Recent statements from President Trump indicate he is prepared to continue, or escalate, U.S. military strikes while simultaneously signaling he is open to continued negotiations. Some would see this as a reasonable offer of carrot or stick. But, having lost scores of ships, missiles, and military production facilities, U.S. actions still depend on what Iran does. This is allowing the regime leadership to control the pace of the conflict. How is this possible?

By his own words, President Trump is admitting the United States is in full-blown reaction-mode, granting Iran effective control over the tempo of both military operations and peace negotiations. This is a mistake, born of the obvious desperation of the White House to extricate itself from the black hole that is the Iran War, and that is increasingly proving to be a drag on Republican chances in the approaching midterms.

Iran is clearly playing the provocateur, poking the bear with selective strikes on shipping daring to test their illegal claim of administrating the Strait. They are paying the price by suffering increasingly focused destruction of their offensive coastal capabilities.

This is as it should be. Iran simply cannot be allowed to impose itself on the movement of shipping through an international waterway. But… the President’s quickly aborted claim that the U.S. military should receive a 20% gratuity for its efforts to keep the Strait open has predictably only muddied the issue further.

Who’s Really in Charge in Iran and What Do They Want?

The regime clearly sees itself in the dominant position. Or, at least, in a position to bear more pain, for now, than their adversary. I believe this likely reflects their own internal political dynamics, not unlike U.S. domestic politics driving much of Trump’s actions. But with Iran, this is a more factional disunity of opinion over the best course of action vice the overly unitary decision-making process the U.S. side is suffering from. I’ve written about this before in my 25 April post; ‘The Iranian Power Struggle’: “In my years at CIA dealing with Iran and Iranians, I observed many instances of such backroom political maneuvering, including a willingness to sabotage efforts by others engaged in back-channel deals. This was particularly the case when the counterpart was America. Publicly scorned as the “Great Satan”, but secretly coveted as the superpower of choice, individuals and factions knew that whoever secured a special relationship with America would be in the pole position going forward. The attitude was “if not me, then no one!”, essentially the grownup version of ‘King of the Hill.’”

This may account for the regime’s inexplicable willingness to reject any compromise while continuing to absorb punishment; perhaps more to put pressure on their internal political rivals than to gain external military advantage. In the end, it is likely they will eventually call a halt to this by reengaging on negotiations when they determine they risk losing too much capability.

Exacerbating this, I would posit that the newly ascended Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, may in fact be a phantom leader. Alive in some fashion, perhaps largely incapacitated, but not actually in charge. And even if able to coherently express his views, in no way nearly as powerful or influential as his father. The seemingly reckless actions of the regime in courting U.S. retaliation may in actuality reflect a lack of a coherent decision-making process as opposed to a unified one. I think it is quite possible that competing factions within the regime are using Mojtaba as an avatar while they maneuver for decisive advantage.

Regardless of which faction ultimately dominates, the implications for the United States remain how to break through to the regime’s decision-makers in the near term.

Hyperbole Weakens the U.S. Position

In the meantime, Trump’s regular stream of alternating obsequious and insulting, but always hyperbolic, ‘Truths’, the result of his obvious frustration over the regime’s unwillingness to accept what he is offering – whatever that might be at that moment - serves only to inflame and/or simply confuse an already chaotic situation. All resulting from the vaguely written and amateurish MOU that Trump himself signed.

As I wrote previously in a 12 April post, Hyperbole is Donald Trump’s love language. He continues to employ it almost daily, usually in reaction to a disappointment with the Iranian regime’s actions. And almost always to the detriment of his stated desire for peace. Unfortunately, the Iranian regime has been practicing this same language of hyperbole on an industrial scale for a generation. They understand both how to use it and counter it.

But the practice of diplomacy is a quiet profession. One that requires patience. One that requires expertise. One that requires steadiness and focus. None of which characteristics the President or his negotiators appear capable of exhibiting.

If I were to give the President a piece of advice, I would echo the words of David Ignatius in his most recent Washington Post column: “Just stop talking,” although more directly and less politely, “Just shut up and let the professionals do their job!”

What now?

I wrote about what may come next, after the permanent cessation of hostilities, in my 15 May post, Groundhog Day: “The issues facing Iran prior to the War were serious, in fact existential – a collapsing economy, hyper-inflation, severe water shortages, lack of electricity, and growing widespread popular anger and unrest – and are ongoing and only getting worse. Whatever the Iranian leadership looks like, it will have to address these issues. And it is not clear that they will be capable of doing this without outside help. This is where the U.S. and hopefully our Western allies come in: sanctions relief, and extensive economic and other assistance in exchange for real changes in policy and a pullback on objectionable activities and programs. The potential for this may, and I say may, have increased with the removal of Ali Khamenei from the Supreme Leader’s seat. But it will depend on whether his son and successor, Mojtaba, is less rigidly ideological than his father. We will see if he is willing to put the Iranian people ahead of the regime.”

