Foreign Affairs Essay: America Isn’t Ready for the Wars of the Future

 

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America Isn’t Ready for the Wars of the Future And And They’re Already Here By Mark A. Milley and Eric Schmidt

In the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, writes for the first time since his retirement from the U.S. military in September 2023. In an essay co-authored with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he warns that the U.S. military is unprepared for how new technologies are transforming warfare.   The wars of the future “will be dominated by increasingly autonomous weapons systems and powerful algorithms,” Milley and Schmidt write. If the United States wants to remain the preeminent global power, it will have to overhaul its entire defense apparatus—and ensure that robots and AI are deployed in an ethical manner. “Washington won’t get it exactly right,” Milley and Schmidt write. “But it must get it less wrong than its enemies.”

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