- The report argues that emerging technologies are changing the character of conflict by expanding persistent gray-zone aggression, accelerating decision-making, enabling microtargeting, and making truth harder to distinguish from deception.
- The report assesses that the People’s Liberation Army seeks to defeat U.S. forces through system destruction warfare while moving toward intelligentized warfare based on AI, big data, advanced computing, and supporting technologies.
- Early observations from Ukraine emphasize the military value of cloud-based data resilience, secure connectivity, crowdsourced sensing, AI-enabled processing, drones, loitering munitions, precision fires, and logistics under large-scale combat conditions.
- The report identifies U.S. asymmetric strengths in joint and combined operations, empowered tactical leadership, expeditionary logistics, alliances and partnerships, global posture, and the innovation advantages of democratic society.
- Offset-X is presented as a competitive strategy rather than a war plan, operational concept, acquisition list, or research blueprint for restoring U.S. military-technological superiority against potential adversaries, especially China gains in the Indo-Pacific region effectively now globally too today. ಇದ is not.
The report presents SCSP’s Defense Panel Interim Panel Report on how emerging technologies are changing conflict and what this means for U.S. defense strategy. It argues that artificial intelligence, proliferated sensors, software, networks, cyber operations, and human-machine collaboration are compressing decision-making, making concealment harder, enabling individual targeting, and blurring the line between war and peace. It also uses early observations from Russia’s war in Ukraine to illustrate the importance of cloud resilience, secure communications, crowdsourced sensing, drones, loitering munitions, precision fires, and logistics. The report assesses China as the central military competitor, describing the People’s Liberation Army’s focus on system destruction warfare, intelligentized warfare, long-range missiles, integrated air defenses, and information operations intended to constrain U.S. power projection in the Indo-Pacific. It identifies U.S. asymmetric strengths in joint and combined operations, empowered tactical leaders, expeditionary logistics, alliances, global posture, and democratic society. The report’s policy argument is an Offset-X competitive strategy, offered as a framework for future defense action and the next National Defense Authorization Act, with initiatives on distributed networked operations, human-machine teaming, software advantage, operational resilience, partner interoperability, public-private collaboration, war planning reform, and counter-autonomy.
Before the end of this decade, the United States and its allies will face a new kind of warfare.
SCSP
- Fully embrace distributed, network-based operations to survive, out-manoeuvre and overwhelm adversaries. The U.S. military should continue to develop and experiment with how it will employ smaller, highly-connected, organically resilient units.
- Lead the world’s militaries in human-machine collaboration and human-machine teaming. By 2030, the U.S. military should fully integrate human-machine collaboration and teaming into daily operations at every level.
- Gain and maintain software advantage. The DoD should complete a new information architecture that will allow it to be far more flexible, scale on demand, and adapt dynamically.
- Ensure resilience in our ability to sense, communicate, attack and supply. The U.S. military needs to build resilience, including through redundancies, across every link and node of its operations.
Published by the Special Competitive Studies Project. Co-publishers and external authors, where they exist, are credited in the byline above.