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Executive Summary
A military force that adapts faster over repeated engagements can decisively defeat one with superior firepower and equipment. This is not a slogan. It is demonstrated analytically in this report and is increasingly visible on the battlefields of Ukraine, where electromagnetic warfare, communication networks, flight profiles, and weapon payloads change over weeks rather than years. Military advantage is migrating from what a force possesses to how fast it can learn, and advancements in system performance and lethality frequently evaporate before they matter.
Previous shifts in the source of military advantage revolved around novel technologies that enabled new ways of fighting. In some cases, only one military fielded the relevant technologies, giving it a temporary edge over opponents. For example, the United States initially developed the guided weapons and data networks that ushered in today’s era of precision-strike warfare. The US military used them to great advantage during Operation Desert Storm, and now they are a baseline part of every armed force.
Other revolutions followed a different pattern. Railroads and telegraph lines crisscrossed the territory of every major and middle power by the late nineteenth century. But only Prussia built the organizations and infrastructure to exploit them militarily. Its armies could concentrate faster than opponents could react, leading to Prussia’s success during the German Wars of Unification.
Technology proliferation and commercialization mean that the next revolution is far more likely to follow the railroad pattern than the precision-strike pattern. The enablers of modern warfare—cloud computing, software development tooling, artificial intelligence (AI), digital manufacturing, ubiquitous sensing—are globally available. The military that first builds the infrastructure to best exploit them will have a potentially insurmountable advantage.
This report proposes that Adaptation in Contact—the deliberate weaponization of the learning cycle—represents the next revolution in military affairs. The concept describes a closed loop:
- Operational contact and technical intelligence collection generate data.
- Data informs rapid development of updated tactics, software, kill chains, and system configurations.
- Validated changes deploy back to the force before the adversary can react.
Ukrainian maritime drone warfare illustrates a nascent form of Adaptation in Contact. Teams of operators and technologists iterate hull designs, payloads, and vehicle autonomy, using telemetry from each engagement. By evolving faster than its opponents, a small Ukrainian force was able to deny Russia’s Black Sea Fleet access to the open water and destroy numerous vessels inside defended ports. Kyiv’s troops never fielded a wonder weapon but used a primitive learning engine to turn contact into capability faster than the Russians could respond.
As the Ukrainian example suggests, Adaptation in Contact does not rely on faster decision-making within a tactical engagement. Instead, it derives advantage from the ability to implement changes across a military force between engagements, including adjustments to its software, electronic signatures, hardware configurations, and doctrinal playbook. A brilliant tactical decision benefits the unit that made it in that moment, but can be undone in an instant by an enemy countermeasure. The institutional capacity to generate and deploy the next adaptation before the enemy can respond to the last one is a durable advantage that could define a true revolution in military affairs.
The US military may have pioneered the precision-strike revolution, but its leadership in the next regime of military competition is not preordained. Three institutional barriers throttle the learning loops that would enable US forces to become more adaptable:
- The gap between those who fight and those who equip
- The wall between military operations and intelligence authorities
- The reliance of acquisition and budgeting process on predicted requirements rather than current need
Each of these seams adds weeks for classification reviews, months for funding realignment, and years for milestone approvals while adversaries iterate in the field.
The US military needs infrastructure, not exhortation, to overcome the barriers to a more adaptable force. In the nineteenth century, steel rails and copper telegraph wires enabled a military revolution centered on speed and coordination. Today’s US Department of War (DoW) needs to build a set of digital rails, as described in this report, to win the adaptation competition. These include intelligence pipelines that deliver raw operational data to engineers at machine speed, simulation environments that stress-test adaptations under controlled adversity, and secure deployment channels capable of pushing validated updates to the tactical edge in hours.
Governments often centralize infrastructure and processes to maintain control and gain efficiency. The DoW should resist this temptation when implementing Adaptation in Contact. Instead, it should federate digital rails into multiple loops of development and operations that address different domains or missions, run at appropriate tempos for their applications, and share minimal common services. This approach will lend agility and avoid constraining the entire force to the speed of the slowest-evolving missions.
The precision-strike revolution harnessed new technologies to execute specific operational concepts. The US military introduced these technologies, leading US defense planners to assume they could predict how to remain ahead in the competition through long-term weapons development programs. By adopting Adaptation in Contact, the DoW would acknowledge the reality of proliferation and its inability to retain an enduring edge through technology alone. In this environment, the best strategy is fielding an infrastructure for adaptation.
Other paths to military advantage would also depend on digital rails. For example, AI may transform warfare. But if a military applies it without the infrastructure for adaptation, AI simply thinks smarter or faster inside the same bottlenecks, unable to convert insight into fielded change at a competitive operational tempo. To realize AI’s potential, the DoW will need infrastructure that can exploit the options that AI-enabled decision support tools can reveal.
The same machinery that accelerates learning in war can also enable disciplined competition short of it. By applying the infrastructure for adaptation, the DoW can turn deterrence into a measurable control problem. It can run calibrated moves, observe adversary responses, and learn which changes reliably create uncertainty or shift behavior without waiting for a crisis to test US military technology and tactics.
The investments described in this report are not administrative modernization. They are the combat power of the next era. The nation that first institutionalizes the capacity to learn and adapt at operationally relevant speeds will dictate the terms of future military competition.