The outstanding military lesson of the Ukraine war, says Erik Prince, is the enormous extent to which the “democratization of precision weapons” transforms warfare and forces profound changes in defense and foreign policy.
For Prince, an advisor to the US Pentagon in the present administration and founder of private military contractor firm Blackwater, drones, cruise missiles and other AI-assisted precision weapons now widely available on any front line or to guerilla forces like the Houthis of Yemen are great equalizers.
They challenge conventional US defense capacity and impose unsustainable costs on modern armies, while Chinese mass production of missiles overwhelms any US expeditionary force in the North Pacific Ocean and points west, Prince says.
Russia, a peer adversary, adapted and overcame US high-tech weaponry with special acumen in electronic warfare. Far from being degraded in the Ukraine war, Russia’s army has improved dramatically.
In an interview with Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and a speech to Hillsdale students, Prince argues for a complete rethinking of US military strategy in light of this revolution in arms. Excerpts follow:
LA: I want to talk about Ukraine a bit. You seem to know a lot about that and what’s going on there and what should go on there. What do you think about it?
EP: I think President Trump is right in his instincts to bring that war to a close. There’s about a 0% chance the Ukrainians are going to take all their land back. They should have made a deal a year and a half ago already.
I think they’re in a war of attrition right now. They’re back to literally World War I-style, trench warfare-style tactics, but also with the addition of precision drones, precision rockets to make it an even more lethal place for infantrymen to try to survive.
The Russians are hellbent on claiming Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and I think Mariupol, which are traditional Russian language areas, and, of course, they already have Crimea. They’re not giving that up.
I think an imperfect peace is better than a sparkly war, and in a war of attrition, math still matters. Russia has a lot more people and a lot more munitions at a much lower cost than the Ukrainians can generate in terms of people. And the Western European and American defense industry is vastly behind and vastly too expensive to really be relevant.
I think it should be a stark wake-up call for America that our weapons are not doing that well there. They’re not in super-high demand. Some of the stuff might work for a month or two, but then Russian electronic warfare figures out a way to jam it – the navigation, the command link or whatever – to make it useless.
And the idiot politicians say, “oh, we’re degrading the Russian army and we’re destroying all this equipment.” No, the Russian army is significantly better, more lethal now than they were when they started. If you shot at the Russians when they went in in February 2022, then it might take ’em an hour, hour and a half to shoot back with artillery.
Now, it’s more like two or three minutes. So their cycle time of communication of finding where the fire is coming from, communicating that to a battery with accurate positions to shoot back is a lot shorter. Yeah, they’ve gotten a lot smarter.
LA: Can anybody find this stuff out?
EP: A lot of it is open source. The RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute in London, does a pretty good job of analyzing a lot of this stuff. I have a lot of relationships in weird places where I talk to people and get firsthand accounts.
But yeah, the US military has not learned the lessons from [Ukraine], the acceleration, that the nature of warfare has changed tremendously from the application of drone warfare and precision warfare across that battle space.
It is such a democratization of precision strike. I think it’s as stark a happening as Genghis Khan using stirrups on horses.
LA: Is it true that we can’t protect our aircraft carriers?
EP: Well, the Houthis, right, the Iranian proxy in Yemen have been firing lots of missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, kamikaze drones at ships and the Navy says they’ve shot down, they’ve used a billion dollars’ worth of US missiles shooting that stuff down, which is really bad math because you’re using not one but two $1 million missiles to shoot down a $20,000-$50,000 drone.
But they say they’ve used a billion dollars to do that but it’s really $5 billion because if the inventory costs are from the 90s when they bought that missile, then to replace it, it’s going to be five times the cost.
Any aircraft carrier, anything that could be located now, can be targeted by dozens and dozens of precision weapons. So then again, it’s just a matter of math.
If the US Navy has to fight a war to in some way defend Taiwan and you drive an aircraft carrier within range of all those [Chinese] missile batteries, they can keep shooting missiles until we run out of missiles to shoot them down, and it becomes a real problem because it’s cheaper for them to build missiles.
The Chinese have done that very well. Our missiles are eight to 10 times as costly, and we only have so many of them.
LA: We can’t seem to build more at any speed.
EP: There are [ways]. I was just talking to a senior executive about this. He said they need to pivot back to an automotive mentality, away from a government defense contractor mentality. They need to read the book “Freedom’s Forge” about how American industry pivoted and really helped win World War II.
And then you go to an automotive company or automotive supplier, they understand a complex assembly in volume. And they’re expected to lower costs every year, not raise costs. There’s plenty of automotive production know-how and capacity that can make great weapons at a more and more affordable cost.
LA: What does this mean for the strategy of the United States? The modern United States, which maybe begins at the First World War, is interested in power projection and that’s the Navy and the Air Force and some soldiers sometimes.
But if those big aircraft carriers that carry for all those planes and are not safe and they’re very expensive and they can be killed by something cheaper, what does that imply for the future of our defense and foreign policy?
EP: That submarines become even more important, dispersed air power, dispersed combat power, combat projection power into submersible, semi-submersible or other vessels that are harder to kill. Innovation counts … and imagination.
Oddly enough, remember when [President Ronald] Reagan decided to deploy two battleships, he really literally took ’em out of a storage closet and brought ’em back to full combat duty in the 80s.
One of the oddities was that they were largely impervious to modern missiles because they had been built to withstand 15 and 16-inch gun hits. And so any of these cruise missiles, any of these drones, would literally bounce off a battleship.
Even a water displacement torpedo, which is designed to remove the water from below a ship so the keel breaks, the keel on the Iowa-class battleships was so strong it wouldn’t have mattered. So maybe you go back to a very [old technology].
LA: Some of them are still around.
EP: They’re still in storage, yes. That’s a lot of steel to try to rust away.
