Bob Work, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, will tell you the Third Offset is the next generation of warfare. It may take at least ten years but it will showcase the rise of the machine, and the decline of the human in the business of operating weapons systems. The speed at which weapons systems will have to act when going from intelligence collection to kinetic action will no longer allow for determination by human beings, but by on-board software which will require massive amounts of data and make instantaneous decisions at speeds that will be impossible for the traditional command and control systems to match.
Today’s “Great Powers” have reemerged at near-peer capability where the U.S. will no longer enjoy technical superiority. Each will employ weapons platforms with the capability to see and decide, while operating in a time frame and scale impossible for human intervention. These are the machines which will fight our wars for our combatant commanders. To complicate it further, these will not be individual platforms commanded and controlled individually, but they will be platforms operating in tandem with other weapons systems—weapons systems burden-sharing on intelligence collection and weapons employment. Battle plans at that time are not going to mean the same they do today. During the Third Offset it’s going to be a combatant commander with hundreds—if not thousands—of platforms all needing intelligence updates and all providing intelligence updates. The traditional human battlefield commander will be incapable of keeping pace.
“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62
Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.
Subscriber+
