The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war

The dynamic Ukraine battlespace has provided a needed jolt to a system that has long been too slow to change.

For several decades, military reformers such as retired Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix have pleaded with the Pentagon to stop buying wildly expensive but vulnerable aircraft carriers and fighter jets and instead focus on getting vast numbers of cheap drones. But nobody seemed to listen.

“Buy Fords, Not Ferraris” was the title of Hendrix’s iconoclastic 2009 polemic for inexpensive survivable systems. Aircraft carriers, he wrote, “have become too expensive to operate, and too vulnerable to be risked in anything other than an unhostile environment.” Similar arguments applied to exquisite systems beloved by all the services.

Hendrix became so eager for change that he argued the Navy needed a skunk works to reinvent itself for the 21st century. He proposed using Lake Michigan, away from prying Chinese eyes, to create an “Area 52” experimentation site for autonomous naval systems. He imagined it as a Navy version of the Air Force and CIA’s famous Area 51 test site in Nevada.

Read Full Article