Interview with Clinton Hinote

CSDS-SWJ STRATEGY DEBRIEFS • 11/2025

Interview with Clinton Hinote, by Octavian Manea

21.11.2025

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote served as the Deputy Chief of Staff, Strategy, Integration and Requirements, United States Air Force. In that role, he served as the senior Air Force leader responsible for Air Force Futures. In this position, he focused on developing Air Force strategy and concepts, conducting strategic assessments of the operating environment through wargames and workshops, manifesting an integrated future force design and achieving timely and effective operational capabilities required for tomorrow’s Airmen to fight and win. He was a military assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defence during the Third Offset Strategy (3OS).

The current Netflix series – “Dept. Q” – reminded me about the designation “Q” in military circles. Tell us a bit about the symbolism of your personal use of “Q” as a signature.

Clinton Hinote: It is not as mysterious as you might think. When I was a wingman fighter pilot – my first fighter squadron – my job was to programme all of the pods, the missiles and the threat warning devices. And back then, there were lots of different pieces of machinery that each had to do one of those things. In my office, in the back of the squadron, we kept all of those pieces of machinery, and they looked like gadgets. It had the appearance of walking into Q’s office in the James Bond series. And so I got the call sign Q, and it stuck.

There is a culture in the United States Air Force of using call signs in many circumstances. It comes from the importance of being able to talk to somebody individually over the radio without using real names. So, as an example: if somebody saw that I needed to take action in the air – maybe a missile had been fired at me – they could say (and I have actually heard this happen): “Q, break right”. It is a way of getting someone’s attention quickly. But it has also grown into a deeply ingrained cultural practice within the Air Force.

A key notion that we have heard since the days of the “Third Offset Strategy” is that of parity – particularly of peer competitors that are on the verge of achieving parity in precision-guided munitions and theatre-level battle networks. For some, parity might suggest equilibrium and an inherent stabilising reality. For others, parity is an omen for war. Why should parity be a call for action for change, for trying to restore overmatch or trying to fight differently? Why is parity perceived as a danger, as something to be avoided at all costs? 

Clinton Hinote: The notion of parity is something US strategists have tried to avoid for decades – all the way through the Cold War. From the start, the idea was that we did not want to match up tank for tank, ship for ship, aircraft for aircraft with the Soviet Union. That path would almost certainly leave us at a numerical disadvantage, and if it came to an actual fight, the outcome would be anything but certain.

As a military strategist, I always have to assume deterrence could fail/break down – that we might actually have to fight and win. And I think you can see some of the big problems of/with parity on full display in Ukraine today, which is precisely what we have been trying to avoid.

One of the things we are always trying to avoid is battlefield parity. That is why we consistently seek some form of advantage – because parity often leads to stalemate, where countless lives are lost for no real strategic purpose. We have seen that before in Europe, and we are seeing it again in Europe today. As we think about the future of warfare, we do not believe that seeking parity is good for the international order or for our own chances of securing an advantage if we actually have to fight. It is a deeply held belief within the strategist community, and I share it. I have always felt it was incumbent on all of us charged with building a future force to seek advantage wherever we can find it.

If you are the underdog and you achieve parity, you feel pretty good. But if you are the one who has been enjoying overmatch for some time, and then parity comes, it does not feel good at all – you feel like you have lost the advantage.

That is exactly the situation we found ourselves in coming out of the Cold War: a period of unipolarity, with a very dominant United States – certainly in a military sense. But as China rose and built up its military capabilities, we began to see a loss of advantage as they were achieving some level of parity. They were certainly achieving parity – particularly in key areas of the globe that included their near abroad, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Meanwhile, the strategist community in the US was searching for other ways to restore and sustain advantage.

Recent US National Defence Strategies can, in many respects, be seen as acknowledgements of the obsolescence of the post–Cold War American Way of Warfare and its traditional expeditionary approach. Why has this legacy model become outdated? 

