- US special operators need cheap weapons for future conflicts, and they need a lot of them.
- The war in Ukraine has shown the value of having lots of cheap weapons, such as drones.
- Operators and industry will need to work closely together to develop the right capabilities.
US special operators are going to need a bunch of cheap, expendable weapons to fight a fast-paced, high-intensity, and materially demanding future war, US military leaders said recently.
And those weapons are going to need to be able to be rapidly modified to adapt to ever-changing battlefield threats.
At the National Defense Industrial Association's US Special Operations Symposium last week, special operations leadership and other military officials spoke about the shift from counterterrorism and counterinsurgency to great-power competition and the challenges and opportunities that presents for the US military's elite special operations forces, or SOF.
Looking at a potential future conflict between the US and a major military power, like China or Russia, officials said a war like that would be fought across a range of contested domains, such as space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Dominating these warfighting domains will be decisive, they said.
Preparation for this fight has led to increased demand for innovation and the acquisition of new weapons and combat technologies.
Lt. Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson, the director for Joint Fore development, pointed to Ukraine's success in crippling Russia's Black Sea Fleet with uncrewed surface vessels as an example. There are lessons to learn from the Ukraine war, he said, especially when it comes to drones.
The general said "there are a lot of cheap things you can do to have an asymmetric advantage."
US special operators are often among the first American troops to get their hands on new technologies, and they work closely with the defense industry to develop new systems.
Anderson said that he wants to see "technologies that are truly cheap in the hands of the operators" so that they can "experiment" with them and offer feedback.
Getting tech acquisition right
The key to developing these capabilities, he said, is rapid-cycle iteration. Industry and operators should work closely to develop new systems, edit them based on observations, and switch out capabilities quickly for different missions, he suggested.
But these systems need to be affordable, Anderson said, capable of being bought on a large scale for relatively low cost.
That's been important in Ukraine, where soldiers burn through thousands of drones and where new drone companies are constantly building newer, cheaper hardware and updating software based on current battlefield challenges.
In recent years, the Pentagon has been moving to achieve mass through drone warfare, as seen in Ukraine. The Replicator Initiative, announced in 2023, is the Department of Defense's effort to streamline the development of uncrewed systems with key industry partners, with the goal of deploying thousands of multi-domain drones at speed and scale.
The biggest challenges, though, lie in how DoD obtains new systems and works with the defense industry. Similarly, technologies related to artificial intelligence, autonomy, uncrewed systems, and electronic warfare are moving at breakneck speed, meaning what is innovative today may be obsolete tomorrow.
Chris Brose, the chief strategy officer at Anduril Industries, said that a potential solution to this problem is the creation of flexible systems that can be updated quickly.
Brose said that Anduril's work with DoD on countering drones with US Special Operations Command largely began with trying to solve problems that operators were experiencing on the field.
"It started with units that were deploying," he said, with "capabilities that were not working, with threats that were outpacing them, with technology that was rapidly getting better but they were incapable of incorporating."
Those challenges led to an understanding that operators and industry need to work together and quickly, adjusting in real time in different locations against different threats.
While much can be learned from the war in Ukraine, there are still unanswered questions, especially about how AI will evolve and what humans will actually be needed for in certain combat roles. SOF leadership said that autonomous capabilities and AI may potentially change what roles operators play on the battlefield, such as flying drones.