Next steps

First, we need to significantly blunt the regime’s ongoing ability to project power and control the Strait of Hormuz. It needs to reopen and stay open. And it will. Both sides need it to, but not on the regime’s terms. The focused effort on degrading Iran’s coastal offensive capabilities should continue apace.

We need the regime to be forced to address the internal existential threats listed above. This is sure to absorb much of their time and money and may eventually consume them. And it may even bring them back to the negotiating table. Escalating military strikes on energy facilities and civilian infrastructure would serve only to alienate the Iranian population and distract from the Iranian leadership’s appalling incompetence, strengthening the regime. As part of this, the current MOU must be abandoned and recast in a more evenhanded manner, leading to permanent peace. Adhering to it as currently written will only ensure we will be forced to return in the future. As we are already seeing.

The current dynamic from the U.S. side is emotionally driven and self-defeating. The Iranians appear riven by paralyzing factionalism, with a hefty dose of hubris regarding their temporary advantage. Neither is a recipe for success. The question is not whether Iran can win a military confrontation with the United States. It cannot. The question is whether it can continue forcing Washington to react rather than act. For now, that answer appears to be yes.

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Editor’s note- Russia's war in Ukraine has fundamentally changed the character of warfare, proving that autonomous and attritable drones are no longer supporting tools but have become a decisive instrument of combat. In this provocative essay, co-authors Xen & Matthew Creedican argue that the United States must abandon legacy assumptions and adopt an entirely new military doctrine, force structure, and industrial strategy built for the age of autonomous warfare. (Xen is a former US Special Operations veteran with experience fighting alongside Ukrainian forces. We have granted his request for anonymity).

This paper is written expressly for the policy and decision makers across the military and public and private sectors who are bound to translate national strategy into reality. We will withhold for another day the arguments for convincing those who have yet to concede that the rifleman’s day is over or that drone warfare in Ukraine generalizes. Instead, we are making a series of recommendations to those already on board with direction from the Department of War (DoW) that “we are pivoting the Pentagon and industrial base to a wartime footing”, as manifested in a $50B+ modernization program to ensure that “every warfighter must have access to low-cost/attritable sUAS [small drones] to conduct missions.” To help leaders meet such a steep challenge, we will describe how the force should be structured, how doctrine should be written, and how the industrial base must be re-engineered to match present scaling by our adversaries.

What a Modern Drone Force Should Look Like, For Now

If we could snap our fingers now and summon an army well-trained and well-equipped according to the latest understanding of modern drone warfare, it might be composed of battalions fielding approximately fifty to a hundred mixed-role unmanned systems deployable simultaneously, with stocks of thousands more unmanned vehicles and spare parts (antennas, ground stations) ready to replace those attrited. The force tailoring would have to include both rotary and fixed-wing drones performing reconnaissance, mothership, electronic warfare, one-way attack (OWA), bomber, and multi-role tasks. Such a battalion should be able to organically find, fix, and finish targets at ranges up to 300km.

Presently in Ukraine, formations tend to specialize by range. Tactical or “infantry” battalions deploy quadcopters controlled by direct radio link or fiber optic from positions 3-10km from the absolute front, flirting with the danger zone, with the better teams now fielding glide-kit quads reaching out to 50+km, doubling their effective range from last year. Ground drone units are increasingly critical as well, performing the vast majority of evacuation and logistics within the 9-15km+ “gray zone” where manned vehicles are not worth the risk to employ. Dedicated drone battalions overwatch these units from 10-20km from no man’s land, operating typically out to 80km but at times out to 300km thanks to proliferating autonomy and redundant communications (direct, meshing, repeating, satellite, LTE, etc.). This upper end for the “mid-range” or “operational” level of warfare has also at least doubled since last year. Finally, specialized deep strike teams are now conducting strikes out to beyond 1500km against strategic targets, with high-volume, low-cost, independent, adaptable platforms quite different from expensive legacy US drones.

At every level of the above structure, it is understood that even the non-OWA platforms must be attritable, since they rarely accomplish more than several missions without being rendered inoperable. Particularly cheap systems are even deliberately used as decoys. And of course, seeping down into these echelons is autonomy enabled by AI, and the beginnings of swarming protocols. It must be understood that what the aircraft carrier once did to naval gunnery is what the drone is doing to the rifleman. The fundamental unit of combat power is now the small drone team, and it is an over-the-horizon asset.