Clinton Hinote: We were seeking overmatch at the end of the Cold War. That was central to the strategy: we did not want to go aircraft-to-aircraft, tank-for-tank, ship-for-ship. The goal was to defeat a larger force with a more qualitatively superior force. By the end of the Cold War, we had qualitative advantages in nearly every aspect of warfare.

But it was not just that our platforms were better. We were also beginning to integrate them through advanced communications – this was the essence of the battle network concept. Soviet strategists became deeply concerned about this. They feared the cumulative advantage of battle networks over legacy forces – legions of tanks, fleets of ships, wings of aircraft. The idea that a qualitatively superior force, connected through a battle network, could achieve decisive effects – effects approaching those of a nuclear weapon – was alarming to them. They did not believe they could match it. And so, even as the Cold War was winding down politically, militarily there was a clear advantage accruing to the US: the qualitative superiority of platforms plus the ability to knit them together into a battle network.

Fast forward to the Iraq War. The interesting advantage that we leveraged was that, in addition to battle networks, we had also built a logistics network. Its original purpose was to support the massive logistical lift required to fight and sustain a war in Europe – to get our aircraft, tank divisions and everything else across the Atlantic and keep them in the field. In many ways, then, it was not just a battle network revolution – it was a logistics network revolution as well. When you put the two together, the effect was striking: we could deploy large numbers of qualitatively superior equipment and formations – ships, aircraft, tanks – position them just outside the reach of Iraq’s forces and simultaneously put in place the logistics infrastructure to sustain them in the field. And critically, we had the ability to decide when to fight.

Iraq, which at the time had one of the largest militaries in the world, could not do much about it. This became the new American way of war: deploy large formations of qualitatively superior systems, integrate them through a multi-domain battle network and support them through a robust logistics network.

The Chinese – just as the Soviets before them – recognised the extraordinary power that came from the combination of the logistics network and the battle network. They understood that if nothing changed, they could be coerced by that military capability. And in fact, that is exactly what happened during the Taiwan Strait crisis: they were compelled to back down because the US possessed a vastly superior military force, leveraging together the logistics and battle networks.

In that context, China began a multi-decade effort – one that continues to this day – to offset that military capability, to achieve some measure of battlefield parity/ bring some level of parity to the battlefield that would prevent coercion. For them, it was existential. They saw the alternative as nothing less than the possible end of the Chinese Communist Party.

Their answer was to develop their own offset strategy, one premised on adapting and leveraging many of the technological advances we had pioneered and fielded: precision weapons, sensors, communications, data, information – the battle network itself. But instead of trying to replicate our global reach, they built a regional battle network centred on the southern mainland, the Taiwan Strait, Japan and the South China Sea. That became what we now call the anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capability. It was their version of an offset strategy – a way to achieve parity without needing to match us platform-for-platform in quality/without having to have qualitatively equal platforms.

As they were fielding their A2/AD capabilities, they were, at least initially, relying on systems that were qualitatively inferior. But when assembled into an integrated network – and especially when deployed in large numbers – those systems became something the United States could not simply fight through. This did not happen overnight. While the US was focused on Iraq and Afghanistan during the 2010–2020 timeframe, China was making steady, deliberate gains toward its objective: offsetting US military advantage in its near abroad.

They succeeded in building a formidable A2/AD network. And what is more, they have not just moved to parity using this offset strategy – in some cases, we are now seeing their platform quality rise to the point of being comparable with Western standards.

In other words, they have realised their offset strategy in their near abroad through A2/AD, and they have simultaneously raised the quality of their platforms. The result is that China no longer feels coerced by US military power like in the past. Instead, they now believe they can pursue their national interests in ways that simply were not possible for them back in the 1990s. It is a long story – a 30-year story – of China identifying what it needed to do, and then executing that strategy with remarkable consistency.

You mentioned this parity through reverse engineering on the Chinese side. What exactly are they targeting in the model you have just described? Because in many ways, it seems to collapse – or even neutralise – the very method the United States relied on in “Desert Storm”. So, what centre of gravity are they aiming at?

