The Democratization of Air Power (Neon Liberalism #76, with Secretary of Defense Rock)

Samantha Hancox-Li and guest Secretary of Defense Rock talk the state of modern war: the proliferation of drones, the endurance of the human factor, Ukraine's successful strategic bombing campaign vs. Trump's unsuccessful one.

What does the democratization of air power mean for the politics of future wars?

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Transcript

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:00:10]**
Welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I'm Samantha Hancox-Li. Last week I talked with Professor Nicholas Grossman, who argued that we are seeing the end of the Pax Americana — or the rules-based international order, or the liberal international order, or something — that we are stepping off the edge of a time that felt more stable and staggering into a much more uncertain future, one that Grossman argued will be a kind of multipolar anarchy: a world defined not by a single superpower hegemon, but something more akin to the great power rivalries and conflicts that preceded World War One.

Now, maybe you think this is inevitable. Maybe you think this is something that we must avoid. Either way, you want to think about this. I think, as people who are interested in politics and policy, in these kinds of historical questions, we actually need to know a little bit about the state of modern conflict — which is to say, the state of modern war — as we proceed into this more unsettled age, as it seems that more and more things that we took for granted are becoming uncertain. If we want to comment intelligently on the future, we need to understand where military technology, military strategy, military institutions are.

And so I am very excited to welcome Secretary of Defense Rock to the podcast. The Secretary is a military analyst, he writes on Substack over at History Does You, and he is one of the most intelligent commentators on the state of military affairs. So, Secretary, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:02:11]**
Thank you for letting me join. This is a great opportunity. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:02:22]**
Yeah, me too. So, I guess, simple question to start off: what's the state of modern war? How is modern war fought, and what can it accomplish?

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:02:33]**
Well, I mean, I think that war, in many ways, is still the same, but it's obviously evolving in a lot of different ways. I think it's kind of interesting to look at the way low-intensity conflicts continue to go on, and yet at the same time we have this obviously massive war — probably the biggest war that we've seen in Europe since World War Two — in Ukraine. And yet we have all these smaller conflicts, whether it's in Myanmar, Sudan — and yet they all are kind of stuck. It's this kind of strange thing, in the sense that if you think about the great power wars, the world wars, those were done in four and six years, and yet the war in Ukraine has reached year four. It's seemingly frozen. These low-level conflicts in Sudan, Myanmar — you're reaching up to a decade, years and years and years. You think about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — you're talking about decades. So war is still a tool that is present, but the length in which these conflicts go is quite striking. And again, I think it's the way in which technology makes it both easier to prosecute war, but also makes it much more difficult to defeat your adversary. And trying to sort through where this is all going to end up is obviously the question that is always on the minds of anyone who studies this stuff.

For me, obviously, the war in Ukraine has been the conflict I've been following the most, just because we've seen the way the conflict has evolved from these tank slugfests in the opening weeks in 2022 to now — you basically just have drone teams trying to kill each other across a certain level of the zero line, as it's kind of called now. A pretty remarkable change. And what emerges, what lessons you can draw from that, is obviously going to be, I think, the number one question for any military, or anyone who studies that stuff. So, more broadly, I would just wrap it up as: it's still a big tool, the technology continues to evolve, but I would say the general goals that you see in war are still generally the same.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:05:22]**
Yeah, so it's interesting that you mentioned these other conflicts — Sudan, Myanmar. It's over-ish now, but there was a quite enormous war in Tigray relatively recently, in the last few years. I read Ben Connable's book, *Ground Combat*, where he emphasizes that military analysts tend to zero in on a few particularly important or famous wars, but there have been and continue to be wars and battles that are fought all over the world and that are very serious — this is not necessarily five kids with one AK between them, but tanks and helicopters and artillery and a panoply of combined arms. But people don't look to the war in Tigray to think about: what's the future of warfare going to be? Like you said, mostly people look to the war in Ukraine to try and understand the future of war.

So I'm kind of curious how you think about that analytical question. Is that the right choice analytically — that we should just be focusing on Ukraine as a laboratory or a lens of analysis? Or, when thinking about future conflicts, should we look at a lot of these more — I don't even want to say low-level conflicts, because, again, the war in Tigray may have killed 100,000 people. This is not a small conflict by any measure.

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:06:29]**
Yeah, I mean, I think it's very interesting to think about military institutions and sort of the biases that kind of come with them. A lot of people have analogized that this might be like the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, where you saw the machine gun, you saw the prevalence of artillery, barbed wire — you saw the beginnings of what would be the First World War — and we're thinking, oh, is this going to evolve into the next great conflict? But at the same time — yes, that was all true, but a whole bunch of people also concluded that, oh, well, the cavalry is still dominant; standing in line and blasting each other at point-blank range, that still works totally fine. So it won't surprise me, and I would think it's the same here, that people are going to draw the correct lessons from this conflict, and people are also going to draw the wrong lessons. Unfortunately, that's just kind of the reality. And you can kind of guess — for me, I've been sort of on the record thinking that drones aren't necessarily going to be kind of the decisive lesson out of this conflict, but I could be totally wrong, you know what I mean?