Saving Combined Arms Maneuver

Drones employed properly in such formations could execute combined arms maneuver warfare rather than the attrition warfare we currently see. After reconnoitering the enemy and making contact, unmanned battalions could use air platforms in both expendable and regenerative loitering waves to degrade air defenses, electronic warfare systems, logistics, and command structures, after which successive waves could suppress and attrite ground forces in preparation for ground drones to take, hold, and shape ground. Only then would humans move forward to effectively deepen the range of their systems. All this implies an in-depth rewriting and reapplication to unmanned warfare of manuals and doctrine guides such as FM 3-0 Operations, FM 3-90 Tactics, and FM 3-96 Brigade Combat Team. Current revisions have relegated the drone to a supporting role at best. Another example: given that a legacy US Army Corps of tens of thousands of personnel has multiple days to make decisions across approximately the same operational striking depth as that of one of the aforementioned Ukrainian drone battalions of a few hundred personnel, clearly we must revise our echeloned depths of responsibility . The existing disparity has practical consequences, as Ukrainians not only handily defeat NATO forces in joint exercises, but they do it with comparatively tiny forces, striking larger formations and assets in areas thought to be “safe”.

As such, it should be clear to those familiar with the actual contestants in programs like Drone Dominance that we are staging to mostly procure platforms that are too expensive for the requested operational ranges. Although the DoW has set a target of roughly half a million drones per year for procurement, it will actually need at least fifty million to meet the lofty goal of training and equipping a ~500,000-1,000,000 man force with attritable systems. If we look to the rest of the world, we will see that Ukraine and Russia this year are each likely to utilize around twenty million drones, while China, as the manufacturer of most of the world’s drone components, will likely build the equivalent of a hundred million drones.

Predictive Doctrine for a Moving Target

But even this, unfortunately, is not the real crux of the issue with respect to the development of future requirements. Doctrine must not only be prescriptive of the present, but also of the near future. The fact is, we cannot just snap our fingers to summon a drone army. It will take years to build it out, and by then things will look even more “sci-fi”. That is, we are chasing a moving target three to ten years out, and so we had best engage in some imagination to meet that challenge.

We are conscious of how radical this is going to sound, but our goal with such provocation is indeed to shift the Overton window, so, we believe that the future will look like something out of Ender’s Game, and it’s going to happen well before those now entering the military reach retirement eligibility.

Man, Train, and Equip for the Sci-Fi Near Future

Individual drone controllers will become tactical commanders (so let’s call them “tacticians”) remotely running squadrons of individually autonomous drones, point-and-clicking their way through a 3D interactive, AI-mediated, sensor-fusion digital twin of the battlefield. The base layer is already here in the digital panopticon emerging from cloud-native Common Operating Picture (COP) software like Ukraine’s Delta merging with military AI suites. Palantir’s Maven already suggests courses of action at the command level, and there’s no reason this couldn’t be extended down to the lowest tactical levels, controllable by voice, touch, or text. In a few more years the tacticians themselves will be inside something Neuralink-shaped, performing at the speed of AI-enhanced thought and striking at the links in the chain that enable adversarial tacticians. Under those conditions the adaptation cycle, too, will move at a speed that cognitively unenhanced humans cannot keep up with, and intelligence becomes the runaway comparative advantage at every level. There is no telling where such cognitive selection pressure combined with the ability to remotely control drone swarms will end. Will individual soldiers control dozens of drones simultaneously – or thousands? How many drones should a “battalion” have?

Decentralization is a factor too. Everything we are seeing develop now is scaling in Ukraine down to the individual operator, as it must. The over-the-horizon warrior needs personal access to livestreamed tactical radar to check if the skies are clear before he exposes himself by making movement. He needs edge compute not just onboard his drones, but for local offline AI to analyze the battlefield and make decisions even in a communications blackout. Already we see backpack portable drone interceptor systems for personal defense; I’m aware of contracts under consideration for such systems to miniaturize to automated shoulder-launch, like a personal version of the tank-mounted Trophy system. The current estimate is that a soldier has one to four seconds to defend himself against a visual drone contact vectoring on him, and soon that timeline will compress enough to exceed human reaction times.

Asking what exactly the mass of conventional soldiers will do under such a radical restructuring is much like asking whether or not Large Language Models (LLMs) are going to have the net effect of creating or destroying jobs in the civilian workforce. We may see the formation of a tiny military class, or perhaps warfare will become even more industrial in human scale. Certainly, humans will be pushed farther and farther back in the logistical chain that ultimately delivers kinetic effects upon an adversary. Currently, there is a need for people to physically emplace, operate, and recover antennas, ground stations, and drones. Once robots are more commonly executing these tasks (already, some aerial drones are launched via multi-domain mothership drones), people will work on those robots, and so forth. Eventually, it’s hard to see what anyone will need to do physically, as robots will be building, repairing, improving, and employing each other. The only real foreseeable tasks left at the tactical echelon will be those of the tactician and the true engineer, who innovates and integrates locally. Whoever best automates tasks end-to-end will win the tempo fight. The transportation of weapons and sensors has to be contemplated as one mass-manufactured logistical animal.

