Michael Peck Talks Future Warfare with Brookings Institution

Another excellent article from Michael Peck - this time, interview PW Singer of the Brookings Institution, for Foreign Policy. There's a LOT of meat to this article, but here's one particularly critical point.

One of the lessons of history is that there is no such thing as a permanent first-mover advantage. The British invent the tank, inspired by science fiction. They come out of World War I with 12,000 tanks (which is the same number of unmanned ground vehicles that the U.S. military has now), but by the time World War II comes, the Germans had figured out how to use the tank better. There is a more diverse battlespace now in terms of the range of actors out there. It's not just facing off against the Soviets or the Viet Cong. It's a mix of adversaries, from states to nonstate actors that include terrorist groups, to criminal groups, insurgent groups, and private military companies. There are now domains such as cyberspace that didn't exist a generation ago. It is a more complex setting. In a video-game setting, those challenges are a good and a bad thing. It's a more complex world to build, but also a more complex world to create neater characters.

Go read it all. There's much to discuss.

By: Brant