But again, I think the broader you study, the more lessons you can draw. Circling back to the drone thing — it's kind of fascinating just how prevalent they've become in every single conflict. And it wasn't really a thing before, in a sense — the Reaper drone, for example, became very prevalent during the global war on terror, but these small, very cheap drones that now Ukraine is using, Russia is using, Hezbollah, Hamas — all these different groups across all these different vectors have now found this really cheap precision munition that is very difficult to stop. And that's one thing you can look at in a broad sense and be like, okay, this is everywhere now — what does that mean in a broad sense?

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:08:42]**
Yes, that was definitely on my little list of bullet points to go over. Drones — drones has a really big bullet next to it, both because, as you say, it seems to be everywhere now, it seems to be very important, and a lot of people are talking about it. We've seen you've talked about various kinds of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs who are pitching drones as the future of warfare, and their company as the future of drones, and so forth. So I guess I'm curious — yeah, you asked the question: what's up with drones? What is their battlefield impact, and what do you foresee their future battlefield impact being?

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:09:11]**
I mean, I think what's interesting is the way in which the prevalence of drones has basically frozen the front lines in the Russia-Ukraine war. Neither side can really achieve a decisive breakthrough and sort of maneuver, with the support of different fires, in a way that can actually, tangibly take a large amount of ground. And my broad takeaway is that drones have really made tactical surprise incredibly difficult — and by tactical surprise I just mean being able to attack and surprise whoever you're attacking, break through, and then bring on follow-on forces. We saw that as early as 2023. So I think ISR — intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance is the term — is really, to me, where drones are the most potent, because you just can't gather a large amount of forces at a decisive point and get there, because you're going to get spotted. And then you can get hit with more drones, you can get hit with artillery, you can get hit from other positions. And it's boiled down so much more at the tactical level, where an individual platoon now essentially doesn't have to be told, hey, we see 20 guys coming at you — no, I can literally launch a drone, find it: oh, I know they're coming, I can prepare.

So when people bring it back to, well, drones clearly are this new thing, they're going to be super decisive — from my perspective, that's actually not the case, because if they were decisive, well, then this conflict would have been over by now. Someone would have won; someone would have been able to maneuver. So the way I have thought about it is: okay, how can you integrate drones into this broader combined-arms approach? And combined arms is, obviously, you combine all these different military elements — that's infantry, your guy with a rifle, a tank, planes — coordinated all together, trying to achieve a certain objective. And that's the only way, in my opinion, you can do it. And again, there's a lot of different reasons why the Ukrainian army has leaned so heavily into the drones — they're cheap, they remove manpower, which they don't have a lot of, from the front line, they are very precise — but at the same time, they haven't been able to defeat the Russians. So I think, more broadly, that is kind of the question.

I do think the American military has actually done a better job as far as trying to envision how you integrate it at the sort of tactical level, but the way it's evolving so fast makes it a lot more difficult to do in peacetime. And even though we are at war with Iran right now, that is, I would say, only one real component, as far as air power is being used — we're not really using guys on the ground. Most of my friends who are in the military are actually deployed over there, and they're the ones trying to figure out: okay, well, how do we actually integrate these things into an American way of war?

So I just think the broad view of drones is fundamentally flawed, and I think that stems from — maybe that's just the Silicon Valley thing, maybe that's just the prevalence of drone videos, for example. People see this stuff over and over again, and it probably gets drilled into your head that actually, maybe these things are decisive. But I think you have to look at it at the meta level. I'm still not entirely sold that drones are this decisive kind of technology that is going to revolutionize warfare.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:13:13]**
Well, I actually want to push back on that a little bit, and kind of ask you: what do you mean by decisive, exactly? Because, you said it — the Ukrainians are using a ton of them, the Russians are using a ton of them, they have affected the battlefield on a tactical level. And one way to frame what they've done on the larger scale is to say that they've made maneuver warfare impossible — that no one is making these breakouts, no one's doing big encirclements, no one's unhinging anybody's position. It's just this endless grind of what they call positional warfare, where it's like, well, we're just going to point our armies at each other and grind on each other until somebody gets tired, and we'll find out who gets tired first. And so that sounds a lot like drones have been decisive in changing the nature of warfare on the Ukrainian battlefield. They haven't let either side win, but in part that's because both sides have adopted drones in enormous numbers. I'm curious what you think of that perspective.

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:14:15]**
Yeah — I think that is a good way to look at it. But I think the question is: okay, if we lean so heavily on the drones, are you replacing other capabilities that you still need, such as artillery, or tanks, or armored personnel vehicles? There's a lot of interesting field exercises between Ukrainian forces and NATO, and every single time it's like, oh, NATO is super far behind, they get hit by a bunch of drones — and it's like, well, yeah, of course that's going to happen.

