The text below is a transcript of the audio from Episode 36 of Onward, "Breakthroughs in military technology: Lessons from history and future implications".
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Ben Miller:
Professor Andrew Wilson, welcome to Onward.
Andrew Wilson:
Thank you, Ben. Appreciate it.
Ben Miller:
So I wanted to do this episode because we invest in technology and there's this revolution underway with AI and autonomous drones and autonomous weapon systems. It feels like we're on the cusp of a new era in military technology, and every time I try to think about the future, I always look at the past and try to draw lessons from history.
So I thought it would be interesting to get your thoughts on some of the historical consequences of these big breakthroughs because they're political consequences, societal, economic. New empires get launched and whole social structures get reordered. First off, could you walk us through a few examples of these sort of big technological breakthroughs and what the consequences have been to them?
Andrew Wilson:
Absolutely. When you hear a lot of the classic, it's the rise of feudalism in Europe. A lot of people chalk this up to the introduction of the stirrup, which allowed heavily armored knights to lean forward on their chargers and basically become an unstoppable force on the battlefield. So that's a small piece of military technology that actually came from the east, from Asia.
The cascade effect was, if you're going to have these knights with their very expensive horses with their very expensive armor, they needed a source of steady income. So you start to see these knights becoming the feudal aristocracy in control of fiefdoms. A dedicated piece of territory that would go to a single family.
They would have serfs underneath them. So here you have a piece of military technology related to capabilities on the battlefield that then has cascading effects over society and orders European society for much of medieval period, something closer to our own time. The global order in which we live is clearly a product of the Second World War, and the technological world we live in is clearly an outcome of the Second World War, where you have these two superpowers that, for probably the first time in world history, committed themselves to unceasing technological innovation when it came to the national security sector.
This is when we get. The origins of the defense industrial complex or the military industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about. So we have these societies that are constantly trying to innovate the idea that military technologies, which. Used to prevail for hundreds of years, now only prevail for decades, if not only a few years.
Um, and that has had cascading effects on our world, right? This is how we get the internet. It's out of DoD projects. This is how we get that transistor. This is how we get jet aviation as a normal thing of everyday life. So that's something near and dear to our hearts. One piece of military technology that I really like is the ancient Greek trireme.
This was a battleship that was about 120 feet long, about 15, 16 feet wide, had a crew of about 200. That's a lot in a small ship. And the Athenians invested the strike from a silver mine in building a big Navy of these things. And unlike Ben Hur, which you might've learned from Ben Hur. These galleys are actually rowed by paid professionals, by paid citizens.
And what happened there was the investment in this particular military technology required the buy in of the lower classes of the Athenian state into the policies and strategies of the government. So there's a direct link between the adoption of this particular form of military technology and the rise of Athenian democracy.
It was also connected to the fact that most of the raw materials for these ships had to be imported. So this created an impetus for expanding trade networks. So commerce came along with that. So this is how Athens becomes increasingly wealthy and how it becomes an empire. And of course, in the West, we derive many of our political traditions from Athenian democracy.
And a lot of that had to do with this one very specific type of technology that they developed. And then that went with military. issues that went with commercial issues. You also needed a large supply of skilled craftsmen. So you need a sort of a defense industrial complex in Athens to first build and then repair these ships over the long time.
So you see the starts of these sort of institutional dimensions of strategy, as we call them. You have to build not just the military institutions, But the non military infrastructure capable of maintaining standing militaries that can operate year in, year out.
Ben Miller:
Let me recapitulate some of that because that was a lot in just a few paragraphs. The reason I wanted to center this conversation around these breakthroughs is that you have breakthroughs, you said the stirrup as an example, or the trireme. had absolutely dramatic effects on how society was organized.
So in the case of Athens, the birth of democracy, and the case of Europe, a thousand years of feudalism, was centered around technology that didn't change from maybe 500, 600 AD to 12, 1300 AD. These are what look like relatively small technological breakthroughs to compare to what's happening now, and they had these huge effects on social and political order.
Andrew Wilson:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The huge effects on the social and political order. And a lot of the technological innovations take place outside of a military specific context. So obviously the reason that we have a bronze age is because You can make bronze at lower temperatures than it takes to smelt iron. So while the copper and tin are much more rare than iron ore, it was pretty much the only metal that you could really fashion into weapons and armor, and other luxury goods and the like.
Obviously gold and tin you could work with and things like that, but something that was of sufficient availability so that you make weapons out of them. When somebody figures out Some sort of commercial production facility, how to get furnaces hotter. Suddenly now you have workable iron and iron is something like 30 or 40 times as plentiful as copper is on earth.
So suddenly you have a non military innovation in terms of smelting that then has huge impacts on the ability to mobilize for warfare because now you have a plentiful supply of iron ore. Another thing about bronze is you need tin to make it work. And tin is only really available in Central Asia, and I believe on the British, I think in Wales, I think they have a lot of tin there as well.
So that had to be imported to places that simply didn't have it. So bronze weaponry in the Bronze Age was an era in which only the elites could afford these sorts of weapons. Whereas now when you have the Iron Age, It's that small technological innovation allows for a fundamental transformation, both in warfare, but also you now can have iron implements and used in agriculture means that you could have massive increases in food production, which means you could have massive increases in populations, which then allows you to field ever larger numbers of soldiers, which you can more readily equip with standardized iron weapons.