Going further, the tactician need not position himself relative to any front at all, because he can fly remotely and because he would be sensible to reduce his threat profile from direct action threats to intelligence-driven threats only. That is, he should position himself to strike with impunity. Already in Ukraine, Sting pilots have flown their interceptors remotely 500km away from where they were launched. Midrange teams outside the gray zone already drive to position in unmarked civilian vehicles, wear their uniforms only for the minimal time needed to deploy their systems, and then fade back into the population. And the naval drones striking the Russian fleet are not generally controlled from the sea, but ultimately from bases on land. If trends hold, the smallest independent tactical elements may be able to cheaply strike anywhere on Earth within a decade.

Branching Futures: eVTOLs, Smart Dust, and Beyond

But this is merely one vision of the future. There are branching pathways, perhaps some of which may coexist. Weaponized human-optional eVTOLs like the Chinese prototype ZR-300 could become a new air cavalry paradigm unto themselves if employed en masse in shock fashion, sweeping aside whole nations in a day the way Central Asian hordes did in the Medieval period, or the way Islamist insurgents swept across the Sahel in Toyotas. Microscopic drone “clouds” also known as smart dust could penetrate any conventional barrier, performing reconnaissance or even coalescing explosively or penetrating air ducts and lungs. Does this seem one step too far, straining credulity? Remember that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” from the perspective of the old guard, and that all these technologies are already real, just not fully scaled and integrated. In fact, micro drones were feasible decades ago, technically if not economically – timing is everything. We already have a leading indicator in the German army’s very real purchase of cyborg insect swarms from Swarm Biotactics. Against such dizzying possibilities, we will advocate further on below for a rapidly adapting structure that ingrains real-world feedback and extrapolates from it.

Economies of Scale for Drone Production

First, let’s deal with how we produce enough useful drones to simply match our adversaries. The necessary industrial base to deliver manufacturing on the required scale simply does not exist anywhere in the West currently, whereas China has quietly captured the drone market and the sub-component supply chains over decades and is integrating such technology down to their lowest tactical echelons at a hundred times our volume. Much has already been written about the need to innovate and iterate on a scale of weeks rather than decades, and while true such a need potentially comes with the steep requirement of continuous retooling of factories and endless R&D. Ironically, funding this effort at the scale needed will require a vision across a much longer (generational) timeline, in opposition to the quarterly results that drive Western business strategy. Currently, the US buys primarily the end-product rather than engendering the component markets directly. From a cost-savings standpoint, we would do well to preemptively build adaptable systems, and also to stop trying to update legacy programs (we will never need a new sniper rifle). The DoW budget has to fund the domestic mass production of production itself, with an eye towards dual-use sub-components and machine tools, since commercial R&D and production can fund itself to an extent. Vehicles, phones, and drones sold into civilian markets pay for their own scaled production, and volume buys down cost. As it stands now with our current component outsourcing, we are paying our enemies to equip us, tying the rope with which they intend to hang us.

Pillars of a Sovereign Drone Industry

The pillars of industry to be funded include locomotion, actuation, energy, storage, compute, sensing, and communications. The component-level specifics, meaning motor sizes, magnet chemistries, cell formats, and the rest, belong in a technical paper. What’s important here is that the government has to guarantee the market for base components as much as scale requirements dictate and raw materials allow, while simultaneously finding the alternatives that bypass adversarial chains entirely.

Shallow or single-sourced chains halt on the first disruption, so volume has to be distributed across multiple domestic entities in order to create redundant paths. That means accounting for the physical bottleneck of factory siting, the legal bottleneck of restrictive radio frequency and flight-test regimes, and the social bottleneck of technical workforce recruitment, which in practice means a nationwide push for engineers with the education pipelines to match. We should fixate less on the static stockpile and more on the velocity at which the economy can replace a lost or outdated asset. Eventually, this may look like self-assembling factories, but for now we should see a dramatic increase in industrial jobs, not a reduction.

Guaranteed Requirements and Manufacturer Caps

The Departments of War and Commerce must jointly establish requirements and guarantee purchase of components at massive volumes, over multi-year timescales, according to stringent standards for minimum viable products meeting or exceeding foreign equivalents, with caps set on what portion of the total any one manufacturer can source. Subcontracting and manufacturer caps will encourage competition inside our own secure ecosystem rather than across national borders, where we are frequently undercut by adversaries. As needed, the government can resell unused inventory back to industry at or below the cost of subsidized foreign imports, letting American companies build with cheap secure inputs.