Clinton Hinote: I talked about the combination of the battle network with the logistics network. That, in a nutshell, was – and is – the American way of war. The Chinese offset – the so-called A2/AD – directly counters both pillars of that American way of war. The anti-access component is a direct challenge to the logistics network. The area-denial component is aimed squarely at the battle network. And the two work together in tandem, just as our logistics and battle networks were designed to reinforce each other.

The way they think about and they have structured their A2/AD network is deliberate: it prevents our ability to get logistics where it needs to be, and in doing so, it undermines the effectiveness of our battle network, it prevents the battle network from being effective. It is a very astute – and very effective – way of offsetting our advantages.

What was the “Overmatch Brief” and what picture did it paint? I think it is highly indicative/symbolic in terms of the structural trends that pushed for 3OS.

Clinton Hinote: It was produced by the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), contracted through RAND, and the brief itself was meant to communicate what was happening – particularly in relation to China, although there was a Russia component as well – and to show how the technologies that enabled the battle network were proliferating.

Other countries – very much China, but also Russia – were adopting these technologies, integrating them into their own battle networks. And because of the tyranny of geography and the scenarios we were wargaming, it would mean the difference between victory and defeat for us.

So if we believed we were going to have to defend NATO on NATO’s eastern front – well, that’s a home game for Russia. They could bring their battle networks to bear and use them against NATO forces. In its near abroad, China had established A2/AD battle networks. Essentially, the same technologies that had been pioneered by the US in the 1980s were, by the 2010s, being adopted and operationalised by China. The big punchline of the brief was that – in the most credible war games we had been fighting – we were losing all of them.

It was a shock to the political leaders who took the Overmatch Brief. And that is what the ONA tried to do. They wanted everybody to see what they had been seeing. They had been watching the development of these networks. They had been watching how the war games were unfolding. They believed that they were seeing a change in the way military advantage was being wielded. Political leaders were shocked because the general belief was that there was no military as strong as the US, and that it was not going to be challenged. All of a sudden, we see that there is some level of parity between the US when it deploys and tries to do these scenarios with Russia and China playing a home game and brings its battle networks to the field. It was a deep shock.

It was a shock to the political leaders who took the Overmatch Brief. And that is exactly what the ONA was trying to achieve. They wanted everyone to see what they had been seeing. They had been watching the development of these networks and they had been observing how the war games were unfolding. They believed they were witnessing a shift – a change in the way military advantage was being wielded. Political leaders were shocked because the prevailing belief was that no military on Earth could rival the US – and certainly not challenge it. But all of a sudden, we are seeing signs of parity when the US deploys and runs these scenarios against Russia and China, playing the home game and bringing their battle networks into the field. It was a deep shock.

For those who actually took the brief – who took the time to understand it – I do not think they will ever forget it. I remember seeing it for the first time, and I still remember going back to my office, slumping down in my chair and just thinking, “Man … the world has changed”. It was a wake-up call.

As someone who worked with Bob Work on the Third Offset, I want to revisit his call for a multi-domain Operational Fires Network. That idea, first aimed at NATO’s eastern flank after Crimea, now surfaces in the Indo-Pacific as the Joint Fires Network (JFN) and Hellscape concept. How effective is a multi-service JFN at deterring aggression in the first island chain, and how directly does this doctrine trace back to Third Offset multi-domain thinking?

Clinton Hinote: I will preface my answer by saying this: every branded strategy tends to get built up too much by one side and politically denigrated by the other. As if the other side cannot have a good idea, you know? In our polarised politics, the Third Offset has that branding problem. If you are in a Republican administration, you cannot admit that 3OS was a good thing. That being said, I am coming at it strictly from a military strategist’s point of view.

Just as the US was seeking advantage in the Cold War – never wanting to go ship for ship, tank for tank, aircraft for aircraft – it felt, after the Overmatch Brief and as China achieved parity through A2/AD battle network, like it was time to find a new way of gaining/achieving advantage.