I think, again, decisive, to me, is: can you actually maneuver and achieve an objective in an efficient manner? And I think that drones have made it far more inefficient. If you look at, for example, the recent counterattacks by the Ukrainians in January, February, early March, in the southern parts of Ukraine — they were able to achieve a local drone advantage, or, I would say, in some ways local air superiority, for a couple hundred feet off the ground, and they were able to advance forward. But for the most part that was still very infantry-based. A lot of these guys had to walk kilometers over ground, take a point, and then hold it. In some cases — at least from some of the videos I have seen — they were able to push up vehicles, but it's still a very slow process, and inefficient. So that, to me, is what I would define as decisive: this efficiency versus inefficiency. The more inefficient a military is, the longer it takes to take and hold ground and achieve objectives.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:16:40]**
Yeah, so you emphasize the importance of infantry there, which we have still seen in this war — if you want to go forward, it's infantry that are going forward. And so I think these certain kinds of pitchmen for drones are saying the drone will do everything: it'll be cheap, it'll be expendable, it'll be everywhere, it'll be exquisite, it'll replace everything — all you need is drones, which I personally am selling, so please, please sign on the dotted line. And I'm dubious that that's going to happen tomorrow, for the reasons you know.

But I think, as you also highlighted, there are reasons that when the Ukrainians can replace a person with a drone, they want to replace the person with the drone. Ukraine is demographically highly constrained — there are millions of people living in Ukraine, but they don't want to conscript half a generation and send them to die, because they don't have another giant generation standing right behind that, coming up through the ranks. No one does these days. So the Ukrainians have devoted a lot of energy to this, piecemeal, where they can: we aren't going to have people driving ambulances, we aren't going to have people flying medevac helicopters — we're going to be evacuating people on unmanned ground vehicles, a little robot golf cart to pull people who are injured out of combat, just to take one example. So I'm curious: what do you think of that process?

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:17:49]**
Yeah, actually, UGVs — unmanned ground vehicles — are one thing I've been very fascinated by, again at the tactical level, as far as you've seen Ukraine scale these things up. As you mentioned, they have these unmanned golf carts, almost, that are doing so much of the logistics now. They're evacuating people, they're bringing ammunition and water to people that are still on the front line — you're replacing logistics, you're replacing medevacs, and in some cases they're actually holding positions: a stationary position, like an observation post, or quite literally the front line. But I'm curious, as far as thinking about, well, if you could get a UGV with a machine gun, can that replace a human machine gunner in an infantry platoon? Okay, you automate one part of the process — how long is it going to take to automate the whole process? And I've seen a lot of very interesting commentary on it, as far as: could we reach a point where you have robot humanoid kind of soldiers running around? But there's still a human support network. I think everyone sees the drone, but there are entire teams behind it.

I was talking to one Ukrainian battalion commander who mentioned that he has more drone operators than infantry, but he would rather have more infantry than drone operators, because it's harder to hold the ground without a lot of infantry. It's still very manpower-intensive — it's just that, in some ways, they are farther away from the danger, but I would say that they are still very much in danger. As I recently heard him talk, he mentioned that basically the front line now is basically drone teams trying to displace other drone teams. So I wonder — I'm almost like, well, is the drone team now just the new infantry? It's just that they're farther away from each other. You don't see a lot of infantry shooting at each other from 100 meters away — it's drone teams from thousands of meters away searching for one another. I've almost likened it to carrier warfare in the Pacific, where the land is kind of like an ocean now, and you're trying to find the carrier — which is like a drone team — and then you bomb them, and hopefully you find them before they find you.

So it's one of these interesting dynamics, I think, where it's like: can you lessen the human burden? As you mentioned, there's a reason why Ukraine has leaned so heavily, and I think will continue to lean so heavily, into that, and that is because it replaces the frontline infantryman, who even now, I think, is still taking the vast majority of the casualties. And it has become a lot more dangerous for drone teams, logistics, medical, too. But at least right now, I think it's still going to come down to that guy in a foxhole with a rifle, and I don't think that's going to change in the near future, despite the fact that the technology continues to evolve very rapidly.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:21:22]**
I agree with you. There are people who kind of want to sell you on this fantasy that the drone is going to do everything, it's going to replace everybody — we aren't going to even need personnel. But again, if you just look at how the war is being fought — yes, drones have a lot of human personnel involved with them, but equally, you can see reasons why the Ukrainian military is trying to push more people into these drone teams if they can, because, like you said, casualties are lower, and they're effective.

I do kind of want to also ask you about something that you've touched on a bit here, which is logistics and resupply. Because we've talked about that tactical drone — this little FPV drone, probably the most famous drone from the war, like a little mosquito that's chasing you around with a shaped-charge warhead. These have a certain kind of range — a lot longer than a rifle, but it's not the longest range in the world. We've also seen Ukraine pushing into drone munitions that have much longer range than that, that are in this kind of middle range, where they're not attacking soldiers in foxholes — they're attacking trains, they're attacking trucks, they're attacking supply depots that are 100, 200 miles, maybe more than that, behind the front line. The Ukrainian general staff has written about this a little bit — they're expanding the battlefield in some sense, expanding the dangerous area for Russian forces. And I'm curious how you see the importance of that dynamic.

