In the Field

One of the greatest photospreads in American military thinking appears in the May 11, 1959 issue of LIFE Magazine. There, amidst an article about the then newly-formed RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, are four pages capturing the goings-on at what the magazine diminutively called at the time a “valuable batch of brains” and an “odd little company”.

The photos are out of a parallel universe. There’s a guy putting a chunk of beryllium in his mouth to prove that it’s safe for industrial use in planes. There’s a guy on the beach smoking a cig next to a transmitter he built for sending back signals from the moon. There’s a circle of bespectacled dudes hanging out late at night in a funky looking living room talking about nuclear war.

And, perhaps most iconically, the LIFE photographer captures an action shot of two, silhouetted RAND engineers dressed in full suits and ties clambering precariously on an off-shore oil drilling rig in the Pacific Ocean to assess its suitability as a mobile missile launching platform.

These photos really stick with you. There was a time when to advance American military thinking, it was very natural to build new things, travel to strange places, and in some cases take on some real personal risks to get a true sense of what conflict in the post-WWII era was going to look like. They were researching war in the field.

Into the Field

The modern defense and foreign affairs think tankers are sad creatures in comparison. If you’ve been around Washington, you may be familiar with this type. Often brilliant and pedigreed, but almost religiously committed to the study of war as an intellectual exercise to be pursued behind a desk. Strategy to be worked out slowly through a neverending sequence of anodyne opinion pieces, white papers, and formulaic roundtables. It’s the kind of slop that a crude AI might generate - and it can.

This sort of person is perhaps sufficient for a more comfortable era of unchallenged American power. Since the end of the Cold War, we have had the luxury to study and think about war and strategy at a leisurely pace. The long era of the Global War on Terror undoubtedly presented real threats and horrifically costly quagmires, but in a broader sense never presented an existential threat to US global dominance. We could proceed – one year to the next – fuzzily and incrementally. Military thinking did not evolve much because it really did not need to evolve at all.

This is no longer an acceptable state of affairs. The US now faces a global challenger in the form of China. We are seriously behind in a way that was never the case during the Cold War. Deindustrialization has eroded the capacity for the country to produce the bare minimum level of munitions necessary to wage conflict. Most experts forecast that in a war with China over Taiwan, the US would run out of vital long-range, precision guided missiles in a matter of weeks. We struggle to build even a handful of ships as China pumps out naval assets in the hundreds. The urgency of the moment cannot be overstated, and the events transpiring from week to week have a real, material impact on the future state of global competition.

Just as important is the fact that war itself is changing rapidly. The experience of the Ukrainian war teaches us that there is something very strange and not yet well understood happening on the battlefield. Drones are shaping conflict, obviously. But, there is much else besides: guys on horseback sporting a Starlink for connectivity, soldiers blasting Shaheds out of the sky with hundred year old machine guns, prediction markets mapping ever last turn of the conflict, Russian tanks sporting Mad Max-esque anti-drone hedgehog spikes, the use of Discord as a battle management system. These experiments, strategems, and counter-strategems in the art of modern conflict are evolving at an insane, day-to-day pace. Ukraine is a massive laboratory, the Shenzhen of war.

The speed and magnitude of these changes mean that the defense thinker that is serious about American success in the 21st century cannot simply do their work sitting in an office in Washington. He cannot just wait for the facts to come filtering back from the front through the distorted lens of some “OSINT” account on X. That is too imperfect and far, far slower than we have time for.

The fact is that the pace of change exceeds our ability to create tidy theories or even collect comprehensive data about military phenomena of all kinds. The situation favors being present, building real connections, and seeing it as an eyewitness. The future of warfare has arrived. To understand where things are going, we need to go there.

The DARC Fellowship

The United States needs to raise up a new generation of field men, a kind of expeditionary thinktanker that studies the deep questions of military strategy and tactics through first hand experience. You want to know about drone warfare? Go right up to where the drone warfare is happening. You want to know about reindustrialization? Go find work in a shipyard. You want to know about munitions? Go get some and blow some shit up.

There will always be a place for the bloodless theorist in the world of defense strategy. It was RAND, after all, that pioneered that type. But the time calls for the restoration of a complementary breed of researcher that is hardy and resourceful enough to go, gather precious knowledge, and come back in one piece.

This is why this summer we intend to send two researchers into the war zone in Ukraine to study some of the biggest open questions in defense strategy. The Defense Analyses and Research Corporation (DARC) Summer Fellowship will pay for the costs of travel, provide connections to established networks on the ground, and support extraction if required. It goes without saying that the mission is inherently risky, but we suspect that if you are the right person you will return from this trip with insights more valuable that the vast majority of defense “intellectuals” with more prestige and less courage.

We envision this growing into a restless and growing network of field researchers, traveling outbound across the world and returning with knowledge that the nation will need as it plots its path through this fantastically dangerous century. Over time, this cohort will force the debate with the “serious”, established pundits that currently influence the machinery of foreign policy and defense strategy: Who knows better? Who can make better predictions? Who offers the better ideas?

The answer seems clear. It should not be special to study war by going into the field. Indeed, we should demand it.