We have a realistic precedent for all this, as described in the book Freedom’s Forge: In anticipation of US entry into WW2, President Roosevelt brought together former of heads of industry in order to align military requirements, government funding, and civilian production capacity so that goals could be revised upward continuously, and the resulting volume forced a dynamic of subcontracting to keep up with demand. American industry responded, not only producing hundreds of thousands of complex war machines, but also rapidly retrofitting them as needed based on frontline feedback, on much the same timescales that we today see in Ukraine.

Innovation on the Machine Timescale

In the near future, however, we will have to go even further, with innovation necessarily occurring on the machine timescale. The same digital twin in which soldiers will virtually train and fight will also let us simulate hardware, factories, and logistics before steel is ever cut. The panopticon in which the end product’s edge sensors feed data into will be the same in which an arbitrary number of tests under variable conditions may be run before the more refined next generation of product is built. Supply chains from base-component assembly through fuel and battery pathways can be estimated and stressed the same way. Data streams from around the globe and from local instrumentation can all compartmentalize or cohere as needed for efficiency or breadth of understanding, all of it parseable by ever-increasing machine intelligence, at worst bounded in growth only by Moore’s Law. As an aside regarding encouraging a martial culture amongst the youth who will one day fill the tactician ranks, our military should release realtime strategy wargames involving drone swarming, initially as standalone games but eventually living inside the kind of digital twin explained above. And as earlier mentioned, all of this will eventually be experienced in breathtaking detail in virtual reality and via brain-machine interface. This is not so distasteful a task on a wartime footing, especially considering even in peacetime the military has released first-person shooter games and simulations.

Massive integrated training areas, in which units, contractors, and manufacturers co-locate to live-fire and iterate together, belong on the near-term build list. The mandate inside such an area should be inverted from current practice, so that the burden shifts from justifying permission for a given action to justifying why any given action cannot happen. The FAA, the FCC, and the rest of the regulatory apparatus should be effectively kicked out of the perimeter, and legislation should extend a good-faith liability shield covering crashes and honest mistakes. Dedicated integration units, which can be thought of as Transition in Contact supercharged, should be created. The core skill of these new units would not be warfighting but rather adapting to and assembling whatever technology is available. Every unit, not just dedicated ones, should additionally have at least some innovation budget and personnel, so that they are not merely customers but also integrators. Specifically, this means the military needs to be mass recruiting engineers to fill out dedicated innovation units and also sprinkle across the wider force. And lastly, the soldiers who will become the drone tacticians must be allowed to train for that role full-time, studying meteorology, radio theory, and other topics and skills currently regarded as arcane among warfighters.

A Permanent Feedback Loop from the Front

None of the above works without a permanent structured feedback loop that connects requirements to what is actually happening in a live conflict. Local units cannot generate requirements for now let alone five years out if there is no frontline feedback, no rotating instructor cycle, and no living link to platforms that do not yet exist in Western inventories. A peacetime force generating peacetime requirements will buy peacetime equipment no matter how decentralized the process is. Instead, we need a much greater scale of personnel who are aggressively forward deployed to conflict zones, visiting tactical operations centers and doing ridealongs on relatively low-risk mid- and deep-strike operations. Our partners will gladly place them there if they provide as much as they take. Directly in this role we can put our incredible all-volunteer special operators, who want nothing more than to get close to the fire. Adjacent to it, in lower intensity areas, we can forward deploy conventional troops as well to learn from partners, including by attending their own schoolhouses.

What we are suggesting here is deploying thousands of troops, not merely small cells of elite military and intelligence agency operators whose reporting does not reach the wider military. Much like the technical innovation measures described in the previous paragraph, these warriors should be distributed both into new dedicated units for the express purpose of doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures innovation, as well as across the wider force, to supercharge change and acquire what Clausewitz called a “fingertip feel” for the present state of war. If there is really no political appetite for this, then the only other option is to accomplish the same via other methods, such as by inviting large numbers of military instructors from partner nations currently involved in active conflict or by rotating civilian contractors more discreetly through conflict areas, as suggested by former Green Beret Bryan Pickens.

Piping Frontline Signal Directly to Doctrine Writers

Regardless of how it is done, the core part of whatever structure is created should report directly to the senior military leadership responsible for the development of force-wide doctrine and requirements, so that they cannot ignore reality and hide in dead paradigms. Various new offices are being created, such as DRPM-UxS, and our hope is that with direct signal they can utilize sweeping - even disruptive - authorities to continually remake the military; for, as Napoleon said, “unhappy the general who comes on the field of battle with a system”. Given the enemy’s endless adaptation, the best meta-doctrine is to accept no particular doctrine as certain or permanent, and even to assume that it is likely wrong if it has not been overhauled lately. Official doctrine documents would be better written and accessed as living Google docs rather than year-dated static PDFs.