Ben Miller:
Everybody can have a sword rather than only a few,
Andrew Wilson:
Yes, exactly.
Ben Miller:
And so you can have a huge army. So when I think about many of the major technological breakthroughs in history, I end up either seeing or wanting to organize them around certain patterns. Let me just name the three and then you may have more, you may refine or change the ones I have. But what you're describing, one, is a democratization of What technology does is democratizes often military power, so only some people could have bronze weapons and then iron because why it's spread so more people can have it, which changes the power structure of society. So democratization is a pattern
The other two are the technology centralizes power or decentralizes power. And the third one is that often the power, military technology accrues to the offensive or accrues to the defense, And so I went out and actually built a grid looking at every major technology and charting it by, is it expensive to make or is it cheap to make?
Because if it's cheap and easy, then obviously it becomes very widespread, democratized, like a stirrup. Or if it's expensive. Tank. Like not everybody has a tank or aircraft carrier.
Andrew Wilson:
True, true. Yes. Lumpy capital. Exactly.
Ben Miller:
Yeah, lump. Right. So you need a large central government in order to spend a few billion dollars on a nuclear submarine. How do you think about those patterns? Do you think that there are other really key ones? And then if you do think those are worth diving into, how do you think about them?
Andrew Wilson:
I think both of those, actually all four of those trends can operate simultaneously. You mentioned the introduction of, you might think about the introduction of the gun and the implication that had for the feudal aristocracy. Now, when you can basically outgun somebody who spent the ancient equivalent of a billion dollars on their kit with a relatively cheap weapon that's relatively easy to operate rather than a feudal knight who has to spend his entire life training for it.
I always, when I talk about these technologies and these revolutions in military affairs, but I make reference to that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy's confronted in the marketplace by the Master Swordsman, right? He's the apotheosis of aristocratic warfare.
Here's a guy who's trained his entire life to master swordsmanship. And Indy is he's a farm kid and all he has is a handgun and that simple piece of military technology democratizes the exchange, right? The someone who's not a professional warrior has the upper hand because of that piece of technology.
Ben Miller:
He shoots them. For those who have, okay.
Andrew Wilson:
Them. Yeah. It's from a 21st century context, it's a cold blooded scene, but it got a laugh in the eighties. But it points to how entire socioeconomic and cultural structures built around aristocratic warriors can be overcome by essentially rudimentary technology. So, you have the ability for the little guy to fight back against the holders of power.
But at the same time, you have a tension there with, okay, once this technology comes online, does the advantage accrue to the smaller groups that are armed with them? Or is it something that if a state is able to mobilize mass resources? So, we see in the ancient Near East how the introduction of iron weapons Demolishes the chariot as the centerpiece of ancient warfare.
This happened in China as well, where the introduction of standardized iron weapons. Undercuts the traditional aristocracy, which are chariot mounted archers. Chariot driving is a highly skilled thing. Firing a long bow from a chariot is even more highly skilled. If you can confront that with 500 young farm boys with rudimentary training, all carrying standardized weapons made of quality iron, then you're undercutting the existing.
Political system in some places that might also end up transforming warfare where you have states that thing about cherry warfare is that the king would have his armies, but quite often, the subordinate aristocratic lineages would have their own private armies. So, it had an element of elite democracy to it.
So, if you're going to go to war, say, you were the Duke of New Jersey, you'd have to get the counts of Cumberland. So, it had an element of elite democracy to it. So, if you're going to go to war, say, you were the Duke of New Jersey, you'd have to get the counts of Cumberland. And the marquees of Monmouth and Mercer to agree to show up on a particular day and bring their own private armies with them, right?
So the king wasn't ruling outright. He had to cobble together these feudal coalitions to bring together these private armies. In ancient China, what we see is a move away from those More democratic breakdowns or shared power with individual states to the rise of highly centralized, autocratic, bureaucratic, and meritocratic states rather than aristocratic run by professionals who are experts in the logistical and institutional requirements of fielding very large armies armed with mass numbers.
Of iron weapons. And you also have states doing this by centralizing iron production. They could actually engage in research and development. So they could come up not only with better weapons, but better plows. And the better plows you have means the more food you can produce, which means the more taxes the state can draw in.
So in some places, these democratizing military technologies actually become the instruments of ever more autocratic states. These multiple trends operating off the train simultaneously. Another example, we might look at the American Revolution, very famously, the patriots run to their homes and they grab their hunting rifle or the shotgun off the mantle and they go out and They fight back against the British.
That might work okay on a couple of occasions, but if you're actually going to meet the British army in battle, the Americans have to get their hands on large numbers of standardized weapons and even more standardized ammunition. So that was not a war that could be won without adopting, in the United States, in the 13 colonies, at least some of the mechanisms of a European state.
Fortunately, we had the French to provide a lot of those weapons for us. So, again, the same technology that essentially democratizes can also lead to requirements of having Of an ever larger state that in some ways is runs across purposes.