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:22:56]**
Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways they've been able to substitute tactical air power with drones. Even though the Ukrainian air force has F-16s, and they're also getting other fighters from European militaries, they've almost developed drones — which I think in some ways is just a missile, in a lot of ways — and have been able to kind of replace an air force. They're doing a lot of the missions that a traditional air force would be doing, which is, again, attacking logistics centers, command posts. I mean, I still see videos fairly regularly of Ukrainian jets flying combat missions, so it's not totally obsolete. But I think it's just that the volume of the fires that the Ukrainians are able to put out has rapidly increased, and I think that's a large part of why you've seen the front line largely not change. The fact that the Ukrainians have been able to massively scale up these middle fires, and have been able to hit these targets that are miles and miles beyond the front line that support the logistics, is a pretty impressive achievement.

And I think it sort of circles back to: do you need a traditional air force? And I would still say yes — there's a lot of different things that a traditional air force can do that the Ukrainians aren't doing. But the fact that the Ukrainians have been able to essentially replace it — despite the fact that they don't have a tradition of an air force, that it's not really a NATO-trained air force — and that they're still able to achieve and really do strategic bombing... I mean, that is, in my opinion, what this is: it's strategic bombing. I've kind of written about this — being able to hit strategic targets behind the front line that affect Russia's economic and military infrastructure. But again, that just circles back to: well, they're calling it drones, but it's like you just made a missile, basically, is all you did. So I think in some ways I chuckle at how we sort of reinvent new technologies, even though they're just old, you know what I mean?

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:25:22]**
I almost thought about starting this as: what is a drone, anyways? Because people call all kinds of different stuff drones, and it is in many ways a pretty unhelpful terminology, just because drone as a phrase is always meant to suggest really cheap — but then you look at the actual price point for these various different systems, and they're all over the place.

But anyways, what I do want to ask you about is that phrase you used just now: strategic air campaign. Which has maybe got kind of a bad rap, in the sense that a lot of people have looked back at the various strategic air campaigns the United States waged in the 20th century and said, none of that worked, so we just shouldn't do it anymore. But if you look at the world today, everybody is doing it. Russia is waging a strategic air campaign. Ukraine is waging a strategic air campaign. The United States is waging a strategic air campaign, or something like it, on Iran, and Iran is waging one right back. So I'd like to hear: what is the state of strategic air campaigns? Do they work, and how are they fought these days?

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:26:22]**
Well, I think they're still very alluring, and I think it's because the lure of air power has always been that you don't actually have to put people on the ground — you can fly in, you can hit a target, and you can leave, and you don't necessarily have to worry about the political costs of having to send someone to the other side of the globe and stick him in a foxhole to potentially be killed or wounded. I think, again, that is why the war against Iran that the United States has carried out has been almost entirely from the air, even though there have been some ground-based fires from some of the Gulf states where American troops are.

You've seen Russia, I would say, largely do strategic bombing. They had initially done it with planes; that became too difficult, so they've sort of reverted back to Shaheds — the Shahed drone, which, again, I still think is just kind of a cruise missile at the end of the day. You've seen Ukraine doing it. So I think the way in which sort of strategic air power is used has sort of evolved. I think it's become cheaper for countries to actually do it — you don't need to have a B-2 bomber or an F-16 or whatever, you could just do it with a drone, and I would still classify that, in my opinion, as strategic bombing in a lot of respects, because you're hitting a target from a distance, from the air. So I don't think that has largely changed — the fundamentals haven't changed. I do think the technology has evolved. And have they been decisive? I would say no. I mean, the original prognosis of strategic air power was that you would be able to win conflicts by themselves, and that's just not the case, you know?

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:28:22]**
Yeah, I mean, that's the classic line, right? A mere 100 tons of explosives delivered to the heart of London would end this war instantly, or whatever. And that didn't happen — that's never happened, ever, basically. So there's a level of hype around strategic air power that was very prevalent at the start of the air age. And like you say, there's always this temptation — we don't have to put boots on the ground — and that seems to be why America is fighting this war in the way that we are. I'm curious how you apply that lens to Russia and Ukraine, though. They have hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground — that whole political calculus isn't really their problem anymore — but they're still both waging strategic air campaigns. How do you think that's going for them?

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:29:06]**
I mean, I think that they're both hurting each other as far as logistics. From the economic standpoint, I think Ukraine has been more successful, as far as they've been able to hit a lot of different targets in a lot of different areas. They've taken a ton of Russia's oil and gas industry offline; they've consistently been able to hinder their logistics hundreds of miles behind the front lines. But again, that hasn't necessarily collapsed the Russian economy. One week you read the Russian economy is close to collapsing; the next week you read, actually, no, it's fine, they can keep doing this forever. And vice versa — I think you saw during this winter, where the Russians really ramped up their targeting of Ukrainian infrastructure: the winter is very cold, a lot of the big cities in Ukraine were without power and heating for many, many months, but as we've kind of seen, the public endured, and they sort of just worked through it. And we see this going all the way back to the Blitz against the British in 1940 from the Luftwaffe, and you saw this vice versa from the Allied strategic bombing: at a certain point the public just kind of gets used to it. It's different being hit from the air, as opposed to seeing someone on the ground in front of you that is an enemy with a rifle.

But again, they're very useful, and I think they are very helpful as supporting mechanisms to an overall conflict. I just don't think there is the evidence to suggest that they can win wars by themselves. And I'm sure we'll keep arguing about this forever and ever, because I'm sure people will still be doing strategic air bombing 100, 200, 300 years from now — in space, maybe, you know?

