If you follow conflict in Ukraine or in the Middle East, you likely have a sense that drones are the future of war. But in the late 2000s, that wasn’t so obvious. When the AeroVironment Switchblade was deployed in Afghanistan, it was the first loitering munition used by the US Army. Today, versions of the Switchblade are used in Ukraine, purchased by America’s allies in Western Europe, and will likely be deployed to Taiwan.
Today’s interviewee is Chris Anderson. Anderson’s a former DoD program manager who served in a unique organization called the US Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG). Anderson is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Troika Solutions, a defense consulting firm based in Virginia.
We discussed:
The birth of the Asymmetric Warfare Group
Why American troops in Afghanistan couldn’t strike Taliban operatives
Why the military avoids risky technology, even when it would save lives
What we’ve learned about drones from Ukraine
The difference between drone use in Ukraine and in the Indo-Pacific
Thanks to Nancy Ruiz for her judicious transcript edits, and to Jon Askonas for sharing his not-yet-published history of the US Army Asymmetric Warfare Group.
The specific piece of technology that you helped develop is a lethal miniature aerial munition system, the Switchblade.
It’s the first kamikaze drone the US military has deployed, right?
Yes, at the tactical level, launched by soldiers on the battlefield, I think we could say that with 100% certainty. Civilians would call this a kamikaze drone. In military speak it’s a loitering munition, a one-way attack drone, and specifically, it’s a tactical version of a loitering munition.
I want to get to the technological specs. But first, tell us about the organizational structure you were embedded in. Will you explain the Asymmetric Warfare Group?
In 2006, General Schoomaker, the Chief of Staff of the Army, realized he wasn’t getting enough information about what was going on in the field, particularly in Iraq.
He contacted some former operators who worked for him in JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) and said, “Go over there, get kitted up. You have my permission for freedom of movement. Come back and tell me what's going on.” That was the genesis of the IED Task Force, the predecessor to the AWG.
General Schoomaker and General Cody, the Vice Chief of Staff at the time, said, “We want our own Army unit that can telescope into the battlefield and embed with soldiers at the tactical level. We want to see what’s happening on our side and the enemy side, so we can make changes quickly.”
I've got a quote here from General Schoomaker, who says the mission of the AWG was “to change the culture of the Army.” What did he mean by that?
That statement could offend almost everyone in the Army. What's wrong with the culture? Why do we need to change the culture? That's the first answer that you get when you hear that statement. I think he meant that he just wanted to speed things up and make the Army adapt faster to changing conditions in the world: in that case, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Most listeners have a sense that the US military faced a different set of battlefield conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan than the conditions it had been built for over the 20th century. What were the tactical or strategic issues that Schoomaker wanted to change?
I would put it in two categories: leadership adapting, and the acquisition system adapting. Army soldiers, marines, airmen, sailors: they have to adapt. When your life's and your buddy’s life are on the line, you're going to figure it out. But leaders changing the way they operate was another issue. The acquisition system, meaning getting to requirements faster and around the red tape — acting like your life was on the line when you're a program manager in the acquisition system — was the second.
When the AWG was first stood up, what acquisitions did Schoomaker want to move quicker?
Things as simple as changing the camouflage pattern on uniforms, boots, packs, helmets, making everything lighter. Particularly at higher elevations in Afghanistan, soldiers weren’t wearing uniforms designed for going through the mountains at five, eight, or ten thousand feet.
In another case, we took a shot at changing the M4, going to the HK416, that got us in trouble. The operational advisors in the AWG carried HK416s, which in our view was a better gun. A different squadron tried to push that to the Army, but the people in charge of that program resisted.
Tell us how the AWG fit into this traditional procurement process. When Schoomaker wanted to move acquisition faster, what was happening bureaucratically?
Their goals didn't fit into the traditional procurement process. So Cody and Schoomaker created two units, the Asymmetric Warfare Group and the Rapid Equipping Force (REF). The Rapid Equipping Force was focused on purchasing and acquiring gear, equipment, and technologies fast. They would buy commercial and off-the-shelf equipment. It could be new boots or new optics. The Colonel who ran the REF had the authority to purchase that stuff up to something like $50 million. Don't hold me to that exactly, but it was a big number.
They embedded a piece of the Rapid Equipment Force in the AWG, called the Asymmetric Product Office. I started at AWG in the Asymmetric Product Office, where acquisition authority for the AWG resided.
To clarify, the equipment you mentioned — boots, gear, kit — that's not asymmetric. Will you define asymmetric warfare for me?
Asymmetric warfare is something really powerful going at something that's not very powerful. You can think of the war in Ukraine as asymmetric, as the Ukrainians are using cheap and different tactics against an overwhelming enemy.
Taiwan comes to mind. We did a five-year-long program in Taiwan that’s a perfect example of asymmetric warfare, against the People's Liberation Army [of China], helping the Taiwanese Army see that tanks and F-16s aren't going to get it done because they're all going to get destroyed. You need small teams of guys with unconventional tactics spread out across the island, with a lot of small, inexpensive weapon systems.
But what Schoomaker and Cody had in mind was a group of people that could look at the enemy conducting asymmetric warfare, as in the Taliban and ISIS in Iraq, and counter their tactics. They named it the Asymmetric Warfare Group so that it didn't fall into anybody else’s basket. If they named it the Irregular Warfare Group, the Special Operations folks would be ticked off, since they handle irregular warfare.
Will you describe those tactics from the Taliban and Iraqi militias that were creating problems for us?
It started with the IEDs, improvised explosive devices. It’s actually simple: a bunch of enemy dudes on a mountaintop would look at what we were doing every day and say, “Hey, look, every day they get in their vehicles at 11 o'clock and drive 10 miles to this other base, and then they come back. Wow, that's pretty predictable.” They just started blowing us up on the roads. Predictability was how they got to us initially.
More than any military on the planet, we have a code of ethics. We try to avoid collateral damage. They know they can exploit our desire to not have collateral damage and not to go full-auto on them on a daily basis. They were using militants dressed in civilian clothes, along with the IEDs. There were no uniforms on the people we were going against.
In retrospect, our desire to be in combat outposts surrounded by big HESCO barriers [high-level security barriers] became a weakness every time we went outside the wire, and they were able to exploit that.
Our mutual friend Jon Askonas writes about how, in Afghanistan, our rules of engagement meant that often American troops would take mortar fire or indirect fire. By the time they had clearance to fire back, the targets would have melted back into the civilian population. Why did unmanned munitions seem like a useful solution?
Early on, sometime between 2007 and 2009, we looked at Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), small hand-launch UAS to see what we could do with them and how to get these things to soldiers. Now these are ubiquitous on the battlefield. They’re like iPhones. But from 2007 to 2011, units were not using unmanned aerial systems very often. There were just small pockets of innovation happening.
We started to realize that we can use these things to call for fire; you can drop munitions from them. We started experimenting with all the non-traditional things you could do with UAS, which is what led us to Switchblade and its hand-launched tactical use.
Our goal in advancing the Switchblade was to go after mortar teams and rocket teams that would fire one, two, or three rounds, and then depart their point of origin. I used experts to help me write the concept of operations for clearances of fire for the Switchblade [A concept of operations document is used in the military and in software to describe the characteristics of a system].
The best thing that we did was have Switchblade designated as a direct-fire weapon. We wrote a memo to the director of what's now called the Maneuver Center of Excellence. When we met with him, we described how the Switchblade was employed: There's an operator looking at the target. The operator looking at a target is the same operator who’s going to pull the trigger, so to speak. We told him this is no different than an M4. It's no different than a rifle and a scope.
In that scenario, a soldier with a rifle and a scope doesn't need clearance of fire to pull the trigger. He just needs to follow the rules of engagement, which are that you see an enemy, he's got a weapon, he looks hostile, so you can fire. It made sense for Switchblade to be designated a direct-fire weapon.
Define direct fire versus indirect fire.
Direct fire is like a deer rifle. You're looking through the scope 200 yards away at a deer. The bullet's going to travel at a trajectory directly to the deer. When you're shooting through a scope, you have a high degree of certainty that you're going to hit pretty close to where you're aiming.
Indirect fire would be launching a mortar which goes up in the air a thousand meters. It could go over buildings or a forest, and then come down on top of people. With a rocket or mortar, an indirect-fire weapon, you can't necessarily see the target when you're launching the rounds or the rockets. Someone's saying to you, “Look at this grid coordinate, there's a tank.” But you as the operator of that weapon don't necessarily see the target.
I’m being very literal. The reason you need clearance of fire with indirect-fire systems is that you don't know exactly where that thing's going to land. You also want to make sure there are no friendly aircraft in the airspace.
The reason it was so important to classify these unmanned systems as direct-fire weapons was that you didn't need to radio back to base to get clearance to shoot back, right?
That's correct. What we didn't want was a team of soldiers on the ground to have to call for permission to launch it against an enemy, because they were in a tactical formation or they were being engaged. Ultimately the operator who was going to kill the target was able to see the target. He wasn't talking to anybody. He didn't need a guy with binoculars to tell him, “Shift your fire to the right.” He was going to loiter over the target, put the crosshairs on the target and he was going to ultimately bring it into the target.
Even though it was an indirect-fire weapon system, technically, the method of attack was direct. And we had the Maneuver Center of Excellence Director agree that this was a direct-fire weapon.
So you went up the chain, and you got an internal legal classification from somewhere else in the military.
That's correct. People would argue with us, but we acted like we were in the Jack Ryan movie: “Do you have this memo?” And they didn't have that memo. We had the memo.
We said, “Hey, it's a direct-fire weapon. You may not like it, but we had it classified as a direct-fire weapon.”
Keep in mind, in 2008, 2009, 2010, these things were not on the battlefield. We had to walk the dog with these folks and explain the logic. We would show them a video of how this was employed: the guy that's flying it is the guy that's going to bring it into the target and unlike a traditional direct fire, he can wave off. Waving off means to abort the mission. That means you can bring this thing almost all the way to the target, and if you get close and say, “Oh, that guy's holding a shovel, not a weapon,” you can wave off and either go blow it up in the air or go find another target.
Why would somebody responsible for authorizing weaponry resist putting this directly in the hands of soldiers on the battlefield?
The main resistance in the case of the Switchblade was the risks involved. It's a hand-launched munition in a tube. You have to carry it. It's got an explosive in it. All the things that could go wrong make government employees who are in charge of this stuff nervous. It's easier to say no than it is to say yes. That doesn't go across the entire force or the entire DoD, but our tolerance for risk is extremely low.
When we were pushing the Switchblade, they asked, “Why do we need this thing? Can it blow up in the guy's pack? Could it blow up when it launches? Could you kill the wrong person? Could it turn around and come back and kill the guy that launched it?”
And all those things are possible and make people uneasy. Today, one of the things my company is working on is a robotic quadruped that has a remote weapon station mounted on it. Just taking that thing to a live fire range is a major undertaking from a safety standpoint, to get it approved. “Oh my God, is it going to turn around and shoot the VIPs?” No, it's not going to do that.
Will you describe more of the characteristics of the solution that you guys ended up with in the Switchblade? It's pretty remarkable to me that in 2010 or 2011, this fairly advanced machine that weighed less than six pounds could be launched from a tube on the ground and controlled from a laptop.
The story of the Switchblade is really the story of a company and its vision for the future. That company, AeroVironment, also makes the Raven unmanned aerial system, the Wasp, the Puma. But around 2008 and 2009, they invested a lot of their own money into the Switchblade. There was a requirement for it: to be able to take out four targets inside of a pickup truck, a Hilux truck. Hilux trucks are the number one choice for all terrorists today, but particularly the Taliban. I don't understand why we don't have them here in America — they’re a good truck.
But anyway, the idea was low collateral damage. We needed the capability to precisely, from kilometers away, reach out and touch targets like a guy on a mountainside, a dude on a rooftop.
Askonas says that you could remotely calibrate the warhead for different burst patterns, and that it could take out a vehicle in traffic without harming anyone around it.
It's pretty accurate. I still have “classified PTSD,” so I'm always worried about what I can say, but yes, you could calibrate the warhead and the blast pattern. It had a warhead with what's called CL 20, which is a special kind of explosive, and inside that warhead was tungsten, say 200 pieces of tungsten fragmentation. That’s a really heavy metal, and they were in very small diamond patterns.
In the first version we took to Afghanistan, we had a set blast pattern that went off at a set distance from the target. One of the improvements we made was to be able to dial the blast from a certain distance — call it 20 meters down to 2 meters — so you could kill one specific dude and not anyone around him. The eardrums of the people around are going to be completely destroyed, but those people won’t be taken out.
Tell me what your personal relationship with this technology was. My understanding is that you helped shepherd it into this program.
A lot of people were involved. Initially, another member of the unit and I were assigned to be the UAS guys. The guy I worked with was a former JSOC operator who had brought unmanned aerial systems early on into Afghanistan. He had a really good vision for what these things could do because he had used them. I was told, “Hey, go help this guy,” which I thought was awesome.
We met with a lot of different companies. We bought a bunch of UAS and started testing different ways to employ them and to drop munitions from them. We went to AeroVironment and saw the Switchblade. At the same time, some folks at Air Force Special Operations were also looking at Switchblade.
I don't know exactly what we spent last year, but it was around $850 billion on defense. We spend more than the next 14 countries combined. At any one time in the Department of Defense, there are going to be people doing the same thing. This is key; the first thing you do is go find the people who are already doing it, because they're there. You're definitely not the first dude to think of the idea that you came up with. So we found some people at AFSOC, the Air Force Special Operations. And then there was a lieutenant colonel at the Maneuver Center of Excellence in the Army, a really sharp dude, a unique cat, who was thinking about this kind of warfare. The Maneuver Center folks weren't actively buying anything, but they were writing a requirement for it. So we got in touch with him.
Between the three of us, we said, “Let's buy these things. We have AWG operators that can fly them. We can go get ranges and test them. Let's bring them into the country, see what they can do.” And they all looked at us and said, “Well, that's a great idea. But who's going to do it?”
We said, “We can do it. My commander will sign off on this.” And that's what we did. Then we found a program office in the Army, PEO Missiles and Space, which is something that’s required for anything that’s going to become a program. Within that program office, Close Combat Weapon Systems is the office that owns the Javelin weapon system [a larger portable direct-fire system]. They said, “This is a great idea. We will partner with you on this.” We got them to be our PM daddy, if you will. They said, “If this thing works, we'll make it a program.”
It took more than one person to say, “Oh, the Switchblade is the deal.” I will say though, hats off to AeroVironment. I never worked for them — this is an unpaid advertisement for them — but they were heads and shoulders above anybody else that we saw in that space at that time.
What did you have to do for testing before you could deploy this on the battlefield?
We were simultaneously making all these arrangements and getting the memo that says this is a direct-fire weapon. We also brought it into the field, out to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. We trained our guys to fly it with no warhead. We would launch it out of a tube, fly it for about twelve minutes, maybe fifteen if I'm stretching it. They would fly for as long as they could, acquire a target, loiter, go into terminal phase all the way, and then wave off. We'd spread those targets out across a desert environment, typically, and sometimes with Dugway in a mountainous environment.
Our targets were in the middle of a net. At the very end, they could fly the vehicle into the net and hit the target. The net would capture it, we'd go retrieve it, and AeroVironment would recondition it and put it back in the tube.
We'd do it all over again with about ten or fifteen of these things. We trained our guys to be proficient in launching the system, getting out to the target, making positive identification (PID) on the target, and then bringing it in to terminal phase as many times as possible until they were experts.
The other aspect is the air munition system. The reason it's called the Switchblade is that the wings scissor out, like a switchblade knife. Because it's an air vehicle with munition, we had to have it packed in its tube and sent to the safety people. They tested it by putting it in a cold room, a hot room, in a dryer-type machine. The thing just bounces around in there for hours. Then they throw it against the wall. Burn, hot, cold, bounce, jumble tests. It has to be able to work after that. We brought those out, launched them, and after all that, they still worked. The batteries were all good. We also trained soldiers on keeping the batteries charged and the concepts of employment as well.
What’s the concept of employment?
The scenarios in which you would use this weapon, which we developed with the Maneuver Center of Excellence. One is base defense. You're sitting there on your little base in Afghanistan, your combat outpost. Three things could happen. One, your counter-battery radar goes off and somebody is launching a rocket or mortars at you. Two, you don't have a counter-battery radar, and you start getting rockets and mortars coming down on you. Three, there's a direct attack on your base, a formation of Taliban moving towards you. That's a base defense concept of employment.
You put the tube down and get out the bipod. You launch the weapon system, get it in the air, acquire the target, and start taking guys out. With the counter-battery scenario, we would get a ten-digit grid coordinate from the radar, showing the point of origin of the mortar launch team.
As soon as we got the ten-digit, which is almost simultaneous to the launch of the mortar or the rocket, our guys would put the ten-digit grid into the Switchblade system to launch it. The Switchblade would move out to that location at top speed and then loiter over the target, to make sure that the enemy still had the mortar in their hands or you could see it on them as they're getting into their truck, make PID, and then bring the Switchblade down and smoke those guys.
There's no other way to get them that quickly. You could counter, you could launch mortars back at them, but again, in 2009, tactical directive number one, which was put out by the commanding general at the time, was about reducing collateral damage. All collateral damage was really frowned upon.
Tell us about the live testing in Afghanistan in Khost, on the border with Pakistan, in 2010, after testing it at home.
We spent 12 months getting the safety confirmation so that soldiers could use it. We had to have the right location to go and permission to go do it. AWG operated under the authorities of the unit that we were with, since we embedded with units only by invitation. The commander of the AWG was a colonel. He had to get permission to do anything from generals.
We got an invitation from the 101st Airborne Division. The commanding general was going to take over the Combined Joint Task Force and be in charge of eastern Afghanistan. We went to them before they deployed and left the United States. We showed them what we wanted to do, explained to them the significance of what it was, explained the risk, and that general said, “Here's another memo. You can go anywhere in my area of operations.”
How prevalent is the Switchblade across the US military now?
The people who are really using the Switchblade are the Ukrainian military, and our special operations units across different formations are using it. [For more on the lessons of Ukraine for unmanned systems, see this thread from an editor at The Economist.]
I've read the same articles as you, and I’ve talked to people who say that we're getting formations of UAS in the Army and the Marine Corps. I know the Marine Corps is doing it and taking it pretty seriously. I don't know to what extent an MOS, a Military Occupational Specialty, has made it someone’s job to be able to run UAS.
But the DoD is a large ship. The $850 billion machine takes a lot to turn. I couldn't tell you with certainty that it's really part of a culture, that there are teams of guys that are trained on it. But we always wanted it to be used in the conventional force.
Do you think that'll change going forward? It seems like in Ukraine, the lesson is every company and every platoon has this stuff and doesn't think twice about it.
It's changing now. Right there. You can't look at war and not take lessons from it. The guys in the Russo-Japanese War, at the turn of the century, saw the machine gun and what it could do, and they reported back to their superiors: “There's this thing that can turn about a hundred guys into hamburger. Probably should think about that.”
You were saying that Marines in the Indo-Pacific actually have the Switchblade in their arsenal. What's the concept of employment there?
There's a lot of debate about this. The commandant of the Marine Corps is getting a lot of flack from his former commandants and other people about what's called Force Design 2030 and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, which is what the Marines are doing in the Pacific — small teams of Marines on the first and second island chain, small islands, with missiles and rockets.
I would imagine they are using the bigger one, like the Switchblade 600, which has a lot more range. But the idea is to be able to go after ships, with rockets and long-range missiles. I could see having a bunch of Switchblades to defend the island as well, to defend your position on the island at standoff. If you have 50 Marines on an island with a bunch of long-range missiles and Switchblades, they could do some damage.
There's a whole debate about whether that's the right approach. I'm not a war gamer and wasn't part of the decision process to do that, but it does make sense, a little bit.
But the original concept you guys had was a very different kind of encounter than what we're talking about in the Indo-Pacific.
They are worlds apart. That doesn't mean that we didn't come up with concepts for big warfare, but our three main concepts were base defense, direct attack, and maneuver. We talked about base defense. Direct attack is a platoon of soldiers moving in on a location, knowing they're going to hit that location.
With the Switchblade, you would potentially have snipers around a village at different locations. You've got a scheme of maneuver that you're going to use to attack that village. You'd also have one or two Switchblade teams maybe a kilometer back. Once the order to attack happens, or just before, you would launch one or two, have them loitering over the target while you were hitting it so that once the enemy is coming out of their hole, you could bring these munitions in on individual targets at will. That's direct attack.
Maneuver is when you're on a patrol and you encounter the enemy. It’s just reaction. Your Switchblade team sets up launches and starts taking guys out. Rules of engagement aren’t the same when you're being attacked.
Those are the three main scenarios that we had, and they're all related to Afghanistan. We had one related to bigger warfare, for instance, using mortars. Often when you're attacking a location with mortars, once you stop the mortar attack guys start coming out of their holes, thinking that the attack is over. So our idea was to have Switchblades in the air already, twenty, thirty, forty of them. They begin to come out of their holes, thinking it's all good. That’s when you start bringing in loitering munitions. It’s pretty quiet, and the enemy doesn’t know what's coming until the last minute. All the pictures of a guy about to be killed with a Switchblade shows someone who looks very surprised. You don't know until the last second that it's coming in.
You mentioned the lessons from Ukraine a moment ago. Tell me more about great power conflict. What specifically have we learned about these technologies?
We've learned two big things. Number one, the Russian Army is not as good as everyone thought they were. Two, if you want to defend your homeland and you have a passion for it, you can do it. There are some things about UAS and drones that have proved to be very effective on the battlefield, particularly for the side being attacked, the Ukrainians.
I don't like people to make comparisons to Taiwan from Ukraine, saying, “The Taiwan Army could do the same thing.” Because while in some respects they could, it’s a totally different environment.
By the way, we’ve pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into that version of the military-industrial complex. Certainly more than the Russians have in their entire defense budget. We've probably put five times that amount in there. But we've learned that these guys with UAS can do a lot of damage, particularly one-way attack drones and using drones to call for fire, to see where enemy formations are, where the command posts are.
I don't know how many generals the Russians have lost, but it's a really high number. Certainly more than we've lost in the last 50 years to just old age, probably. A lot of generals are dying on the battlefield from the Russian side. That means command posts are getting hit or that generals are becoming soldiers and going out on the tactical front end to the edge. I don't know, a combination of the two, but certainly the one-way attack drones have had something to do with that.
You were just out in Saudi Arabia for a live fire test. Tell us about that.
We focused on counter-UAS, counter-drones, but that effort really started at the same time that we started the Switchblade at AWG. When we were employing the Switchblade, we were also asking ourselves, what do we do when the enemy has these things? We didn't have an answer. So we started the counter-UAS program at the Asymmetric Warfare Group. Now I've worked in that area for a long time.
My colleagues and company have worked with CENTCOM and Army Central, ARCENT, on what's called Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center, which right now has a very heavy focus on systems, capabilities, and training to counter drones, particularly in the Middle East.
We brought 22 different capabilities with us, different companies and government entities that have counter-UAS technologies. On a range in the middle of the desert, we brought up a red team, guys that fly drones to mimic what the enemy drones look like from group one, which are really small, and group two, which are a little bigger. And then group three, which are typically fixed-wing drones, like the ones that the Iranians use, Shaheed 136s, for example. We were trying to shoot down these different types with different capabilities at different distances.
That's where Red Sands is focusing right now, as well as looking at robotics on the battlefield. How do you use autonomous systems to augment humans on the battlefield and what is the human machine interface? Who, when, and how do you make those decisions across the kill chain, all those things that make people nervous? We talked about the fear that the gun's going to become a weapon, self-aware like the Terminator. Self-awareness isn't real, but those decisions are. How you employ these weapon systems on the battlefield with soldiers so that you can reduce the risk to the soldier and increase the risk to the enemy — that's what Red Sands is about. That's what we were doing in the desert there for three weeks.
What can you tell me about the takeaways there?
Boy. The desert's hot, and sand gets into almost anything. Working with the Saudis is fun. They're good to work with, and part of the Red Sands experiment is working with a partner. As Americans, we like to push our operating system onto everybody, and that's not helpful. The way we do it is good for us, but it's probably not good for some of our partners. So we got to see how they work.
What we learned from the UAS perspective is that these things can be taken down a lot cheaper than we do now. You remember the drone and ballistic missile attack on Israel a couple of months back where we spent, combined, $1 billion shooting these things down.
The ones we're shooting down off of Africa, Yemen, the Gulf, and in the Red Sea, those cost $50,000 and $25,000. But we're using missiles that cost $500,000 to shoot them down. That works right now, but that's not going to work in a wider conflict from a cost perspective and also because we can't manufacture those kinds of missiles fast enough.
One of the areas that we focused on in Red Sands was cost per kill. How do we take legacy weapon systems, legacy missile systems, and legacy guns and make them really precise? Instead of spending $500,000 to shoot down something that's $25,000, we should be spending $2,000 to shoot them down.
The dynamics have changed. The Iranians are making these things, and they have a very robust and distributed manufacturing. They have set up manufacturing for Shaheeds deep inside a Russian manufacturing facility to pump 5,000 of these things out in one or two months.
We can't spend our way out of this problem. We learned, though, that we can shoot these things down, take them out of the sky, hard kill, with legacy weapon systems that have been tuned and made smart. Remember the ‘90’s, when we made dumb bombs into smart bombs, and they were very accurate.
Legacy weapon systems can be made very accurate and autonomous so that they can track these systems at a distance and take them down.
Given your experience helping shepherd the Switchblade into Army adoption, what advice would you give folks today to get new weapon systems into the hands of American soldiers?
At AWG, we were passionate about what we were doing. It was the mission every day to speed these things along. I have a 17-year-old son, and he might join the military. Your son might be in the military. Your daughter might be in the military. The faster you can speed these things along — safely and morally and ethically — the faster it could be in your son's hands and save his life somewhere around the world.
The other thing is the Federal Acquisition Regulation is very complex, but it's like the Constitution — it's all in how you interpret it. You don't need to employ the same methods to fast-track the loitering munition that you do to build an aircraft carrier. Building an aircraft carrier is extremely complex. Building a B2 stealth bomber is extremely complex. Fielding a new group two drone is not very complex and doesn’t have to be. What I say to these people all the time is don’t keep asking for permission to do something. Read the rules and do what you're allowed to do, which is a lot. You can interpret the Constitution in many ways.
[For more on the FAR, see our interview with Rick Dunn]
How to Buy Stuff Like DARPA Does
We didn't break any rules when we did Switchblade. We just interpreted the acquisition regulations in a different way than some other people did. For instance, getting the memo from the Maneuver Center to make it a direct-fire weapon — we didn't see that in a book. It wasn't in the defense acquisition regulations. As a team of guys, we were talking and thought, if we made this thing direct fire, we wouldn't have to get permission to fire it from anybody outside of the current command system that we were in or the location we were at.
We didn't break any rules when we did Switchblade. We just interpreted the acquisition regulations in a different way than some other people did.
Just be imaginative and interpret the Constitution the way you want it to be interpreted. Don't ask for permission. Ask for forgiveness. Just do it. That's what I say.
Why was the AWG shuttered?
I'm part of a Signal chat with 300 former AWG members. At least once a week, we lament what the AWG could be doing today but isn’t, particularly in Israel, in Ukraine, in Taiwan. The kinds of men and women we had were extremely unique and perceptive individuals. They could go anywhere and see what the enemy was doing, what we were doing wrong, what our partners were doing wrong or right.
Since you asked me, it's a shame that the Army decided to deactivate the Asymmetric Warfare Group because it was a unique capability that doesn't reside anywhere today. And I believe with all my heart that when the next war comes and American boys and girls start getting killed, we're going to create something just like it again. That's a shame because we could just have it ready already.
I think it was shuttered because of a lack of imagination. The need was apparent in wartime, but then the war goes away and it’s not readily apparent that you need it right now. The leadership of the Army said, “We don't really need this now. We can pay for all this other stuff we want to do and the modernization and the new tanks and the hovering motorbikes and other things that we want to do.”
Obviously, everything in the military comes down to the golden rule: he who has the gold rules. The people with the gold aren’t willing to part with this gold for that unit when there's not a war going on.
With what’s going on around the world right now, we could be learning so much more with seasoned professionals on the ground, observing them and bringing those things back and helping the Ukrainians.
The next big problem might be Taiwan. At some point that balloon is going to go up. If you think Ukraine is bad, Ukraine could fall tomorrow and you and I would be fine. If Taiwan falls tomorrow, our cell phones don't work. They make 90% of the advanced microchips. When we try to imagine what that's going to do to the supply chain, it's going to be really bad. We could be learning a lot and prepare in much better ways than we are right now.
That's why I will give my last plug to a unit that does the kinds of things that the AWG did. And not just because I was in it, but because I saw it.
Share this post