Ben Miller:
So I want to try to take these frameworks and. Let me just try to refine them a little bit and then pull them into the present. So there's huge and fairly consistent Consequences for major breakthroughs, right? Typically, there are new empires, new social political dynamics with social hierarchy, ideology, social values changing, and then also economic.
And actually it just, you mentioned economics, but it's It seems to me that virtually all these technologies actually end up encouraging market forces and that generally over time, more military technology has forced more market forces onto political leadership who often resist market forces and just want to have centralized control.
So that seems to be usually the consequences of the technology. And then again, I'm taking this framework, which may be a little bit reductive, whether something is democratized or cheap and easy to produce versus expensive, how that centralizes, decentralizes power, and then how it either accrues to offensive or defensive position.
So one of the reasons I've been thinking a lot about this is I've been thinking about AI, and I'm thinking about autonomous weapons and drones, and trying to figure out among these major patterns what is likely. And so I'm going to posit a position to you and let you Respond. So the big open question among technology people today, is whether AI is going to be open or closed.
And so open is in software world, basically that people share the underlying code. And today, Databricks and Facebook or Meta are out there producing models that they're then sharing for free. These models are very expensive to build. AIs are expensive, but they're sharing it, so after investing billions and maybe tens of billions.
And then the other side, there are those who are pursuing a closed model, that's OpenAI and Google Gemini. And that's, uh, there's this open question whether or not it's going to end up being an open or closed model, and then if it's an open model, it's likely to be inexpensive to manufacture for other people to get access to it, and highly democratized, and if it's a closed model, it's likely to be inexpensive.
Centralized and expensive. And so we're at a forking moment. It seems to me that either way it forks to this expensive centralized or inexpensive decentralized. Either way, it seems to be primarily an offensive weapon. Autonomous weapon systems and AI seem to be primarily the benefits accrue to the offense.
You could walk through both scenarios. I think ultimately it's going to be centralized. And I think that's my expectation, but either way, a million autonomous drones operating with an AI, that's radical departure from the past, whether that's being launched by a nation state or by a. small private army.
Ukraine currently producing, I think, 50,000 drones a month. So how do you think about the future considering the lessons from the past?
Andrew Wilson:
Yeah, I think this sort of goes back to that issue of scale. If you look at, for example, what the Houthis are doing in the Red Sea, Bab el Mandeb Strait, Gulf of Aden. They did not develop this technology themselves. Probably didn't pay for a lot of it themselves. I won't say who's paying for it. But I have my suspicions.
But That's a non state actor using emerging technologies as part of a cost imposition strategy. They're there to harass ships. They're there to inflict costs on the global economy, perhaps do damage to the United States Navy and the like. But you mentioned that a million drones operating under that same system, right?
So the development of these capabilities might be in the open realm, might be a lot of what we're seeing now, but are we going to see small groups capable of scaling this up to, you mentioned, The million drones. Now Ukraine, while nowhere near as rich and powerful as Russia, 50, 000 still a lot. That takes a state with significant state help from several other states to pull that sort of thing off.
So I think this sort of runs into that same, a gun is a good way to sort of unmount a feudal knight. What is that technology going to require when you now have several major states capable of mobilizing those resources? You mentioned the offense versus defense. Obviously, if you look at the cost of admission are much lower with these open source technologies, right?
So, if a non state actor can leverage some algorithms to sequence DNA or something to create biological weapons, that's a bad thing. And that's a lot easier because they no longer require the state infrastructure or the educational infrastructure to produce the types of scientists that come up with that sort of stuff.
They can just either steal it or get by it off the shelf, or Use some sort of open source for that. That would be an example of these being advantageous on the offense. And we see this. In cyber, the ability to write code quickly, create malware fast, but you can also throw AI at defense as well. You can have algorithms that run that are better equipped to catch phishing or spear phishing, right?
Cause I don't know if this is still the case, but the most critical enable of successful cyber attacks is human failure rather than the quality. Get ahead of the dumb mistakes that people make when they open emails when they open links on email. I mean, I think it really. The technology influences the character of the combat, as it were, of the operational stuff, but I think we have to think as well about the more fundamental natures of war, right?
War is still a political act, and strategy is still the process of trying to match your actions to your political purpose, right? It's what these actors want to achieve. So rather than the technology necessarily driving the political objective that they're pursuing is it so we say, usually when you're on the offense, you're pursuing a positive objective.
You want to change the status quo you want to seize a piece of territory in an exit. whereas a negative aim in war tends to be more on the defensive. You want to deny, deter, or prevent an adversary from trying to change the status quo. And I think the Ukraine war, if anything, demonstrates the old maxim that defense is the stronger form of war, for both practical reasons, having to do with the challenges of terrain, but also for psychological reasons, in the sense of Practically, it's easier to defend a piece of territory than it is to take it.
Terrain is a bear. Moving through terrain is highly attritional. The more you move, the higher the cost you suffer. Even if you're moving through relatively friendly territory, there's an attritional factor to movement, whereas staying in one place is much less attritional. And then the generally stronger form of the defense.