This applies down to the nitty-gritty of institutional knowledge as well. The train-the-trainer model informed by forward-deployed reporting must fuel change in our own programs of instruction and battle drills, so that we actually know how to employ the unmanned weapon systems we are scaling, a capability which further feeds into local units understanding the requirements for the next round of equipment purchases.

A sharedrive with compartmentalized access is not enough; we need our whole force separated at most by just one degree from someone who has seen modern war up close. And if the military is that close to the combat demand signal, then by extension the manufacturers who visit the units they are equipping will be that much closer.

The Transition Engine and Treating Ukraine as a Peer

Joseph Gagnard of Atlas Special Projects calls the sum total of all these joint efforts the “transition engine”, meaning operators, builders, contracting specialists, and investors institutionalized together, because no single one of them fields capability alone. That transition engine has to be paired with a treatment of Ukraine that most of the current western defense industry still resists. Treat the Ukrainians peer to peer, at least as well as Taiwan or South Korea, and better than either, because they are in an existential fight we cannot afford for them to lose. I suggest bringing thousands of Ukrainian engineers, managers, and operators into the United States to help build the drone industry. Regarding AI, America holds the architecture, the compute capacity, the models, and the global reach. But Ukraine holds the live-fire scaffolding for how that data actually gets generated, labeled, fused, and fed back into the iteration cycle; they have the premier Common Operating Picture software, Delta, to facilitate collection; and they are best positioned to evaluate the battlefield effectiveness of each successive generation of combat AI.

Furthermore, Ukraine is waging a global hybrid war on the West’s behalf, which we hardly engage in except via the most deniable means. China, Russia, and their proxies and allies ruthlessly exploit neutral ground with a vast array of tools, strangling us of resources, allies, and positioning. As political will allows, we suggest unleashing our special operators and intelligence officers in nearly-overt ways, in partnership with Ukrainians, who willingly perform more risky action and have a history of cooperation with our intel services, to operate across the globe responding in kind to the Axis arrayed against us. Drones, of course, are the perfect semi-deniable weapon for this. And the signal we receive back by more heavily involving our forces in low-intensity conflicts will feed back into the plan regarding getting a “fingertip feel” back for war.

The Vulnerable Homefront

The homefront, meanwhile, is ripe for a crippling preemptive strike against us. Our infrastructure is vulnerable, and drones as stated are a perfect scalable weapon that can be employed by deniable proxies. A strike could produce economically disastrous effects, and in response to such an attack of ostensibly deniable origin and limited death toll we would certainly not seek to launch, say, a nuclear retaliatory strike. Containerized long-range drones could be lurking on civilian ships off our coast right now. DHS testified to the Senate that in 2025 there were an average of 10,000 foreign drone flights per month near the southern border. Particularly at risk to such a looming threat is our AI infrastructure. Whatever one’s thoughts on the supposed “AI bubble” (the dot-com bubble didn’t stop the triumphant march of internet adoption, did it?), it is undeniable that both the previous and current administrations have regarded the AI race as existential, and our enemies clearly feel the same way.

We saw from a recent strike by Iran on data centers in the UAE providing Amazon Web Services that such centers are vulnerable, going down for several months at a minimum due to spreading fires and long lead time for repair parts. A few hundred drones striking data centers or upstream links in the chain could easily set us back in the AI race which could provide our adversary an opportunity to surge permanently ahead, a situation which, again, our bipartisan leadership regards as an existential threat.

A Decentralized, Always-On CONUS Defense

The right posture for CONUS defense is one that is always on and autonomous-capable, able to intercept without waiting for the chain of command. In addition, such efforts must take the form of a whole-nation decentralized effort. In Ukraine, a nationwide cheap network of mobile phones acoustically tracks hostile long-range drones swarming their country, and recent legislation approved the use of electronic warfare and interceptor drones by businesses to protect their own assets. New manufacturing and power facilities tend to be built in a distributed, resilient, redundant manner, with cheap hardening available for obvious targets (like anti-drone “cages”). Our recommendation, like elsewhere, is to empower everything local. We would even go so far as to suggest that the Second Amendment needs to extend to counter-drone equipment, and any U.S. person or institution should be able to engage perceived threats up to certain altitudes above their own land.

AI as Sovereign Terrain

We can extend the Second Amendment and drones argument to the First Amendment and AI; that is, to digital and not just physical terrain. Across the information domain, China steals from us and undercuts us, releasing open LLMs to erase Western software margins. Intellectual property in this context is a burden more than a benefit by now, perhaps functioning somewhat to promote internal competition but leaving us wide open for external exploitation. The best way to stay ahead of our enemy in the face of their undermining of our brittle centralized systems is to fight fire with fire. We need policy and funding to shy away from the current big LLM players and instead encourage open models, local compute, and data sovereignty, which offer numerous long-term advantages across the board that mirror the kind of resiliency and initiative-encouraging effects we will get by distributing compute and AI models down to the lowest levels of our military.

