applied to functioning weapons systems and procured in
ever larger quantities.

HARNESSING AMERICAN TECH TALENT FOR LONG-TERM WAR PLANNING

There’s one consequence of such an investment in RDT&E that’s
almost too obvious to mention. If you think the Pentagon budget is sky
high now, just wait! Future spending, as today’s laboratory concepts
are converted into actual combat systems, is likely to stagger the
imagination. And that’s just one of the significant consequences of
such a path to permanent military superiority. To ensure that the
United States continues to dominate research in the emerging
technologies most applicable to future weaponry, the Pentagon will
seek to harness an ever-increasing share of this country’s
scientific and technological resources for military-oriented work.

This, in turn, will mean capturing an ever-larger part of the
government’s net R&D budget at the expense of other national
priorities. In 2022, for example, federal funding for non-military R&D
(including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of
Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
represented only about 33%
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spending. If the 2024 military budget goes through at the level
requested (or higher), that figure for non-military spending will drop
to 31%, a trend only likely to strengthen in the future as more and
more resources are devoted to war preparation, leaving an
ever-diminishing share of taxpayer funding for research on vital
concerns like cancer prevention and treatment, pandemic response, and
climate change adaptation.

No less worrisome, ever more scientists and engineers will undoubtedly
be encouraged
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not to say, prodded — to devote their careers to military research
rather than work in more peaceable fields. While many scientists
struggle for grants to support their work, the Department of Defense
(DoD) offers bundles of money to those who choose to study
military-related topics. Typically enough, the 2024 request includes
$347 million for what the military is now calling the University
Research Initiative, most of which will be used to finance the
formation of “teams of researchers across disciplines and across
geographic boundaries to focus on DoD-specific hard science
problems.” Another $200 million is being allocated
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University Microelectronics Program by the Defense Advanced Projects
Research Agency, the Pentagon’s R&D outfit, while $100 million
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being provided to the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics by
the Pentagon’s Joint Hypersonics Transition Office. With so much
money flowing into such programs and the share devoted to other fields
of study shrinking, it’s hardly surprising that scientists and
graduate students at major universities are being drawn into the
Pentagon’s research networks.

In fact, it’s also seeking to expand its talent pool by providing
additional funding to historically Black colleges and universities
(HBCUs). In January, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin
announced that Howard University in Washington, D.C., had been chosen
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the first such school to serve as a university-affiliated research
center by the Department of Defense, in which capacity it will soon be
involved in work on autonomous weapons systems. This will, of course,
provide badly needed money to scientists and engineers at that school
and other HBCUs that may have been starved of such funding in the
past. But it also begs the question: Why shouldn’t Howard receive
similar amounts to study problems of greater relevance to the Black
community like sickle-cell anemia and endemic poverty?

ENDLESS ARMS RACES VS. GENUINE SECURITY

In devoting all those billions of dollars to research on
next-generation weaponry, the Pentagon’s rationale is
straightforward: spend now to ensure U.S. military superiority in the
2040s, 2050s, and beyond. But however persuasive this conceit may seem
— even with all those mammoth sums of money pouring in — things
rarely work out so neatly. Any major investment of this sort by one
country is bound to trigger countermoves from its rivals, ensuring
that any early technological advantage will soon be overcome in some
fashion, even as the planet is turned into ever more of an armed camp.

The Pentagon’s development of precision-guided munitions, for
example, provided American forces with an enormous military advantage
during the Persian Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, but also prompted
China, Iran, Russia, and other countries to begin developing similar
weaponry, quickly diminishing that advantage. Likewise, China and
Russia were the first to deploy combat-ready hypersonic weapons, but
in response, the U.S. will be fielding a far greater array of them in
a few years’ time.

Chinese and Russian advances in deploying hypersonics also led the
U.S. to invest in developing — yes, you guessed it! —
anti-hypersonic hypersonics, launching yet one more arms race on
planet Earth, while boosting the Pentagon budget by additional
billions. Given all this, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn
that the 2024 Pentagon budget request includes $209 million
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the development of a hypersonic interceptor, only the first
installment in costly development and procurement programs in the
years to come in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

If you want to bet on anything, then here’s a surefire way to go:
the Pentagon’s drive to achieve dominance in the development and
deployment of advanced weaponry will lead not to supremacy but to
another endless cycle of high-tech arms races that, in turn, will
consume an ever-increasing share of this country’s wealth and
scientific talent, while providing negligible improvements in national
security. Rather than spending so much on future weaponry, we should
all be thinking about enhanced arms control measures, global climate
cooperation, and greater investment in non-military R&D.

If only…

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* weapons
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* Technology
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* hypersonic missiles
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* national security
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