Now we've convinced, so we convinced ourselves that Our modern technological suite of capabilities has overturned that historic balance and that the United States has demonstrated consistently its ability to wage highly successful offensive operations, albeit not always achieving our political objectives.
Ben Miller:
And not against a formidable opponent.
Andrew Wilson:
Yes, exactly. Right now, with the reemergence of Russia and especially the rise of China, we're in a maintenance mode. And I think Potentially a shift away from decisive offensive operations to thinking more strategically about the strength of the defense and the role of these technologies in that construct is what we have to be doing a lot more.
That's just my own personal opinion. Does not reflect the position of the United States government, the Department of the Navy or the United States Naval War College. Yes.
Ben Miller:
My next topic because I want to ask you about strategy. I still have questions of applying this framework. Let me just do strategy. I'll come back to the framework because you raise why I'm so interested. And now, as you're saying, is that the global order is shifting with the rise of China and the re emergence of Russia.
And there's a lot of parallels to the past. And because the status quo is, I wouldn't say hegemony in the negative sense, but hegemony in the liberal sense, liberal democracy, and our global competitors don't want to maintain a U. S. hegemony, we have a bias to the status quo, and they do not. That's what So, I see us going to the defensive in the sense that we're trying to preserve a status quo and they're trying to upset it. And so it makes sense that we would be reconsidering the benefits of defense as the historical maxim would suggest. So when I think about strategy, and you are the, literally the expert.
I really just love Basil Littleheart's frameworks and way he thinks about strategy. And so the framework he has, he wrote an entire book recapitulating this, repeating it over and over again, which is that for some reason there's a military leadership bias towards the direct approach, and especially from the dominant status quo orthodoxy defaults to a direct approach. And just to try to explain what that means is that, you know, World War I is famous for people just sending waves after waves of men against the trenches and dying and just keep doing it for years on end. That's a direct approach. An indirect approach you Would be to go around, to flank, to do something unexpected, something deceptive, and frequently my understanding is that often the Western philosophy is a bias towards a direct approach, a decisive battle, and the Eastern philosophy is a bias towards Or has a history of a indirect or more deceptive approach. Here we are looking at an East West War, and I just see all these patterns repeating again. And I wonder what the establishment is doing or thinking about as they now contemplate this new era.
Andrew Wilson:
Wow. Okay. Yeah. That's actually a question. The East versus West strategic culture argument is something that I've spent a lot of time working on. And Little Heart actually says, you're familiar with Sun Tzu's Art of War, right?
Ben Miller:
Mm hm. Hahaha!
Andrew Wilson:
Which he called that book, especially its emphasis on the indirect approach and deception as the concentrated essence of wisdom on the conduct of war.
He went as far as to say it was almost as good as the stuff he had written, which is a huge admission from Basil Littleheart. And he, of course, is critiquing sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly the Prussian school, or in particular the Prussian theorist Karl von Clausewitz, who talked about centers of gravity and the idea that a direct blow against the enemy's center of gravity was the most decisive means to achieve your political objectives.
And that positive names could only be achieved on the offense. So if you want to change the status quo or decisively impact the behavior of an adversary, it's about mass, it's about power projection. And he chalks that sort of obsession up to The strategic and moral bankruptcy of the First World War, where the lack of strategic imagination, the inability to either find or better exploit indirect approaches.
Led to the unnecessary expenditure of blood and treasure on the battlefield and all of the concomitant political and social upheavals that came with it. Right. World War I does not merely kill millions of people on the battlefield. It leads to the collapse of several, I think, five major empires and the significant weakening of several others followed on by Spanish influenza and all sorts of other things.
And then what the impact that this had on societies, the rise of anti liberal All these sorts of things. So one sort of school of strategic thought might be responsible for the mess that the world of the 1920s and 30s was from little hearts perspective. But another thing when we talk about strategy and technology.
And status quo powers versus revisionist powers is that rising powers tend not to be on the hook for maintaining the status quo. So the United States as a status quo power with global presence has to configure its military for lots of different missions, lots of different problems. If your goal is primarily the recapture of Taiwan and you understand that the biggest thing standing in your way is America's ability to project power, that gives you a lot more strategic focus.
Japan in the late 19th century, it was a rising imperial power, did not have a lot of imperial responsibilities, waged a couple of smart wars, took the money from those wars and was able to invest in the newest technology. It didn't have an old Navy that it had to maintain. It could spend all of its money on buying a new Navy and learning from the best lessons of each other and managed to surprise and defeat the Russians.
Because they had a strategic focus and because it's a rising power, they had the greater freedom of action to focus one dimensionally, strategically, and also to invest in the latest, greatest technology that a status quo power with a lot of institutional financial problems couldn't actually do. Are we in a position like that today, where we have much more focused adversaries?
That are better able to focus their investments in emerging technologies to solve their much more specific strategic challenges, or are we in a situation like the Spanish Civil War Spanish Civil War is the 1930s is the test pit for all the emerging technologies of the day. This is where we see close air support.
This is where we see strategic bombing. We have the mix of regular and irregular forces, all those sorts of things that everybody was intrigued by. It was a proving ground for emerging tactics, doctrine, and technology. So now we have a couple of hot wars. We have the Ukraine. We have the, what's going on in the Middle East, not just merely the offense centric, high technology, Israeli approach to war.