We are always trying to achieve an advantage. Everyone in the military is looking to achieve an advantage. No one is aiming to match China ship for ship, tank for tank, aircraft for aircraft. We are always going to be looking for something different – something that lets us fight through their A2/AD capabilities and still win. That is the essence of the offset strategy. And I believe any Republican or Democrat would go for it. I still believe there is strategic continuity between administrations on this issue.

For me, personally, that is why I wanted to join Bob Work’s office – because he was thinking differently. He was looking at the technologies that were emerging, and more importantly, how to combine them and put them together.

So no military technology exists in a vacuum. The way you get overmatch is by putting them together in different ways. The Germans did this early in World War II – knitting together emerging technologies in a way that gave them an almost unstoppable advantage in the Blitzkrieg. In the very same way, we were looking to gain an advantage by combining and integrating new technologies. So, what were those technologies?

Certainly, communications were becoming better – more secure, more ubiquitous. We had packaging. Our navigation systems were far more advanced, much more accurate and much more widespread. Accuracy itself became an advantage. At the same time, computing power was growing exponentially. We saw the very beginnings of artificial intelligence. We saw breakthroughs in microelectronics – packing immense computing power into an incredibly small space. That was new. And then, you start to see how the technology of autonomy was becoming increasingly viable.

And we have had autonomous weapons for a while. A US AMRAAM missile, or certain gun-defence systems – they have been autonomous for years. But the new versions of autonomy were far more capable, far more reliable, far more advanced. So, when we started knitting those technologies together, you could begin to see how a new concept might emerge. That concept relied heavily on autonomy. And now, with major advances in autonomy, you could start thinking about autonomous systems at scale in mass. Lots of them. This is where the vision of many drones comes in – drones in the air, on the land, on the ocean, under the ocean’s surface. Satellites operating autonomously in space. Suddenly, you could see how entire battle networks could be built around autonomous systems.

And if you knit enough of these systems together into your network, you might achieve something that feels like swarming – many autonomous entities, operating across domains (in air, land and sea, under the sea and in space), acting together for common purpose. And the technology was moving so quickly that autonomous operation meant one person could now control many.

Eventually, one command node could control the swarm. That is where we saw the real advantage: creating battle networks using autonomy – large numbers of uncrewed, unmanned vehicles, spread across multiple domains, operating together. That, in turn, would begin to create a kind of defence the world had never seen. No modern force has ever fought through a truly multi-domain defence. And by that, I mean all the domains – land, air, sea, undersea, space – operating together, organically as one.

And this became the notion of Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2). The battle network evolving to the next level, integrating all of this together so that it is operating as one. It is all working together for the same purpose. So it is not some cosmic concept. It is really just the next version of the battle network. You are expanding the number of nodes within the battle network and they are all working together. They are connected – air, land, sea, space, cyberspace – and they are integrated. Ultimately, the leap to JADC2 meant a transition from essentially a domain-centric joint force to one that is all-domain, able to move seamlessly and operate fluidly across domains.

But the bigger point to be made is that no modern force has ever fought through a multi-domain defence. That, I believe, is the brilliance of this Hellscape idea. And what I will say is that I saw versions of the Hellscape beginning to take shape in 2018. Now, it may have started earlier, but I personally saw advanced – or at least preliminary – versions of Hellscape in 2018. And I believe it represents exactly the way we need to think.

Is it too far to say that this multi-domain defence is the operational legacy of the Third Offset Strategy? I think it could be argued that in many ways, a multi-domain swarming defence is the legacy of the 3OS strategists, who were able to see beyond the horizon. Some of what we see taking shape today was, in fact, schematised and sketched out back in 2014 and 2015.

