It has long been clear that Israel is our most important ally. The fecundity of Israeli technology will be more important to building a second American century than anything the Germans, the French, the Brits, or even the Taiwanese can offer. That’s been clear for a while.
But here is a new thought. What we now know, since the thwarted Iranian attack and the neat Israeli response, is that today Israel is our most militarily potent ally. There is no ally that could do more for us in an actual war.
No nation has ever so totally rebuffed a massive combined missile attack—cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and those quite good Iranian drones—as the Israelis did on April 13. Though the U.S. and some of the Arab states assisted, Israel pulled off a feat America could not duplicate today if such an attack were scaled up to U.S. size.
Several months ago I wrote a series of pieces called The End of Force Projection (Part I is here) explaining how various modes of warfare were becoming implausible.
Most implausible is the seaborne attack by one continental power against another. The combination of long-range missiles--even if not hypersonic—and universal satellite coverage make the current navies of the world useless against major powers.
The Navy Sinks
The navies could never run; since satellites they cannot hide. Even if we can defend our carrier fleet—and the Navy’s Aegis system is awesome—we cannot protect transports. We can’t put an Aegis on every supply ship, most of which could not survive a single missile strike. The financial and moral cost of sending such a force over the sea only to lose 90% of the ships, soldiers, and equipment would ruin a nation.
The second least plausible mode of warfare, I argued, is the airborne attack. Because missiles beat airplanes and lasers increasingly beat both even if a carrier survived its air wings could not. Israel just showed how impotent even a missile attack can be; five years from now offensive missiles will be even less of a threat.
Attacks from the air remain somewhat more plausible than attacks by sea only because the human cost of defeat would likely be somewhat less.
When I made that argument, only a few months ago, my sense was that the airborne attack might remain viable for another five or even ten years as laser technology, and even more important the U.S. military’s commitment to that technology, matured.
Israel moves up the schedule
What Israel proved last week is that airborne attack—against a major power—is already implausible, against any major power with the will and resources to commit to air defense.
Oh, and the other thing Israel proved is that it is a major power.
To see just how completely irrelevant Israel has demonstrated the air forces of the world to be, imagine for a moment that the Iranians had sent a manned bomber fleet against the Israeli defense. The carnage, the loss of life and treasure would have been crippling. The mullahs might well have fallen.
Stealth is a myth
Do not comfort yourself that our bombers are “stealth.” Stealth is a myth. It is a pre-AI technology. For now it can still fool second-rate powers. It might fool the Russians. It cannot fool the Chinese or the Israelis or any power that has built an AI into its defense system. With the advent of AI It’s not possible to move any large object through space at speed and not leave a detectable signature.
AIs can’t think. That’s all nonsense. What they can do is process millions of times more data than a human millions of times faster. Radar, which stealth technology was devised to beat, operated originally by creating a simple signal that one human operator could track, a blip on a screen. Today AI managed radar, lidar, and more track movement across multiple parameters and pull clear signals out of what, to any human operator, would look like noise.
The thwarted Iranian attack confirms also that the advantage in warfare is shifting to the defense even for major powers. Israel’s triumph was on the defense. Today Israel still could go on the offensive against Iran; the precision strike on that Iranian nuke center demonstrated as much. But computation is cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Within this decade, probably, most second tier powers will all have powerful AI driven air defenses. Then even Israel will find attacking from the air has become far more difficult and perhaps implausible.
What should the U.S. do with this information?
Cut $250 billion from the defense budget and…
The 2024 budgets for the U.S. Navy and Air Force sum to somewhat more than $460 billion. That number should be reduced by at least half. We should never build another aircraft carrier, or indeed another capital ship. Quite likely we should never build another manned combat aircraft.
The Navy and Airforce we have are more than sufficient against second tier powers; both will soon be useless against superpowers. The Army similarly needs no more manned aircraft; forty years ago Soviet army helicopters were being shot down by stone-age Afghan tribesmen armed with U.S. Stinger missiles.
The Navy and Air Force budgets for stocks of advanced weaponry—missiles, lasers, air defense-- should be retained.
…give it to Israel
We should then take the money saved and give it to Israel. The Saudis and the UAE and Kuwait and whomever should chip in as well. In exchange we ask Israel to build what they have, and whatever they come up with next, for us.
The U.S. DoD would want to administer the money itself even on projects driven by Israeli intellectual property. That would be a mistake. One of Israel’s great strengths is its ability to make great stuff on the cheap. It’s how Israel survived during the decades when it got little to no help from the West.
U.S. funding would inevitably undermine Israeli thrift as it does today in joint Israeli-U.S. projects such as Iron Dome. Yet some of that virtue might be preserved if Israel handled the money, chose the subcontractors and all that sort of thing.
To the same end, we should allow the Israelis to sell the weapons they make for us to any friendly nation. Since every other nation is more cost conscious than we are, that would put some downward pressure on prices and recoup some of our investment.
What remains of war with traditional navies and air forces gone? Bloody attrition in the trenches. Practically speaking the only nations anyone will be able to go to war with will be their next-door neighbors. And that, as we shall see next time, has huge implications for U.S. grand strategy.
The videos from Ukraine seem to show that infantry is as obsolete as armor in the age of the FPV drone.
Are you neglecting antisatellite warfare? Modern and near-future weaponry at all levels depends on reconnaissance, positioning and communications, which in turn increasingly rely on satellite systems, predictable in their orbits and vulnerable to missile, electronic and laser attack.
Oh, yeah, like totally, Richard. When those ICBM's come arcing over the Pole, and NORAD is helpless to stop them, the IDF will be standing tall in harm's way. God, how much do they pay you to write this garbage?