We have this sort of combo approach to the Houthis. And I can guarantee you. Military specialists from other countries are on the ground, potentially in advisory roles or in observational roles. Looking at how this new technology is working in that particular context, but also thinking about how it applies to their more specific strategic challenges.
Ben Miller:
When I think about the greatest risk for the United States, I think it's less about cost, because I think the U. S. actually could afford, if it had to, a lot more. Not that I'm recommending it. I'm more concerned about orthodoxy. They thought of the famous book, John Boyd's, War to Try to Change the Way Fighter Jets Were Made. And I think about that now with it. If, just to hyperbolize it for a minute, if all war is a battle between autonomous weapon systems, that is such a dramatic change to the way we make war. I can imagine the U. S. would be very reluctant to make those types of changes until they have to. And then again, if it's about producing a million drones rather than a hundred really exquisite drones, China will have an advantage.
Andrew Wilson:
Yeah. Some have accused the contemporary us military of becoming more like the German military of the 1940s focused on small numbers of absolutely exquisite systems, hand tooled leather seats and measurement fighters, rather than rolling out just something that's just good enough to throw into the battle.
Yeah, and that there's all these emergency technologies and then the cost calculations start to shift. Yeah, treasure is not really as much of a consideration to the United States, but is blood? One. I'm not going to get into a cultural argument about the value of human life. Are there some political objects that are simply far more valuable in terms of blood for some potential adversaries than they would be for the United States.
This is the question that quite often comes up about Taiwan. Here's an object that the Chinese Communist Party has sold as an existential issue for China and has cultivated a lot of popular passion around it. So the willingness to expend blood for that object would seem to be far higher on the Chinese side.
Is that part of their calculus of trying to figure out to Outvalue of the United States clauses talks about you place a value on a political objective. And the value of that is measured in the magnitude and duration of your effort. So I refer to that as a combination of blood treasure, spirit. Moral forces and time.
I was an asset, right? So how much of those 4 things are you willing to spend for object X?
And if your adversary is willing to spend more. Then that might, is that the essence of deterrence, the investment of technologies that threaten or potentially threaten high costs, depending on what the adversary values specifically.
Ben Miller:
Is the question. About the U. S., is it really not a question about how much China values Taiwan versus how much U. S. values Taiwan? I really question how much China values Taiwan and how much U. S. values the status quo. Because it's not just about Taiwan, it's about all of the trade, we've outsourced manufacturing to China, the financial system, and so, if China invades Taiwan, the entire status quo, geopolitical, economic, society collapses.
And so how much will we actually defend that world order, rather than that island?
Andrew Wilson:
That's again, that's the follow on question. Is that a myopic view if that is the view from Beijing that they value Taiwan. As an individual item more than we do. That seems to be myopic. Because that doesn't factor in the consequences of the violent reassertion or not reassertion, the violent assertion of PRC authority over one of the most vibrant and successful democracies on the planet in the midst of the world's most significant trade route position between several of the world's largest economies and all the implications that has for the whatever you want to call it, the liberal international order or whatever the current buzz phrase is, that's the message that has to be sent back.
I think you mentioned earlier some of the problems of institutional inertia and orthodoxy within big institutions like the Department of Defense. But at the same time, from what I see, yeah, there's a lot of that. But there's also one of the things We have successfully going for us that the Chinese are trying to simulate, but in a limited way, is the really dynamic interaction between the private sector and the government.
A challenge is that the private sector is globalized now. So it's hard to get it to serve purely national interests, but it's a much more open and dynamic system. And I think the points of contact between The U. S. government and the Department of Defense and the private sector are much more robust and multi dimensional than they are in China.
They have the system of civil military fusion, but that is, tends to be a much more of a top down type rather than a two way street. That might just be my inherent optimism. I think one of the things with this, the way the United States organized the defense military industrial complex. It was more than that, it had to do with academics, it had to do with the private sector, it had to do with public education, it had to do with public education, not just your school system, but selling technology and selling technological innovation as a way of life.
And that created a whole ecosystem in the United States. That's something that the PRC is trying to replicate, but trying to replicate under state control. So I think that's a big impediment. But at the same time, as I just mentioned, they have the luxury of greater strategic focus when it comes to their extramural, their foreign strategic challenges.
But they, at the same time, they have far more domestic security challenges than the United States does.
Ben Miller:
The genesis of this episode was that there's an enormous revolution happening in technology, and around AI, autonomous weapons, all of that is originating in the United States. The Defense Department has actually been incredibly progressive, and they've been embracing a lot of these new technologies. Case in point, Anduril just won the autonomous airplane contract as one of the two primes, which is defied all expectations of the establishment.
So my two lines of questions for you is I know you're an expert in China, and also you're, I'm interested in going and looking at historical parallels, depending on which one you think is more applicable here, because we have seen technologies break through, get invented somewhere else, get upstart. We've seen.
Expensive, centralizing technology is useful for the offense. The Ottoman Empire was built on the cannon and took down Constantinople, and There are some parallels here. I'm interested in either line of questioning, either about how you think about China or how you think about historical parallels.