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:31:05]**
Three hundred years from now — that's a thought. In space.

Well, so there's parts of what you said that I basically agree with — that Russia is doing, from what I can tell, the real classic strategic bombing, meaning: we are targeting civilians, we are deliberately targeting civilians, the point is to break the morale of the enemy, to inflict pain on them until they yield and give in to our demands. This has been tried so many times, and it just never works, because people just get used to it — or, I apologize, people don't get used to it: they hate it, they hate it so much, but they hate you even more. And we're kind of seeing that in Iran right now; we've seen it in Ukraine.

I think it is worth dwelling on the fact that Ukraine isn't prosecuting the same kind of strategic air campaign — that not all strategic air campaigns are created equal. They're not trying to do terror bombings of Russian cities, they're not trying to terrorize Russian civilians or inflict suffering on the Russian people. They're targeting things like munitions factories; they're targeting, most famously, oil infrastructure, which in the Russian case turns out to be a very important component of their budget and their overall macroeconomy.

As you may know, I'm a big fan of Phillips Payson O'Brien's book *How the War Was Won*, and in it he basically argues that the thing about the Allied strategic air campaign in World War Two was that we went into it thinking: the Axis has this industrial web, and if we can just identify the most critical node in that web and explode it from the air, then their whole economy will just fall apart, and that'll be that. And this leads to these ball-bearing factory raids, and we don't do as much damage as we wanted to — and also it doesn't matter, because, like in almost everything these days, there's some kind of substitute. Economies are enormously resilient, because everything substitutes for everything else in some sort of way, not even in the ways you would expect, really. But as an institution, the Air Force kind of learns and adapts and changes its targeting programs, develops new tactics, develops new technologies, and the air campaign doesn't win the war by itself, but it exerts severe pressure on the German economy relative to what it might have been otherwise — especially in attacks on transportation and energy.

And I think you can see a similar logic playing out for Ukraine, where they don't think that attacking Russian oil infrastructure is going to win the war by itself. They didn't start by attacking Russian oil infrastructure — like you said, it's been four years of war; it took some time for them to build up the institutions, the technologies, to have the organizational experience to identify what actually are the critical points in the Russian economy, and just exert pressure on the Russian capacity to produce war materiel. So it's not going to win the war by itself, but it's going to, in this big war of attrition, be one way to increase the rate of attrition for their Russian opponents.

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:35:10]**
I think that's a great way to put it. As you kind of mentioned, the Allied strategic bombing campaigns focused almost entirely on going after the nodes that supported the Luftwaffe — which was, again, the actual factories that produced the planes, the ball bearings — and then it evolved to oil and transportation. I think the oil campaign, in my opinion, was the most successful aspect of the strategic bombing campaigns. If you look at 1944, 1945, the German military, which was famous for maneuver, could not maneuver because of a lack of fuel. Even though they were producing more planes, for example, they didn't have the fuel to get them up there. So even though they sort of were able to evolve, they could not put the actual planes in the air, they could not train their pilots.

And I think that leads into the war in Ukraine. I do wonder: are the Russians having issues as far as being able to move things from point A to point B? Is that why we haven't been able to see kind of big attacks or offensives? There was this supposed Russian spring offensive that was coming — if it did happen, I didn't really see it. I think one of the big challenges is trying to analyze in real time. It's one of the things I've constantly thought about with the war in Iran. My most recent piece was just about air power against missiles and mobile targets, and how difficult that is. As successful as, for example, the oil campaign was, Operation Crossbow — which was the Allied campaign to go after the V-1 and V-2 missile program — was a failure. They could not decisively defeat that. And a part of me wonders — there's a lot of different analysis I've seen; supposedly Iran has been able to retain something like 70 to 75 percent of their missiles and mobile launchers — and a part of me wonders: is that because hitting them with munitions is so difficult, or is that because the air force is focusing on different targets? I don't know. It's one of these questions that I am constantly kind of wondering about — this kind of fog of war — and that's what makes it really difficult: it often takes years to really analyze and understand what exactly happened.

And that is why I've always had a really keen interest in, for example, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which I think is one of the best studies of contemporary air power ever done. I'm actually writing a book about it — be on the lookout in a few years. But again, the way in which we study the use of air power is one of these things that I think is going to continue to be really important, and I think Ukraine is a really interesting case study, in particular, about how effective this is. We can only really work off of visuals and anecdotes, but I do wonder, at some point down the road, whether we'll be able to do kind of a full analysis to understand how big a role this has played, in both Iran and Ukraine. I think they're two very fascinating case studies about the use of air power, drone power, whatever term you want to use.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:38:36]**
Yeah, I absolutely agree, and I think it is worth being wary of the fog of war. I, at least — I don't know, you're obviously the Secretary of Defense, so you might have access to more privileged information. I do not. So there is, as you say, a lot that we just don't know, and may not know for some time.

