For too long Australia and the West assumed that our qualitative edge would overcome any quantitative advantage of our opponents. ⬇️

As Ukraine has shown, large scale war is not won by qualitative advantage. Russia has been able to meet and beat the West’s weapons through relentless innovation and adaption. Likewise Ukraine has leveraged the best the West has provided with sovereign capability and ingenuity to hold off the might of the Russian military. It has been the ability to generate and maintain sheer scale and military mass that has led to incremental advantage in a war like this.

The Lowy Institute recently ran an event focused on ‘the Future of Warfare‘. Christian Brose, the Chief Strategy Officer of Anduril Industries and author of ‘The Kill Chain’ considered the challenge of the West facing war with China burdened by a legacy military industrial complex and a Western way of war that sought quality over quantity and the exquisite over good enough:

“The systems we are so over indexed on are so enormously expensive, so complex, so exquisite that it is incredibly difficult to imagine how you could scale production on any timeline that would be relevant.”

As the iron laws of battlefield economics are relearned, the West has realised that the exquisite edge is fleeting and boutique bombs and artisan arms are not well suited to large scale war. Quantity has a quality all of its own and if mass matters, it follows that our industrial base needs to be able to manufacture the consumables of combat on mass. Mass production, simplicity of design to assemble and operate and efficiency in manufacturing are vital in supplying and sustaining large scale combat operations. When the USA was the manufacturing megalith of the world it was able to pivot its extensive industrial base to become the Arsenal of Democracy:

“The reason the Arsenal of Democracy was able to spin up and produce such a massive amount of capability during World War II was that the type of military systems that were producing were relatively simple and straight forwards”

Christian Brose expands on his thoughts about how the West needs to do Defence differently in his classic essay for the Hoover Institution ‘Moneyball Military‘. Identifying ways to offset our military capability vulnerabilities and leverage opportunities to build military strength in unconventional ways will be critical in enabling the Free world to restrain the rise of the Autocrats in the Indo Pacific and elsewhere.

Food for thought!

📸 via Department of Defence