Clinton Hinote: I believe that multi-domain defence is a direct descendant of the thought process that was leveraging emerging technologies and knitting them together into an operational concept – one that could gain advantage over A2/AD, that could gain advantage over China. I believe that’s the Third Offset. But I understand – the label throws people off. You know, the label distracts. What I would say is that there has been real intellectual work – work that began as these technologies were emerging – and it continues to this day. It is at least ten years in the making.

Going back to the 3OS days, another notion debated then was the need to develop a kind of Assault Breaker 2.0. Is Hellscape some sort of Assault Breaker 2.0?

Clinton Hinote: So it is interesting you bring up Assault Breaker. Assault Breaker, of course, was the name for the battle network produced at the end of the Cold War. It was quite offensive in nature – meaning, the offence was ascendant. You could penetrate using low-observable technology, you could communicate, you could hit what you were aiming at, use far fewer weapons than before and you could create all sorts of systemic effects deep inside enemy territory. It was system attack – and Assault Breaker could do system attack.

What we are talking about with Hellscape is turning that around to a degree – making it defensive in nature. Now, there are people who would propose an Assault Breaker 2.0 – another version of offence. And yes, you could use that against China, you could use it against Russia. But there are deep disagreements – especially within places like the Department of War – about whether or not that is advisable. But there is very little disagreement on the advisability of creating a multi-domain swarming defence – which is what we are talking about with Hellscape.

The concept of Hellscape is very much a defensive game. And I think that is important because I believe the battle network of today – using autonomy, using advanced communications, using large numbers of unmanned vehicles across all domains, all connected through JADC2 – is inherently defensive. It has a tremendous defensive advantage. It is defensive dominant.

Now, there are parts of today’s technologies that are offence-dominant. And I think it is important to say – it is not like all the technologies we see out there are defensive by nature. Depending on how you place them in a scenario, I could make a strong argument that either the offence or the defence has the advantage. But what I believe is that as we begin putting together the battle network of Hellscape, we have the potential to create a very defence dominant battlefield.

I believe that is good for us – strategically and geopolitically – because China and Russia have to go somewhere to achieve their objectives. We do not. We are status quo powers. We just have to keep what we have got. So if we can create a battlefield where defence is dominant, and geopolitically, all we need to do is hold our ground – that reality is massively in our favour. What that does is align the high, grand strategic interests with the military operations. And when those are in alignment, we have the potential for really good results.

So, as an example – if we were fighting Russia in Ukraine, I would say: put Hellscape in Ukraine. And in my humble opinion, there would be nothing the Russians could do to gain ground. No matter how many men they threw at the problem, it would be almost impossible for them to take ground. We would deploy the battle network – Hellscape – on land, against Russia, and let them try to fight through it. Well, good luck with that. And so, I do believe it creates tremendous continuity – from grand strategic all the way down to tactical. And if you have got that, and you do not use it – I think you are just putting people on the line.

How adaptable/fungible is the Hellscape concept across different theatres? In other words, are its operational principles theatre-specific, or can they be applied more broadly in diverse environments and against varying A2/AD challenges?

Clinton Hinote: So, I would say the platforms and the weapons are distinct. The types of swarms you had have on land, at sea and in other domains – those would be different. But the concept, I believe, is fungible between a Taiwan scenario and a NATO defence scenario. That is forward defence.

What I would say is, we have preserved an advantage in what you might call the middle defence – so maybe that’s the Pacific Ocean in a China scenario. So yes, we need to put Hellscape in place for the Taiwan scenario. But if China wants to do damage to the United States – and they might – I mean, I have seen it. In war games, they always try to hit the US. They try to strike with all sorts of weapons.

And they have to fight through what we have called in this interview the continuity forces or legacy forces. So yes, they had have to fight through four carrier strike groups, a submarine net and the fighters you would need to get past in order to reach Hawaii. And I mean – they do not have the advantage there. There is no parity there. Not yet.

So not only do you have the Hellscape defence forward, but you also have a conventional advantage in the middle – and then, what I believe you will see is “Golden Dome” as the concept for defending the homeland against strikes.

