The New Frontline: Technology Is a Modern Warfighting Domain

Technology Maneuver

Technology maneuver treats individual emerging technologies like contested terrain, requiring speed to seize initiative, deception to misdirect adversaries, and constant repositioning to maintain advantage. As a framework, it provides a mechanism to mobilize all national resources with a shared understanding of both warfighting and homeland defense requirements. To successfully adapt technology at combat-relevant speeds, military technical forces that are embedded with operational units must maintain continuous connection with the nation's academic and industrial bases.

Maneuvering through the technology domain is the art of modern conflict, demonstrated by the war in Ukraine. As with other forms of maneuver warfare, time is a critical factor in technology maneuver. Time pressure requires the Ukrainian military to execute nondoctrinal solutions to build new warfighting capabilities. Frontline units have integrated research and development shops that adapt commercial technology to unit-specific tactical tasks and challenges, compressing innovation and adaptation cycles to weeks, days, and even hours. Tactical innovation did not replace the work of institutions, laboratories, or centralized procurement. Rather, small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) and electronic warfare-enabled counter-UAS capabilities were of immediate importance at the tactical and operational levels, creating combat advantage to buy time for the strategically important, long-term investments in the production capacity for first-person view (FPV) drones, cruise missiles, and sUAS to occur.

Maneuver warfare is defined by actions and counteractions. In the war in Ukraine, Russia has executed several counteractions in the technology domain to which the Ukrainian military has then had to respond. In response to the rapid fielding of commercial drones by the Ukranian military, Russia deployed high-power, large-scale jammers, which then required Ukraine to innovate counter-counter-measures. The rapid industrial scaling to mass production of low-cost Shahed drones and development of fiber optic drones are other examples of technology maneuver that significantly affected all warfighting domains.

Technology maneuver lessons are not new. In World War I, Major General George Squier, commander of the Signal Corps and radio scientist, recognized that signal troops did not have the expertise required to run communications hubs. He recruited telephone operators from the United States who were technical experts in their craft, enabling faster dissemination of orders to Allies and freeing Signal Corps members to execute their mission closer to the front. Employing technical expertise for faster command and control was a huge success and marked a critical turning point for the Allies.

During World War II, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, an innovative aviator and one of the first recipients of an aeronautical engineering doctorate from MIT, was tasked to plan an air raid on Japan. He used his technical and operational expertise to design the plans to modify the fuel tanks of the B-25 and build innovative training and tactics so modified planes could take off from a carrier.

In each of the examples described above, leaders relearned old lessons in the crucible of combat, as the realities of war necessitated tight coupling with technical and operational forces. How might the United States set conditions now to prepare all forces and the nation so that it does not have to rediscover these principles when the next conflict starts? Technology maneuver prepares U.S. technical forces (e.g., scientists, coders, and engineers) as combatants in an essential aspect of warfighting-technological adaptation.

A successful maneuver approach needs a military prepared to outlearn the adversary by employing combined arms teams connected to existing acquisition reform levers. Recent guidance to unify defense technology innovation efforts under a single chief technology officer is a step in the right direction. The undersecretary of war for research and engineering, who will serve as the department's chief technology officer, recently released a new list of critical technology areas. The list provides some focus by consolidating the previous administration's fourteen critical technology areas to six. However, the services often duplicate investments without always having a clear purpose for doing so. One way to deconflict research investments and maximize gains is for the undersecretary of war for research and engineering to appoint a lead service for each critical technology area, optimizing investments and decisionmaking authority. The lead service for each critical technology area should then design technology development campaigns that include identification of key technology terrain, associated military objectives, and mechanisms to achieve unity of effort across the development ecosystem of academia, industry, and federal research and development organizations.

Recently, acquisition was codified as a warfighting function, following Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's unveiling of the Warfighting Acquisition System. The acquisition system has traditionally focused on the strategic level of war, generating deterrence through the development and procurement of large, complex, advanced weapons systems (Figure 2). The recent guidance memorandum on transforming the defense innovation ecosystem is the first step in realizing a future where technology development is fluid, with iteration cycles closer to combat than bureaucracy. It directed moving the current ecosystem away from alignment to technology maturity, instead aligning to the three pillars the innovation ecosystem delivers: technology innovation, product innovation, and operational capability innovation.