The Big Five - 22 March edition
A weekly guide to new readings on modern war and adapting to win
Welcome to this week’s Big Five.
The aim of this wrap up is to provide five recent articles that assist policy makers, military leaders and the broader public to understand the intellectual, physcial and moral challenges of war under modern conditions, and the types of adaptations to organisations, warfighting concepts, training and education, command and control and technology, that will be needed to succeeed in 21st century military endeavours.
This week features stories on anti-drone lasers, responsible use of AI and updates on the war in Ukraine. I have included one podcast among the five.
A couple of readers have also suggested that, to assist those with limited reading time, I choose one article as my top read. As such, this week’s top read is the first article below which examines Taiwan’s laser program to destroy Chinese drones.
1. Taiwan’s Anti-Drone Laser Plan
Bringing down the cost of drone intercepts, so it is cheaper to kill drones than fly them, is a big priority in modern military institutions. The Taiwanese military, understanding that the PLA Air Force will use a multitude of drones to overwhelm their air defence systems and attack land and maritime targets, are developing a new mobile laser to intercept these drones quickly, and crucially, at a very low cost per intercept. Read the full Asia Times story here.
2. Responsible AI for the Military
This piece by Sydney Freedberg in DefenseOne discusses an upcoming meeting in the U.S. to thrash out and hopefully agree on some common principles for the responsible use of AI in military institutions. Given the diversity of nations attending, this is going to be a very interesting meeting indeed. You can read the full story here.
3. Detering War Without Threatening War
A terrific article from Antulio Echevarria from one of my favourite journals, Military Strategy Magazine. In this article, Echevarria argues that with the re-emergence of strategic competition, the West is now reluctant to risk going to war to deter aggression. Further, we can no longer rely on achieving overmatch against lesser threats. Another approach is needed to offset its risk-averse approach to deterrence without abandoning it altogether. You can read the full article at Military Strategy Magazine here.
4. Strenghthening Pacific Bonds
The U.K., U.S. and Australia may expand the existing trilateral AUKUS defence agreement this year to include at least two more allies. Japan and Canada are apparently being considered for membership in the Pillar 2 component of AUKUS, which the collaboration on the research, development and deployment of advanced technologies outside of the core nuclear-powered submarine (which is Pillar One). You can read the full article at Politico here.
5. The Situation in Ukraine
Michael Kofman and Rob Lee have travelled to Ukraine regularly to assess the situation and provide informed analysis on key issues related to the war. In this podcast, Kofman reviews the key issues he observed on his most recent visit to Ukraine in the past month. Listen to this episode of the War on the Rocks podcast here.
FYI on Asia Times - they often verge on being a pro-Beijing mouthpiece.
And I say this as someone who doesn't see malign Chinese influence everywhere. I dropped them from my media monitoring lineup after Honrada and Breyen began to get a smidge too predictable.
As far as lasers go, it's been a generation of folks insisting they were right around the corner yet nobody has yet solved the issue of needing up to ten seconds of continuous exposure for each shot. There's a reason laser defense projects usually get canceled. Unfortunately.
Optically guided shotguns, now...