So there are three kinds of zones: there is the forward defence – you might call that the battle network of Hellscape; then there is the middle defence – that is conventional force on conventional force, where they have to fight through your carrier strike groups; and finally, you have your homeland defence.

The combination of all that gives you a way of thinking about defence across the depth of the globe – from hemisphere to hemisphere. I think if you put that in place, the chances of war are low. What I absolutely believe is: you do not get into great power wars if you implement that three-layer defence. You have created deterrence for this century – not the last century, but for the next. That is where I believe we are going.

You have talked extensively about this multi-domain swarming defence. Let us unpack what Hellscape would actually look like in practice – specifically in the First Island Chain.

Clinton Hinote: I am happy to unpack what I believe a defensive concept of Hellscape should look like. We actually called it the purple woodchipper: all-domains, bringing together the colours of the core service stakeholders, while at the same time carrying the symbolism of, “put your face in the woodchipper and see how that feels”.

The way to think about it is to describe what China would experience if it were trying to get off the Taiwan Strait. Well, at the very beginning, they would face tremendous difficulty – friction in their logistics – because you would see all sorts of cyber and kinetic attacks on their logistics systems. In addition, you would start seeing fires – attacks – on their ports, on their actual platforms, while they are cross-loading the platforms, while they are trying to get all their logistics in place. Then they would begin sailing – and they would start to encounter fires from the air. Some of those would come from drones. Some of them would be missiles.

The sensing network would be in place – and it would be impossible for them to knock it out. Not least because hiding a ship on the open ocean is not easy. And even if they managed to knock out parts of the sensing grid, they would still be pretty vulnerable – because their ships are on the ocean. And that is not a very hard problem for sensors. So they would have to knock out a tremendous amount.

The sensing grid will remain in place – to some level. So they will start receiving fires. They will have to do something about that. They will have to figure out how to manoeuvre through the fires. Some of them will be attrited. They will reach the very difficult currents of the Taiwan Strait. And at that point, they will not just be receiving fires from drones – they will start receiving fires from underwater. Some of those will come from unmanned submarines.

Some of those will come from manned submarines. Some will come from mines. And now, they will start receiving surface-to-surface missiles from Taiwan itself. At that point, they have to fight through the confusion that comes with attrition. And you are going to see electromagnetic warfare, where their communications become very difficult. Now, we will not be able to fully disrupt their communications – and they will not be able to fully disrupt ours – but there will be tremendous difficulty. Young Chinese commanders on those ships will begin to feel isolated.

They will have a hard time coordinating with anything beyond what they can directly see. They might still be able to use basic signalling and such – but coordinating a coherent attack? That is going to be very difficult. And as they approach the shore, they will start receiving artillery fire from the land. They will take fires from the air – air-to-surface fires, loitering munitions, drone attacks. Not all of those will be lethal.

Some of them – on their own – might feel like nuisance attacks. But when you have 10, 20, 50 of those hitting a single ship, you begin to see how each little pinprick adds up – making it all the more difficult for those Chinese invasion forces to reach the island.

As they get closer to the island, they start receiving real fire from Taiwan. The Taiwan Defence Forces have been rehearsing this. They know the exact distances. They know where their firing positions are. They have mined the beaches. They have mined the approaches to the ports. They have probably blown up the ports. I do not know that – but I suspect that might be the case as the Chinese were getting close.

If China tries to insert airborne forces – I mean, it was incredibly difficult in Normandy. Just figuring out where all their people were was a massive challenge. I think you would see a lot of the same kinds of confusion on the battlefield if they tried to drop airborne troops in. It is not likely they will be able to seize a runway and use it as a staging area – because a runway is fixed. And if nothing else, we are going to keep providing fires to Taiwan to take out all of the Chinese assets on that runway. So then – you get to the beach. And whoever gets to the beach has to fight their way through crossfire. They have to coordinate amongst themselves – somehow.

