Fred Stein dialed in Wednesday from Georgetown, Texas. He had just gotten back from his high school reunion.
His sixtieth.
I had nothing. “If I was a comedian I would say something.”
Fred co-wrote Network Centric Warfare with David Alberts and John Garstka back in 1999. I still think it’s “probably the most overlooked book in the world.” A lot of what organizations call agile today traces back to it.
Six months ago (NWO EP148) Fred told me he hadn’t cracked the code on Ukraine. He came back with a theory. He’s been teaching a class on revolutions in military affairs at his local senior university, and he’s convinced we’re living through one right now, built on drones and AI.
The technology usually shows up first, and then doctrine and organization have to change before any of it pays off, which is the part big militaries keep getting stuck on.
His example was the machine gun. The British proved it in Africa and decided it was too inhumane to use against Europeans. The Germans built their own, pushed it down to platoon and company level, and the British and French took a year to figure out what had happened to them.
“They didn’t have the organization to put the machine guns where it was supposed to be, and they didn’t have the doctrine of how to use them.”
We talked about the Tomcat last time he was on. “We bring the Tomcat in and we get this radar and we don’t know what to do with it.” Aircrews had a picture of the fight nobody else had, and doctrine took years to catch up.
Ukraine doesn’t get years.
General David Petraeus (NWO EP93) and Isaac Flanagan put the numbers in Foreign Affairs. Ukraine updates its drone software every two weeks. NATO’s doctrine revision cycle takes 15 to 20 months.
I said it on the show and I’ll stand by it. “Our doctrine could actually kill us now.”
A grain trader runs the drones
Fred brought a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Jillian Kay Melchior. She went into the bunker of Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, who commands Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. Brovdi is a former grain trader. His force is about 2.5% of Ukraine’s armed forces, and he credits it with about a third of all Russian casualties in the past year. Fred was careful with that number (”whether he was being totally honest, I don’t know”), and so am I.
Still. Fred thinks we may need people from that kind of background, folks who are used to fast, high-volume decisions, inside our own development process, whether it’s the Navy, the Marine Corps or anybody else.
He spent his last stretch at MITRE inside the Army’s NIE experiments at Fort Bliss. They cost a good deal of money and they found a lot of stuff. “But very, very little ever got into the systems.”
One group flat refused to share its radar data with him. “Our engagement loops are too tight.”
Fred’s answer: “I’m not trying to interfere with your engagement loops. I just want the information.”
From what Fred read in the Journal, Ukraine broke those silos down. And “all that drone footage also constitutes AAR.”
Fixated on the technology
When I was first introduced to network centric warfare, everybody talked about the technology and almost nobody talked about what you do with the information. That’s where we lost our way with NCW. “What matters here is the process of pushing that information to the warfighter.”
Fred went a step further.
“Data is useless unless it’s combined with experience to produce information.”
Experience. That word matters to me. Boyd put previous experience inside orientation, right alongside genetics and culture, and orientation shapes what you see and what you do about it. Fred got to the same place from the network side, more than twenty-five years after the book, talking about drones.
Dogfighting with the human taken out is close to a closed system. “You can program the heck out of that.” Ukraine is fighting in an open system that keeps changing under you, and the tools that can handle that, reinforcement learning and active inference, “look more like the real OODA loop” than the four-box version doctrine handed us.
Do we still need carriers?
So here’s my edge. I think our leaders in the military don’t have a full grasp of this yet. Go outside the system, find the people who are learning this stuff, and bring them in, “because we can’t do it from within.”
And I hate to say this as a Navy guy. Do we still need carriers? I don’t know. You’ve got to challenge all assumptions, and those things are damn expensive.
Years ago I worked airspace and air and missile defense planning. I spent a week and a half up at Dahlgren. A lot of what I’m watching now, I saw back then. “I knew how to set some of these things up, but nobody wanted to do it. Now you have to do it.” I live in Virginia Beach. My neighbors come home from deployment, and they’re the guys flying these missions.
A company of five
People feel like they’re discovering something new in the way agents work together, whether it’s human-agent teaming or agent-agent teaming.
“It’s not new.”
Fred and his co-authors were writing about this in the 90s, and we learned it building teams in the military. What makes a team is the quality of the interactions, for humans and for agents. That’s the whole idea behind Human-Agent Teams.
I gave Fred a prediction on the show, and I’ll give it to you. “There’s gonna be a small company of five, maybe three people that are going to dominate your company of four hundred.”
It’s coming.
Fred is more careful than I am. “At least for the foreseeable time we require a human in the loop. He may have a companion agent as well.”
His advice for the new commands standing up right now is simple. Go do the AAR on the ones that failed first. Why did NIE fail? Why did small companies almost go bankrupt working with it?
“Go back and try to understand why other organizations like this didn’t work so that at least you will make new mistakes.”
I’ll take that one.
There is No Way Out!
-Ponch
P.S. Fred’s book pick is Linked by Albert-László Barabási, the math behind networks and why the nodes follow a power law. Fred couldn’t pronounce the author’s name, so he spelled the title for us instead. L-I-N-K-E-D.
P.P.S. Fred doesn’t have a Twitter or a Facebook. He does use AI for recipes and his golf game. We use it to cook around the house too. The food’s always good.
Catch the full conversation:
YouTube:
Apple Podcasts:
Spotify:
Buzzsprout:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2109174/episodes/20005915
No Way Out on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/@nowayoutpodcast