Grand Strategists: We will bake a cake and serve it with dinner.

Me: Uh, well, so we don't have flour or sugar, a pan or anything to make icing with, and the oven is broken. So...

Grand Strategists: A Cake It Shall Be!

Me: Are you listening?

People talk about things like a cheaper, unmanned, more distributed, more expendable military and I'm all: they haven't figured out how to get unmanned underwater vehicles to avoid fishing nets yet that I'm aware of. It's a great goal, it's a direction. It's not soon.

My concern is that there are too many "big thinkers" who are working with bad information because the hype machine tells them AI and unmanned is the future. And it probably is. But as of right now, it's still a ways off. And you don't want to make force structure decisions on it.

In my cake example: If we're talking about dinner like next week I can solve all the issues laid out above: get the oven fixed, go to the grocery store, and procure a cake pan. But if dinner is in three hours, we need to figure out what we already have that would work.

There is a lot of cool stuff happening in the unmanned and AI world. Some mind-blowing stuff. But university labs are not a fielded, globally deployable military capability. In fact it's probably a decade or more between the lab and being in the hands of a warfighter.

It's unsurprising that the places where unmanned technology is making the most impressive advancements is in the air. Because we've been fielding aerial drones for a couple decades and more now. But UUVs and USVs are still in their infancy.

I'm also worried that we are overestimating our ability to make a UUV and USV conops work, if the goal is to save money. It may very well end up being more expensive and more dependent on lots of exquisite communications nodes to make it work. And if those go down... Well.

Take that BAMS drone shot down by Iran: It was packed with incredible tech, but it cost about half as much as an LCS. Now it was not built for value but still, reason for pause when your aircraft costs $200 million.

CNO says we cant keep wrapping $2 billion hulls around 96 missile tubes. Thats right, it seems like anyway, but should we bet the power projection farm on something new that we haven't fielded yet and dont know if it will work?

Anyway, I don't have the latest and greatest information, but I do my best. Maybe we're further along than I think. But if so, it would be helpful for the military to communicate it.