That said, one way to look at everything we've been talking about — one way that I happen to like — is that what we've seen is basically the democratization of air power. There was a kind of tactical air power that the United States cultivated at tremendous expense for a long time — we achieved a real tactical mastery of the air — but a lot of the stuff that we used to use these very exquisite air forces for, you can kind of do with a drone now. Or a drone, or a missile, precision — whatever you want to call it. These are a lot cheaper than they used to be; they're a lot more accessible to countries that don't necessarily have the money to shell out for a traditional air force. And this is having the effect on the battlefield that air power traditionally does — namely, that it's not decisive by itself, but it can do a great amount to impede maneuver, to impede concentration, and to impose attrition on the enemy at various levels. And now it seems this kind of effect of air power is available to a lot more people, and probably will be going forward. Do you think that's an accurate assessment?

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:40:13]**
Yeah, I think so. Again, I think the ability to hit targets at a distance, despite the fact that you might be constrained by the traditional technologies — that being a jet or whatever — is going to incentivize states to carry out conflict. Like you mentioned, this democratization of air power — I'm like, is that going to make conflict more prevalent? Because, A, it's cheaper, and, B, it's still that fundamental thing that makes air power alluring, which is that you can hit a target over a distance and not have to worry, again, about putting someone on the ground. So I think there is this really interesting political dimension, where it's like, okay, if I don't need an air force, does that make me more likely — and I think in some ways that will make states more likely — to carry out conflicts.

So, to circle back to the beginning, when we talked about some of these conflicts — again, Myanmar, Sudan, Armenia, for example — I do wonder if those types of conflicts are becoming, or will become, more prevalent between states that have bigger economies but aren't necessarily the United States, Russia, or whatever, that spend billions — rather this sort of middle power, if you want to term it that, that are able to maybe copycat some of these technologies and say: we don't need an air force, we could just do drones. And does that make it more likely? So I think it's a really interesting question. I think democratization of air power is a great way to frame it.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:42:01]**
Okay, so I guess we're about 40 minutes into this recording session, and I can kind of see two big ways we can go forward, so I'm going to leave it to you to decide which one you'd rather talk about. One of them is procurement, and what all of the things we've been talking about really mean for the American military budget going forward. Or do you want to talk about this more political question, about what kinds of effects these things are going to have on political calculation — and maybe some of these broader questions that I know you're quite interested in, in terms of strategy and civilian-military relations?

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:42:43]**
Well, I think I'd feel more comfortable with civil-military relations. I wish I was more well-versed in procurement — there are definitely smart people you could bring on who could talk more about that. But again, I think the political dimensions — to quote my old friend Carl, who always says war is an extension of politics. Even though he has 700 other pages of writing, and it's important to factor that in when you quote it — if I see that quote in isolation, I usually discount whatever that person is writing.

But there have been a lot of interesting conversations about this war, in particular, on the civil-military dimension. The administration has basically gone to war without the consent of Congress. People in the military allegedly did not think this was a great idea, and went through with it anyways. And so we kind of see the civil-military dimension where the executive — even though he's the commander in chief — has basically been able to dictate war and strategy without any real oversight, and we can kind of see how that strategy has gone awry. I think, as annoying as Congress can be, and as annoying as the military can be, Congress can be very helpful in shaping strategy and serving as a check to point things in the right direction. I think about the surge in Iraq — when that whole debate was going on, the Democratic majority was asking incredibly hard questions, and that was very important, I think, for shaping what that strategy would be, which I think in some ways worked.

But I think the fact that there isn't any real congressional oversight right now means that the strategy just has gone completely awry. We started this whole conflict in Iran — it started out as regime change, we're gonna destroy their nuclear capabilities — I think those were really the two goals. And now we've circled back to: well, hopefully we can open the Strait of Hormuz, and maybe we can negotiate at some point down the road; maybe we'll revive the — not JCPOA, the non-JCPOA — and everything will work out. But again, if you had good congressional oversight, and one that actually functioned, I don't necessarily think we would be in the sort of situation we are in today.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:45:22]**
So that's interesting, that you focus on Congress here, because a lot of people — I think a lot of ordinary Americans — would look back at the last 40, 50 years of American war fighting, as they say, and say it's kind of crazy, because we keep on winning all these battles. We fought a whole war in Afghanistan for 20 years, and we won every single battle, and we lost the war anyways. And that is a familiar pattern for many American conflicts over these last 50 years. And people, I think, would look at that and say: why are you asking about Congress? This is a military that doesn't know how to think strategically — that is obsessed in the way that Westmoreland, back in Vietnam, was obsessed with body count. It's racking up its kill-death ratio with all of these little tactical maneuvers, which it is admittedly extraordinary at, but it doesn't have a plan for how to tie these to a larger strategic objective. Curious what you think about that perspective.

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:46:22]**
Yeah — and I would reference Congress because I think that in some ways the military has internalized the military dimension of conflict, and rightfully so. But the central point that Clausewitz originally made was that politics, strategy, and war are all tied together — you cannot do one without the other, and if you were to, that means the policy is wrong, and if the policy is wrong, well, then of course the war is going to go sideways. So I think we've seen this sort of separation of the strategic and tactical dimensions between the military and the civilians, where, because the military is so obsessed, as you mentioned, with, for example, the body count, they can't really see the political dimensions of this.

But it's a two-way street, in my opinion — civil-military relations is a two-way street. And even though we have operated under the system of civilian supremacy — which is that the president and the Congress control the military, that what they say goes, and that the civilians have a right to be wrong, and I think that is correct — one of the big challenges is that the military can't give political advice. And because they can't give political advice, I think there's often a disconnect between the military and civilians. And I think that's always going to be a challenge, because of the political polarization of our politics: anything that is political is going to be viewed through a partisan lens. And I think that is just a reality, and that's not going to change — those are fundamental problems. And that's where one of my favorite Clausewitz passages comes in — he was talking about how the military officer should be comfortable giving political advice, and the civilian should be comfortable giving military advice. That's essentially what he was saying.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:48:25]**
Very much. I really want to hone in on that specifically, because that is something that really seems to leap out at me when I read about this history. So, for example, there's H.R. McMaster's book, *Dereliction of Duty*, whose title is very clearly meant to be an indictment of the generals and the Joint Chiefs of Vietnam, and it's often read that way — that the generals of Vietnam just derelicted their duty to give proper advice, or something like that, I don't know. But if you read that book more carefully, I think it's — to be blunt — an indictment of JFK and LBJ, who, excuse me, got the wars that they wanted, in some sense. And you can see this is a pattern that recurs, where there's just this breakdown of communication between civilian officials, who might understand politics but don't really have an understanding of the details of military affairs, and military officials, who are quite the opposite.

I was just reading this morning — make sure I get this right — a paper by Jeffrey Meiser called "Ends plus ways plus means equals bad strategy," and he talks about the debate over the surge, where Obama comes into office, and the Joint Chiefs present him with: okay, here are three options for what we're going to do in Iraq. And Obama looks at these three options and he says, you're bullshitting me, because two of these options are obviously sucker choices, and then there's only one good one, so I want an actual array of options. And the Joint Chiefs come back and are like, okay, here are five options, and Obama looks at them and is like, this is just the same thing again, guys. He wasn't really able, according to this paper, anyways, to really wrangle the Joint Chiefs to get them to give him the kinds of options he was looking for. And this just, again, feels like a breakdown, where on the White House side there isn't that level of practical military expertise, and on the military side there isn't really any level of political thinking going on. And I'm curious — I don't know — do you think that's an accurate read of what our problems have been?

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:51:06]**
Absolutely. I think the surge — I know you said Iraq, but I believe you meant Afghanistan, in 2010, 2011, when that debate was going on. Maybe. Regardless — I think that debate is very fascinating, because I think Obama was looking for a military solution to a political problem, and the military was looking for a political solution to a military problem. There's that weird disconnect. And civil-military relations, at its core, is just a relationship between humans, really. If you think about the really good civil-military relationships throughout American military history — Grant and Lincoln, Marshall and Roosevelt, I would even wager, in some ways, Truman and Ridgway, after he took over from MacArthur — they understood each other, they had good rapports. And I think, in some ways, because the military has sort of separated itself into this separate sphere, intruding on that from the civilian side is going to be viewed through a partisan lens, and I think that leads, again, to poor strategy and everything like that.

I think, in a perfect world, for this to function better, civilians would have to be more comfortable with the military giving political advice, and the military would have to be more comfortable with civilians giving military advice — because that's originally what Clausewitz said. His prognosis for civil-military relations, even though it's only six or seven pages, is, I think, really good: you have to be able to have a coherent dialogue between the military and political dimensions, because they're tied together. If you separate them out, you're going to get the wrong policy — that was kind of his prognosis. And, unfortunately, I think that's just not going to happen anytime soon, because of, again, this political polarization problem. But in an ideal world, that is the way it would work, and in a lot of ways, that is how it worked when it functioned well.

It's always very interesting — Grant and Lincoln's first meeting. I always loved this story: when they met at the White House, when Grant had first taken command, Lincoln literally walks Grant up to a map and is like, you see this river? I think you should land behind the James River and attack Lee from the rear. And Grant's like, okay, I understand, but I think I'm going to do this another way. But again, Grant understood where Lincoln was coming from — Lincoln has this vision of a strategy, he has a way he wants it to be executed — and Grant is like, well, yeah, maybe I want to do it a different way, but I understand where you're coming from. So I always like to tell that story, because Lincoln was one of these guys who was very comfortable in that role, in some ways, and I think in a lot of ways was smarter than the generals. And again, I think that is the thing, at its core: both militaries and civilians have to be comfortable with getting advice from outside sources that might be outside their lane of expertise.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:54:42]**
I would, yeah, I do — I like that story a lot. And I just have to wonder what you think of our current Secretary of Defense — you're the Secretary of Defense in exile, but the reigning Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, can't shut up about getting politics out of the military. He wants to get rid of wokeness and DEI and caring about the laws of war and all that stuff — he wants to keep politics out of it. You should only be thinking about lethality, right? He wants to change professional military education so that you're only thinking about lethality and not any of this girly stuff like economics and history. And what's interesting to me is, he is ranting about getting politics out of the military, and he also can't stop putting politics into the military — he is really an avatar of MAGA politics. You can see it, for example, in the National Security Strategy — this isn't exactly the Department of Defense's job, but it's still blob shit, right? The National Security Strategy is just dripping with MAGA politics. So they seem to be a lot more comfortable bringing their partisan politics into war making, and I'm curious what you think about these developments.

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:56:00]**
I mean, I think in some ways it's their prerogative. On the other hand, I'm just like — it cracks me up that it's like, well, we can't have this set of politics, but we're bringing this other set of politics in, but it's the correct politics, because it's my view. And look, the reality is, again, the military is a political instrument, and there's always going to be a political dimension to it. But I think Hegseth is sort of an avatar for a way of thinking about the military and these sort of failures, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan: that the fundamental problem was that we fought those wars with our hands tied behind our backs, or it was DEI, woke, whatever — you insert whatever boogeyman you want — that was the issue, and if we simply rip that wiring out, we will start winning wars. However, as we have seen with the war in Iran, that has not worked. So then it circles back to: well, maybe it is a different problem. Whether Secretary Hegseth realizes that, I'm not so sure. Whether Dan Caine realizes that — probably; will he say anything? Probably not. Does President Trump realize that? Probably not.

But again, this political dimension — it's just sort of a view that it's like, we have the right amount of politics and we're going to impose our will on it. And I think it's been interesting to see, more broadly, the military's reaction to all this, which is to simply continue to be the quote-unquote apolitical professional and not say anything. Right? We know that people were fired from the chairman, the Joint Chiefs, because of their race and their gender — we know that — and nothing really happened. There was no protest. There was nothing. It was like, well, that is the politician's prerogative. And on one hand, again, that's just the way the system has kind of evolved; but on the other hand, there's a clear political dimension to it. And if you're not going to stand up to Trump in that instance, why would you stand up to Trump on the war in Iran? You know?

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:58:00]**
I mean, to me, I would say: for all you military professionals out there — yeah, civilians have a right to be wrong about the conduct of military affairs. They don't have a right to be wrong about the 14th Amendment. To put it mildly.

As I've articulated before — we're running out of time, very unfortunately; I could talk for another hour about this — but I guess my last question for you is: is there any connection between the two things that we've talked about? Between these developments in technology — the democratization of air power, the changing nature of war — and these political questions about how our political system interfaces with our military?

**Secretary of Defense Rock [00:58:51]**
I think the real question is: is the technology going to make it easier to project military power? And if that makes it easier, does that make it easier for the United States to continue these conflicts without political costs? I think that is kind of the fundamental question — at least for the United States, and I think it is going to arise in other countries as well. If they can resolve conflicts with lower political costs, and if they think that technology — i.e., drones — can do that, will we continue to see conflict rise? We went through this interesting period where, obviously, there were a lot of wars, but not at World War One, World War Two scale. But are we going to continue to see — again, not low-level, but conflicts between smaller states, state on state, as opposed to these vast coalitions fighting against one another — and is the technology going to enable the political costs of that, or the political incentives of that, to continue?

So, again, I think that is really kind of the fundamental question for me, at least: is that technology going to lower the political costs of war? Is it going to lower the threshold? And I would wager that, in some ways, yes — given the prevalence of, again, these very bloody conflicts that continue to go on without political resolution. But at the same time, because of the length of those conflicts, I do wonder if that disincentivizes other states — for example, China vis-à-vis Taiwan. I wonder if, in some ways, all of this going on will sort of self-deter China from ever actually trying to resolve the Taiwan question with military force. But I'm sure that is a conversation for a whole other day.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:01:18]**
Yeah — somehow we got through an entire hour of talking about the state of modern war without talking about Taiwan. I obviously have a lot to say about that, but I do want to reflect a little bit on what you just said about the costs of war. There's a book that just came out — it's called *Conquest*, or something; I need to read it — and it's about the endurance of conquest, the endurance of territorial ambitions. And it basically argues that since World War Two, people haven't really repainted the map in really large ways, but people keep on trying to do it, and it's because they see some domestic political benefit in basically these little posturing wars — where it's like, oh, we're going to take a little nibble out of our neighbor's territory that we think is totally ours, and this will benefit me politically in some way. But like you said, we haven't seen another World War One, we haven't seen another World War Two. And so I can really see the rise of drones driving more and more of this kind of skirmishing — like the little slap fight we saw between India and Pakistan just recently, where it's like, oh, we're not at war: this is a special military operation, where we're going to be flinging air power at each other, and some people are going to die, and there will be casualties, but it's not going to wreck a society. So I can absolutely see that kind of dysfunction — enabled by air power, enabled by crumbling political constraints — really proliferating in the years ahead.

So that's great. That's a really happy, optimistic note to end on. [laughs] Thank you for coming on. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

**Secretary of Defense Rock [01:02:43]**
Yeah, most definitely. Likewise.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:02:56]**
And to all you listeners out there: you may have noticed that I have been drinking from this beautiful Liberal Currents coffee mug, because the Liberal Currents merchandise store is now live. So you can buy this beautiful Liberal Currents coffee mug — or a different Liberal Currents coffee mug, even — or a tote bag, or a t-shirt, or whatever kind of liberal merch that you feel you need in your life. Link in the description!