Yesterday, the command of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command changed over from Adm. Philip Davidson to Adm. John Aquilino in a ceremony at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin used the occasion to declare that a new form of warfare has emerged for the 21st century. “You know, I’m a civilian now, but I’ve spent most of the past two decades executing the last of the old wars,” he said. “But the way we’ll fight the next major war is going to look very different from the way that we fought the last ones. We all need to drive toward a new vision of what it means to defend our nation. In this young century, we need to understand faster, decide faster, and act faster. Our new computing power isn’t an academic exercise.” Clearly, Austin was channeling the military utopians who believe that artificial intelligence is the wave of the future.
“Galloping advances in technology mean changes in the work that we do to keep the United States secure across all five domains of potential conflict—not just air, land, and sea but also space and cyberspace,” Austin continued. “They mean we need new capabilities and capacities and operational flexibility for the fights of the future.”
Davidson, on the other hand, channeled former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on China. “The strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific is not between our two nations. It is a competition between liberty — the fundamental idea behind a free and open Indo-Pacific — and authoritarianism, the absence of liberty, and the objective of the Communist Party of China,” he said.