Encryption code, for example, was previously ruled to fall under free speech protections. There is an argument against allowing centralizing and censorship of digital spaces as well, regarding them as a kind of common space since there is a barrier to entry in networking at the level of Internet Service Provider infrastructure. We need a diverse market of competing open AI models, local compute, social networks, etc. A centralized internet and centralized AI have severe risks within the domains of psychological and information warfare, which play out across the public digital arena, but to go further in that discussion we would have to depart from the scope of the kinetic warfare focus of this article. Suffice to say, the most dystopian and existentially risky outcomes are plausible if centralized AI should win, whether by our own hand or the hand of the enemy, who will surely centralize control over their models as soon as they gain an advantage.

Deterrence via Force Projection

Another point worth addressing when discussing CONUS defense is the idea that “the bomber always gets through”, which is probably true regarding drone swarms. However, regarding the homefront, Ukraine has shown first that the effects of long-range drone attacks can at least be mitigated significantly, and that it is economically optimal to do so. Furthermore, the striking arm we are also building alongside the defenses will serve as a deterrent, since nuclear doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction is insufficient for the aforementioned reasons. If we can threaten to do unto our enemies as they wish to do unto us, and indeed if we actually regularly exercise this capacity in the global low-intensity ongoing war, then we will make them think twice before hitting us.

The Core Principle: Endless Distributed Adaptation Capacity

The single principle of this piece is this- Stop buying end products and start buying the ability to produce them, at scale, sovereignly, and forever – doctrine here being one of those end products. The victor that emerges from the next several years will have built the meaningfully decentralized version of what we have described here, meaning distributed compute, sensors, swarms, command, cognition, industry, and authority, with the standards and alliances to match. The rallying cry, in the end, is the architecture. In the last great war, we firebombed cities, preemptively invaded neutral countries, and of course ultimately resorted to nuclear weapons. The political license for a national revitalization as a form of deterrence seems, by comparison, an easy pill to swallow.

Note from author (Xen)- For those who wish to understand not merely the how but the why, or who have comments, or who desire greater breadth or depth of understanding: Over the coming weeks I will be sharing additional information to my personal Substack and website. As for my co-author, Matthew A. Creedican, you can find him on LinkedIn.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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“This is not at all a strategy-driven [FY 2027 defense] budget. This is a budget-driven budget. If you look at the Truth Social posts by the President [Trump] and the statements of the people around him, he [President Trump] makes very clear that this budget was driven by a budget number, a budget target, an arbitrary level that was set based on five percent of last year's GDP…They set this arbitrary level and then at relatively the last minute in the budget development process the [Defense] Department was told come up with a request that gets you to this number, this $1.5 trillion number. And so they did.”

That was Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute and one of the nation's top experts on defense strategy and the defense budget, speaking last Tuesday at the Brookings Institution as part of a panel on The FY 2027 defense budget: How much is enough?

Remember, as I wrote last week, the Trump FY 2027 defense request is for $1.15 trillion with another $350 billion request to be placed in a FY 2026 reconciliation package; and there now also is the new FY 2026 supplemental request, which has another $67 billion for the Defense Department.

House members have been weighing all the defense numbers and this week may be voting on a FY 2026 reconciliation package of $95 billion with only $73 billion for defense – far less than what was being sought.

Last Tuesday, Harrison went on to explain what may have been going on: “I say it is absolutely not a strategy-driven [FY 2027 defense] budget because they didn't have to make hard choices. They made some easy choices.”

As an example, Harrison said, “Do you want, you know, a fourth generation fighter jet? Buy some new fourth generation [F-15s]; or do we want to continue buying the fifth-generation fighters like the F-35 we have in production; or do we want to invest in sixth generation fighters? Do all of them, right? You can do all three at once, if you have a virtually unlimited budget, you don't have to make those hard tradeoffs.”

And, in fact, all three are included in the proposed FY2027 defense budget.

But Harrison goes on to suggest another way to view this Trump defense budget giant increase saying, “There's still a limit to how much the department can consume in terms of this funding…because I don't think they [the Trump budgeteers] actually intend this to be like a one-year budget authority number, especially with the reconciliation [set at $350 billion]. I think it is actually more like a five-year budget number that they're trying to get pre-funded up front, but they actually plan to spend it at a slower pace over the next five years.”

Harrison also looked at “the parts that I think absolutely don't belong in here are these big pots of money they created in defense-wide accounts that have very little description with them.”

For example, he picked out “$54 billion in the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) line item. That is a single program element that's got $54 billion in it,” Harrison said. “That's unprecedented. If you read the budget description with it, it gives very little detail. You know, it's [clears throat] supposed to be investments in drones and things like that, but like tell us

quantities, tell us specific types of drones, like tell us what you're going to be using it for, and that detail is not there.”

