New WarNotes Podcast episode is live Monday 17 February 2025.

The age of the infantry is over after a thousands-year long reign in human warfare and conflict.

The next 75 years in the 21st century will put paid to an august and enduring institution in human conflict.

The combination of salvo competition, reduced costs of combat UAS munitions, targeting of exquisite platforms, intelligence/reconnaissance/surveillance (ISR) ubiquity, and anti-fragility/fragility are some of the factors informing this demise.

There is no longer near peer competition and there is only peer competition, you will never hear me utter the former phase again. A hybrid of technology and the nature of sensor & effector synchronization has driven cost and opportunity so far down, it is now a rational calculation to destroy individual infantrymen and small units in detail.

For the first time in conflict history, the infantry on the battlefield will be targeted in a cost-effective fashion that will annihilate them on any field they step on in any climate at any time on the planet. The difference now is that wholesale elimination of infantry forces is nearly available to every combatant force on Earth.

And it will simply become more refined and deadly with time.

It’s time for some severe self-reflection and reassessment to question the efficacy and utility of the infantry mode of combat. This Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) needs to be faced immediately.

This is an existential crisis for combat arms in the West.

Tick tock.

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A declaration of the University of the Intuitively Obvious.

Spicy times ahead.

This is part of the “prompt strike” initiative trying to increase the speed of delivery of munitions operationally. It took two years of delays to have a first test launch in December 2024 (maybe, Pentagon is shady on launch date actual); The missile at the core of Dark Eagle, also known as the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), is the same one the Navy plans to arm its Zumwalt class stealth destroyers and future Block V Virginia class submarines with.

Here’s rudimentary graphic illustrating the parabolic differences between launch modes.

Why the Pentagon publishes milestones on these blue sky programs, I wonder at and I know they do so per Congressional pressure but this is yet another program where I suspect the concepts and requirements left of bang did not do their homework properly.

While firing a missile from the Dark Eagle launcher is a major milestone, the fact that it has only come now underscores the problems that have been dogging the system’s development for years. The Army scrubbed three planned launches last year. The Pentagon did announce a successful end-to-end common AUR test in June, but that had made use of a different ground-based launch apparatus.

https://www.twz.com/land/army-dark-eagle-hypersonic-missile-finally-blasts-out-of-its-launcher

Of course, the worm turns:

Following the apparent cancellation of the U.S. Air Force’s AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) program in 2023, it appeared that Dark Eagle would become the U.S. military’s first operational novel hypersonic weapon. At this stage, there’s still some uncertainty surrounding ARRW status and there could still be plans for a follow-on effort.

https://www.twz.com/land/pentagon-still-unsure-about-lethality-of-dark-eagle-hypersonic-missile

I have mentioned in my podcasts that the term “near peer” is no longer useful in any explanatory framework for 21st century warfare and this sort of marks that officially. All warfare on the conventional front are now peer competitors. I will forecast that the BRICS countries will start to pull ahead in these modes of missile delivery as the US acquisition system gyrates in bureaucratic red tape and the death spiral gyre of defense spending. Building these at scale and ensuring operational readiness in quantity in addition to all the teething problems of deployment puts these at least a decade out.

Conventional SLBMs or ICBMs may be much more effective than the hypersonic weapons the US is pursuing. Both in performance and cost. Especially if they are MIRV and/or MARV configurations. In the arcane specialty of building missiles, there is constant tension between Mach speed/velocity and the munitions payload because at a certain point, the increased speed obviates the need for an exploding warhead munition. To cause damage by kinetic energy alone you need mass and velocity. The hazard is mistaken identification of a nuclear armed launch BUT what if the increased speeds of munitions is making the “lethal payload” less important than the destructive energy release of terminal contact with the ground that creates near-nuclear effects with no residual radiation?

In the graphic above, natural space exposure requires very expensive onboard protection of electronics suites in the missile body the higher the parabolic path but the cruise & aeroballistic missiles don’t have those requirements (air-breathing) hence the increased common usage of these will put them in the hands of Third World armed forces (think Yemen and Armenia/Azerbaijan) in the next decade. If you survive until 2040, you will look back and be astonished at the changes in the ways of war.

Again, flattening and expanding the distribution curve to all armed combatants on Earth with these missile variants being able to destroy or neutralize very expensive exquisite platforms like carriers, surface ships and all manner of ground vehicles from manned to tanks to infantry fighting vehicles is here to stay.

Spicy times ahead.

You had one job. Well, two. You can’t launch and receive aircraft reliably. Nor apparently can you detect and deploy sensor capabilities to aim the aircraft that occasionally leave the very expensive deck.

The radar has actually degraded over time.

The dual-band radar (DBR) aboard the Navy aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), the ship’s primary sensor system, struggled to perform during a pre-deployment exercise and suffered failures as it grappled with the constant need for radar coverage. It remains unclear whether DBR’s issues impacted Ford’s operations during its first full deployment, which began in May 2023 and was extended before ending in January 2024, but the Navy is now seeking to replace Ford’s DBR entirely.

These findings are part of the Pentagon’s Director Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) annual report released last week. The document contains revelations regarding what the Navy will need to do to continue using the DBR, which was only installed aboard Ford and a truncated version of it exists in the three ships of the USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) class. The full DBR suite was supposed to equip these ships before being scaled back significantly a decade ago, mainly due to cost concerns. In addition to DBR, the latest DOT&E report also offers fresh insights into the state of the Navy’s newest carrier, how it performed during deployment and the potential for rough seas ahead.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/uss-gerald-r-ford-still-004554296.html?guccounter=1