Or even both, because China has a bunch of historical parallels with their warring states.
Andrew Wilson:
Yeah, absolutely.
The challenge for China is. Going back to Warring States, I mentioned some of this earlier. We have the end of the, their equivalent of feudal aristocracy, these chariot mounted warriors who thought of the battlefield as not a place of political purpose, but rather as a holy place where you would spill the blood of your enemies and honor the gods and the ancestors and things like that.
So battle had an end in itself. To, if you read The Art of War, it's a much more of a cold blooded, rational approach. to the use of the military, right? You don't use the military unless it profits, unless it brings tangible benefit to you. Do not deploy your, your armies and don't go into battle unless you're going to come out of it better than you went into it, or at least less worse off than you went into it.
There's a foundational current of strategic thinking in China and a rich strategic tradition. But at the same time, it's a country whose history has proven that Rationality and clear strategic thinking doesn't always prevail. We saw just recently, recently in historical terms, the utterly self destructive behavior of the early People's Republic of China in terms of its catastrophically bad economic policies, the terror of the Great Leap Forward, the famine that followed.
For those of you who've watched the Three Body Problem or read the Three Body Problem, The Insanity of the Cultural Revolution, all that stuff. A century prior to that, there was the largest civil war in history, led by a guy who thought he was God's Chinese son. Killed more people in China than World War I killed on a global scale.
It's a country with a rich strategic tradition, but also one that has suffered immeasurably in the modern period. What's the tension there? Does that create a tension between the sense of, on the Chinese side, this sense of historical grievance when they talk about the century of humiliation? Is that the primary driver of their strategic behavior and of their motivation to embrace these technologies, to fundamentally and finally overturn all of those humiliations, one of which is the partition of Taiwan from the mainland?
Or is it more driven by rational tempered strategic thinking that this is more about creating technologies that will for now stabilize the situation, allow us to catch up and give the United States pause and give the population of Taiwan pause, any sort of unilateral action to change the status quo.
That's a conversation that's really, unfortunately, our relationship with China's. Not in the best place. It's been in a while, and I haven't been since COVID, so those are conversations that we used to have a lot more frequently. Getting off script a little bit, again, ultimately, what are the motivations?
Is it rationality? Is it passion that are driving these decisions to develop these new technologies? One place that the Chinese are talking, obviously the Chinese military is huge and they're, the whole military reform system is trying to do a couple of things. The two big things is to professionalize it, to de corrupt it and modernize it, but also make it related to that much more subordinate to centralized political control.
So something that we take for granted in the United States, that the U. S. military follows the orders of the president, that that's not necessarily the case in China, where the military is itself a powerful political force. And a lot of Xi Jinping's time in office has been trying to assert the authority of the general secretary.
He has constitutionally absolute authority as chair of the central military commission, but in practical sense, does not. His predecessors, he believes, were pushed around by the PLA. You know, a little bit off script there, but that's an effort to modernize the PLA, get it to be more joint, much more akin to the United States in terms of capabilities, the ability to join us in the sense of getting different military branches to interact at a practical and functional level in terms of communications, to rationalize.
The communication systems to make it more expeditionary because it's really a military built essentially for homeland defense. So, to get it more into the power projection business, this is why you have Chinese ships operating in the Gulf of Aden dealing with counter piracy operations. You have the Djibouti base and things like that.
The islands in the South China Sea, for example, a realization that if you're going to develop a carrier force, that you need to extend the reach of your land based aviation or your land based cover forces to allow your carriers to operate farther and farther from your home soil if you do not have overseas bases.
So you have this sort of learning curve in China. So all these manifestations of China's military modernization and the embrace of old technologies like aircraft carriers, new technologies like cognitive science, this sort of intelligence-tization to carry on from informationization. So basically from network centric warfare to the merging of human thinking and computer thinking, making systems more intelligent, bringing AI into that as well.
Looking at ways to create hybrid human computer technology. We're not talking cyborgs here, but just better interfaces between. Human operators in the computer systems that they're operating and trying to, again, this is a rising power taking advantage of unprecedented wealth and technological achievement and China's neighborhoods problematic, but in general, it's had a pretty benign periphery for several decades.
So that has allowed it to focus on internal development, economic growth, but now clearly investing bigger, not overwhelmingly in the military. Of course, they learned a lot of lessons from the Soviet Union about what over investment in the military does to regime survival, to regime longevity, and the economy, both of which are connected.
So, again, a long way to come back to these initial questions is, Is there investment in these emerging technologies, again, about maintaining the status quo and hoping for some future reintegration of Taiwan? Unfortunately, I think the chances of that have declined significantly based on Chinese behavior, especially in Hong Kong, that losing the hearts and minds of the people in Taiwan as a result of that.
So maybe they're only. The main aspect left now is rather than the carrots, it's the sticks to develop these path breaking technologies. And I don't think they're going to launch an invasion of Taiwan on any set date. There would have to be a trigger in my mind. It would have to be something that happened on Taiwan specifically.
That would force their hand. But obviously as any smart power would, or as any power driven by an insatiable sense of grievance, perhaps an irrational sense of grievance, Now that's a dangerous combination.
Ben Miller:
I know sometimes this is called Thucydides Trap, which does help bring it back to the historical parallel to the Peloponnesian War and Athens and Sparta, so do you have a line of thinking around how you get out of this trap? How does the US get out of this trap?
Andrew Wilson:
I have my own issues with the Thucydides Trap as a concept, but essentially, for your audience, it's from Graham Allison's book, Destined for War. Should have had a question mark. The idea that Thucydides Trap is that the basic story of the origins of the Peloponnesian War is that You have this rising, ambitious, unrestrained power in Athens that's just acting in ways that are just so threatening to the status quo power, the old Spartans, these conservative land power guys, that the Athenians with their radical democracy and their triremes spreading empire and trade routes and expecting everybody to become Democrats or at least follow their lead.
That was the spark that caused the war. If you look at the course of history, all the great cases Of rising powers and status quo powers coming into potential conflict. I think it was either 12 out of 16 or 13 out of 17 cases, whatever it was the overwhelming majority of cases. It's and it's a rare thing.
The case of the United States and Great Britain. Where you have the rising United States and the existing superpower, Great Britain, that this was not, at the end of the 19th, early 20th century, this did not end in a major war between the United States and Great Britain. That's an example of a rising power and a status quo power peacefully making that hegemonic transition.
Almost all those other cases, you have this violent transition, and so Graham Allison is looking at the China case, and he glosses Athens onto China, which I find problematic, because a lot of the things that so antagonized. The Spartans about the Athenians have much more in common with the United States,
Ben Miller:
The maritime country.
Andrew Wilson:
much more of a maritime power. China is a much more conservative state, much more homogenous in the sense that Sparta was in the classical age. But again,
Ben Miller:
It's more Germany Britain than Athens Sparta.
Andrew Wilson:
absolutely. But the idea is that This is the setup and that we need mechanisms to sort of dial down minor crises. We don't want Sarajevo moments where one minor crisis like the, again, this was the Britain and Wilhelmine Germany, right? That conflagration in World War I is set off by a minor crisis in the Balkans.
Allison talks about a ship collision in the South China Sea as something that might escalate into a major clash between the United States and China. When I was in China, when the Allison book came out, I had a lot of conversations with Chinese think tank folks about this. And their big concern was that the book was getting so much play in the United States.
So they heard about it, so they read it, and they're like, Wait a minute, is this how Americans are actually thinking about their relationship with China? And I found that really quite interesting. And later on, I know that Allison had a conversation with Xi Jinping about the book, and something came up to the effect of everybody's talking about the origins of the war.
Xi Jinping said, I've read my Thucydides, I'm much more interested in the Melian dialogue. This is where the Athenians tell the Melians that the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must. Is that a reference to China being a strong power and other powers being weak powers? Or is that a reference to It's the United States that engages in hegemonic behavior, which is quite often a label that's placed on the United States, that we engage in what's called bachuanchuy, which is like a hegemonism, that the rules based international orders is our rules, our order, everybody else is supposed to obey the rules.
Anyway, so the Thucydides Trap is interesting in the sense that there's this, the sense that there might be this fundamental underlying inability For these two types of powers to exist simultaneously, and that invariably these disparities between political systems between national ideologies and simply between operating space, right?
The United States has since 1945 taken for granted that. The vast majority of the ocean, the world's oceans, and especially of the Western Pacific, are free for us to operate in. And that's really hard to square with China's national experience, which is during the century of humiliation, China was invaded from the sea so many times and culminating in the absolutely horrific Japanese Invasion and occupation that ended up in the desks of 25, 30 million people.
That's a national history. Very different from that of the United States, the Brits burned down Washington once. That's bad, but that's nothing like what the Chinese experienced in their modern history when it came to maritime insecurity, so, and for a proud. A nation that's made a lot of achievements to have the United States have no component.
Again, this is from their perspective. And I'm not saying anything about us policy here, but from their perspective to have U. S. naval vessels operating freely in waters that they believe are their own could make their sensibilities bridal.
Ben Miller:
There's a line of reasoning in a tech industry that says that AI and autonomous weapons will catapult the US sort of back into primacy. And then that actually could create more volatility with China as China feels like their return to power is suffering a setback. So, Sounds like you have some critiques of some of the main thinkers out there about the way forward.
So, what lines do you think are a positive path?
Andrew Wilson:
Tense sort of break down into two schools. One is that the Chinese are eating our lunch technologically and that we're so bogged down with political infighting and All this other systems maintenance that we have to do that strategic focus and the command economy and the way the Chinese can focus investments on emerging technologies and like and sort of steal a march on the status quo power versus those who say, wait a minute, the United States is the innovation leader still is all these super chips are come from our ideas.
And our level of investment is just that much greater. Our infrastructure is so much better developed than the Chinese that we're going to capture this. That could be, from a Chinese perspective, if that is in fact the trajectory and the way they view it, very dangerous because Some scholars, Michael Beckley, for example, talks about China as a peaking power, that as the demographic crisis comes home to roost, with the aging population, slowing economy, declining government resources, basically means that what's the peak position of Chinese power?
And do they have to make their move before they pass that peak? It's a delicate balancing act. When it comes to Taiwan, I think, and this is just my personal position, making clear that we're fine with the status quo, that we have no interest in encouraging the folks of Taiwan to declare independence.
Again, that's just my own personal opinion. We're not going to stop innovating. We're not going to stop developing technologies. It's hardwired into our DNA and into our economic ecosystem, and that's spread. But at the same time, we shouldn't begrudge the Chinese their ability to invest in their own national defense and in their own defense industrial sector.
Because if that's what makes us secure, and we understand the Chinese leadership wants to have ever greater ownership of their national security. That's fine. It is a sovereign power.
Ben Miller:
The sea change in opinion, I feel like, dates to their unlimited support of the invasion of Ukraine.
Andrew Wilson:
That was a terrible blunder on Xi Jinping's part. And I think while There's been some developments recently. I saw some research that the Chinese, while not selling military technology to the Russians, are selling them lots and lots of trucks and construction equipment, of which the Chinese have a lot and have a lot of excess capacity.
And obviously that's dual use technology, especially considering how important logistics and infrastructure are to the Russian war efforts. So unlike Teddy Roosevelt did in the Russo Japanese war. of the head of state of a rising power, leaning forward and trying to go help two powers that both wanted to get out of a war, negotiate out of a war.
It would be great if Xi Jinping did that. Another rumor is that Madame Zelenskaya actually tried to deliver a letter to that effect, to Xi Jinping. That might be a rumor, but to try to get him to play that mediating role. But it's clear that, that Xi have really sort of tethered themselves. To the Russians and particularly to Putin.
So I think that's been a terrible mistake, and I think that is said, and a lot of, and here's something my friends in China, in my experience, have a hard time processing, is that a lot of the change in Western, and particularly U. S. attitudes towards China, come in direct response to Chinese. actions and behaviors.
They quite often used to ask me, what's changed in Washington? Why is this new consensus coming from? What's changing in the United States when it comes to China? And I said, no, this is how China is behaving. That's causing these changes in attitudes. A few years ago, a report came out from the Hoover Institution that was essentially all the leading China watchers in the American academic community coming together and saying, China is not a good actor as a state.
They can distinguish China from the Chinese people. The Chinese state is not a good actor, especially when it comes to academic freedom and a whole range of other things. So here you have the constituency in the United States, China watchers, China experts like myself, who love China, who are big fans of the country, of the people, of its history, of its culture, of all these things.
The people most likely to give them a break are like, no, that we've had enough. So when you get the academic community, we get both sides of the aisle in Congress, when you get the American business community to be down on China, it's like, wow, this is not about stuff that's changing in the United States.
This is stuff that's changing in response to Chinese behavior.
Ben Miller:
I have friends in China and their stories are bone-chilling. Just the authoritarian shift in freedom and people just getting arrested, having to go to extraordinary measures to get free and then to leave the country.
Andrew Wilson:
China used to be fun up until right before COVID. I had great times in China. I was aware of the nature of the regime and things to watch out for. Yeah. And there used to be thousands upon thousands of American kids who were studying in China, went to China to do business or try to make their fortunes or just backpack around that sort of stuff.
And now Americans studying in China is down in the hundreds and that's all about what's going on in China.
And of course for young up-and-comers, kids want to get rich. China's not as nearly as attractive as it was a couple of decades ago.
Ben Miller:
I think it's much more the former.
Andrew Wilson:
Yeah. It's much more the atmosphere. And I think if the atmosphere changed, then the business prospects would change as well.
Ben Miller:
So at this intersection of technology, strategy, and grand strategy or geopolitics, do you have a sort of parting thoughts and maybe recommendations for people to go read or think about because a lot of people are worried about it and there's not, I think, a lot of good places to go follow and learn from.
Andrew Wilson:
Well, I think there's obviously the classical literature on military technological revolutions. If we look at how these impact the past, Jeffrey Parker's military revolution, Hans Delbruck's the massive histories of war, but fun stuff. I mentioned the Greek trireme, John Hale's Lords of the Sea is just a fantastic book.
This is the guy who rode crew at Yale and studied under Don Kagan, one of the great historians of the Peloponnesian War. Talks a lot about these ships and the impact that the trireme had on Athenian democracy and the like. And that's a really great sort of cross domain study of societies and the military technologies they adopt, or how the military technologies they adopt transform those societies.
A really great book on China today is Innovate to Dominate. Timing Jump, Innovate to Dominate, is a great book on the whole ecosystem of the military technological corporate and educational establishment in Xi Jinping's China. That's also really well grounded in these larger grand strategic issues, geopolitical issues.
It's not just an inside baseball of the various players. It puts it in the context of what specific grand strategic challenges domestically and internationally the PRC confronts. That's a really good primer for folks who want to get a look inside the way the Chinese are approaching these technologies.
Ben Miller:
I've really enjoyed this conversation and I'm deeply appreciative that you took the time, so thank you.
Andrew Wilson:
My pleasure, Ben. I really appreciate it. Hope you have a chance to converse some more.
Ben Miller:
Well, uh, onward.
Andrew Wilson:
Onward.