Harrison went on, “It appears they haven't figured that out yet, so I think $54 billion is quite a reach, trying to ask for that much money for something that has not yet been well defined. So, I think that there are areas here where they've really overshot and they've tried to just throw everything in there and ask for a super high number. And I wonder if they almost expect that they're not going to get that full number -- that Congress will cut them back down quite a bit. But they were just trying to reach that overall $1.5 trillion level.”

As Yahoo Finance pointed out earlier this month, the $54 billion for DAWG sought for FY 2027 is 243 times greater than what DAWG got this year, and “now exceeds the entire Marine Corps budget request of $52.8 billion and represents nearly 15% of the entire $350 billion reconciliation package.”

Harrison’s view: “You get to the endgame, Congress is going to have to sort through this and say, ‘Okay, what are the what things in here are serious things that really do need to get funded one way or the other, and we'll have to figure out how to make that happen, and what are the other things that were just budget gimmicks or just filler?’"

Harrison was not the only expert on last Tuesday’s Brookings panel.

Joining him were David Wessel, who runs Brookings’ tax and fiscal policy in the economic studies program; and Mara Karlin, professor at John's Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, who has worked for six Defense Secretaries over her career.

Wessel took a broader financial view saying, “The President is proposing a big defense budget at a time when we have unsustainable fiscal trajectory, and so I think that raises an important question and that question is…budgeting is about tradeoffs and the President and Congress at the moment seem to be avoiding trade-offs. There are ways we could offset if defense spending is really important. We should think about ways to pay for some of it either by cutting some other places in defense or raising taxes. And there's some ideas floating around on that, but none of them are politically popular.”

Wessel also raised two other issues: “I think it also requires some trust on the part of the public that the money is being well spent and that relies on Congress doing oversight. And secondly, that we are sticking with a military that is nonpartisan and follows the leadership of the President and the Congress, but is not totally politicized. And I'm afraid that the trust in the military is being eroded by some of the personnel decisions that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is making. And I think that's a problem.”

As for Karlin, she referred to the Trump national strategy and focused on what she called “a break with the bipartisanship that has characterized how folks have thought about these threats for a long time.”

Karlin noted, “The real emphasis of this [Trump national] strategy is on the Western Hemisphere, right? The real threat is seen in this strategy as these alleged narco-terrorists as they're so named…So, that's the priority.”

But, she adds, “You then see China mentioned, but in a pretty circumscribed way, just the first island chain. And in general, the language reads a lot softer than almost any recent defense strategy. You see a desire to downgrade involvement in European affairs, a little bit of mention of the Middle East, but in no way signaling that we would be starting this massive [Iran] conflict. And so here's where I think, there's some confusion worth highlighting because traditionally a national defense strategy is a decoder ring. It's going to tell you where the Secretary of Defense will put their energy and attention.”

“When we look at this budget, this very large budget, that's really at kind of World War levels,” Karlin said, “and frankly, the number [$1.5 trillion] isn't really merited by the strategy.”

She explained, “If one were really to just prioritize the Western Hemisphere and this quite circumcised focus on China as a major threat, and not be involved in most other regions of the world, in fact, the Trump administration could have put out a quite tiny defense budget request. So I leave you with a bit of perplexity.”

Two more things Harrison mentioned need recording.

“I forgot to address the [Trump] battleship issue,” Harrison said at one point, “because you know that's in here and far from defending it, I think that's one of those examples of things that got thrown in because they didn't have to make tough choices.”

Then he explained, “No one in the Navy can say with a straight face that we're going to go from starting a brand-new, clean-ship design in FY 2027, to procuring the lead-class [battle]ship in FY 2028, to going to all the way by FY 2031 being at full rate production, ready to buy them at one per year. That doesn't pass the laugh test…And so are we just setting ourselves up to spend a few billion dollars chasing, you know, this weird idea before we eventually have to cancel it and then things go back to the way they were before.”

Finally, Harrison said, “I think there needs to be some fundamental look on the congressional side at just how do we reform the budget process to get it working again; open the aperture to things like changing the start date of the fiscal year [which now begins October 1], re-jiggering the committee structure.”

I believe Harrison is questioning why each year the Armed Services Committees in both the House and Senate each authorize spending programs, and then the House and Senate Appropriations Committees set the actual dollar-level of funds made available for that year.

“You know,” Harrison said, “I'm talking a lot of third rails here, but I think we're at that kind of point like we were in the early 1970s where Congress realized it [the budgeting process] just wasn't working. I think that they need to do some serious inward-looking reform like that.”

I agree, having twice worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1960s, and followed defense spending over the past 60 years. Harrison is right – the Legislative Branch system for passing Executive Branch funding needs to be repaired.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief