Katrina Manson of New York, in other areas, preparations for the fight continue. At a Lockheed Martin facility in Arlington, I put a helmet on my head. Below, fields and waterways stretch out of Washington, DC.
Green lines and numbers fill my vision. Disappearing in the helmet of an F-35 stealth plane, it feels like immersing yourself in the most futuristic - and frighteningly realistic - computer game. Pilot Billy Flynn tells me, "It's like the 'military factory in the movie' Tony Stark. This is the Iron Man movie."
The $400,000 headgear makes the pilot more of a machine than a man.
Flynn says that six infrared cameras built into the plane feed us into one combined vision, giving the pilot the ability to "see through the skin of the plane".
The aircraft relies on stealth - a hallmark of "fifth-generation" aircraft - to outmaneuver the enemy's plans.
The aircraft is shaped and painted to avoid radar detection, and it carries its weapons and fuel inside in order to reduce detectable heat production.
It is loaded with four weapons - two missiles and two bombs - and can jam enemy radars with electronic attack. Its real strength, however, is that it is a center for collecting and distributing data in a way that enables it to coordinate any battle and outsmart a less efficient enemy.
Packed with 8.6 million lines of code, and operating in formations, these aircraft can infiltrate deep in and out of enemy territory, exchanging information with each other via a short secret link, and sending and receiving data over long distances to mission commands, ships or missiles hundreds of kilometers away. . The stealth plane, Flynn says, "takes the workload away from the human being."
“We are now flying in a safe haven, where no one sees us, but we see absolutely everyone, and everything is there,” says Flynn, who is one of 15 F-35 test pilots, adding that he can see 300 kilometers to the horizon from his plane. Rise about nine kilometers in the air.
He says, "We operate with impunity and attack whatever we want... Nobody knows we are there. An invisible attack will bring down enemy planes; they will have to watch the planes scatter to pieces."
The new US fighter jet is intended to last 50 years, giving the United States and 13 of its allies a permanent advantage over China.
More than 2,000 of them are set to be built over the next two decades, including 330 aircraft that have already been delivered.
China is competing aggressively to build an aircraft like the F-35, in part because of stolen US military blueprints, on which Beijing is allegedly reliant to design its own version. Flynn says his jet aircraft are 15 to 20 years ahead of China, and will continue to evolve.
"We don't even have a definition of sixth generation yet," he says. One future innovation might include sensors seen in different spectra, beyond the radar range.
A little over 100 years ago, commentators predicted that weapons of war had become so technologically advanced, so lethal, that no one would ever use them. Many have shrouded the relentless arms race as part of an economic effort to stimulate the domestic industrial base, arguing that such a scramble would never lead to conflict. The First World War proved them wrong on these two predictions.
In the terrifying race to find better ways to fight, including killing, today's military experts often still think that improved technology will save lives, and that the flashes of World War III could be over in a matter of weeks.
They argue that shifting the risk toward robotics should reduce the human cost. "Hundreds of years ago, people would fight head-to-head with swords. Today, most soldiers don't see other soldiers," says Cott, referring to the decline in battlefield deaths over the ages.
"Most likely, smarter things on the battlefield will reduce human mortality on the battlefield," he added.
Today, however, Pentagon officials worry that the United States will absorb a huge number of casualties if it goes to war with China, even if it eventually wins.
“The battlefield of the future will be extraordinarily deadly, and the pace will be 24 hours a day, all day, all weather, no rest,” Bob Werk, a former deputy defense secretary, tells me. “It will be a war of AI on our part against AI on their side. One side will go into the command system and shut everything down. You can find yourself in situations where your weapons don't work, quite literally."
Bots may also fall short. US officials are unclear whether decades of artificial intelligence in the future can provide the creative spark needed to excel in battle and be able to hold the ground, or whether machines may ultimately pursue values different from the humans they think they are. responsible for them, and the catastrophic impact of this “if you rebel against them”.
Mattis doesn't anticipate that there will be one simple panacea when it comes to a specific weapon in the future. Of today's military planners, he says, "They're merging all the developments together, starting with the intelligence inputs, the surveillance, the missiles, everything."
"(It takes) time to put it together and talk about it..every war is unique." He says that this kind of synergy, not specific weapons alone, will bring wins.
Such a shift would need a new military doctrine of the kind that has never been tested, with massive amounts of data delivered quickly to reach life-and-death decisions.
Mattis takes his lessons from history. "The Germans didn't have the best tank when they entered World War II, the French had them. The Germans knew how to integrate it into the war, however, adding that their introduction of a radio and air cover gave the tank much more power," he said.
Tomorrow's war will likely be different from the way anyone might expect. "It could be artificial intelligence, or robots using hypersonic weapons."
But Mattis also acknowledges that some things may have such a profound effect that he can't be sure how the war will change. Human control of AI — so central to the work that takes place at the Pentagon and elsewhere — could eventually recede. "Obviously in the near future there will be an important human component. Maybe for 10 years, maybe for 15 years, but not over 100 years," Lee said.
For Jim Mattis, the question is what technological advances like this will do to the nature of war itself. He wonders whether artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics may one day take out of the fray the most important quality that humans have: fear. Matisse studied early 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who argues that the best victories come from wars conducted deep in enemy territory, and that surprise in combat is often unattainable.
Like Clausewitz, Mattis sees confusion and fear as essential components of war, but he has spent long enough thinking about the coming turn of the war that he knows he can't quite understand it yet.
"I haven't gotten to that point yet in all my thinking about it," he told me, in his first personal interview with a national newspaper since taking office.
We're on his doomsday plane — so advanced that it can also function like an air bunker from a nuclear attack, it's so old-school that it has vintage fire extinguishers and 1980s furnishings to match.
Mattis is a retired four-star Marine who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, takes a measured, but ruthless approach to war, and is known for his witty, hit-and-run remarks: "Be polite, be professional, but you must have a plan to kill everyone." You meet him”—he still savors the gesture his colleagues once gave him: Colonel has an Outstanding Solution, where the initials of this sentence in English form Chaos. Nowadays he is often praised as a warrior monk.
The day we speak, in early September, he was on a 22-hour flight to India to sign new military cooperation agreements that would begin to revive an old American hope that Delhi would become a high-tech military heavyweight, standing up to Beijing.
However, he does not believe that the United States is destined for war with China. “I'm not one who thinks there will be automatic conflict in the future,” he told me, referring to Graham Allison, a former Pentagon official, about the Thucydides trap — where a rising power replaces an existing one through war.
Earlier this year, Mattis and other military dignitaries in Beijing attended a dinner, which culminated in a soft late-night musical.
"They threw me a party you couldn't believe," he recalls. In the midst of words of courtesy, China announced that it would not give up even "an inch" of the South China Sea.
Mattis earlier accused China of "intimidation and coercion", days after his abrupt decision to cancel Beijing's large-scale naval exercises in the Pacific.
A senior security official told me that Mattis privately warned his "Chinese" counterparts that they would be at a disadvantage against a highly seasoned adversary like the United States, who has exploited Chinese fears of combative inadequacy.
Things quickly deteriorated. Last October, Mattis canceled his second trip to Beijing amid escalating military tensions, after a US destroyer avoided a collision with a Chinese warship in the South China Sea.
Last week the two sides tried to "fix it" again - Defense Secretary General Wei Fengyi, who last month issued customary warnings that the Chinese military would take military action "at all costs" to preserve Taiwan, traveled to Washington to meet Mattis.
“It just seems to me that there is tension against hegemony for both of us,” Mattis says, but he points to an aggressive authoritarian streak in China that frames the tension as a confrontation between two regimes with vastly different values.
“By the time they come of age and find it simply not possible to enter and control other people’s ports, guarantees, etc., there will be discipline.”
He says that ultimately it is important for the two countries to "look at the kind of relationship we can develop" - without explicitly saying that he expects China and the US to swap places - referring to the fact that when the US eventually overtook the UK as a global power in In the early twentieth century, the two countries managed to avoid a military confrontation; Because they share pretty much the same values.
None of these things, however, prevent Mattis from preparing the United States for war. He tells me of extensive efforts to determine which future technologies show "the best promise or could be a game-changer... We already have a rocket scientist who knows how to do the extra stuff," he says proudly.
Mattis means Michael Griffin, the Pentagon's chief technical officer. This former head of NASA is entrusted with the task of bringing the American war machine into the next era.
He is rushing to prepare the military hardware of the future, and he wants to avoid a "man-to-man fight" with China.
"It's not the kind of fight we want to get into, and we probably can't win this fight," Griffin says. On top of that, he is tasked with making major breakthroughs in mind-blowing new technologies - not just artificial intelligence, but also ultrasonic equipment, quantum science, lasers, nuclear weapons, and electronic warfare.
Overtaking China will require accelerating development cycles. At present, the US would need an average of 16 years to realize an idea of operational capability, compared to less than seven years for China. Share it
Add a comment