And then they have to start thinking: Where do I create a port? And I do not believe they can create a port. I fundamentally do not believe that – because a port is fixed. And as long as there are munitions that can hit fixed targets, I do not think you can truly create that port – that logistics hub. So I do not believe they get armour – or certainly not armour of any real substance – onto the island.

They have had to fight through this air, land, sea, space and cyberspace defence. They have been attrited in a major way. They can only get sporadic forces on the island. And when they do get on the island, they really cannot consolidate into a single fighting formation – and they cannot be logistically supported.

All of that adds up to this: China has not won. In fact, I believe Taiwan is winning at that point –because all Taiwan has to do is hold on. I do not believe that if you put a full – a multi-domain defensive battle network – in place, the Chinese can get enough force in the right position to subdue 23 million people who want to maintain their democracy and their freedom. And it would be horrible. There would be an incredible amount of death and destruction.

I do not know what the political outcome would be inside mainland China – because I think the Chinese Communist Party would feel like it has to win, very much like Putin feels like he has to win. But I do not know what that looks like – when Xi cannot win. And I do not know what it looks like when the Chinese Communist Party cannot win. I think it looks like they have weakened their country to the point of exhaustion.

Certainly, no one on the Taiwan or American side chose for China to invade Taiwan. But if they choose it, I think we have an operational concept that can prevent the Communist Party from extending control over the island.

Let us turn to the broader transformation underway within the services. You were at the forefront of this process in the Air Force. We see a similar process inside the Marine Corps with the broader FD2030 and the establishment of the Marine Littoral Regiments (MLRs) and their shift toward distributed, mobile, sea-denial operations and long-range strike capabilities. Could you describe the context behind these changes, the direction they are taking, and the progress made so far in these transformations?

Clinton Hinote: So, I will start with the four services you could call the legacy services: the Army, the Air Force, the Marine Corps and the Navy. They each have different stories – and it is worthwhile to understand those stories. Because the reason we are where we are today is because of them. We did not start with a clean sheet. We never started with a clean sheet.

First of all, the legacy of Desert Storm was: why would you change when you are so good? You come out of that period feeling pretty confident about your operational concepts, your doctrine, your platforms – everything. Then 9/11 happens and we get very, very involved – especially on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I think you could say for both the Army and the Marine Corps, that consumed the lion’s share of their attention.

So their ability to modernise the force was limited. With a few exceptions – you could point to some anti-IED capabilities that were modernised. But in general, the counterinsurgency period for both the Marine Corps and the Army was a period of near exhaustion, where their focus was fully on Iraq and Afghanistan. And as they came out of those wars, they had not modernised. They had concepts and an entire force tailored for counterinsurgency. To expect them to turn on a dime and adopt offset strategy technologies – that would be difficult. And I understand why.

The Navy and the Air Force had a slightly different story. They were, of course, involved in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I was the air strategist for Iraq and Afghanistan for a time in the 2006–2007 timeframe, so I am very familiar with everything we were doing. And we were doing a lot. And it was expensive. But at the very same time, we were also trying to modernise our platforms. For the Air Force, that meant mainly airplanes. For the Navy, that meant airplanes, ships, and – to some degree – submarines.

And those platforms became more and more and more expensive – exponentially expensive. As an example: the F-22 was, at the time, the most expensive airplane ever produced. And then, of course, came the B-2 – which was even more expensive. So the way we were modernising was through very expensive platforms. We were continuing the qualitative trajectory we had been on at the end of the Cold War. But each of these ships, each of these aircraft, each of these submarines – was costing more and more.

At the same time, the military’s budget did not grow with the demand. It did not keep pace with the two demands: the demand of actually fighting, and – at the very same time – the demand created by exponential cost growth. And our budgets did not expand to cover that. Eventually, the pressure on modernisation inside both the Navy and the Air Force became unbearable. We started slipping. We stopped modernising. And we are still in that hole. So again – we do not start with a clean sheet.

And I argued very, very hard – beginning in 2019 – for a Hellscape-like concept, for the Air Force to adopt Hellscape-like capabilities. At first, I was not welcome. There were a lot of people who argued against me. And their point was: we had to reestablish the qualitative advantage over China that we had at the end of the Cold War over Russia. But you could not. There is only so much budget to go around – and each platform was taking an increasing percentage of it. So the crunch really hit. And – at least in the Air Force – there was not the margin to change the force into a Hellscape-like force.

There were people who did not believe in a Hellscape-like force. It was not in doctrine. We had never fought a war that way. It seemed very experimental. So people were willing to run experiments – but they were not willing to, say, actually field force structure. The force structure was built around the very best cargo airplanes, the very best bomber airplanes. It was fixated on continuing the types of platforms that had gained us the advantage at the end of the Cold War. In that sense, it was an evolution. Hellscape would have been, in some ways, a revolution.

And most military services in history – not just the United States, but throughout history – have not adopted the revolutionary path over the evolutionary one. I would say both the Navy and the Air Force had that problem. Now, there have been an increasing number of people within those services – still true even today – who believe that revolutionary, Hellscape-like capability is what’s going to help us recreate Overmatch. But the budgets, they have not really expanded.

Bottom line: coming out of the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army and the Marine Corps were spent. They had not modernised, and they were looking for what was next. The Air Force and the Navy, meanwhile, were dealing with this incredible growth in cost per platform – and finding it very difficult to squeeze in anything new.

And this is where, just a few years ago, you began to see the Marine Corps totally change. I would argue that the way they are thinking about distributed operations throughout the First Island Chain is exactly right. And I believe it is revolutionary. But, as you might expect, they ran into tremendous pushback – from people who believed it needed to be an evolutionary change, not a revolution.

I think you are seeing the Army go through its revolution right now. You are seeing fires become increasingly important – artillery, long-range missiles, air defence. At the same time, you are seeing large ground formations decrease in importance. That is a revolution in the Army.

In the Navy, you are seeing a major push underwater – fires underwater, manoeuvre underwater. That includes manned submarines, but it also includes smart mines and unmanned vehicles. And then, on the surface, the goal is to decrease risk – so you are using a lot of unmanned vehicles on the surface, along with significant air defence. I think you are going to see the Navy play a huge role in the “Golden Dome”, as an example.

Finally, you’re seeing a revolution in the Air Force with the advent of collaborative combat aircraft. And now there is increasing interest in producing air power for Hellscape that does not rely on runways – so you do not have the vulnerability of attaching your air power to a fixed runway.

All four of those are revolutionary. So you are seeing the tension between the evolutionary (“we need better platforms, and we need to keep spending money on those”) versus the revolutionary (“we need unmanned, autonomous swarms across all domains, working together with JADC2”). It looks to me like the evidence is increasingly clear that the revolutionary side is going to continue to grow.

Ultimately, this entails that our whole approach to joint warfare must change. It needs to become domain-agnostic, compared with our traditional formations that were domain-centric and move across domains without artificial seams and boundaries. The true revolution is the transition from a domain-centric joint force to a domain-agnostic joint force. But will this happen fast enough? I do not know. I do not think it is fast enough now. If Taiwan, Japan, Australia and the US invest heavily in Hellscape-type technologies and weave them together, then I do not see how China can believe it could be successful.

I do believe we are watching a window. And that window, to me, feels like it may be closing –especially if you see sustained investment carried forward by this administration. If that is the case, then we are in a dangerous part of history – watching China try to figure out what its true options are. So Xi is going to have to decide: is there a window? And is it closing? Because the Chinese Communist Party has, for decades, believed the window was coming – that it was ahead of them, that they were going to get stronger, that they were going to have a better opportunity to reestablish the “Middle Kingdom” – that their power was growing compared to everybody else and that they were in ascendance. But it is possible now that we are actually watching a peak – and a descent – in their military advantage.

And if that’s true… it is a dangerous time.

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